Neat about the alcohol sachets!
I don’t see how “decreeing minimum sleep” would work. Why aren’t the high school students getting enough sleep? Are they also working jobs? Do they live far away from the schools?
Cienna
Karma: 266
Meta: looks like this is Skye’s first post on the EA Forum. Welcome, Skye! Thanks for your courage in posting this!
(Writing in cluelessness from the USA) I accept the argument for importance, and notice myself defaulting to considering the problem intractable because I don’t know how tractable it is to meaningfully improve school safety in Uganda. Will you please share more about how hard it might be, and what it would take, to make this better?
I agree that reducing childhood trauma in the USA looks quite tractable, and that it’s not as neglected as other issues. Examples of things which are happening:
1. There’s already work being done to understand, prevent, and overcome Adverse Childhood Experiences (notably in California, under Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris). ACEs are dose-dependent, with people who report more childhood trauma having worse health outcomes, including a higher risk of early death.
2. the intactivist movement appears to be making progress over the last decade on shifting public opinion toward opposing childhood genital cutting.
DonorsChoose (recommended by an Experiment friend). I haven’t seen yet whether these projects do report back, but the infrastructure is there for following up about whether the project went as expected.
I used to do transcribing with timestamps. I met some cool people and learned a lot about the topics I was working on that way. It was a good remote flex-time freelance job for me at 20. I rarely do transcription work anymore, but I would be happy to do a call about what I learned and my setup with anyone considering this line of work.
RE #3, the company’s website includes a helpful infographic. It sounds like they added an optogenetic control on the Z chromosome (I couldn’t find anything more specific than that). The breeding hens contain one altered and one normal Z chromosome, and the breeding roosters are normal. Female chicks receive a normal W from their mother and a normal Z from their father and are “wild-type”, but male chicks receive an edited Z chromosome from their mother and a normal Z chromosome from their father. Shining blue light on all the eggs “deactivates” the edited Z chromosome in male eggs, disrupting development when the embryo is “only two layers of cells.” Maybe we can find out more about how the optogenetic control works if someone with paid Academia.edu access searches for Dr. Yuval Cinnamon’s papers? I tried a title search and didn’t find anything.
Oooh, I’m hopeful this technology could be used for identifying insect stings too! Insect antivenom faces some similar challenges.
If you had other small predators around to keep the rodent populations in check, such as weasels and hawks, maybe you could get away with removing snakes. Rodent population booms are undesirable because rodents carry diseases which can be infect humans, pets, and livestock. Rodent poison isn’t a good alternative because the poisons also kill scavengers (dogs, owls, etc.) that eat the poisoned rodents, and are harmful at sub-lethal doses. Birds of prey aren’t enough to keep a rodent population in check because they can’t access most of the places where rodents like to hide, so predators are also needed which can travel along the ground and enter burrows.
Predator removal has been tried repeatedly, usually with negative consequences on the ecosystem. Australia in particular has lots of case studies about humans trying to manage small pests without enough predators, and Yellowstone has a famous case study about the value of reintroducing predators. Keeping predators around is unpleasant, but the human effort involved in compensating for their absence is expensive.
I think keeping the non-venomous snakes mostly covers this concern though!
The only upside I know of provided by venomous snakes specifically is that they are a source of very complex specialized proteins with potential medical applications, such as anticoagulants and vasoconstrictors.
Project: bioengineering an all-female breed of chicken to end chick culling
What interaction experience are you wishing for, which you imagine an app would provide?
Fungal infections are also large contributors to the recent declines in bat and amphibian populations.
RE nature walks, I’ve found personally that I get a lot more perspective and relief when I’m somewhere it smells really “green”. A thickly verdant yard is better than an impoverished forest. I think it may have something to do with what the plants give off: a small, full greenhouse has that restorative effect on me without the walking.
