Strong-upvoted for presenting a detailed writeup, putting all your work in one place, and including a “Mistakes” section (though I wish you’d written a bit more about how you knew the fundraiser wasn’t a good fit after just one month).
Thoughts:
1. What feedback did you get after presenting at DARPA? How was the experience of talking to government officials whose job it is to think about long-term concerns? Did they seem to take the ideas seriously?
(My biggest question about ALLFED has always been “what’s the path to reaching policymakers?”, and I’m pleasantly surprised to hear about this presentation.)
2. When you say that “It turns out it is much easier to keep most mammal species alive than to feed all people”, I can imagine this idea being interpreted as “we’ll have to sacrifice some lives in order to preserve biodiversity”, which is a message you’ll want to be careful about.
At the very least, it seems bad to use language that implies a direct trade-off. For example, you could say something like “it’s important to consider how a disaster could affect other species; preventing extinction among edible species will be highly valuable after humanity recovers”. (I don’t know how close to ALLFED’s thinking this is, since I haven’t read the book.)
Not that EA doesn’t contain plenty of trade-offs like this, of course, but those other trade-offs (e.g. “how many chickens would you rather save than one human?”) generally don’t appear in scientific research papers. The need to collaborate with governments also seems to weigh against ALLFED’s presenting ideas in controversial ways.
As for how we knew the fundraiser wasn’t a good fit, two factors weighted in our mutual decision to part ways. Firstly, approaching mainstream funders with concerns of existential risk was proving somewhat challenging (this is also the experience that other EA-aligned organizations were telling us they had). Secondly, the fundraiser was finding remote working difficult and discovered he preferred a job with more face-to-face contact. We have a small but intercontinental team, based in the US, Europe and intermittently in Asia, and so our mode of operations at this time is based on networked individuals or teams of two. We have thus discovered we need to highlight this more in our recruitment so as to ensure a good organizational fit for any future hires.
The DARPA meeting was about 10% of global agricultural shortfalls. So I started with that, but I also talked about agricultural collapse. We have found that generally outside of EA, it is hard to get people to take seriously more than 10% global agricultural shortfalls. There seemed to be good engagement at the meeting, but there was little follow-up.
Very good point—I reworded to indicate that feeding humans and other species is not at least a technical trade-off because it is quite feasible to do both.
Strong-upvoted for presenting a detailed writeup, putting all your work in one place, and including a “Mistakes” section (though I wish you’d written a bit more about how you knew the fundraiser wasn’t a good fit after just one month).
Thoughts:
1. What feedback did you get after presenting at DARPA? How was the experience of talking to government officials whose job it is to think about long-term concerns? Did they seem to take the ideas seriously?
(My biggest question about ALLFED has always been “what’s the path to reaching policymakers?”, and I’m pleasantly surprised to hear about this presentation.)
2. When you say that “It turns out it is much easier to keep most mammal species alive than to feed all people”, I can imagine this idea being interpreted as “we’ll have to sacrifice some lives in order to preserve biodiversity”, which is a message you’ll want to be careful about.
At the very least, it seems bad to use language that implies a direct trade-off. For example, you could say something like “it’s important to consider how a disaster could affect other species; preventing extinction among edible species will be highly valuable after humanity recovers”. (I don’t know how close to ALLFED’s thinking this is, since I haven’t read the book.)
Not that EA doesn’t contain plenty of trade-offs like this, of course, but those other trade-offs (e.g. “how many chickens would you rather save than one human?”) generally don’t appear in scientific research papers. The need to collaborate with governments also seems to weigh against ALLFED’s presenting ideas in controversial ways.
Thank you for the feedback and valuable points.
As for how we knew the fundraiser wasn’t a good fit, two factors weighted in our mutual decision to part ways. Firstly, approaching mainstream funders with concerns of existential risk was proving somewhat challenging (this is also the experience that other EA-aligned organizations were telling us they had). Secondly, the fundraiser was finding remote working difficult and discovered he preferred a job with more face-to-face contact. We have a small but intercontinental team, based in the US, Europe and intermittently in Asia, and so our mode of operations at this time is based on networked individuals or teams of two. We have thus discovered we need to highlight this more in our recruitment so as to ensure a good organizational fit for any future hires.
The DARPA meeting was about 10% of global agricultural shortfalls. So I started with that, but I also talked about agricultural collapse. We have found that generally outside of EA, it is hard to get people to take seriously more than 10% global agricultural shortfalls. There seemed to be good engagement at the meeting, but there was little follow-up.
Very good point—I reworded to indicate that feeding humans and other species is not at least a technical trade-off because it is quite feasible to do both.