Head of Data & Research at Our World in Data
GWWC pledge (10%) since 2018
EdMathieu
Karma: 1,179
Congrats guys – it’s great to see this productive collaboration become a full-fledged organization!
Space Exploration & Satellites on Our World in Data
Strong-upvoting this. The way you could decide to invest money into expanding your social media reach would be to properly sponsor your account through ads on IG/Tw/FB. These platforms allow for precise targeting based on demographics and interests – and given the specific scope of HIA, I imagine that designing good targets would be easy enough.
Our World in Data publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.
Head of Product & Design
We are looking for a talented and experienced Head of Product & Design to join our leadership team. We believe that this role is the “missing pillar” in our team. You will lead and manage your own team and run the design process in the way you like. The huge impact of this role on our team and our work means that we are looking for someone experienced and very well aligned with our mission.
Open, rolling applications for any role
We’re always keen to hear from people passionate about our mission who want to help achieve it. Because of this, we’ve just added a new page dedicated to open, rolling applications for any role. No matter what your skills are, if you believe you can support our work, let us know!
We are particularly interested to hear from people who could contribute to our data management and research work on demography and public health.
My (unverified) suspicion is that these people wanted to pick something that they considered to be a specific diet but that isn’t related to meat-eating and therefore wasn’t listed, e.g. ‘gluten-free’. That could also explain the correlation with age if younger people tend to adopt these ‘alternative’ diets in a higher proportion.
Thanks for the feedback Jakub! I’ve added a clearer mention of the self-reporting aspect in the article & charts.
Thanks for the feedback! I’ve edited the title.
What share of British adults are vegetarian, vegan, or flexitarian?
I love this idea! I’ve also been thinking a lot about the lack of quick-response capabilities within EA during the pandemic, so I think it could be a very impactful project. Having coordinated Our World in Data’s work on COVID for the last two years, I’d be very happy to be in touch and contribute to anything data-science-related once you start to plan things.
The current implementation doesn’t include them. I guess it would be possible to do it, but they’re quite larger than Grapher charts in terms of interface, so I’m not sure we would manage to find a user-friendly way to make them fit within the width of a forum post.
New forum feature: preview & embed Our World in Data charts
We also did this for EA France a few days before EAGx Oxford (on Tuesday), and it was indeed very helpful. We answered many questions that people had about 1o1, explained how to use Swapcard (some people hadn’t quite realized how important it would be during the conference), the ‘etiquette’ for contacting people on the app, important physical & mental health tips, etc.
I’d also suggest creating a WhatsApp or Messenger group. It’s very useful for practical coordination before (hotels, admin stuff, COVID restrictions, etc.) and during the event, and gives first-timers the feeling of going to the conference as part of a larger group.
A new Our World in Data article on longtermism
Very sorry to know that you’re feeling this way. And yes, I think this is a perfectly good place to post this question. A good community should also be there to support its members during times like these. Here are a few things that come to my mind.
Avoid doom-scrolling
Much like for the first few weeks of the pandemic, we all feel the compulsive need to get constant updates on what’s happening in Ukraine. But each new tweet or update on The Guardian’s live feed doesn’t really add much information to your knowledge of the situation. Worse, it can give you the impression that things are continuously worsening while they have only “stably worsened”. In this kind of situation, I find it useful to:
choose one way to be updated on the situation (reading a specific newsletter that I like, listening to a daily podcast in the morning), stick to it, and avoid other low signal-to-noise sources throughout the day.
favor things that summarize the situation so far, rather than continuously tell me how it’s evolving. As a stats-oriented person, I find it more useful to check this forecast on Metaculus every few days, rather than reading every bit of news about nuclear threats.
Take a step back
If you feel overwhelmed, maybe it’s also good for a short period to browse EA-related websites a little less. By the very nature of our focus on the long-term future of humanity, we’ve all been very caught up by the renewed prospect of a nuclear war for the last couple of weeks. And so if you’re already seeing it mentioned everywhere in non-EA media, maybe reading in-depth EA analyses on top of that might not be the best thing for you right now.
Accept that you can’t really do much
Somewhat relatedly, the EA community focuses on how to do the most good, and how to fix things. And so it’s natural for all of us to wonder exactly the same thing now. And while I do think that, on the margin, we can do some things to help steer the discussion in the right direction (e.g. explaining to people why the idea of a No-Fly zone is very bad), it’s also important to accept that, right now, the main stakeholders are basically elected officials and army generals, and there isn’t that much we can do in the very short term to “solve the situation” like we always try to.
Try to see the bigger picture
By far the most likely outcome is that this crisis will be solved at some point, without any nuclear weapon being fired. And while the geopolitical equilibrium will be different, we’ll most likely go back to working on the many other very important problems of the world that we all feel so passionate about. For example, even in the current context, I’ve personally found the announcement of the FTX Future Fund to be a great source of hope for the future, and I’m very excited to see what it’s going to allow the EA community to do in the coming years.
Don’t blame yourself for feeling this way
While I don’t think this is the end of the world as we know it, it is likely to be a pivotal moment in 21st-century history (akin to 9/11), and what’s happening is really pretty horrifying. Especially if, like me, you’ve never known anything but peace in your part of the World for your entire life. But given that the situation is already bad, you might as well spare yourself the double punishment of feeling bad about the situation and feeling bad about feeling bad.
Not much yet, but on (5) we now have this world map: Number of biosafety level 4 facilities
We now have a first chart based on their pre-print here: Estimated computation used in large training runs of AI systems
Glad to hear that :)
Thank you! Just FYI, on (6) we have:
Expected value seems very important. It underlies a lot of other important concepts, is relevant to both neartermism and longtermism, and is extremely frequently brought up in EA discussions and arguments.