This is not intended as a reply to the substance of your post but rather as a reply to your choice of vocabulary. I don’t understand why it is helpful to use the word “eugenics” to refer to modern assistive reproductive technology and/or human genetic engineering. Eugenics commonly refers to a primarily 20th century movement which was a force for tremendous evil.
Why try to repurpose that word when you could just choose a new one?
You seem like a thoughtful person who is willing to listen to feedback, which I really appreciate, but I think there is something that you are missing here. Spending time trying to raise a billion dollars takes your time away from doing other things that have a higher chance of success.
I was referring to Joyce Alvino—not sure if that account is controlled by you, but it is almost certainly a fake name/PFP and it is the only account that is quite supportive of your idea here.
There is no point sharing your identity with me—I’m not looking to contribute financially to your organization. Any anonymity is going to be unacceptable to most donors, and use of multiple fake names (Sally Atkins, Degen Chadwick) comes off as as particularly sketchy.
From this comment it does seem like your heart is in the right place—I was perhaps a bit too extreme in saying that this could damage the reputation of EA. I do really think you should take a step back and reconsider this work. Is your biggest impact going to be in creating something new, or could you work more effectively by leveraging the organizations that already exist in EA?
If you really want to launch a new org, that is not going to happen quickly. You need a business plan, a clear and concise pitch, a website, information about who you are and what your track-record is, etc.
People are being very polite to you and asking substantive questions. Others, please correct me if I’m wrong, but let me say what I think most readers here are really thinking:
You should stop what you are doing. This comes across as a scam (I’ll give some more details about that below) or at least as poorly organized. If this were to be successful, even in any small way, it would damage the reputation of EA because of the way in which it is presented.
You need to have a little humility. Yes, EA is a space where people can and do have a big impact when they are new. But teams of the smartest people here have been trying to raise big money for years and it is simply not that easy. The good news about EA is that you do not need to raise 1 billion to have an impact. We are here to focus on the most effective things around, which means you can make a huge difference with just a few thousand dollars.
Here is why this seems like a scam to me:
“Your organization”, EffectiveCauses, doesn’t have a website or any other public-facing information. However, there are a bunch of accounts.
The “EffectiveCauses” Quora account is pushing crypto stuff that is unrelated to your DAO.
The one person commenting in support of you looks a bit like an astroturf account (created recently, fake name/PFP).
The Twitter account you linked to is also quite shallow (few posts/no substantive posts, no followers, etc.), as is your EA Forums account.
>Asymmetric justice in action. What a bonkers outcome. Thanks for sharing.
So many problems in safety regulations and wrongful death case law. I could go on. Still, the US has a pretty good system compared to many other countries.
I think nuisance odor could be a plausible cover story. But how do you communicate that information to mink farm management without creating a heap of evidence that the mink farm owners know about H5N1? Perhaps something along the lines of “we want to stop H5N1, but we know this is a fringe conspiracy theory/not something you believe, so will give you free masks if you want to use them for nuisance odor reasons.”
I’ll add that the manufacturers say you need frequent cartridge replacements, so if they were doing it for OSHA/compliance reasons they would have to do those frequent changes. However, I have found that replacement schedule to be overkill unless you are in a really dusty environment. If donating masks, you could probably cut the replacement schedule in half (I’d want to do deeper research on this of course). That would bring the cost of the per-worker intervention to ~$30 + $90/year.
Another nice cover could be having everyone wear N95s for COVID reasons, although this might be culturally difficult depending on how much of the real reasoning management was able to convey to the workers themselves.
I think this would probably be worse from a legal perspective compared to simply requiring them. They would be admitting that they know there is a risk to workers, but not doing anything. Then, when a worker got sick, they could sue saying that the company had known there was a risk but hadn’t had proper safety procedures.
All in cost for respirators would be approximately: $30/worker for half face masks, ~$70/worker/year for training and compliance ($30 for 1 hour worker time plus variable overhead, $40 for training course), $180/worker/year (monthly replacement of N95/nuisance vapor cartridges*).
