I’m a quantitative biologist with a background in evolutionary theory, microbiome data science, and metagenomics methods development. I co-lead the [Nucleic Acid Observatory project](https://naobservatory.org), which seeks to develop a metagenomics-based early warning system for future pandemics.
mike_mclaren
Karma: 322
Thanks for writing this post! I enjoyed looking over these, many of which I have also been puzzling about.
What’s the minimum viable human population (from the perspective of genetic diversity)?
After seeing this question picked up here I thought I would share some quick thoughts from the perspective of a person with a population biology/evolution background. I think this is a reasonable question to ask, but I suspect is not as important as the other factors that go into the broader question of what is the minimum population size from which humanity is likely to recover, period. Genetics are just one factor and probably not the most important when we consider the probability of recovery after a severe drop in global population.
Suppose that after some catastrophic event the population of humanity has suddenly dropped to a much smaller and more fragmented global population, e.g. 10000 individuals scattered in ~100 groups of 100 each across the globe. While the population size is small, it will be particularly susceptible to going extinct due to random fluctuations in population size. The population size could remain stationary or gradually decline, until eventually a random event causes extinction. Or it could start increasing, until eventually it is large enough to be robust to extinction from a random event.
The idea of a minimum viable population size (MVP) from a purely genetic perspective is that, since small populations are predicted to have lower average genetic fitness due to an increase in the expression of recessive deleterious mutations (“inbreeding depression”), an increased fixation of deleterious mutations in the population, or a lack of genetic variation that would allow adaptation to environment, there is in theory a population size small enough where a population would decline and go extinct due to low genetic fitness.
But in reality, the population seems more likely to go extinct because of poor environmental conditions, random environmental fluctuations, loss of cultural knowledge (which, like genetic variation, goes down in small populations), or lack of physical goods and technology, none of which have much to do with genetic variation.
Another way in which the concept of a MVP is too simplistic is that it is defined with respect to a genetic “equilibrium”—it assumes that conditions have been stable enough that there is a constant level of genetic variation in the population. However, after a sudden population decline, we would be far from equilibrium—we would still have lots of genetic variation from the time the population was large. This variation would start to decay, but as different local populations become fixed for different variants, much of this variation would be maintained at the global level and could be converted back into local variation by small amounts of migration. Such considerations are not usually included in MVP considerations. (Some collaborators and I have written about this last point at it relates to conserving endangered species here)
Perhaps we should keep the term “minimum viable population size” but use a broader definition based on likelihood to survive, period. I see that Wikipedia uses a broad definition that includes extinction due to demographic and environmental stochasticity, but often MVP is used as in the OP to refer just to extinction due to genetic reasons, so it is important to clarify terms.
Non-itemizing US taxpayers can deduct $300 of their 2020 donations
Thanks for posting this. Posts introducing books or other bodies of work not explicitly about EA or an EA cause area, but that introduce or explain relevant ideas from disparate disciplines, seem valuable and I would like to see more.
Interesting post, thanks for sharing. Although I am skeptical for some reasons I note below, the potential upside to such a cheap treatment for a very unpleasant disease seems highly worth pursuing. For context, I’m viewing this post as an academic biologist who develops methods for microbiome data analysis and collaborates with some clinicians, though my background is ecology and evolution rather than medicine.
While reading the post, I struck by how the referenced evidence for the author’s (Martin Laurence) hypothesis is entirely from citations to his own papers and a short reply to a journal article (I don’t think peer reviewed) about anecdotal observations from six IBD patients. The author’s papers referenced take the form of reviews and argued hypotheses from research done by others, rather than original experiments, and seem to be about spondyloarthritis, prostate cancer and MS rather than Crohn’s directly. Given that IBD and Crohns disease are popular research topics in biomedical research and specifically in microbiome research, I found this lack of reference to others in support of the main hypothesis suspicious, and it made me think the hypothesis is controversial or not well subscribed to in the field. That is not to say it is unfounded, but I would have expected some acknowledgement if this is an “out there” view and discussion of why that included some references to the mainstream view and coverage of the controversy. I would also expect that building further evidence that would convince other researchers and mainstream funders in the field would be the next step, rather than crowd funding a clinical trial, and so would have liked to see an explanation for why this strategy isn’t being taken.
