“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.
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/
May I suggest: https://allfed.info/research/publications-and-reports
True, not only outreach but also sufficient engagement/retention is needed in order to reliably increase the ratio.
That’s correct. Artificial intelligence and engineered pandemics are just given as examples of things that may fall under the category of threats from emerging technologies.
Outreach in groups with higher ratios of women: this is the one thing that comes to my mind every time I think about this. As long as EA is downstream of a few male-dominated disciplines/fields, it seems virtually impossible for the gender ratio to change.
Here’s a diagram I made to explain my thinking. The width of the arrow represents how many people are coming from each field, and the colored surface in each figure represents the gender ratio in each field:
If correct, this picture shows that you’d need to do something against this very strong society-wide selection pressure. Short of changing the gender ratios of the disciplines that EA is downstream of (society already spending significant amounts of resources on this), you would need to change which fields EA is getting people from. So here the outreach intervention you propose is equivalent to increasing the width of the arrows that represent female-dominated fields.
Physical engineering lab to build capacity for prototyping hardware ideas with relevance to areas identified as important to the long-term future
One of the best, most useful posts I’ve read on the forum. Terrific work, Sam.
Thanks again for this fantastic initiative. Here’s the official link to the final Denkenberger publication for those interested.
Is there a way to get email alerts whenever a new UnJournal evaluation gets published?
I like the idea of being more intersectional in our thinking on how to approach the assessment of specific interventions.
On the topic of food, some ALLFED colleagues and I recently gave a workshop on the intersections between different EA cause areas:
On the topic of interventions improving various cause areas simultaneously, some of my colleagues have published scientific articles arguing that the type of work we’re doing appears to be highly cost-effective for improving both the long-term future and saving lives in the short term / current generation. Obviously consider a conflict of interest as I work for ALLFED, but this seems very pertinent to the topic of the post.
I’d be happy to help explain how building capacity for responding to abrupt food catastrophes (nuclear winter, volcanic winter, collapse of electricity/industry, etc.) by rapidly increasing food production could help save lives and reduce the chance of civilizational collapse (see ALLFED—Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters)
Thanks so much for this effort. I just wanted to say again that EA engineers, including physical engineers, are always very welcome to apply for volunteering, internship and/or open positions at ALLFED—Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters.
Thanks for the reply Noah. Are you working on this field or a related one?
It’s worth mentioning that the new Charity Entrepreneuship book How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit does go into some of the “concrete issues” questions you’re asking. Particularly, the one on legal structure receives very good treatment (though somewhat lacking for non-US/UK orgs). They also go in some depth into media/website/aesthetics.
I’ve seen a few people wondering how this relates to our work at ALLFED (@JoelMcGuire , @George Vii , @Brian Lui).
Bivalves can be grown in sinergy with seaweed in what is know as integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) systems, which promise a consistent feedstock, in situ, with the co-benefit of recycling aquaculture waste (ref). They are also resilient to food trade restriction and the pests that affect land crops. They look like they could be significantly more resilient to changes in climate than land crops, thus being useful to counter falling agricultural yields in two ways like most resilient foods: 1) resilience—the higher the production of this food is prior to an abrupt food production shock, the smaller the overall fall in food production capacity, 2) response—the fall in agricultural yields could be countered by rapidly scaling production of this food post-catastrophe.
These are the things that we have yet to ascertain though. Uncertainty remains, but there definitely seems to be potential for bivalves and IMTA to compete in price and speed with other resilient food options, indeed contributing to a resilient food portfolio. It mostly depends on how growth rates would be affected by changes in climactic conditions. Because bivalve cultivation is not very complex technologically it looks like it could not only contribute to resilience and response against global catastrophic food shocks involving an agricultural collapse, but also those originating from a loss of critical infrastructures.
In short, I agree with the post and believe there could be significant potential for bivalves to increase food security overall and as a resilient food for extreme scenarios and would like to see more work on this. I proposed a project to look into this but we haven’t yet got around to working on it (so many important projects to do, so little time… We could use a little help). Below I paste the rationale for working in this topic I wrote for my bivalve project proposal:
Ramping up bivalves could have significant potential food for GCR, seeing as to how they’re somewhat similar to seaweed (which is very promising as such),
Depending on how fast production can ramp up, they could be an excellent alternative food for both sun-blocking and loss of industry scenarios
they are similar to seaweed but very rich in protein and nutritious
feed on phytoplankton
are as plant-like as possible
do not require fish feed
do not require conversion of habitat
do not contribute to pollution
not likely to experience pain and suffering
General info here
Technical info here
Production and price info here
Clams cost approx 6 USD retail/person/day (on the medium side of cost). Of these calories 50-70% is protein
How do you think the push to replace humans with AI systems in nuclear warfare decision making will affect the chance of accidental nuclear war going forward? I hear some countries have been considering it.
While you are correct that vegetable oil would be the most compact way of storing edible calories, we wouldn’t be able to rely only on it as it misses several key nutrients, and it would still not solve the prohibitive cost of storing enough food to last for a multi-year catastrophe. We think strategic micronutrient supplement stocks could be cost-effective but haven’t looked into it in depth yet.
Any type of food stock would be very useful on the onset of a catastrophe, but the cost-effectiveness of large-scale long-term food storage interventions is not great.
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.