Christopher Chan 🔸

• Christopher Chan 🔸 12 Mar 2024 21:15 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Re­search pro­ject idea: food stock­piling as a GCR intervention

  Food stockpiling already exist as mitigation strategy in many countries and international aid organisation (FAO, UNHCR etc.). Not just to tackle short-term non nuclear winter (< 3+ years) scale for GCR. The goal is not only to feed population, but also to stabilise food price in such events. Stabilisation of food price is important to prevent local and global famines, especially in an event where communication and industrial infrastructure collapse.

  The reason GCR focused orgs are focused on the production scalability and deploy-ability of resilient food is partly to ensure adequate nutrition and calorie requirement, but this could also stabilise food price for diminishing food stock in such an event.
  
  Thus, food price movement is often a catalyst for instabilities in food insecure regions and structurally unstable regions (e.g. First and Second Arab Spring).
  
  Freezing food and the ‘cold-chain’ distribution of require access to stable energy supply, which fuel inequality and poverty in many unstable regions don’t have access to, we could postulate this would also happen in many GCR scenarios. Particularly in higher-likelihood human caused GCR (war --> nuclear exchanges) food and fuel infrastructure is often weaponise as political tokens, rendering stockpile and transportation infrastructures around such supply chains vulnerable to attack.
  
  Corentin wrote an excellent yet underappreciated 3-part long posts on our reliance on fossil-fuel which maybe of interest to you , part 3, in particular discussed under-researched areas, which are relevant to the topic.

• Christopher Chan 🔸 14 Jan 2024 11:45 UTC

  1 point

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  on: In­tro­duc­ing Path­ways to Progress

  Was part of the first cohort, I got to learn a lot and met a lot of very insightful folks from all corners, EA, non-EA, and EA-adjacent. Very professionally facilitated, would highly recommend!

• Christopher Chan 🔸 26 Nov 2023 17:10 UTC

  2 points

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  on: There are no peo­ple to be effec­tively al­tru­is­tic for on a dead planet: EA fund­ing of pro­jects with­out con­duct­ing En­vi­ron­men­tal Im­pact Assess­ments (EIAs), Health and Safety Assess­ments (HSAs) and Life Cy­cle Assess­ments (LCAs) = catastrophe

  Sorry for being 2 years late to the discussion.
  

  There were also points I agree and disagree with after reading the post and the comment session. EAs tendency to quantify things and run BOTECs are probably the reason this post did not receive its deserved attention. WIth some footnotes and cavaets to this can better express the author’s opinion.
  
  While I generally agree with the comments made by aogara and timunderwood. I have to highlight my agreement with Deborah of “Do no harm” oath, however, I would frame it as a ratio of “Doing loads of good/​Doing minimal harm”, as the cases in the comments that some externalities maybe unavoidable let alone, LCA might also have blind-spots in identifying all the non-obvious externalities. But the missing “Doing loads of good/​Doing minimal harm” is often missing as an epistemic status in EA thinking in favour of quick and brash utilitarianism BOTEC calculation instead of exploring the complexities as explored by Doing EA Better.
  
  I thought the marginal damage of bednets chemically leaking is dangerous and contributes to the extinction event is probably under-assessed, although I have no expertise in commenting on chemical contamination. [Epistemic status: low]. One could potentially argue that this is an intermediate solution before the arrival of the Malaria vaccine, which on 2023 update is coming soon, then I suspect that AMF efforts is justifiable despite the environmental externalities. However, in light of this, I hope this is true and therefore will actually redirect most of AMF funding to rapidly speed-up and accelerate the vaccine trials and distribution like we had in COVID. This could be done to minimise the AMF externaliites. In a general scope, we wish near-termist charities to eventually disappear because this is a sign of a progressing human civilisation. We want less charities not more, more charities is an indication of problems becoming bigger.
  
