Dr. David Denkenberger co-founded and directs the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED.info) and donates half his income to it. He received his B.S. from Penn State in Engineering Science, his masters from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Building Systems Program. His dissertation was on an expanded microchannel heat exchanger, which he patented. He is an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in mechanical engineering. He received the National Merit Scholarship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, is a Penn State distinguished alumnus, and is a registered professional engineer. He has authored or co-authored 143 publications (>4800 citations, >50,000 downloads, h-index = 36, second most prolific author in the existential/āglobal catastrophic risk field), including the book Feeding Everyone no Matter What: Managing Food Security after Global Catastrophe. His food work has been featured in over 25 countries, over 300 articles, including Science, Vox, Business Insider, Wikipedia, Deutchlandfunk (German Public Radio online), Discovery Channel Online News, Gizmodo, Phys.org, and Science Daily. He has given interviews on 80,000 Hours podcast (here and here) and Estonian Public Radio, WGBH Radio, Boston, and WCAI Radio on Cape Cod, USA. He has given over 80 external presentations, including ones on food at Harvard University, MIT, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Cornell University, University of California Los Angeles, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos National Lab, Imperial College, and University College London.
Denkenbergeršø
Thanks for all you two do! If you donāt mind me asking, how does the return on your investments factor in? E.g., is the negative savings offset by return such that your net worth is not falling?
ALLFEDās 2024 Highlights
I like how comprehensive this is.
Note that a one in a millennium eruption together with a once in a century plague, like the Plague of Justinian still wasnāt enough to cause existential risk (humans arenāt extinct yet), though the ensuing little ice age could arguably be categorized as a catastrophic risk.
Minor, but existential risk includes more than extinction. So it could be āhumans havenāt undergone an unrecoverable collapse yet (or some other way of losing future potential).ā
I guess as long as there is another category (like āotherā), itās ok. But I believe one EAG exit survey didnāt have another category, so one person I heard from felt excluded.
I donāt know of any good data source on how many people are currently earning to give, but our internal data at GWWC suggests it could be at least 100s (also depending on which definition you use)
According to the 2022 EA survey, out of 3270 people who answered, 335 people were earning to give. Since there are a lot more EAs than 3270, I think it would be more like a thousand people who are earning to give. But itās true they might not be using the 80k definition:
Current definition 80k: āWe say someone is earning to give when they:
Work a job thatās higher earning than they would have otherwise but that they believe is morally neutral or positive
Donate a large fraction of the extra earnings, typically 20-50% of their total salary
Donate to organisations they think are highly effective (i.e. funding-constrained organisations working on big, neglected global problems)ā
I agree with you that it should not have to be a different job, but I disagree that 20% is too low. There are many (most?) EAs who do not have a direct high-impact career or do a lot of high-impact volunteering. So roughly the other way of having impact is earning to give, and if people can give 10%, I think that should qualify.
Thatās interesting to think about the transition from early agriculture/āpastoralism to pre-industrial society. The analyses Iāve seen focus on just recovering agriculture and/āor industry. Do you think in between could be a significant bottleneck or it would just take time? Not a peer-reviewed study, but there were some estimates of future recovery times here.
Thatās very helpful. Do you have a rough idea proportions within creating a better future, e.g. climate, nuclear, bio, and AI?
33% of participants have transitioned into high-impact careers, including joining Charity Entrepreneurship and roles in AI Safety;
That is amazingly high!
These are very exciting! Could you say more about the foci of these orgs within EA cause areas?
Existential catastrophe, annual 0.30% 20.04% David Denkenberger, 2018 Existential catastrophe, annual 0.10% 3.85% Anders Sandberg, 2018 You mentioned how some of the risks in the table were for extinction, rather than existential risk. However, the above two were for the reduction in long-term future potential, which could include trajectory changes that do not qualify as existential risk, such as slightly worse values ending up in locked-in AI. Also another source by this definition was the 30% reduction in long-term potential from 80,000 Hoursā earlier version of this profile. By the way, the source attributed to me was based on a poll of GCR researchersāmy own estimate is lower.
The conventional wisdom is that a crisis like this leads to a panic-neglect cycle, where we oversupply caution for a while, but canāt keep it up. This was the expectation of many people in biosecurity, with the main strategy being about making sure the response wasnāt too narrowly focused on a re-run of Covid, instead covering a wide range of possible pandemics, and that the funding was ring-fenced so that it couldnāt be funnelled away to other issues when the memory of this tragedy began to fade.But we didnāt even see a panic stage: spending on biodefense for future pandemics was disappointingly weak in the UK and even worse in the US.
Have you seen data on spending for future pandemics before COVID and after?
We do not claim to be an x-risk cause area.
I think thatās reasonable that biodiversity loss is unlikely to be an existential risk. However, existential risks could significantly impact biodiversity. Abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios such as nuclear winter could cause extinction of species in the wild, which could potentially be mitigated by keeping the species alive in zoos if there were sufficient food. These catastrophes plus other catastrophes such as those that disrupt infrastructure like extreme pandemic causing people to be too fearful to show up to work in critical industries, could cause desperate people hunting species to extinction. But I think the biggest threat is AGI, which could wipe out all biodiversity. Then again, if AGI goes well, it may be able to resurrect extinct species. So it could be that the most cost-effective way of preserving biodiversity is working on AGI safety.
We are deeply saddened to hear the news of the passing of Marisa, a valued former volunteer of ALLFED. Marisaās dedication and contributions touched many lives and made an impact on our community. Our heartfelt condolences go out to her family and friends at this time.
I use Dragon, and it looks like it does work for Mac. You can trade off speed for accuracy, but I go for accuracy because I usually have enough pauses while Iām dictating that it catches up. You train for a few minutes at the beginning, and if you correct when it makes a mistake, it gets very accurate.
Iām sorry to hear about your negative experiences in EA.
I am dealing with repetitive strain injury and donāt foresee being able to really respond to any comments (Iām surprised with myself that I wrote all of this without twitching forearms lol!)
Sorry also to hear thatāhave you tried voice recognition software? It was a game changer for me back in 2000 (and itās gotten a lot better since then!) - both for RSI and productivity.
I think that saving lives in a catastrophe could have more flow-through effects, such as preventing collapse of civilization (from which we may not recover), reducing the likelihood of global totalitarianism, and reducing the trauma of the catastrophe, perhaps resulting in better values ending up in AGI.
I think the main reason that EA focuses relatively little effort on climate change is that so much money is going to it from outside of EA. So in order to be cost effective, you have to find very leveraged interventions, such as targeting policy, or addressing extreme versions of climate change, particularly resilience, e.g. ALLFED (disclosure, Iām a co-founder).
I have been recently asking around whether someone has compiled how much money is going into different ways of mitigating GCBRs, so this is quite relevant! Do you have estimates of the current EA (or otherwise) spending in these or similar buckets?
Prevention: AI misuse, DNA synthesis screening, etc
Suppression: Pathogen-agnostic early warning, planning for rapid response lockdowns, etc
Containment: UV systems, P4E stockpiling, plans for keeping vital workers onsite, backup plans for providing food, energy and water non-industrially with low human contact, etc
Medical countermeasures: Platform technologies for medical countermeasures, etc
Detection for stealth pandemics: Different pathogen-agnostic early warning?
I think itās true that a lot of topics are not discussed because of concerns about info hazard. But I do think we already had some concrete examples, such as some hotly debated gain of function cases, considering the possibility of something as infectious as measles but as fatal as rabies, or Myxomatosis killing 99% of rabbits.