Currently: Biosecurity roadmapping (focus on built-environment disinfection via far-UVC).
Previously: Finishing a virology PhD on clinical sequencing, diversity, and evolution of DNA viruses in the transplant setting.
Also ran EA Osnabrück and Hannover from 2015–2022. Cultivating a wide range of EA-related interests, including welfare bio, metaethics, progress studies, and many more.
All posts and comments are in purely personal capacity.
Nice initial analysis to get some ballpark numbers on this. You probably already considered this and I have no insight into the profession but I would imagine therapists often work with patients having mental health problems with lower or very little treatment response compared to depression/anxiety.
You also wrote that the estimate is not replaceability-adjusted but what is your basic estimate about this factor? Similar to the replaceability of medical doctors? My intuition is that the amount of therapists is more limited by the number of therapist offices than by the supply of eager psych students. But I also haven’t had a detailed look into Lynette Byes model yet to see if it’s mentioned there.
This is great! To have a collection of links of interventions, arguments, resources etc for each cause is super valuable for people who are not that well versed in the EA-website-bubble.
Looking forward to people adding their resources; S-risks for example are still missing and a quite important consideration. But I imagine someone from the FRI is already writing.
Thank you for sharing your experiences! I agree, this post is very valuable.
I tried using Polar a few months ago (so I can’t comment on the features of the most recent release), but found it ultimately still too limited for my use.
For organising papers, it’s too rudimentary compared to citation managers with folder structures, tags, multiple linked files, metadata etc.
For organising ebooks, it’s too rudimentary compared to ebook software like calibre which manages your metadata, syncs to eReaders, supports more formats than just PDF etc.
I used it only for the built-in Anki card generation; and I might test it for that again, if there would be the option to use it as just an external PDF reader like Adobe Reader without having to import the files. And for card types other than simple forward/reverse (cloze, image occlusion, lists) it’s also not usable.
I’d love to have a PDF/ebook reader for all my platforms which syncs to my Anki and which serves just as the viewer for my management softwares. But the Polar workflow just wasn’t faster than annotating my documents in calibre/zotero, automatically extracting the annotations, and making a suitable Anki card for each bit of information.
I like the new name as well. And pretty similar sounding to the new EA Hotel acronym...the start of a new, soon confusing EA org renaming trend?
I like the idea of contact tracing apps and, as we can see, people are already working on them. FWIW, the German Hanover Medical School is also collaborating with a software dev on an app for (mainly) Germany: https://www.geohealthapp.de
It collects anonymous location histories of infected people and crosschecks locally with your location history, as far as I understood. Needs data donations to create a map of spatiotemporal high-risk locations, though.
Looks like it is. Waschke-Wischedag already *sounds* like a made-up German name and googling confirmed that.
On the one hand I empathise with your situation – (seemingly) interested in the guiding principles and the core idea and put off by other aspiring EAs in your immediate vicinity. On the other hand, I don’t see your situation as generalisable to EA as a whole and very contrary to most experiences on conferences, in local groups etc (e.g. DGB is neither bible-like, nor an EA-blueprint imho).
Your title’s “why” seems to be solely based on a small sample of local EAs and the “how” is just a ‘really think about how much good the actions you take do’?
You could’ve addressed your local group directly, or started separate events or meet-ups meeting your standards (which is something people did before and which is encouraged as to circumvent lock-in). You could’ve been more careful with the generalisations and written a caveat on how to not run a local group as to not put off newcomers. But in this format, you don’t really provide a differentiated critique and I’m not really sure where you’re going with this post. Hence a downvote.
After I plugged the raw numbers into guesstimate I started to look into the data a bit more and came out a bit more confused.
I was not sure how much the numbers were influenced by 2015, which had more refugees combined than all following years until now (’15: 1M, ’16: 360k, ’17: 170k, ’18: 140k, ’19: 125k) but also fewer deaths than the following years (’15: 3.7k total, following years: ~2–5k total, so way higher fraction). I also found little data on the fraction of refugees being saved by NGOs (data for 2015 and 2016 is 14 % and 20 % respectively).
So many of Sea-Watch’s lives could’ve been saved during peak migration 2015 when empathy on the Mediterranean sea was still higher and the counterfactual impact is less clear. To check that I updated the Guesstimate to try to model a post-2015 year with refugee numbers and deaths more similar to 2016/17/18 and yielded similar numbers of saved refugees as Sea-Watch claims, so 2015 was likely not an extraordinary year for Sea-Watch (They also only operated in the second half of 2015 with just one ship).
It really hinges on the question of whether the removal of an NGO would result in the refugees they would’ve interacted with dying or being saved by other ships. I tried to bound this “counterfactual death rate” by calculating how high the total death rate would be without NGOs operating and how big Sea-Watch’s share of total NGO-activity plausibly is. Again, see the model. Under these assumptions, cost-effectiveness for a 2016/18-like year would be around 5000€. Which is still very surprising IMHO! But data is spotty and I made the Guesstimate at 1 am, so I apologise for potential errors.