  I initially thought that the point on insect pesticide resilient was a good point and probably the most dangerous scenario until I considered Guy point, the number of mosquito in contact with the bednet in comparison to spraying is fair.
  
  I also think that climate change as not part of the x-risk funding scheme is although epistemically mistaken, however due to less-neglectedness aspect, I can see why this was the case.
  
  One contradiction in the movement when considering longtermism (I work on nuclear risks X AI) is that we use future humans as part of the moral justification on a flourishing future, yet we do not account for them suffering-risks and future living organisms in the 6th mass extinction. Yes, nature hangs in the balance and that if you ever visited a tropical forest, it is a constant life and death battle, but surely the shear number of species drop and their potential offsprings up to an equilibrium balance has not been seen in our past BOTEC calculations. While we only account them when we talk about near-termism risk in animal farming. I thought this might be misguided and more in-depth evaluation shall be done here.

• Christopher Chan 🔸 21 Nov 2023 10:27 UTC

  4 points

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  on: A case against fo­cus­ing on tail-end nu­clear war risks

  Hi Sarah,
  
  Many thanks for pointing me to this. I had a brief look at the content and the comments, not yet the preceding posts and succesive posts. While I generally remain in agreement with the ALLFED teams on the neglectedness of the tail end, and how solving this also solves for other naturally occuring ASRS scenarios (albeit lower probabilities). Your argument reminds me of a perspective in animal welfare. If we improve the current condition of the billions of animal suffering, we have more of an excuse to slaughter them, in turn, empowering the meat companies, and thus it impedes our transition towards a cruelty free world.
  
  Now I don’t think I have anything to add that was not covered by the others a year ago, but I want to take this opportunitiy to steelman your case: If the lower neglectedness and higher tractability of civil movement /​ policy in denuclearisation to less than 300 nuclear weapons (approximate number for not causing a nuclear winter) > higher neglectedness and lower tractability of physical intervention (resilience food and supply chain resilience plan), you might be correct!
  
  The tractability can be assessed on the civilian organisations (in and out of EA) that have been working on this and the success rate of reduced stockpile /​ dollar spent
  
  But note that at least half of the nuclear weapon deployed are in the hands of authoritarian countries [Russia: 3859, China: 410, North Korea: 30] which does not have good track record in listening to civil societies. While you could argue that Russia had drastically reduced their stockpile at the end of the cold war, many non-alligned countries [non-NATO, non Russia Bloc] have only increased their stockpile absolutely. I suspect with low confidence that reducing stockpile by a lot is tractable but complete denuclearisation, squeezeing the last 10% is an extremely hard up-hill battle if not impossible as countries continue to look up for their interests. There’s been a lot of recent talks about in hindsight Ukraine should not have given up their nuclear weapons and Russia just lifted their ban on testing them.
  
  Interested in your thoughts here :)
  Chris

• Christopher Chan 🔸 6 Nov 2023 7:19 UTC

  −1 points

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  on: State of the East and South­east Asian EAcosystem

  🇭🇰🇭🇰🇭🇰 🥳🥳

• Christopher Chan 🔸 21 Oct 2023 9:52 UTC

  9 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Famine deaths due to the cli­matic effects of nu­clear war

  I understand the desire to use cumulative probability to calculate probability of nuclear war before 2050, but if interdependency of base rate was not used (i.e. 0.0127 * 26 = 0.33, which is equivalent to metaculus), shouldn’t we already use a Beta conjugation of the base rate as each year pass-by?

  - If detonation does not happen, Beta(1, 79)

  - If detonation happen, Beta(2, 79)

  - annual probability = 0.0127

  - Cumulative probability of 21.843% by 2050

  
  I saw you use Beta distribution for the CDF constraint the probability of a large nuclear war, defined using the metaculus question, I agree with this, I think this checks-out. I also like that you give less weighting to the metaculus question that ask for probability distribution as it will be less accurate than taking the Beta distribution of 100 to 1000, I learnt something about how to evaluate metaculus question here:
  

  There seems to be 2 set of questions regarding nuclear impact and winter:

  - The Nuclear Risk Horizon Project (no monetary incentive)

  - Nuclear Risk Tournament ($ 2685.5 reward, and ends on 1st Feb 2024)
  

  I wan to understand how do you calibrate the monetary incentive and limited time frame when weighing the 2 sets of questions for your research?
  

