Not many. We’d be thrilled to find more opportunities to work with advocates.
Michael Goff
Karma: 13
Thanks Rosa. Our work is aimed firstly at environmental advocates, for whom we want to provide better information.
This is a very important post, and thank you for writing it. Coming from the environmental world, this parallels my frustration that huge amount of efforts go into projects for which the evidence is shockingly flimsy. A significant fraction, maybe even the majority, of environmental advocacy is for measures that are nearly useless or outright harmful.
If you will pardon a personal plug, I wrote a piece on my Substack blog recently that looks at the evidence at a high level, drawing heavily on the methodology of Rethink Priorities’ Moral Weigh Project. If we want to monetize animal welfare (in my piece, broiler chicken welfare), then estimates for the proper valuation span several orders of magnitude due to irresolvable philosophical differences. I am very grateful that the Moral Weight Project was done, but clearly we have a long way to go before we have reliable numbers that we can use.
I am particularly interested in your comments on alternative proteins, since it will be very relevant for a piece I am working on regarding meat taxation. A major focus will be to review that we know about the rebound effect and induced/latent demand to argue that, if they attain widespread market viability, alternative proteins will mostly augment the meat supply rather than replace it.
Looking at this list, it looks like the focus is on relatively low-cost interventions that will make a big difference, though not necessarily on the high-cost interventions that will be most important. Those would be things like insuring the industrial capacity for rapid vaccine/antibiotic development and deployment and better surveillance to catch risks early. And there is the question of how to deal with those political factions that work to undermine public health responses, as we saw with COVID-19.
Related is the possibility of massive crop failures caused by pathogens, whose spread might be aided by monoculture systems. We lost the gros michel banana due to a blight, and the Irish Potato Famine, which may have killed over a million people, was caused by a blight. There do exist crop blights that attack multiple crops. Perhaps a plant biologist can weight in as to what the worst case scenarios might be. For that, food storage is particularly relevant. A massive shift to indoor agriculture has such problems that it might not be realistic. It is not clear that these kinds of environments would themselves be safe from the blight, and they depend fully on an industrial base that would also be at risk.
That said, these sound like great projects that would deliver benefits orders of magnitude greater than their costs. Have you identified any needs in the Philippines in particular?
Thanks for this analysis. I continue to be impressed with the advancements the industry has been making, which in the last five or so years in particular have been far beyond what I had expected. Nevertheless, I haven’t fully moved out of the skeptic camp for two reasons. One reason, regarding the hazards of extrapolating curves, has been discussed in some other comments.
The other reason is that, despite some attempts to make it rigorous, I still find the term “artificial general intelligence” to be vague, and I expect it to continue to be subject to a moving goalposts problem. There was a time when researchers reasoned that, since chess is a pinnacle of human cognition, AGI would be inherent in a system that can play chess better than any person. This view was revealed to be obviously false after Deep Blue in 1997.
I think a bold prognostication about the development of AI would be on firmer grounds if we avoided anthropomorphisms such as “human level”.
Good morning / afternoon / evening / night. I’m Michael. I currently work as a fab tech at a semiconductor fab, I am a researcher with a small environmental policy consultancy Urban Cruise Ship, and I conduct a Living Literature Review through Coefficient Giving, Scaling in Human Societies. I also maintain a mostly biweekly blog on mostly environmentalism and urbanism.
For a long time I’ve watched goings-on in EA as a mildly interested distant observer, but now I am trying to learn much more and get more involved.
A bit tangential to the main thrust of this post, but I have been wondering lately about some the regulatory aspects around prediction markets. Recently there was the scandal of a soldier who allegedly made $400,000 from insider information about the Maduro raid. There is particular interest in the US on banning sports betting, which is seen (accurately) as another form of gambling. Minnesota might ban prediction markets entirely.
Stepping back from the merits of this specific proposal, I see it as a part of a troubling broader anti-innovation trend. We have also seen various political factions (usually the same factions) find nothing but negativity in data centers, human spaceflight, and cryptocurrency and pursue whatever legislative avenues they can to restrict these things. At some point, a person has to identify the pattern.
As a “layperson” (I don’t put my own money into prediction markets, nor is my research specifically related to them), I do find prediction markets to be a helpful source of information in the way that commodity futures are a helpful source of information. But I dislike having to sift through a bunch of predictions on sports matches and short-term crypto movements. That, and my libertarian-ish fears about the heavy hand of government, make me reluctant to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Thanks for sharing. I think in particular about the environmental movement, where a kind of mistrust of humanity—which often crosses the line into misanthropy—holds the movement back from what it could achieve. There are systems of thought such as ecomodernism which try to present a pro-human environmentalism, but I don’t think anyone has really done it right yet, at least to my knowledge.