Thanks for posting this! I just joined the group. I’ve been on Focusmate for a couple of months and spotted the “EA Movement” badge on a few people’s profiles, but the couple of people whom I asked didn’t know how I could join.
I definitely second the productivity boost, especially for people who have found themselves working at home for the first time.
Having done some research on post-graduate education in the past, it’s surprisingly difficult to access application rates for classes of programs. Some individual schools publish their application/admission rates, but usually as advertising, so there’s a fair bit of cherry picking. It’s somewhat more straightforward to access completion rates (at least in the US, universities report this to government). However, that MVP would still be interesting with just a few data points: if any EAs have relationships to a couple relevant programs (in say biosecurity, epidemiology), it may be worth reaching out directly in 6-12 months!
A more general point, which I’ve seen some discussion of here, is how near-miss catastrophes prepare society for a more severe version of the same catastrophe. This would be interesting to explore both theoretically (what’s the sweet spot for a near-miss to encourage further work, but not dissuade prevention policies) and empirically.
One historical example might be, for example, does a civilization which experienced a bad famine experience fewer famines in a period following that bad famine? How long is that period? In particular, that makes me think of MichaelA’s recently excellent Some history topics it might be very valuable to investigate.