  For example contrasting these 2 questions, which you have addressed in your post:
  

  1. How many nuclear weapons will be detonated offensively by 2050, if at least one offensive detonation occurs? [HORIZON, non-monetary]

  2. How many non-strategic nuclear weapons will be deployed at the end of 2023? (No recency weighted)? [TOURNAMENT, monetary]
     

  The deployment mean is an orders of magnitude higher than predicted detonation. Surely, even 100 weapons is a very contained regional war scenario according to Hochmann et al (2021). And a very constrained exchange between Russia/​China and NATO. I would think that the former question and prediction unrealistically low given how many test just NK have conducted recently. I think you have adequately modelled that with your beta-distribution, but that will be 3x higher than the latter question unweighted results which is about 112 at median, and 161 weapons at the 75th percentile (11 Tg soot), and the 95th percentile of your calculation of 1.81k is 3x the latter question’s distribution, do you think there’s a need to reconcile that?.
  

  How do you feel about taking expected value of such numbers https://​​www.metaculus.com/​​questions/​​8382/​​1000-nuke-detonations-cause-4b-deaths/​​ (4 Bil * 0.45) when this seems so far lower than numbers proposed by more sophisticated modelling, esp the Rutgers Team. I am generally going on the heuristic on prediction market probably have an upper hand in counting weapons and predicting deployment and number and location of detonation, but not on long drag-out nuclear winter affects (crop yield, trade, famine numbers).
  
  I still need time to engage with the soot calculation literature, so I will probably write a follow-up on that later next week or the week after if that’s okay, that will give me much more focus on asking the right questions and doing the right research.

• Christopher Chan 🔸 27 Sep 2023 18:02 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Open Task Back­log to Drive EA Engagement

  I am not consciously aware of any centralised EA meta backlog. I am a little confused as to the connection between working on this and the number discrepancies between highly engaged EAs and subscribers on 80,000 hours. From what I know anecdotally 80,000 hours is although funded by CEA, many from other conventional NGO actually use the job board without realising this was part of an EA project, this might result in an inflated count.
  
  Will the open task backlog be meta focused or cause areas focused, if cause areas focus, you might probably get more traction by joining a local org or professional org say High Impact Engineers?

• Christopher Chan 🔸 23 Sep 2023 12:14 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Balanc­ing the Scales: Ad­dress­ing Biolog­i­cal X-Risk Re­search Dis­par­i­ties Beyond the West

  Hi Emman,
  
  While I am no expert in biosecurity, your posts on natural and bioengineered fungi pathogens piqued my interests, particularly on topics of crop resilience. I think your posts have unique values that can be added to the Western dominant EA world, and I love seeing more diversity on the EA forum. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the formatting of your posts might be undermining your very important message. Revewing your several posts I would consider:
  
  - Adding a tl;dr if writing a longer posts
  - Format your post with headers available while editing your EA forum draft
  - Crosslink to important and relevant posts such as Max Görlitz map of biosecurity posts
  - Writing in longer details in general that helps the non-biosecurity reader like me, set the reader up before getting to the main message.
  - References to peer-review sources helps
  
  Your posts deserve a lot more karma than many others, yet I felt like they fall short on readership because of the above reasons, here are just my 2 cents.

• Christopher Chan 🔸 19 Sep 2023 8:49 UTC

  0 points

  0 ∶ 1

  on: Shrimp: The an­i­mals most com­monly used and kil­led for food production

  Thank you for in-text citation and quality post, felt like quality posts backed by peer-review has been absence from EA Forum lately.

