“The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.”—Albert Camus, The Plague
Altruism is the rational response to an irrational world.
ALLFED has published peer-reviewed cost-effectiveness analyses estimating that this work is likely to be more cost-effective than GiveWell interventions for saving lives in the present generation, and likely more cost-effective than artificial general intelligence safety for improving the long run future (resilient foods and resilience to loss of electricity/industry).
Independent evaluations of cost-effectiveness of the type of work that ALLFED does can be found here:
CEARCH’s in-depth analysis of interventions for Resilience to Nuclear & Volcanic Winter. They argue that policy advocacy campaigns are the most promising intervention, around 30x the cost-effectiveness of a typical GiveWell-recommended charity.
Unjournal’s 1st eval is up: Resilient foods paper This is an evaluation of the aforementioned peer-reviewed papers by subject-matter expert senior researchers.
Speedrun: Demonstrate the ability to rapidly scale food production in the case of nuclear winter by Marie Buhl from Rethink Priorities: “my (extremely rough) estimate that this project reduces x-risk with a cost-effectiveness of ~$260 million per 0.01% absolute reduction[1] (~70% confidence interval: 2.2 million to 2.7 billion). If this estimate were accurate, then this project would clear our median roughly estimated cost-effectiveness bar of $500M per basis-point of x-risk averted”.
Famine deaths due to the climatic effects of nuclear war by Vasco Grilo: “I guess the true cost-effectiveness is within the same order of magnitude of that of GiveWell’s top charities”
Shallow evaluations of longtermist organizations by Nuno Sempere: “I disagree strongly with ALLFED’s estimates (probability of cost overruns, impact of ALLFED’s work if deployed, etc.), however, I feel that the case for an organization working in this area is relatively solid.” (Note that this is a 3 year old analysis, when the funding situation and risk landscapes were different).
At ALLFED we are always looking for new volunteers and external collaborators: see the ALLFED research project database.
I know you wrote that new types of research are not really what you are looking for, but I leave the link in case you are interested, and we sometimes also take volunteers to work on areas other than research and policy.
Recovering infrastructure as quickly as possible after a catastrophe
Retrofitting ships to be wind-powered
Emergency CubeSat
Developing plants resilient to low sunlight, temperature, or water
Foods from thin air: Towards CO2-based diets for deep space missions, Earth’s environment, and existential food resilience
Potential of combined production of lignocellulosic sugar and leaf protein concentrate for preventing mass starvation in an ASRS
Potential of microbial fats for preventing mass starvation in an ASRS
Potential of single cell protein from wood and agricultural residues for preventing mass starvation in an ASRS
Potential of single cell protein via solid fermentation of peat/lignite for preventing mass starvation in an ASRS
Rapid repurposing of industrial infrastructure for microbial food production in global catastrophic food shocks
Retrofitting single cell protein animal feed factories to single cell protein human food factories
Agricultural residues: Potential for feeding ruminants
Integrated model with addition of crop relocation, expanded planted area, and (maybe) leaf protein concentrate
Quick cost estimates of potential resilient foods
Systematic review of health outcomes of nutritional issues in an ASRS
Integrated model with infrastructure and population loss
Expanded planted area scale-up analysis
In-depth analysis of labor and equipment for industrial food production
Food production during an x-pandemic
Analysis of international cooperation in an ASRS like nuclear winter
Cost and scaling of energy/electricity production in a catastrophe
GIS analysis of water supply and demand if the sun is obscured
Integrated model with varying number of Tg and duration of aerosols
Literature review and mapping of regions resilient to global catastrophes
Estimating worst drop in food production globally so far for every country
GCFF mental health
Literature assessment on whether people inexperienced in growing food could be trained quickly to do so
Supply-chain modelling under severe disruption scenarios
Mortality from losing infrastructure if basic needs are met
Trade economics without money in loss of industry
Produce a governmental ASRS response plan for a particular country
Produce ASRS or GCIL response plans at various governance levels
Piloting agriculture in ASRS conditions
Water treatment in an x-pandemic
Plant-based meat to displace inefficient animal agriculture in an ASRS
Interesting post. Just a quick comment on the effectiveness of “research and dissemination” and “Spreading “we’re all in this together” frames” type interventions. These sound similar to interventions that policymakers try time and again in response to disasters because they’re intuitive, despite the fact that they don’t work very well or at all.
The source I linked describes a comparison of interventions for pandemic response in the general public, so it’s not directly applicable, but I worry a similar issue may be at hand here. The interventions aimed at changing minds generally have negligible effects, especially compared to other interventions such as providing social support and tapping into individuals’ behavioral skills and habits as well as removing practical obstacles to behavior.
I don’t know what the equivalent on the “nuclear war prevention” area is of these other interventions that work well for pandemic response, but I do worry that the “knowledge and beliefs” type interventions proposed would also be negligible like they are in this other field.
A new paper on this came out recently: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-01930-2
Thank you so much for writing and sharing this resource Sam, and again I can’t thank you enough for your support in helping us launch our policy org ORCG, we quite probably could not have done it without you.
I incorrectly posted something as answer
I was reading one today I think on a similar vein to those you mention
There is peer-reviewed literature estimating that this work is likely to be more cost-effective than GiveWell interventions for saving lives in the present generation, and likely more cost-effective than artificial general intelligence safety for improving the long run future (resilient foods and resilience to loss of electricity/industry).
Other independent or non-academic related evaluations of cost-effectiveness can be found here:
if this space was closer to my grantmaking, I’d be excited to fund a fully neutral study into these questions.
Here’s hoping that the new set of studies on this funded by FLI (~$4 million) will shed light on the issue within the next few years.
https://futureoflife.org/grant-program/nuclear-war-research/
My previous experience assessing the projects of the listed organizations (I did not vote for those I’m unfamiliar with), how neglected the work they’re doing is, and the marginal impact I expect from funding them.