I applaud the explanations of the decisions for the grants and also the responses to the questions. Now that things have calmed down, since the EA Long Term Future Fund team suggested that requests for feedback on unsuccessful grants be made publicly, I am doing that.
My proposal was to further investigate a new cause area, namely resilience to catastrophes that could disable electricity regionally or globally, including extreme solar storm, high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (caused by nuclear detonations), or a narrow AI computer virus. Since nearly everything is dependent on electricity, including pulling fossil fuels out of the ground, industrial civilization could grind to a halt. Many people have suggested hardening the grid to these catastrophes, but this would cost tens of billions of dollars. However, getting prepared for quickly providing food, energy, and communications needs in a catastrophe would cost much less money and provide much of the present generation (lifesaving) and far future (preservation of anthropological civilization) benefits. I have made a Guesstimate model assessing the cost-effectiveness of work to improve long-term future outcomes given one of these catastrophes. Both my inputs and Anders Sandberg’s inputs yield >95% confidence that work now on losing electricity/industry is more cost-effective than marginal work on AI safety (Oxford Prioritisation Project/ Owen Cotton-Barratt and Daniel Dewey did the AI section, except I truncated distributions and made AI more cost effective). There is also a blank (to avoid anchoring) Guesstimate model.
The specific proposal was to buy out of my teaching and/or fund a graduate student to research particularly high value of information relevant projects and submit papers. I think that feedback would be particularly helpful because it is not just about the particular proposal, but also whether the new cause area is worth investigating further.
(Note, I am currently more time-constrained than I had hoped to be when writing these responses, so the above was written a good bit faster and with less reflection than my other pieces of feedback. This means errors and miscommunication is more likely than usual. I apologize for that.)
I ended up writing some feedback to Jeffrey Ladish, which covered a lot of my thoughts on ALLFED.
Building off of that comment, here are some additional thoughts:
As I mentioned in the response linked above, I currently feel relatively hesitant about civilizational collapse scenarios and so find the general cause area of most of ALLFED’s work to be of comparatively lower importance than the other areas I tend to recommend grants in
Most of ALLFED’s work does not seem to help me resolve the confusions I listed in the response linked above, or provide much additional evidence for any of my cruxes, but instead seems to assume that the intersection of civilizational collapse and food shortages is the key path to optimize for. At this point, I would be much more excited about work that tries to analyze civilizational collapse much more broadly, instead of assuming such a specific path.
I have some hesitations about the structure of ALLFED as an organization. I’ve had relatively bad experiences interacting with some parts of your team and heard similar concerns from others. The team also appears to be partially remote, which I think is a major cost for research teams, and have its primary location be in Alaska where I expect it will be hard for you to attract talent and also engage with other researchers on this topic (some of these models are based on conversations I’ve had with Finan who used to work at ALLFED, but left because of it being located in Alaska).
I generally think ALLFED’s work is of decent quality, helpful to many and made with well-aligned intentions, I just don’t find it’s core value proposition compelling enough to be excited about grants to it
Thank you for you recent post and your ALLFED feedback.
I have made my request for such publicly so also responding publicly, as such openness can only be beneficial to the investigation and advancing of the causes we are passionate about.
We appreciate your view of ALLFED’s work being of “decent quality, helpful to many and made with well-aligned intention”.
We also appreciate many good points raised in your feedback, and would like to comment on them as follows.
As I mentioned in the response linked above, I currently feel relatively hesitant about civilizational collapse scenarios and so find the general cause area of most of ALLFED’s work to be of comparatively lower importance than the other areas I tend to recommend grants in
People’s intuition on the long-term future impact of these type of catastrophes and the tractability of reducing that impact with money varies tremendously.
