Risk analyses, values, and LLMs

A personal update on what I’ve been doing these last few months

I’ve been doing a lot of risk analysis lately

My process for this is basically, I make a list of all the potential outcomes, assign a rough estimate of likelihood to them, and decide if that likelihood feels good to me. If not, I decide what I want to do to change it, or if I need to accept it.

1. I bought a new fencing mask because I decided the risk of getting a concussion was too high with my old one. https://anne.loves.technology/anachronism/rapier/2025/06/18/risk-management.html
2. I mask for COVID when indoors and not actively eating. I try to minimize situations where I am eating indoors, though I don’t currently cut them out entirely. I didn’t even really look for a local in-person job because I’m better at working remote and don’t need to develop software in-person, but the reduced disease risk is a real plus. It is annoying to wear a mask during exercise and my glasses fog a lot more when fencing, but that’s just how it is.
3. I made a spreadsheet to calculate our likelihood of successfully becoming Canadian permanent residents. It has multiple tabs for each of the relevant lottery systems, and multiple rows and columns for each inflection point when one of our Express Entry point values change. After making this, I signed up for more French classes.
4. I decided to accept an extremely low offer on the house I used to own in the US, which has been on the market for months longer than I anticipated.

The house one bears expanding upon to some extent. Buying a house in 2022 and selling in 2025 was an extremely poor financial choice and what I took from this experience is that for big changes I need to be more intentional about preparing for potential negative outcomes. When I bought the house, I wanted to do it with years left to build a community with my neighbors before the next US presidential election, so they would have my back in case it didn’t go the way I wanted and I was placed in dangerous situations as a result. I remember thinking explicitly that either I’d buy then, or effectively decide that I would be in Colorado temporarily and that we would instead likely try to leave the US entirely at some point. We were under contract and it was too late to back out without penalty in May 2022 when the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v Wade was leaked. I felt bad, but then again, I felt bad about several things then, it is extremely stressful buying a house, and it made sense to feel bad about potentially losing autonomy over my body in an emergency situation, and we needed to live somewhere, and our apartment complex was raising the rent on our unit by 9% so why not have some stability for once in exchange for that money? In retrospect, this was the wrong call, but that is only clear in hindsight.

But enough about the house, which I almost don’t even own any more

I am trying to stay positive despite grieving the stability I thought I had created for us, despite often feeling homesick and unmoored. I am trying to listen better to myself when I have misgivings - but I feel that it makes sense that I would grieve. And, I chose this, I decided that it was worth the short term difficulties and that I would regret not having tried to leave. Yes, we’re losing money on the house, it’s money we can afford to lose in exchange for a chance at a better life in the future. Yes, the new apartment is small, it meets our needs. Yes, healthcare is hard to access here and we’ve experienced some difficulties, but I’m making progress at finding a workable solution. Thanks to friends sending referrals, I was only unemployed for a month before I found a job. The people here, at the hackerspace, in the SCA, are all so friendly and so kind to us. I hope that I can be as friendly and kind in return.

About my values

I wrote a couple paragraphs above that in 2022, I wanted to build a community with my neighbors. Quick retrospective: I feel I had a mixed success with this. I absolutely found community with my SCA chapter in Colorado. With the people who lived on either side of me, when we ran into each other we enjoyed our conversations, but I didn’t know what else to do on that front. I met people at the hackerspace too, who I was starting to build stronger ties with.

And, the thing that kept me up at night in late 2024 – Trump ran on a platform that was explicitly trans-eliminationist. I had friends, but of the people I was close to, was I close enough to ask them to break the law, with no benefit to them, so we could continue to access necessary medication, if it came to that? We helped our friends in the SCA move, half a dozen times at least, but when we bought the house I still hired movers for our stuff.

In short, I want to be part of a community but I don’t know that I am trusting enough to be fully reliant on a community in order to meet critical needs. I want to have the opportunity to help others, but I want to be able to meet my own needs without them.

Okay but you said there would be LLMs?

Sumana wrote today about her shifting feelings on LLM usage: https://social.coop/@brainwane/114868039738198191

Honestly? I believe that Sumana has the right intuitions about values more often than I do. She consistently, with compassion, pushes me to examine whether my actions meet my stated values. I want to be a good person but often I don’t know how – she always, it seems to me, at least has an idea of how to start rather than giving up entirely. She thinks that caution, partial abstention, and harm reduction is the appropriate choice here. She’s probably right.

At this point I have prioritized my own personal risk reduction over the broader social impact of my actions. It feels kind of like giving up entirely, but I think I need to own the decision and the results as an intentional choice of mine. Here’s why I chose to work at a job requiring LLM usage:

1. I’m burned out and unhappy from working at the companies I’ve recently worked for. I don’t think I can keep doing this successfully without changes, but:
2. I need a software development job with a Canadian employer of record sooner than later, so that I can list it for immigration application purposes after a year and get more potential draws in before I get older - not for an abstract fear of aging reason, the Canadian rules say I lose Express Entry points with every year older I get. (The monthly mortgage payments in USD also weighed on my mind when I considered the timeline for job applications.)
3. I want experience with a startup in order to move towards work at a company that I’d be happy at in the longer term, but this means I need to look for work at startups that are in sectors which can currently receive funding.
4. I was uniformly rejected from PhD programs that, had I completed them, would have offered us a simpler path to permanent residence.

I’m now working at a 15 person startup which basically provides LLM outputs for wealth management advisors. So far I enjoy my day to day much more than I did last fall. I feel conflicted about the impact it has on the world but I figure the negative outcomes possible are limited by the domain. I asked myself and the people I interviewed with questions before joining like, how would the world be different if this was wildly successful? The answer I received is basically that LLMs are likely to be a commonly available technology in the future and this is a useful niche that nobody is doing a great job filling yet. And the LLM doesn’t tell the advisors what to do with the money, it just helps them take notes and more effectively do the human-required actions.

I used to say, as a joke: the microplastics won’t be what kills me! as I microwaved food in plastic containers. Kind of dark but I thought it was funny. It turns out microplastics are actually bad though and so I try to no longer say that. I feel like I am now saying: the LLMs won’t be what kills me! so, if I’m very fortunate in a few years I’ll find out exactly how wrong I was again.