• Christopher Chan 🔸 18 Sep 2023 20:52 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Christopher Chan 🔸’s comment on: Re­la­tion­ship be­tween EA Com­mu­nity and AI safety

  I saw the footnote

• Christopher Chan 🔸 18 Sep 2023 20:48 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Re­la­tion­ship be­tween EA Com­mu­nity and AI safety

  Where is catastrophic resilience from volcanic and nuclear risks, biosecurity and pandemic preparedeness?

• Christopher Chan 🔸 13 Sep 2023 16:09 UTC

  13 points

  5 ∶ 1

  on: Who should we in­ter­view for The 80,000 Hours Pod­cast?

  I would love to see more catastrophic resilience interview after a string of AI safety interviews. Perhaps volcanologists and nuclear security folks:
  
  Mike Cassidy: Associate Professor in Volcanology, authored the best fallout post here.
  
  Follow up with ALLFED and David Denkenberger.
  
  Emad Kiyaei and Kolfinna Tómasdóttir: Setting up an AI risk in Nuclear Weapon civil consortium...

• Christopher Chan 🔸 7 Sep 2023 12:32 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Mike Cassidy’s comment on: More than Earth War­riors: The Di­verse Roles of Geo­scien­tists in Effec­tive Altruism

  Thanks for reading Mike.
  
  With an odd of 1 in 170, that will result in ~$8.964 billion USD (Note that this number and the above numbers are also yearly investment). Not exactly a trillion just yet. The report states that $428.51 trillion over 5-years loss should be considered, if the mean: $85.702 trillion USD GDP loss could be averted by 8.964 billion yearly, this will result in a cost-effectiveness ratio of roughly 9,600:1.
  
  I.e. $1 USD in investment would save ~$9,600 USD in potential economic loss yearly. Although, given my modest understanding of insurance products, if a supereruption does occur, I suspect that payout to loss will have a P<1 chance of actually materialising. I will need to do more research on this to provide a better answer...

• Christopher Chan 🔸 4 Sep 2023 19:25 UTC

  5 points

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  on: On the as­sess­ment of vol­canic erup­tions as global catas­trophic or ex­is­ten­tial risks

  As an overarching review of geospatial data and geoscientists role in EA, I wrote a post and started a channel role-geoscientists on EA anywhere. I would love to see people interested in contributing towards geospatial X-risk here: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​JaACyD72oacQB9WDn/​​more-than-earth-warriors-the-diverse-roles-of-geoscientists

• Christopher Chan 🔸 31 Aug 2023 16:50 UTC

  8 points

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  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: More than Earth War­riors: The Di­verse Roles of Geo­scien­tists in Effec­tive Altruism

  Hi Nathan, thanks for reading. The point of this post was really to address 2 problems:
  
  1. It is generally really difficult to find geospatial scientists (Earth Observation, GIS...) and Earth System Scientists (Geophysicist, Volcanologist...) people in EA. We are a minority here. We get really excited when we meet each other. We want to gather a community and say we can contribute.
  
  2. Geospatial data is very useful in many aspect of our cause areas, hence the breadth of case studies listed above, from neartermist to semi-longtermist (particularly supervolcano impact). While EA as a community don’t seem to attract a lot of geoscientists in general (perhaps it should). Current career advice seem to always err on the side of take your quantitative skills and go work in consulting or finance (which was what I did too). We know that geospatial data and our niche skillsets can contribute, therefore, this post is also a chance to inform the rest of EAs the current geospatial research happening. Think about geospatial data and spatial analysis as a “common language” between an epidemiologist and a volcanologist. Perhaps direct cross-pollination might not happen, but a platform for skill-sharing would be useful.
  
  So yes, geospatial research is underrated. I am not arguing more people should become a satellite image analyst, more advocating for if you work in global health or poverty alleviation already, perhaps also pay more attention to the geospatial aspect of it. Additionally, we could be a platform that perhaps provide geospatial research support if this community gain traction.
  
