Strong upvote! I found reading this very interesting and the results seem potentially quite useful to inform EA community building efforts.
imp4rtial šø
Karma: 1,833
Hi Timothy, itās great that you found your way here! Thereās a vibrant German EA community (including an upcoming conference in Berlin in September/āOctober that you may want to join).
Regarding your university studies, I essentially agree with Ryanās comment. However, while studying in the UK and US can be great, I appreciate that doing so may be daunting and financially infeasible for many young Germans. If you decide to study in Germany and are more interested in the social sciences than in the natural sciences, I would encourage you (like Ryan) to consider undergraduate programs that combine economics with politics and/āor philosophy. I can recommend the BA Philosophy & Economics at the University of Bayreuth, though you should also consider the BSc Economics at the University of Mannheim (which you can combine with a minor in philosophy or political science).
In case you are interested in talking through all this sometime, feel free to reach out to me and weāll schedule a call. :)
Time to up your game, Linch! š
Notes on āThe PoliĀtics of CriĀsis ManĀageĀmentā (Boin et al., 2016)
I want to express my deep gratitude to you, Patrick, for running EA Radio for all these years! š Early in my EA involvement (2015-16), I listened to all the EA Radio talks available at the time and found them very valuable.
Excellent! A well-deserved second prize in the Creative Writing Contest.
In my experience, many EAs have a fairly nuanced perspective on technological progress and arenāt unambiguous techno-optimists.
For instance, a substantial fraction of the community is very concerned about the potential negative impacts of advanced technologies (AI, biotech, solar geoengineering, cyber, etc.) and actively works to reduce the associated risks.
Moreover, some people in the community have promoted the idea of ādifferential (technological) progressā to suggest that we should work to (i) accelerate risk-reducing, welfare-enhancing technologies (or ideas generally) and (ii) decelerate technologies (or ideas) with the opposite effects. That said, studying the concrete implications of differential progress seems fairly neglected and deserves to be explored in much greater depth. In line with the above idea, it seems common for EAs to argue that technological progress has been very beneficial in some regardsāimproving human welfare, especially over the last hundreds of years (e.g. here)āwhile it has been harmful in other regards, such as factory farming having led to greater animal suffering.
Utilitarianism.net has also recently published an article on Arguments for Utilitarianism, written by Richard Yetter Chappell. (Iām sharing this article since it may interest readers of this post)
Thanks, itās valuable to hear your more skeptical view on this point! Iāve included it after several reviewers of my post brought it up and still think it was probably worth including as one of several potential self-interested benefits of Wikipedia editing.
I was mainly trying to draw attention to the fact that it is possible to link a Wikipedia user account to a real person and that it is worth considering whether to include it in certain applications (something Iāve done in previous applications). I still think Wikipedia editing is a decent signal of pro-social motivation, experience engaging with specific topics, and of some writing practice. Thus, it seems comparable to me to a personal blog, which you may also include, where relevant, in certain applications as evidence for these things.
Thanks for this comment, Michael! I agree with all the points you make and should have been more careful to compare Wikipedia editing against the alternatives (I began doing this in an earlier draft of this post and then cut it because it became unwieldy).
In my experience, few EAs Iāve talked to have ever seriously considered Wikipedia editing. Therefore, my main objective with this post was to get more people to recognize it as one option of something valuable they might do with a part of their time; I wasnāt trying to argue that Wikipedia editing is the best use of their time, which depends a lot on individual circumstances and preferences.
In fact, Iād expect the opportunity costs for many people in the community to be too high to make Wikipedia editing worth their while, but Iād leave that judgment up to them. That said, some people (like me) will find Wikipedia editing sufficiently enjoyable that it becomes more of a fun hobby and doesnāt compete much with other productive uses of their time.
I strongly agree that we should learn our lessons from this incident and seriously try to avoid any repetition of something similar. In my view, the key lessons are something like:
Itās probably best to avoid paid Wikipedia editing
Itās crucial to respect the Wikipedia communityās rules and norms (Iāve really tried to emphasize this heavily in this post)
Itās best to really approach Wikipedia editing with a mindset of āletās look for actual gaps in quality and coverage of important articlesā and avoid anything that looks like promotional editing
I think it would be a big mistake for oneās takeaway from this episode to be something like āthe EA community should not engage with Wikipediaā.