(No biomed background, just an avid reader of science news) Maybe you already ruled this out based on your specifics, but could lab-grown mini-organs be a suitable third option for your experimental ideas? That in-between choice might offer an end-run around both the mouse-to-human translation problem and the overhead and slowness of experimenting with human subjects within the time frame of a Master’s. Caveats: your estimate of the moral status of mini-brains, the smaller existing knowledge base of how to care for them and interpret results, and possibly cost. I don’t know if there are existing mini-organ models for Alzheimer’s as there are mouse models, sorry.
I was missing something important before about the aspirational nature of a flag. While the star held something true about there being actually hard, knock-out problems to solve along the way, I think the inevitability of the star-less version is more suitably aspirational.
There is not one singular problem to solve, there are many, and the other shapes already hold that. With the star, I had put an oppositional teleology before the indefinite striving for betterment, and that was out of order. That was more ‘per ardua ad astra,’ “through adversity to the stars,” this is more ‘sic itur ad astra,’ “such is the way to the stars.” Let us not be defined by the battles we have won, but by the ideals we pursue, through and beyond whatever difficulty may come...I’ve kept the star’s color. The hope is that the future is better in both quantity and quality, so having the color brighten as the area expands shows that it’s not just more of the same. I’m annoyed with the gradient technically, I think it breaks the simplicity rule of flag design by making it a lot harder to draw the flag from memory or print it in a standard way. Oh well. SVG here.
I’m interested in writing about this with someone; anybody interested in writing arguments with me about why biodiversity matters? I don’t expect it to make the leaderboard of urgent problems, but as a slow important problem I think it’s a contender.
Here’s a sketch of the argument that convinced me: we want our life support system to handle as many challenges as it can on its own, with as little maintenance as possible. Nature is not a closed system, so the challenges are multi-factor and co-occurring. High biodiversity provides already established stabilizing loops, redundant pathways of nutrient cycling, adaptive strategies, and a variety of pre-existing species and ecosystems which can colonize new niches as conditions change. The more parts are available, the more complex and robust nature’s networks can be, hopefully thereby requiring less human management in order to continue to provision and protect life. Loss of biodiversity is a loss of information, resilience, redundancy, and other resources all at once.
I think biodiversity hasn’t gotten as much attention as people might be willing to give it. I don’t know why, but here are some guesses. Maybe...more clarity is needed about how biodiversity contributes to other goals.
“biodiversity” is at the wrong level: maybe it’s a subproblem or tool, and the cause area has a different name.
“biodiversity” as a concept is too vague or poorly connected to evoke mental imagery or motivate action.
the principles and how they fit together haven’t been articulated clearly/succinctly enough.
it’s hard to get really good at thinking about “biodiversity” because it contains something mentally costly, like patience, perspective-taking, predicting, counterfactualizing, or systems thinking.
more true causal stories are needed explaining how biodiversity contributes to ecosystem services, which lead to personal everyday benefit.
building biodiversity is an upfront investment with a long payoff horizon, so it may not be financially competitive as other projects, except in specific cases with a fast, easy-to-capture payoff.
we’ve still got some biodiversity, so it may be less urgent than other cause areas despite being important.
more post-mortems of failed interventions are needed to address disappointment, counteract the appeal of non-intervention, and reassure funders that ecological interventions can be cost-effective.
more here-now-small-doable localized intervention recommendations are wanted, with a tangible signal for whether the intervention is working (such as water quality, or return of an indicator species). For instance, planting milkweed for monarchs was clear, tangible, and doable, so lots of people planted milkweed (at least suboptimally, possibly counterproductively).
more practice and guiding examples would help about how to compare very different interventions’ possible expected value, and select ones that pay for themselves. For instance, I wonder whether oyster seeding or herbivore exclosures around oaks would support more biodiversity 30 years later per $1,000 spent? Per 100 volunteer hours spent? Which interventions include a way to economically capture part of the increased value of ecosystem services provided? Could beaver reintroduction be paid for with almond futures?
Thanks! Sent you a direct message.
Result: This project came in second place and won the $750 prize, per update here.
Thanks! Now it makes sense how a decree would help. I imagine some additional culture shift would be needed to make sure that the kids weren’t still under a lot of pressure, just less overt.