I recently founded Apollo Research: https://www.apolloresearch.ai/
I was previously doing a Ph.D. in ML at the International Max-Planck research school in Tübingen, worked part-time with Epoch and did independent AI safety research.
For more see https://www.mariushobbhahn.com/aboutme/
I subscribe to Crocker’s Rules
Thank you very much. Unfortunately the source I’m using (Our World in Data) doesn’t report YLLs. Sources that report YLLs are so sparse that I couldn’t have used them for an overview. I’m also not sure whether the results I’m drawing here are in any way conclusive or whether DALYs are such a bad metric of suffering that I’m just reading tea leaves.
I agree. It’s a very intuitive way to introduce people to EA with something they probably already agree with.
We somehow missed your report on pain initially. We have read it now and added a link to it in the post. I really liked it. Completely our mistake for overlooking it.
Unfortunately, we can’t really help much with the problem you describe with (3). We agree that it’s a big problem and we also found that it’s not well understood :(
The conditions we discuss are cluster headaches (similar to OPIS), trigeminal neuralgia, and complex regionary pain syndrome. We want to emphasize that we are not experts on either of the three but their victims consistently describe extreme pain, unlike anything they have experienced before.
The reason why we estimate that their treatment might be cost-effective comes partly from the intensity of suffering that could be solved and mostly from its neglectedness. To our knowledge, there are none or very few people who seriously work on them and we, therefore, thought that even a small group of researchers could already cure a lot of suffering by developing a better understanding.
Due to this uncertainty, though, we find it hard to compare with other pain-related interventions such as access to pain medication in developing countries.
no worries :)
Thanks for the hint. Fixed it!
Re daylight lamp: exactly right. They aren’t even much more expensive than a normal lamp.
So what would you pitch for skeptics look like? Just ask which assumptions they don’t buy, rebut and iterate?
Makes sense. I changed it. Thanks!
what I meant to say with that point is that the tracks never stop, i.e. no matter how crazy an argument seems, there might always be something that seems even crazier. Or from the perspective of the person who is exploring the frontiers, there will always be another interesting question to ask that goes further than the previous one.
Good catch. We agree and updated it to global catastrophe.
I understood the numbers to only contain farm fish and no wild fish.
Thanks for the fact about elephants, I didn’t know that. A better metric might then be the number of neurons in the cortex. But it would still contain a lot of uncertainty about which regions of the brain are actually causally responsible for suffering and so on.