Two more general lessons that I would add, which have nothing to do with the Vipul incident:
Avoid controversial and highly political topics (editing any such topics makes you much more likely to have your edits reverted, get into āedit warsā, and have bad experiences)
Avoid being drawn into āedit warsā. If another editor is hostile to your edits on a specific page, itās often better to simply move on than to engage.
As an example, look at this overview of the Wikipedia pages that Brian Tomasik has created and their associated pageview numbers (screenshot of the top 10 pages below). The pages created by Brian mostly cover very important (though fringe) topics and attract ~ 100,000 pageviews every year. (Note that this overview ignores all the pages that Brian has edited but didnāt create himself.)
Someone (who is not me) just started a proposal for a WikiProject on Effective Altruism! To be accepted, this proposal will need to be supported by at least 6-12 active Wikipedia editors. If youāre interested in contributing to such a WikiProject, please express āsupportā for the proposal on the proposal page.
This is the best tool I know of to get an overview of Wikipedia article pageview counts (as mentioned in the post); the only limitation with it is that pageview data āonlyā goes back to 2015.
WikipeĀdia editĀing is imĀporĀtant, tractable, and neglected
Create a page on biological weapons. This could include, for instance,
An overview of offensive BW programs over time (when they were started, stopped, funding, staffing, etc.; perhaps with a separate section on the Soviet BW program)
An overview of different international treaties relating to BW, including timelines and membership over time (i.e., the Geneva Protocol, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), Australia Group, UN Security Council Resolution 1540)
Submissions of Confidence-Building Measures in the BWC over time (including as a percentage of the # of BWC States Parties and split in publicly-accessible and restricted-access)
A graph that visually compares the funding and # of staff in international organizations for the bioweapons regime compared to chemical and nuclear weapons (e.g., the BWC Implentation Support Unit compared to OPCW for chemical and the IAEA and CTBTO PrepCom for nuclear)
(Perhaps include an overview on the global proliferation of high-biosafety labs, e.g. see Global Biolabs)
(Perhaps include a section on how technological advancements may affect the BW threat, e.g., include a graph on the Carlson curve (Mooreās law but for DNA sequencing))
For many people interested in but not yet fully committed to biosecurity, it may make more sense to choose a more general masterās program in international affairs/āsecurity and then concentrate on biosecurity/ābiodefense to the extent possible within their program.
Some of the best masterās programs to consider to this end:
Georgetown University: MA in Security Studies (Washington, DC; 2 years)
Johns Hopkins University: MA in International Relations (Washington, DC; 2 years)
Stanford University: Masterās in International Policy (2 years)
Kingās College London: variety of masterās programs in the War Studies Department (London) (1 year)
Sciences Po: Master in International Security (Paris; 2 years; can be combined with the KCL degree as a dual degree)
ETH Zurich: MSc program in Science, Technology and Policy (Zurich)
(Note that some of these may offer little room to focus on biosecurity specifically, though they may offer other useful courses, e.g. on AI, other emerging technologies, and great power conflict)
The GMU Biodefense Masterās is also offered as an online-only degree.
Georgetown University offers a 2-semester MSc in āBiohazardous Threat Agents & Emerging Infectious Diseasesā. Course description from the website: āa one year program designed to provide students with a solid foundation in the concepts of biological risk, disease threat, and mitigation strategies. The curriculum covers classic biological threats agents, global health security, emerging diseases, technologies, CBRN risk mitigation, and CBRN security.ā
Excellent post! I really appreciate your proposal and framing for a book on utilitarianism. In line with your point, William MacAskill and Richard Yetter Chappell also perceived a lack of accessible, modern, and high-quality resources on utilitarianism (and related ideas), motivating the creation of utilitarianism.net, an online textbook on utilitarianism. The website has been getting a lot of traction over the past year, and itās still under development (including plans to experiment with non-text media and translations into other languages).