  Hope this clarifies,
  Chris

More than Earth War­riors: The Di­verse Roles of Geo­scien­tists in Effec­tive Altruism

• Christopher Chan 🔸 26 Aug 2023 10:12 UTC

  4 points

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  on: An Overview of the AI Safety Fund­ing Situation

  Shouldn’t the EMA calculation for 3 years be:
  
  EMA = Current_year*2/​(3+1) + Last_yearEMA*(1 − 2/​(3+1))
  
  EMA = Current_year*0.5 + Last_yearEMA*0.5
  
  And EMA calculation for 2 years be (your google sheet formula):
  
  EMA = Current_year*2/​(2+1) + Last_yearEMA*(1 − 2/​(2+1))
  
  EMA = Current_year*0.66 + Last_yearEMA*0.33
  
  However, in the google formula you weighted the previous year by 0.66 and the current year by 0.33, meaning that you gave the most recent data less weightings and the EMA is actually 2 years instead of 3?
  
  https://​​pandas.pydata.org/​​pandas-docs/​​stable/​​reference/​​api/​​pandas.DataFrame.ewm.html
  https://​​www.investopedia.com/​​terms/​​e/​​ema.asp
  
  A slight change to use a 3 year-smoothing of a 3 year EMA
  
  EMA(3 years) = Fund(t)*0.571+EMA(t-1)*0.286 + EMA(t-2)*0.143

  *0.571+0.286+0.143 = ~ 1

  I.e. 3 years EMA should actually be:
  
  

  2014	0	0
  2015	1186000	782760
  2016	6563985	3971904.795
  2017	43222473	25927931.53
  2018	4280392	10427474.64
  2019	63826400	43134826.36
  2020	19626363	25034342.48
  2021	90760985	65152624.55
  2022	118717429	90001213.56
  2023	30873035	52685675.37

• Christopher Chan 🔸 14 Aug 2023 10:13 UTC

  1 point

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  on: How many peo­ple are neart­er­mist and have high P(doom)?

  I feel like I am a neartermist mostly because of my studies and my comparative advantages, neartermist seems more likely to be higher in empathetic leaning person (not sure how to phrase this). However, my tech and interaction with applied AI and geoscience has also allow me to recognise the danger for longtermist risks which with let me approach the research and discussion with open-mindedness despite my comparative advantage in neartermist causes. One of the main attractiveness of EA to me originally was because the movement address both of my concerns.

• Christopher Chan 🔸 6 Jun 2023 13:07 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Larry Baum’s comment on: From vol­un­tary to manda­tory, are the ESG dis­clo­sure frame­works still fer­tile ground for un­re­al­ised EA ca­reer path­ways? – A 2023 up­date on ESG po­ten­tial impact

  Thanks for reading Larry,

  Your assessment is generally correct, however just one more thing. In ESG ratings, we also take into consideration industry clusters so that companies are ranked against their peers as much as possible. Additionally, in order to have more dimensions, we not only use company self disclosure data but also watch for controversial news, lawsuits.
  
  This means that which data to use and how to normalise or “curve” they grade it on is in the discretion of the industry experts within each ESG rating company.
  
  Of course, at the end of the day, funds hold multiple industries. Which means that they eventually get aggregated so lose some of that granularity.

• Christopher Chan 🔸 6 Jun 2023 6:48 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sanjay’s comment on: From vol­un­tary to manda­tory, are the ESG dis­clo­sure frame­works still fer­tile ground for un­re­al­ised EA ca­reer path­ways? – A 2023 up­date on ESG po­ten­tial impact

  You are absolutely correct, the perspective I have is quite narrow due to my lack of experience in the field. However, I hope this none-the-less help shed some light on the current ongoing projects and thoughts around the field. Moreover, I do realise the perspective on the post is very Euro-environment centric. I do not have expertise or experience in other markets to comment on them.