Thanks for considering ALLFED. We try to respond to inquiries quickly. We have looked back, and have not be able to locate any such inquiries. We will be finalizing our 2020 report with financial details soon.
Thanks a lot for the engagement in the cost-effectiveness model. To clarify, the cost of preparation does not include the scale up in a catastrophe. The idea is that the resilient foods (we are rebranding away from “alternative foods”) could be scaled up without large-scale preparation (e.g. countries would repurpose the paper factories to produce food after the catastrophe, rather than spending billions of dollars ahead of time). Most of the promising resilient foods have already been commercialized. In this paper, we found that if there were no resilient foods, expenditure on stored foods in a catastrophe would be approximately $90 trillion and about 10% of people would survive. However, if resilient foods could be produced at $2.5 per dry kilogram retail, 97% of people would survive but the total expenditure would only be ~$20 trillion. So one could argue that resilient foods would actually save money in a catastrophe. But we did not include that effect in the cost-effectiveness model.
I expect that affecting a large amount of the Earth’s future impact (i.e., 3 to 50% of the future impact of humanity) would be very hard even in extreme circumstances.
Just to make sure we are on the same page, if there were a 10% probability of full-scale nuclear war in the next 30 years and there were a 10% reduction in the long-term future potential of humanity given nuclear war, and if planning and R&D for resilient foods mitigated the far future impact of nuclear war by 50%, then that would improve the long-term potential of humanity by 0.5 percentage points (the product of the three percentages).
[I’ll put some thoughts on the ALLFED section here to keep discussion organised, but this is responding to Nuno’s section rather than David’s comment.]
I feel that that 50% is still pretty good, but the contrast between it and the model’s initial 95% is pretty noticeable to me, and makes me feel that the 95% is uncalibrated/untrustworthy. On the other hand, my probabilities above can also be seen as a sort of sensitivity analysis, which shows that the case for an organization working on ALLFED’s cause area is somewhat more robust than one might have thought.
[...]
In conclusion, I disagree strongly with ALLFED’s estimates (probability of cost overruns, impact of ALLFED’s work if deployed, etc.), however, I feel that the case for an organization working in this area is relatively solid. My remaining uncertainty is about ALLFED’s ability to execute competently and cost-effectively; independent expert evaluation might resolve most of it.
I think this mostly sounds similar to my independent impression, as expressed here, though I didn’t specifically worry particularly about their ability to execute competently and cost-effectively. (I’m not saying I felt highly confident about that; it just didn’t necessarily stand out much to me as a key uncertainty, for whatever reason.)
E.g., I wrote in the linked comment:
Their cost-effectiveness estimates seem remarkably promising (see here and here).
But it does seem quite hard to believe that the cost-effectiveness is really that good. And many of the quantities are based on a survey of GCR researchers, with somewhat unclear methodology (e.g., how were the researchers chosen?)
I also haven’t analysed the models very closely
But, other than perhaps the reliance on that survey, I can’t obviously see major flaws, and haven’t seen comments that seem to convincingly point out major flaws. So maybe the estimates are in the right ballpark?
One thing I’d add is that most of your (Nuno’s) section on ALLFED sounds like it’s seeing ALLFED’s impact as mostly being about their research & advocacy itself. But I think it’s worth also giving a fair amount of emphasis to this question of yours: “Given that ALLFED has a large team, is it a positive influence on its team members? How would we expect employees and volunteers to rate their experience with the organization?”
I’d see a substantial fraction of the value of ALLFED as coming from how it might work as a useful talent pipeline. And I think that this could also be a source of nontrivial downside risk from ALLFED, e.g. if their training is low-quality for some reason, or if people implicitly learn bad habits of thinking/research/modelling, or if their focuses aren’t good focuses and they make their volunteers more likely to stay focused on that long-term.
(I’m not saying that these things are the case. I’d currently guess that ALLFED produces notable impact as a talent pipeline. But I haven’t looked closely and think it’d be worth doing so if one wanted to do a “thorough” evaluation of ALLFED.)