One possible mechanism for extinction from nuclear winter is as follows. It is tempting to think that if there is enough stored food to keep the population alive for five years until agriculture recovers, that 10% of people will survive. However, if the food is distributed evenly, then everyone will die after six months. It is not clear to me that the food will be so well protected from the masses that many people will survive. Similarly, there could be some continuous food production in these scenarios if managed sustainably such as fish that could relocate to the tropics. However, again, if there are many desperate people, they might eat all the fish, so everyone would starve. Similarly, hunter gatherers generally don’t have stored food and could starve. Even if agrarian societies managed to have some people survive on stored food, if there were collapse of anthropological civilization, the people might not be able to figure out how to become hunter gatherers again. Even if there is not extinction, it is not clear we would recover civilization, because we have had a stable climate the last 10,000 years and we would not have easily recoverable fossil fuels for industrial civilization. And even if we did not lose civilization, worse values from the nastiness of the die off could result in totalitarianism or end up in AGI (though you point out that it is possible we could be more careful with dangerous technologies the second time around).
As for the tractability, people have pointed out that many of the interventions we talk about have already been done at small scale. So it is possible that they would be adopted without further ALLFED funding (and we have a parameter for this in the Guesstimate models). However, there is some research that takes calendar time and cannot be parallelized (such as animal research). Furthermore, if there is panic before people find out that we could actually feed everyone, then the chaos that results probably means the interventions won’t get adopted.
Given the large variation in intuitions, we have tried to do surveys to get a variety of opinions. For the agricultural catastrophes (nuclear winter, abrupt climate change, etc.) we got eight GCR researcher opinions. The result varied nearly four orders of magnitude. The most pessimistic found marginal funding of ALLFED now the same order of magnitude cost effectiveness as AI at the margin, the most optimistic four orders of magnitude higher cost effectiveness than AI (considering future work that will likely be done). I know you in particular are short on time, but I would encourage anyone interested in this issue to put their own values into the blank model (to avoid anchoring) and see what they produce for agricultural catastrophes. Of course even if it does not turn out to be more cost-effective than AI, it still could be competitive with engineered pandemic.
This particular EA Long Term Future Fund application was focusing on a different class of catastrophes, those that could disrupt electricity/industry (including solar storm, high-altitude electromagnetic pulses, or narrow AI computer virus). In this case, a poll was taken at EAG San Francisco 2018, so the data are less detailed. There appears to be fewer orders of magnitude variation in this case. Since the mean cost-effectiveness ratio to AI is similar, this likely would yield the most pessimistic person judging preparations for losing electricity/industry at the margin to be more cost-effective than AI. Again, here is a blank model for this cause area.
Most of ALLFED’s work does not seem to help me resolve the confusions I listed in the response linked above, or provide much additional evidence for any of my cruxes, but instead seems to assume that the intersection of civilizational collapse and food shortages is the key path to optimize for. At this point, I would be much more excited about work that tries to analyze civilizational collapse much more broadly, instead of assuming such a specific path.
As for the specific path to optimize for improving the long-term future, in the book Feeding Everyone No Matter What, we did go through a number of problems associated with nuclear winter and food shortage was clearly the most important (and this has been recognized by others, including Alan Robock). However, for catastrophes that disable electricity/industry, it is true that issues such as water, shelter, communications and transportation are very important, which is why we have developed interventions for those as well.
I have some hesitations about the structure of ALLFED as an organization. I’ve had relatively bad experiences interacting with some parts of your team and heard similar concerns from others. The team also appears to be partially remote, which I think is a major cost for research teams, and have its primary location be in Alaska where I expect it will be hard for you to attract talent and also engage with other researchers on this topic (some of these models are based on conversations I’ve had with Finan who used to work at ALLFED, but left because of it being located in Alaska).
This has been an interesting one for both myself and the team to consider.
One of the unique features of ALLFED is our structure which does correspond to our work on *both* research and preparedness. As such, we have opted for a small, flexible multi-location organization, which allows us to get to places and collaborate globally.
While I am myself indeed based in Alaska, we also have a strong UK team based in London and Oxford, busy developing collaborations with academia (e.g. UCL), finance and industry and attending European events (just back from Geneva and the United Nations Global Platform for DRR and heading to Combined Dealing with Disasters International Conference next month). As for attracting talent, we have built alliances with researchers at Michigan Technological University, Penn State, Tennessee State University, and the International Food Policy Research Institute who are ready to do ALLFED projects once we get funding. This is why our room for more funding in the next 12 months is more than $1 million. We have also co-authored papers with people at CSER, GCRI, and Rutgers University.
