Update from 2024:
Unfortunately, for maybe the next few years, I probably won't reply to messages due to lack of time. Sorry about that. :( I feel bad when people spend effort sending me questions only for me to fail to respond. So in most cases I recommend not writing, though I'm keeping my contact form open for emergencies or in case you want to send a quick note without receiving a reply. Even if you send a note just for me to read without a reply, I'll probably be slow to look at it, and I can't guarantee I'll read the whole thing.
It's awesome that people are interested in reducing suffering and other things I've written about. There are various online communities where you might be able to ask your question. For example, you can search for Facebook groups and subreddits about insect suffering, wild-animal suffering, negative utilitarianism, suffering-focused ethics, s-risks, etc.
In the long run I might find a human and/or AI helper to reply to messages for me, but I'm not at that point yet.
The original contact-form page from 2023:
Thanks for your interest in contacting me. :) I sometimes fail to reply to people who write to me, and even when I do reply, I may be slow. To reduce the number of messages I receive, I pre-wrote replies to some frequently asked topics, which I list below. If your message is relevant to one of these topics, then click the link to read my reply:
Contents
If you don't see your topic in the list or still want to write anyway, then here is a Google Form you can use to send me a message. Your name and contact info are optional in case you want the message to be anonymous, although if you want me to reply, you'll obviously need to include some form of contact information. I unfortunately don't always find time to reply to messages, so feel free to indicate at the beginning of your message if it's particularly important that you receive a response.
Linking to or hosting your article
About 1/4 of the messages I receive through this form are spam-type requests to link to a random website or include someone else's article on my website. I'm not interested in doing that, so no need to write to me. :) If you're a genuine reader of this site and not someone hired to send out lots of spam messages to lots of different websites, then this comment doesn't apply to you (although I still tend to be lazy about implementing those kinds of suggestions).
Podcast interviews, lectures, presentations, etc
I'm honored when I receive a request for a podcast interview or to give a talk to an effective-altruism group, but I find interviews and talks stressful, so I usually decline. I would rather write than speak if I have something worth saying. Therefore, you don't need to write to me to ask. :)
If you're looking for someone to talk about suffering-focused ethics, one person you can contact is Magnus Vinding. For s-risks, you could contact the Center on Long-Term Risk.
Journalists
Feel free to write to me regarding topics on which I may have expertise. I'm sometimes slow to check my messages, so if your deadline is too soon, I may not have a chance to reply.
College advice
If you plan to work at an effective-altruism (EA) organization, then it's not clear to me how important a college degree is, although it might be worth getting one to keep your career options open in case you later pursue a job at a more standard organization that expects a college degree. My sense is that EA organizations working to reduce animal or far-future suffering are most impressed by passion, intelligence, and a track record of producing good research so far. Therefore, starting a blog or posting on the Effective Altruism Forum about relevant topics may be a better way to demonstrate your fit for EA work than having a college degree is.
If you do go to college, majoring in a topic relevant to the kind of work you want to do later makes sense, although I also think that choice of major isn't that important, because you can learn new skills later, and your area of focus will probably change over your lifetime. In general, it seems better to major in STEM fields, because they're more impressive and because it's sometimes harder to learn that material on your own. Majoring in computer science seems good if you plan to work on research related to AI.
For earning to give, majoring in computer science and/or statistics seems like a good bet, though it somewhat depends on what career you're aiming for.
In general, I think it's good to take college courses in lots of different departments in order to learn about a variety of fields. For this reason, double majoring seems often counterproductive to me, since it limits how many courses you can take outside your majors, though double majoring might make sense in certain instances.
Career advice
For reducing wild-animal suffering and s-risks, my default recommendation would be working at an organization doing research or movement-building related to these issues. Many of these organizations are picky about hiring, so if you can't work for them directly, then getting grant funding from them to work on projects on your own is another possibility.
Earning to give to these causes can be good too, though especially the s-risks field tends to be less money-constrained these days.
Some people recommend pursuing careers at high-impact institutions like AI companies or governments in order to influence decisions there. I tend to be more skeptical of that route because I think we still have so much uncertainty about what policies would even reduce wild-animal suffering or s-risks at all that it's more important to lay foundations first by figuring out what we want to push for. I have some other hesitations about the indirect approach as well. However, for some people, trying to get jobs at high-impact institutions could make sense.
The Center on Long-Term Risk and Center for Reducing Suffering have pages of career advice for reducing s-risks.
Broken links
Link rot is a plague that never ends. As time passes, more and more links in my articles become broken. In theory I would like to fix these links, either by pointing to a Wayback Machine version of the page or by finding the new URL to which the content has moved. However, in practice I may never fix 99% of the broken links on my site. If you see a broken link that seems important to fix, feel free to send it along, though I may not get around to fixing it. There are tools to automatically find broken links on a website, so if I were to ever systematically fix broken links, I could use one of those tools.
Translations
See here.
Scrupulosity regarding harming insects
This comment has some remarks and links to get you started, though feel free to write to me for further discussion. :)
Secure communication
If you'd like to communicate using end-to-end encryption (E2EE) and possibly message expiration, tell me that in your contact-form message so we can set that up. It might be good to say at least one sentence in your Google Form message about the general topic you want to discuss or who you are so that I can filter out spam. As of 2023, I still don't have a mobile phone, so I don't have any of the most popular E2EE apps (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc). Therefore, you would likely have to install a new E2EE app.