Might, yes, but this question of NGOs being a “Pull-Factors” is still very disputed:
The NGO flotilla thus responded to trends in smuggling practices that had been spurred by the anti-smuggling operation, as well as endogenous dynamics in Libya, and the increasing presence of NGO SAR vessels did in fact make the crossing less dangerous. […] While the practices of SAR NGOs may thus have inadvertently contributed to consolidating the shifts in smugglers’ practices, there has so far been no evidence of the criminal collaboration with smugglers alluded to by several actors, and as such, we cannot engage with these claims in details.
Both your post and this report mention changed practices such as using cheaper, more dangerous boats but does this also lead to more refugees or just higher revenues for the smugglers?
Great news, I’m very excited about this! The amount of QALY left by the wayside due to the effective shut down of psychedelics research makes me cringe every time I think about it.
Will you eventually look into psychedelics for migraine as well? They are probably 1–2 orders of magnitude less painful than cluster headaches but also ~2 orders of magnitude more common. (Which could then also make it more difficult to achieve acceptance in the population/regulatory bodies, I suppose...). And as far as I remember, psilocybin/LSD worked for migraine as well.
Cool, thanks for the pointer, I’ll have a look for the study and hope that it kickstarts broader change.
Any explicit reason why migraine orgs and OUCH avoid the topic? Perhaps they fear that migraines are already viewed as “just a headache” and association with psychedelics would undermine the struggle for serious acceptance? Conformity signaling? Status quo bias? Low-openness staff? One person I know who is suffering from migraines is just very unenthusiastic about exploring treatment options despite ~10 days/month of substantial suffering, which always boggled my mind.
Pretty sure people get the reference but just think that you’re mocking longevity research without making a good point. A disclaimer would’ve helped.
Dataset of different viral pathogens which have emerged or are discussed as novel/emerging diseases for both humans and animals, by viral realm and kingdom, Baltimore classification, transmission method, and region.
I’ve thought about this at some point and would be happy to chat and share my thoughts with anyone thinking about such datasets.
I’m also working on viral (and some metagenomic) sequencing for my PhD and could see myself collaborating or at least giving input to related projects on the side, should people want to pursue something along those lines.
I hope you’ll have a great conference with interesting talks and conversations. And I’m also all for small communities of like-minded people within EA sharing experiences and discussing their (possibly unique) views on the project of world improvement.
I do, however, have some reservations against the phrase “advancing God’s kingdom”. I’m assuming it just means “increasing wellbeing/reducing suffering for sentient beings” or something along those lines, but I believe that it can be misread as “adopting EA methodology for missionary purposes since we believe this is (Christian) EA’s top cause”, which would certainly put you beyond the pale of EA thinking/methodology.
Your website doesn’t make any such claims, so people interacting with you likely get the right impression, but I just wanted to flag this and similar phrasings as a caveat :)
Thanks for your further suggestions! We actually briefly looked at the ALLFED website and their publications but had the sense that many ideas were still in the modelling/research phase so we didn’t include them. The new 80k episode goes into a bit more detail (e.g. funding conversion kits for paper mills to enable quick repurposing for glucose production), so anybody more familiar with their work is very welcome to share potential megaproject ideas.
I think an important difference is the explicitness of credences. I expect most of the short-timeline AI people to have explicit probability distributions and I expect them to behave accordingly. This would then definitely entail retirement savings etc. as (from my personal encounters) many have non-negligible probability mass on AGI after their lifetime.
I’m sure there are also the “99.9% within the next 20 years”-people but I’m sure they’re doing better within their subculture than early Christians did and usually don’t risk unemployment, starvation, or ostracism.
Great to have this written up. I usually had this experience when talking to senior professors; they tend to have so much cross-referential knowledge that any piece of data just does much more work than for non-experts. I just never explicitly looked at expertise from a model-perspective. Your posts gives good pointers, but are there any things you see good model-builders intuitively do better? Like not just reading but questioning and grokking. I feel like model-building is also not fully learnable but somewhat distributed among people so I’d be interested in possible differences.
That sounds really devastating. Not having looked into it further yet, do you have any hunch how likely this will get alleviated by the World Bank given the possible funding paths? It already has gathered media and political attention and the governmental situation in the country seem to make it very intractable for international, non-state actors. And disaster-relief is usually more complicated anyways, given logistic challenges etc.
Oh, I didn’t expect Pinker to hold that position; it’s quite disappointing. But it’s hopefully a topic we will see addressed in a future conversation with Sam Harris who should push back on the “AI cannot be a threat”-narrative. Have you tweeted/mailed/whatnot him this response?