Currently, the EA community is pretty good at noticing/predicting problems before they happen. There may be future cases where most of the world is caught flat-footed by something we had already begun to prepare for.
Sometimes, the problems we notice will include some physical component—that is, our ability to solve them will be bottlenecked by physical manufacturing capacity (e.g. masks for COVID). The more people in the community have some sense of how manufacturing works, the more likely it is that we’ll be able to start useful projects that resolve these bottlenecks more quickly.
We’ll also have fewer ideas that are doomed to fail because we didn’t understand this topic. I’ll quote a Facebook comment from a community member with healthcare experience (though I won’t link to the comment, since I’m not sure how large an audience they wanted):
[One unpromising idea that some EAs went for is] trying to get people to work on open-source ventilators, when actually many existing licensed manufacturers can scale up production, but just haven’t seen huge demand, as ventilators are expensive and hospitals need to get funding to purchase more, and they need freight providers to get them to the right places, and get staff and PPE to operate them. Also, it’s easier for related manufacturers (e.g. in the auto industry) to switch to producing ventilators if the need arises. There are many other reasons this isn’t the bottleneck too. In this case I think it just annoys me that people haven’t done some basic checks on their assumptions, or checked with anyone about what the bottlenecks really are.
The thought this post generated as I read:
Currently, the EA community is pretty good at noticing/predicting problems before they happen. There may be future cases where most of the world is caught flat-footed by something we had already begun to prepare for.
Sometimes, the problems we notice will include some physical component—that is, our ability to solve them will be bottlenecked by physical manufacturing capacity (e.g. masks for COVID). The more people in the community have some sense of how manufacturing works, the more likely it is that we’ll be able to start useful projects that resolve these bottlenecks more quickly.
We’ll also have fewer ideas that are doomed to fail because we didn’t understand this topic. I’ll quote a Facebook comment from a community member with healthcare experience (though I won’t link to the comment, since I’m not sure how large an audience they wanted):