Thanks for considering ALLFED. We try to respond to inquiries quickly. We have looked back, and have not be able to locate any such inquiries. We will be finalizing our 2020 report with financial details soon.
This is most likely my fault; I think I got confused between allfed.org and allfed.info
To clarify, the cost of preparation does not include the scale up in a catastrophe
For clarity: 1. Your guesstimate model: 3% to 50% mitigation of the impact of war with a 30M to 200M, a war which has a probability 0.02% to 5% per year. You also say that so far, you’ve already mitigated the impact of such a war by 1% to 20%. 2. My model: a 0% to 15% mitigation (previously 0 to 5%, see below) of the impact of such a war with a 50M to 50B investment, where this is maybe not being fully prepared, but does include some serious paranoid preparation, some factories running, supply chains established, etc. 3. Objection: You’re planning to go with the 30M to 200M path; my estimates should be for that path. 4. Answer: I’d have to think about it. Maybe 2x to 10x lower. Essentially I’d expect any preparation to at least fail partially, fail to get implemented, be ignored, not survive in institutional memory, etc.
In this paper, we found that if there were no resilient foods, expenditure on stored foods in a catastrophe would be approximately $90 trillion and about 10% of people would survive. However, if resilient foods could be produced at $2.5 per dry kilogram retail, 97% of people would survive but the total expenditure would only be ~$20 trillion. So one could argue that resilient foods would actually save money in a catastrophe
I’ll read the paper.
Just to make sure we are on the same page, if there were a 10% probability of full-scale nuclear war in the next 30 years and there were a 10% reduction in the long-term future potential of humanity given nuclear war, and if planning and R&D for resilient foods mitigated the far future impact of nuclear war by 50%, then that would improve the long-term potential of humanity by 0.5 percentage points (the product of the three percentages).
I see, thanks, I think I was getting this wrong (I’ve changed this in the guesstimate, but not in the post). With that in mind, your estimates now seem less high (but still very high). It changes my estimates slightly.
Separately, your numbers still seem fairly high. Suppose that in 1980 you had $100M and knew that there was going to be a pandemic (or another global financial crisis) in the next 100 years, but didn’t knew the details; it seems unlikely that you could have made the covid pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis more than 10% better.
This is most likely my fault; I think I got confused between allfed.org and allfed.info
We tried to buy the .org domain, but unfortunately it was not for sale.
Essentially I’d expect any preparation to at least fail partially, fail to get implemented, be ignored, not survive in institutional memory, etc.
There are definitely a lot of failure modes, though part of the money should go to updating institutions as staff turn over.
Thanks for updating the Guesstimate.
Separately, your numbers still seem fairly high. Suppose that in 1980 you had $100M and knew that there was going to be a pandemic (or another global financial crisis) in the next 100 years, but didn’t knew the details; it seems unlikely that you could have made the covid pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis more than 10% better.
Good question. I think these are quite different because billions of dollars had been put into preparedness, at least for a pandemic. Though billions of dollars have been put into preventing a nuclear war (and reducing weapon stockpiles), we could not find anything preparing for feeding populations for a multiyear catastrophe. I think generally there are logarithmic returns, which means the first amount of money spent on a problem has much greater marginal cost effectiveness.
Thanks for considering ALLFED. We try to respond to inquiries quickly. We have looked back, and have not be able to locate any such inquiries. We will be finalizing our 2020 report with financial details soon.
Thanks a lot for the engagement in the cost-effectiveness model. To clarify, the cost of preparation does not include the scale up in a catastrophe. The idea is that the resilient foods (we are rebranding away from “alternative foods”) could be scaled up without large-scale preparation (e.g. countries would repurpose the paper factories to produce food after the catastrophe, rather than spending billions of dollars ahead of time). Most of the promising resilient foods have already been commercialized. In this paper, we found that if there were no resilient foods, expenditure on stored foods in a catastrophe would be approximately $90 trillion and about 10% of people would survive. However, if resilient foods could be produced at $2.5 per dry kilogram retail, 97% of people would survive but the total expenditure would only be ~$20 trillion. So one could argue that resilient foods would actually save money in a catastrophe. But we did not include that effect in the cost-effectiveness model.