Overall, we feel the geographical spread has been beneficial to us and has certainly contributed to a greater diversity within the team and allowed access to a greater body of knowledge, contacts, connections. As a sideline, we feel all individuals with passion for the GCR work and with relevant talents should be able to contribute to it, regardless of their location, family/personal demands or physical abilities. Facilitating and enabling this via remote working has seemed an obvious benefit to the organization and the right thing to do.
We have read this EA forum post on local/remote teams with great interest and find its conclusions and recommendations consistent with our experience. Working across continents has certainly contributed to the development of robust internal organizational structures, clarity in goals, objectives, accountability, communications and such.
As for my personal experience of being based in Alaska, I don’t feel that my interaction with the team here has been significantly different than with remote team members (referring back to this: the people in Alaska are not in the same hallway, though we do have in-person meetings). So basically we can recruit students for projects that are routed through the University, but then other researchers can be remote.
The exceptions of course are if an experiment requires significant facilities and is not done by a student (as was the case with Finan) or if one’s personal preferences are for more social interactions.
We are of course concerned and have noted your comment on “relatively bad experiences interacting with some parts of (our) team”. We would very much like to learn more about this (if you don’t mind perhaps in private this time, to ensure people’s privacy/confidentiality).
We cannot help but wonder whether our commitment to diversity—including neurodiversity—may have had some unintended consequences… We do have individuals on the team whose communications needs and style may at times present something of a challenge, particularly to those unaware of such considerations. Thank you for alerting us of possible impacts of this; we will certainly look at this, and any other “team interactions” matters, and see how they can be managed better. We are hopeful that, overall, there have been many more positive interactions than dubious ones and would like to take this opportunity to thank you (and anybody else who may have experienced issues around this) for your patience and understanding.
Going forward—and this relates as much to this particular response and any future ALLFED team interaction at all, with anyone reading this—if any such interaction does not quite work out, please let me know (so we may either make good or provide context).
All in all, we are grateful for your feedback and pleased with our decision to engage in this publicly. Hopefully this will be of use not only to ALLFED as an organization but to the broader EA community.
I applaud the explanations of the decisions for the grants and also the responses to the questions. Now that things have calmed down, since the EA Long Term Future Fund team suggested that requests for feedback on unsuccessful grants be made publicly, I am doing that.
My proposal was to further investigate a new cause area, namely resilience to catastrophes that could disable electricity regionally or globally, including extreme solar storm, high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (caused by nuclear detonations), or a narrow AI computer virus. Since nearly everything is dependent on electricity, including pulling fossil fuels out of the ground, industrial civilization could grind to a halt. Many people have suggested hardening the grid to these catastrophes, but this would cost tens of billions of dollars. However, getting prepared for quickly providing food, energy, and communications needs in a catastrophe would cost much less money and provide much of the present generation (lifesaving) and far future (preservation of anthropological civilization) benefits. I have made a Guesstimate model assessing the cost-effectiveness of work to improve long-term future outcomes given one of these catastrophes. Both my inputs and Anders Sandberg’s inputs yield >95% confidence that work now on losing electricity/industry is more cost-effective than marginal work on AI safety (Oxford Prioritisation Project/ Owen Cotton-Barratt and Daniel Dewey did the AI section, except I truncated distributions and made AI more cost effective). There is also a blank (to avoid anchoring) Guesstimate model.
The specific proposal was to buy out of my teaching and/or fund a graduate student to research particularly high value of information relevant projects and submit papers. I think that feedback would be particularly helpful because it is not just about the particular proposal, but also whether the new cause area is worth investigating further.
For more background, see the three papers involving losing electricity/industry: feeding everyone with the loss of industry, providing nonfood needs with the loss of industry, and feeding everyone losing industry and half of sun. We are still working on the paper for the cost-effectiveness from the long-term future perspective of preparing for these catastrophes funded by an EA grant, so input can influence that paper.