However, one wrongful death lawsuit from a farm worker could cost a million dollars (or much more, if a manager or someone else with a higher salary dies).
If they do masks at all, they will want to do it right.
* I think you would want to give them nuisance vapor cartridges because they will get rid of the odor of mink manure which may increase compliance
At least in the US, one problem from the company’s side if they require respirators is that it is essentially admitting that they have a safety problem, which opens them up to legal liability. They then need to do respirator fit checks to be OSHA compliant. Not necessarily a no-go, but certainly a barrier you should consider when talking to mink farmers.
One option might be finding individual workers at mink farms and giving them/convincing them to wear respirators (or at least N95 masks).
You can find a list of US mink farms along with contact information here: finalnail.com
Prevents contact between birds and minks I believe, reducing the likelihood of another crossover of H1N5 between the species.
I’m very very skeptical of longtermism in a practical sense, but not for the reason described here.
It’s like watching people try to come up with rules about flight safety before powered flight—with some people arguing about lifting gasses, others worrying about muscle strains that will occur when everyone has to turn the hand cranks that power the aircraft, and yet others concerned about the potential for an aircraft to accidentally fly to close to the sun. Even if one person started thinking about a real risk (for example, landing too hard) - how would they even come up with a solution without knowing what a plane looks like or what a control surface is?
I think most people who are skeptical of longtermism have reasoning some what similar to mine.
Unfortunately Instagram tells me that the page has been removed—great work/idea though!
Not trying to disagree with what you’re saying—just want to point out that Emile goes by they/them pronouns.
I think OP’s point is that “preemptively addressing potential attacks” is not part of a good apology.
I’d go so far as to say that most people do not know how to apologize well, especially outside of an interpersonal context. I actually thought the Bostrom apology was about average (which is say bad but not totally meaningless).
I don’t think I stated my core point clearly. I will be blunt for the purpose of clarity. Pursing this is not useful because, even if you could make a discovery, it would not possibly be useful until literally 100 quintillion years from now, if not much longer. To think that you could transmit this knowledge that far into future doesn’t make any sense.
Perhaps you wish to pursue this as a purely theoretical question. I’m not a physicist, so I can not comment on whether your ideas are reasonable from that perspective. You say that physicists have told you that they are, but do not discount the possibility that they were simply being polite, or that your questions were misinterpreted.
Additionally, the reality is that people without PhDs in a given field rarely make significant contributions these days—if you seek to do so, your ideas must be exceptionally well communicated and grounded in the current literature (e.g., you must demonstrate an understanding of the orthodox paradigm even if your ideas are heterodox). Otherwise, your ideas will be lumped in with perpetual motion machines and ignored.
I genuinely think it would be a mistake to pursue this idea at all, even from a theoretical perspective, because there is essentially no chance that you are onto something real, that you can make progress on it with the tools available to you, and that you can communicate it so clearly that you will be taken seriously.
A better route to pursue might be writing science fiction. There is always demand for imaginative sci-fi with a clear grounding in real science or highly plausible imagined science. There is also a real need for sci-fi that imagines positive/desirable futures (e.g. solarpunk).
Hi Vlad,
You’re getting a lot of disagree votes. I wanted to explain why (from my perspective), this is probably not a useful way to spend your time.
Longtermists typically propose working on problems that impact the long run future and can’t be solved in the future. X-risks is a great example—if we don’t solve it now, there will be no future people to solve it. Another example is historical records preservation, which is something that is likewise easy to do now but could be impossible to do in the future.
This seems like a problem that future people would be in a much better position to solve than we are.
Obviously there’s nothing wrong with pursuing an idea simply because you find it interesting. A good starting place for you might be Isaac Arthur on Youtube. He has a series called Civilizations at the End of Time which is related to what you are thinking about.
I get that newer practices fall under the meaning of eugenics in Greek. But still, wouldn’t it be better to use a word that isn’t associated with the racist type of eugenics?
Is the idea to fully confront the arguments/controversies that come up over the “eugenic implications” of newer reproductive technologies?