Just to make sure we are on the same page, if there were a 10% probability of full-scale nuclear war in the next 30 years and there were a 10% reduction in the long-term future potential of humanity given nuclear war, and if planning and R&D for resilient foods mitigated the far future impact of nuclear war by 50%, then that would improve the long-term potential of humanity by 0.5 percentage points (the product of the three percentages).
[I’ll put some thoughts on the ALLFED section here to keep discussion organised, but this is responding to Nuno’s section rather than David’s comment.]
I think this mostly sounds similar to my independent impression, as expressed here, though I didn’t specifically worry particularly about their ability to execute competently and cost-effectively. (I’m not saying I felt highly confident about that; it just didn’t necessarily stand out much to me as a key uncertainty, for whatever reason.)
E.g., I wrote in the linked comment:
One thing I’d add is that most of your (Nuno’s) section on ALLFED sounds like it’s seeing ALLFED’s impact as mostly being about their research & advocacy itself. But I think it’s worth also giving a fair amount of emphasis to this question of yours: “Given that ALLFED has a large team, is it a positive influence on its team members? How would we expect employees and volunteers to rate their experience with the organization?”
I’d see a substantial fraction of the value of ALLFED as coming from how it might work as a useful talent pipeline. And I think that this could also be a source of nontrivial downside risk from ALLFED, e.g. if their training is low-quality for some reason, or if people implicitly learn bad habits of thinking/research/modelling, or if their focuses aren’t good focuses and they make their volunteers more likely to stay focused on that long-term.
(I’m not saying that these things are the case. I’d currently guess that ALLFED produces notable impact as a talent pipeline. But I haven’t looked closely and think it’d be worth doing so if one wanted to do a “thorough” evaluation of ALLFED.)
This is most likely my fault; I think I got confused between allfed.org and allfed.info
For clarity:
1. Your guesstimate model: 3% to 50% mitigation of the impact of war with a 30M to 200M, a war which has a probability 0.02% to 5% per year. You also say that so far, you’ve already mitigated the impact of such a war by 1% to 20%.
2. My model: a 0% to 15% mitigation (previously 0 to 5%, see below) of the impact of such a war with a 50M to 50B investment, where this is maybe not being fully prepared, but does include some serious paranoid preparation, some factories running, supply chains established, etc.
3. Objection: You’re planning to go with the 30M to 200M path; my estimates should be for that path.
4. Answer: I’d have to think about it. Maybe 2x to 10x lower. Essentially I’d expect any preparation to at least fail partially, fail to get implemented, be ignored, not survive in institutional memory, etc.
I’ll read the paper.
I see, thanks, I think I was getting this wrong (I’ve changed this in the guesstimate, but not in the post). With that in mind, your estimates now seem less high (but still very high). It changes my estimates slightly.
Separately, your numbers still seem fairly high. Suppose that in 1980 you had $100M and knew that there was going to be a pandemic (or another global financial crisis) in the next 100 years, but didn’t knew the details; it seems unlikely that you could have made the covid pandemic or the 2008 financial crisis more than 10% better.
We tried to buy the .org domain, but unfortunately it was not for sale.
There are definitely a lot of failure modes, though part of the money should go to updating institutions as staff turn over.
Thanks for updating the Guesstimate.
Good question. I think these are quite different because billions of dollars had been put into preparedness, at least for a pandemic. Though billions of dollars have been put into preventing a nuclear war (and reducing weapon stockpiles), we could not find anything preparing for feeding populations for a multiyear catastrophe. I think generally there are logarithmic returns, which means the first amount of money spent on a problem has much greater marginal cost effectiveness.