(Note, I am currently more time-constrained than I had hoped to be when writing these responses, so the above was written a good bit faster and with less reflection than my other pieces of feedback. This means errors and miscommunication is more likely than usual. I apologize for that.)
I ended up writing some feedback to Jeffrey Ladish, which covered a lot of my thoughts on ALLFED.
My response to Jeffrey
Building off of that comment, here are some additional thoughts:
As I mentioned in the response linked above, I currently feel relatively hesitant about civilizational collapse scenarios and so find the general cause area of most of ALLFED’s work to be of comparatively lower importance than the other areas I tend to recommend grants in
Most of ALLFED’s work does not seem to help me resolve the confusions I listed in the response linked above, or provide much additional evidence for any of my cruxes, but instead seems to assume that the intersection of civilizational collapse and food shortages is the key path to optimize for. At this point, I would be much more excited about work that tries to analyze civilizational collapse much more broadly, instead of assuming such a specific path.
I have some hesitations about the structure of ALLFED as an organization. I’ve had relatively bad experiences interacting with some parts of your team and heard similar concerns from others. The team also appears to be partially remote, which I think is a major cost for research teams, and have its primary location be in Alaska where I expect it will be hard for you to attract talent and also engage with other researchers on this topic (some of these models are based on conversations I’ve had with Finan who used to work at ALLFED, but left because of it being located in Alaska).
I generally think ALLFED’s work is of decent quality, helpful to many and made with well-aligned intentions, I just don’t find it’s core value proposition compelling enough to be excited about grants to it
Thank you for you recent post and your ALLFED feedback.
I have made my request for such publicly so also responding publicly, as such openness can only be beneficial to the investigation and advancing of the causes we are passionate about.
We appreciate your view of ALLFED’s work being of “decent quality, helpful to many and made with well-aligned intention”.
We also appreciate many good points raised in your feedback, and would like to comment on them as follows.
People’s intuition on the long-term future impact of these type of catastrophes and the tractability of reducing that impact with money varies tremendously.
One possible mechanism for extinction from nuclear winter is as follows. It is tempting to think that if there is enough stored food to keep the population alive for five years until agriculture recovers, that 10% of people will survive. However, if the food is distributed evenly, then everyone will die after six months. It is not clear to me that the food will be so well protected from the masses that many people will survive. Similarly, there could be some continuous food production in these scenarios if managed sustainably such as fish that could relocate to the tropics. However, again, if there are many desperate people, they might eat all the fish, so everyone would starve. Similarly, hunter gatherers generally don’t have stored food and could starve. Even if agrarian societies managed to have some people survive on stored food, if there were collapse of anthropological civilization, the people might not be able to figure out how to become hunter gatherers again. Even if there is not extinction, it is not clear we would recover civilization, because we have had a stable climate the last 10,000 years and we would not have easily recoverable fossil fuels for industrial civilization. And even if we did not lose civilization, worse values from the nastiness of the die off could result in totalitarianism or end up in AGI (though you point out that it is possible we could be more careful with dangerous technologies the second time around).
As for the tractability, people have pointed out that many of the interventions we talk about have already been done at small scale. So it is possible that they would be adopted without further ALLFED funding (and we have a parameter for this in the Guesstimate models). However, there is some research that takes calendar time and cannot be parallelized (such as animal research). Furthermore, if there is panic before people find out that we could actually feed everyone, then the chaos that results probably means the interventions won’t get adopted.
Given the large variation in intuitions, we have tried to do surveys to get a variety of opinions. For the agricultural catastrophes (nuclear winter, abrupt climate change, etc.) we got eight GCR researcher opinions. The result varied nearly four orders of magnitude. The most pessimistic found marginal funding of ALLFED now the same order of magnitude cost effectiveness as AI at the margin, the most optimistic four orders of magnitude higher cost effectiveness than AI (considering future work that will likely be done). I know you in particular are short on time, but I would encourage anyone interested in this issue to put their own values into the blank model (to avoid anchoring) and see what they produce for agricultural catastrophes. Of course even if it does not turn out to be more cost-effective than AI, it still could be competitive with engineered pandemic.
