Co-founder of High Impact Engineers. Background in materials science and mechanical engineering. Also chat to me about community building, career decisions, etc.
Jessica Wen
Karma: 803
I haven’t heard anyone talk about the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) – it seems that their programmes/focus areas overlap with a few of EA’s cause areas:
Weapons of Mass Destruction: mainly nuclear non-proliferation, also biological and chemical weapons
Security and Technology: AI, cybersecurity, and even brain-computer interfaces (mainly around how these interface with weapons systems)
Space Security: space governance and norms
Global Peace: especially around managing exits from armed conflict and building the Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone
even Gender and Disarmament to tackle violence against women and girls
I was particularly impressed by their AI Policy Portal, which tracks each country’s approach to governance frameworks, practices, and cooperation.
Unfortunately, like most UN institutes, their fellowships and programmes tend to be unpaid. Could be worth applying to some if you can afford it, for the experience and connections!
Thanks for the clarification!
These look like some interesting project ideas! Could you elaborate on why Reslab won’t be prototyping any of these ideas? (Feel free to say that you’d rather not say as well!)
Thanks Allison!
Doing some BOTECs and looking for the total number of attendees at EAG SF 2022, EAG DC 2022, EAGxVirtual 2022, and EAG London 2023. Does anyone happen to have these numbers?
Jessica Wen’s Quick takes
Thanks for sharing these data. The y-axes aren’t shown so it’s difficult to compare these plots, but I think it’s interesting that the distribution of community satisfaction for Black or African American people in the EA community seems to stand out in comparison to other groups.
The small sample size definitely makes drawing conclusions difficult (maybe apart from showing that EA skews very white for a movement focused on big global issues!)
I appreciate the work you put into this survey and report. I would like to see the breakdown of “non-white” racial identities – I would expect that answers would skew differently based on different racial identities.
I understand there might not be enough data points for each racial identity, but that might just be a sign that we need to work harder at retaining certain people (and encouraging them to fill out surveys!)
STEM in Effective Altruism: STEM Community Builders Online Panel Recording
Do you count PhD students as students? (although I reckon the main concern is that we have too many undergraduate students)
Hi Arno,
I don’t know anyone personally, but you could potentially reach out to someone working at the Clean Air Task Force or perhaps Jan-Willem at Training for Good might have contacts in the space?
Jess
I was speaking with someone working on far-UVC research who mentioned that one of the biggest obstacles to GUV being implemented despite it being around for ages is the lack of skilled technicians to install them (which is what we included in our Resources Portal page on how engineers can contribute to biosecurity). I didn’t realise the nuances of this until I read this post – so I really appreciate your work here!
This is a really interesting post! I think we need more posts like this that detail the practical obstacles to the implementation of solutions. Have shared with the High Impact Engineers Slack!
Thank you!
Excited to see this group launch!
How Engineers can Contribute to Alternative Proteins
How Can Engineers Do Impactful Work in Biosecurity?
How Engineers can Effectively Contribute to Tackling Climate Change
Thanks for your comment Vasco! There are definitely lots of factors at play here, and the “all else being equal” bit in the part you quoted is doing a lot of heavy lifting and masking multiple assumptions that we could perhaps have laid out more clearly, including the assumption that p(“civilisation collapse”) << p(“global catastrophe”) << p(“catastrophe”), and that equal amounts of resources are going into prevention, response, and resilience.
This is of course not the case, but analysis of this landscape is out of scope for this iteration of the Resources Portal. This page was designed as an introduction for engineers looking into high-impact areas to do work in/start projects in, and hopefully future iterations of our Resources Portal will be able to deep dive these intricacies. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, as it’s something we will look into in the future!
Hi Joshua,
Thanks for the information and the link to the report! Glad to hear that they are a part of the EA extended universe :)