Hiya! I work on data stuff at CEA. I used to be the content lead on the EA Global team at CEA, and before that I did economic consulting. I was born and raised in Hong Kong 🇭🇰.
Think I’m making a mistake? Want to give me feedback? Here’s my admonymous. You can also give feedback for me directly to my manager, Oscar Howie.
FWIW, I appreciated reading this :) Thank you for sharing it!
We had a bit of a tragedy of the commons problem because a lot of people are risk-averse and don’t want to be associated with EA in case something bad happens to them but this causes the brand to lose a lot of good people you’d be happy to be associated with.
I so agree! I think there is something virtuous and collaborative for those of us who have benefited from EA and its ideas / community to just… being willing to stand up and say simply that. I think these ideas are worth fighting for.
I’m a proud EA.
<3
Nice. You’re such a fast writer! Very helpful, thank you!
From this post:
They’re now sequencing wastewater from eight sewersheds across four metropolitan areas, with the addition of Riverside CA (in collaboration with Jason Rothman) in December.
In Fall 2023 we partnered with CDC’s Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program and Ginkgo Biosecurity to collect and sequence both pooled airplane lavatory waste and municipal wastewater influent and sludge. We’ve submitted a full set of aliquots to MIT’s BioMicroCenter for high-throughput library preparation, and will be sending the libraries to Broad Clinical Labs for sequencing later this quarter.
I see, that answered some of my questions. I still feel confused how big a sewershed is relative to a city, and how much that matters from the perspective of early detection. But no pressure to engage, was just curious. Exciting!
Wow, this is so exciting!! Thanks for sharing, and congratulations team!
To this end, we’re pleased to share that Open Philanthropy has granted $3M to the NAO over one year to fund a significant scale-up of our wastewater sequencing, targeting three NovaSeq X 25B runs weekly.
Wow 😍. That’s great. And if I read footnote 2 right, the implication is that by end of 2025, you’d aim to be able to detect a pathogen that sheds like Influenza A in cities you monitor before 2% of the population is infected? Or is that not quite right because you’re targeting 3 such runs weekly across all cities (maybe I should say “sewersheds”?) so you wouldn’t quite be able to hit that point yet?
I had some other basic / not-an-expert questions but no pressure to engage :)
Which cities are you monitoring again?
It sounds like from this notebook you’re still trying to figure out how valuable monitoring one city is from the perspective of catching any global pandemic, so I assume one weakness of this approach is in the geographic restrictions. Although I’ve vaguely heard of wastewater monitoring in a network of airports / aircrafts as a way to get around this (I can’t tell if that’s just an idea right now or if it’s already being implemented, though.)
Was the 2% threshold chosen for a particular reason?
Thanks Neel! (I work closely with Jessica on the growth pillar.)
To me Growth feels like a somewhat unhelpful handle here that pushes me in the mind frame of what leads to short-term growth rather than a sustainable healthy community. But if it feels useful to you, fair enough
Thanks for your takes on the framing, that’s helpful. The one line description of our 2025-6 strategy is “building sustainable momentum for EA” (as in the body of the post). I do personally find that the best meme to capture the spirit of the strategy. Curious if it resonates!
I feel extremely unsure about this one. I’m voting slightly against purely from the perspective of, “wow, there are projects in that direction that feel super neglected”.
Given that this comment has gained some traction, consider making a top level post with more instructions to get people to do this?
I’d also be interested in a bit more exposition on the theory of change re: writing the AG — I get why writing to your representative is probably useful, but do AGs typically take letters from the public into account when deciding whether to make an objection?! (I’d bid for you to make the top level post even if you don’t address this question though, just for visibility reasons.)
Nice, sounds like a fun event! Thanks for pointing to the initial list of concrete projects, I found them interesting, especially:
Pedantry metrics — I found that an interesting way to think about degrees of falsehoods / how misleading statements can be. Maybe there’s some sort of evals flavored project there?
Argument parser — I like the idea of creating some sort of LLM tool to “neutralize persuasion / rhetoric”.
I’d be kind of interested to see someone try those ideas out if you re-run this hackathon. And wow, I found the demo on detecting fraudulent research super cool. Agreed that it’d be exciting to see this go viral.
Nice! By the way, I really appreciate how consistently your team helps ground discussions like this in data. I opened this post and as I was scrolling through, I thought, “oh I bet David has already responded with something helpful.” It’s a great public service!
I found this such a beautiful piece of writing! :’)
@Anna Weldon I’ve said this before, but I am just SO excited for the managerial expertise and excellence you are bringing to CEA. We (CEA and EA) are so lucky <3
Thanks for such a thorough compendium of advice, this seems like a great resource!! 💜
This is so great, congratulations team!! <3
One thing this makes me curious about: how good is the existing evidence base on electric stunning is better for the welfare of the shrimp, and how much better is stunning? I didn’t realize SWP was thinking of using the corporate campaign playbook to scale up stunning, so it makes me curious how robustly good this intervention is, and I couldn’t quickly figure this out from the Forum / website. @Aaron Boddy🔸 is there a public thing I can read by any chance? No pressure!
FWIW, “how good is stunning for welfare” is the main question I have about the impact of HSI right now (whereas other crucial considerations like “how many shrimp do you target”, “will farmers use the stunners”, “how should we value shrimp / their expected sentience” all feel clearer to me).
I often find myself thinking about this post, and I now often use the phrases “morality as taxes” and “wholeheartedness”. Thank you for writing it :)
Nice. I’d find this super interesting!
(A nitpick responding to just one point and not the whole post)
I feel a bit wary of using SWP as your default example here because this comment from @Aaron Boddy🔸 makes me think that SWP doesn’t have a ton of room for rapidly deploying more funding right now—I’d expect further donations to have lower marginal ROI than directly buying more stunners which I /expect/ is what you’re assuming in the counterfactual (which is not a dig at SWP, seems fine for them to use extra donations for lower marginal ROI things if their top priority tickets are comfortably funded!)
A broader point: I’d expect the marginal ROI of additional funding in the invertebrate welfare space to diminish much faster than the marginal ROI of AMF donations.
I am glad you’ve come to a decision here, even though it sounds like a painful one! I really appreciated being able to read this, thank you for sharing!
I think animal welfare work is more likely to be recommended by my all-things-considered normative views than what I’ve been doing, though I’m not confident that cluelessness doesn’t undermine this, too.
@JesseClifton I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on why animal welfare work seems better under your normative beliefs, if you’re open to sharing. (Not sharing my views because I don’t want to anchor you.) Someone I’m close to is trying to figure out what they believe about cluelessness, and I thought they might benefit from hearing someone else think through this!
This is such good news!! I’m so relieved, even if there will still be a fight in the near future.
I found this ep interesting and inspiring @Cameron Meyer Shorb 🔸, thanks for doing it :) Like Luisa, I hadn’t heard the idea re: selective reforestation before, and found it super interesting.
This is so heart-warming! Thanks for sharing Jamie!
I found a bunch of this really interesting, thanks for sharing this! I’d be pretty curious whether this resonates with anyone who now thinks of themselves as “EA adjacent” in part because of FTX fallout :) (although maybe those folks aren’t, y’know, on the EA Forum 🤷🏻♀️)