This particular EA Long Term Future Fund application was focusing on a different class of catastrophes, those that could disrupt electricity/industry (including solar storm, high-altitude electromagnetic pulses, or narrow AI computer virus). In this case, a poll was taken at EAG San Francisco 2018, so the data are less detailed. There appears to be fewer orders of magnitude variation in this case. Since the mean cost-effectiveness ratio to AI is similar, this likely would yield the most pessimistic person judging preparations for losing electricity/industry at the margin to be more cost-effective than AI. Again, here is a blank model for this cause area.
As for the specific path to optimize for improving the long-term future, in the book Feeding Everyone No Matter What, we did go through a number of problems associated with nuclear winter and food shortage was clearly the most important (and this has been recognized by others, including Alan Robock). However, for catastrophes that disable electricity/industry, it is true that issues such as water, shelter, communications and transportation are very important, which is why we have developed interventions for those as well.
This has been an interesting one for both myself and the team to consider.
One of the unique features of ALLFED is our structure which does correspond to our work on *both* research and preparedness. As such, we have opted for a small, flexible multi-location organization, which allows us to get to places and collaborate globally.
While I am myself indeed based in Alaska, we also have a strong UK team based in London and Oxford, busy developing collaborations with academia (e.g. UCL), finance and industry and attending European events (just back from Geneva and the United Nations Global Platform for DRR and heading to Combined Dealing with Disasters International Conference next month). As for attracting talent, we have built alliances with researchers at Michigan Technological University, Penn State, Tennessee State University, and the International Food Policy Research Institute who are ready to do ALLFED projects once we get funding. This is why our room for more funding in the next 12 months is more than $1 million. We have also co-authored papers with people at CSER, GCRI, and Rutgers University.
Overall, we feel the geographical spread has been beneficial to us and has certainly contributed to a greater diversity within the team and allowed access to a greater body of knowledge, contacts, connections. As a sideline, we feel all individuals with passion for the GCR work and with relevant talents should be able to contribute to it, regardless of their location, family/personal demands or physical abilities. Facilitating and enabling this via remote working has seemed an obvious benefit to the organization and the right thing to do.
We have read this EA forum post on local/remote teams with great interest and find its conclusions and recommendations consistent with our experience. Working across continents has certainly contributed to the development of robust internal organizational structures, clarity in goals, objectives, accountability, communications and such.
As for my personal experience of being based in Alaska, I don’t feel that my interaction with the team here has been significantly different than with remote team members (referring back to this: the people in Alaska are not in the same hallway, though we do have in-person meetings). So basically we can recruit students for projects that are routed through the University, but then other researchers can be remote.
The exceptions of course are if an experiment requires significant facilities and is not done by a student (as was the case with Finan) or if one’s personal preferences are for more social interactions.
We are of course concerned and have noted your comment on “relatively bad experiences interacting with some parts of (our) team”. We would very much like to learn more about this (if you don’t mind perhaps in private this time, to ensure people’s privacy/confidentiality).
We cannot help but wonder whether our commitment to diversity—including neurodiversity—may have had some unintended consequences… We do have individuals on the team whose communications needs and style may at times present something of a challenge, particularly to those unaware of such considerations. Thank you for alerting us of possible impacts of this; we will certainly look at this, and any other “team interactions” matters, and see how they can be managed better. We are hopeful that, overall, there have been many more positive interactions than dubious ones and would like to take this opportunity to thank you (and anybody else who may have experienced issues around this) for your patience and understanding.
Going forward—and this relates as much to this particular response and any future ALLFED team interaction at all, with anyone reading this—if any such interaction does not quite work out, please let me know (so we may either make good or provide context).
All in all, we are grateful for your feedback and pleased with our decision to engage in this publicly. Hopefully this will be of use not only to ALLFED as an organization but to the broader EA community.