I also felt that the reasons under Neglectedness and Funding Gap didn’t explain why other biomedical researchers aren’t pursuing this, or why the author isn’t soliciting funds through standard biomedical funding agencies. The lack of incentive for private drug companies mentioned does not explain why standard agencies and organizations aren’t funding it. It is true that fungi are often neglected over bacteria in microbiome studies, but if there is good evidence that fungi are playing a role in Crohn’s and they’ve been historically neglected, they I would expect researchers to be jumping on this hypothesis, and for standard biomedical funders to be glad to fund it, unless for reasons mentioned above.
After reading the FAQ on the author’s website, I suspect the author is forgoing the mainstream route and soliciting small private donations because he is operating outside academia and lacks academic or hospital collaborators who can apply for the needed grants. But without these collaborators, I don’t see how the proposed clinical trial could be orchestrated. This is not to say that I think the author is wrong in pursuing this work or not credible, but I feel that ignoring these issues makes the post seem less credible than it might otherwise be.
In his recent interview on the 80000 Hours Podcast, Toby Ord discussed how nonstandard analysis and its notion of hyperreals may help resolve some apparent issues arising from infinite ethics (link to transcript). For those interested in learning more about nonstandard analysis, there are various books and online resources. Many involve fairly high-level math as they are aimed at putting what was originally an intuitive but imprecise idea onto rigorous footing. Instead of those, you might want to check out a book like that of H. Jerome Keisler’s Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach, which is freely available online. This book aims to be an introductory calculus textbook for college students, which uses hyperreals instead of limits and delta-epsilon proofs to teach the essential ideas of calculus such as derivatives and integrals. I haven’t actually read this book but believe it is the best known book of this sort. Here’s another similar-seeming book by Dan Sloughter.
It seems basically impossible to reliably execute a newly-learned many-step task within one second.
Since this also seemed hopeless to me after my test donation took me 20 seconds, I thought I’d reiterate the key part of AviNorowitz’s reply even more plainly: What the EA Giving Tuesday team’s instructions recommend is that you do all of the steps except the last one prior to 8AM. So you only need to do one step (a single mouse click) in one second.
After doing a 5$ practice donation, I re-examined the instructions at https://www.eagivingtuesday.org/instructions/us-500-or-more and understood you are suggesting get to the “confirm donation page” before the 8am start time. But I think if the recommendation to start the donation prior to 8am was in the “In a nutshell” section I would have figured it out sooner. You might consider editing the third sentence in the first bullet of the “In a nutshell” section to something like ”We recommended starting the donation process prior to the official match start so that you are able to click the final “Donate” button within the first second after the match start time of December 3rd, 2019, at 08:00:00am EST (05:00:00am PST).”
I think part of my (slight) confusion might be captured in your language “We’re recommending donating within the first second”; by “donating” you mean click the final Donate button whereas I naturally interpret this as meaning do the entire donation process.
+1 thanks to Vipul for writing this. But I also want to balance the second part of Aaron’s comment by saying that I would like to see more posts explaining personal donations in general, and don’t think that will happen if the average level of quality and time has to hit this level. Please share your donation reasonings even if you don’t feel super confident about them and don’t have time to make a carefully researched and written post! I had originally thought “Blog posts” would be a good venue for such less-well-crafted posts, but I see now that attempting to make a new blog post simply takes you to the new post page.
For the record, the AMAs were mentioned as upcoming in the New EA Funds management thread and a few-day window was given on Dec. 5 in the December quick update thread
As a scientist, I consider science a way of learning about the world, and not what a particular group of people say. I think the article is fairly explicit about taking a similar definition of “science-aligned”:
(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out...
(...)
Science-aligned. The best means to figuring out how to do the most good is the scientific method, broadly construed to include reliance on careful rigorous argument and theoretical models as well as data.
There is usually a vast body of existing relevant work on a topic across various fields of research. Trying to seriously engage with existing work is part of being scientific; and the opinions or consensus of researchers in the field are a form of data one should not ignore. You can disagree after serious consideration without being unscientific. Simply coming to your own conclusions without engaging with existing work, or acting based on emotion or gut feelings acquired without ever thinking about them critically would be unscientific.
A part of being scientific is also being open to and trying to learn from critiques of your work. It is true that scientists often make bad critiques for bad (unscientific) reasons, and it can take quite a lot of effort to understand the social and historical reasons behind consensus opinions in particular fields on particular issues. I don’t think most EAs would think having a certain degree of support from a particular group of scientists is the relevant criterion.
A possible reason for the downvote is that your initial question ‘What does it mean to be “pro-science”?’ is explicitly answered in the article and it’s not immediately clear that you are acknowledging that and really asking, isn’t everything science-aligned under this definition?
Just wanted to say thanks to both Gregory and Spiracular for their detailed and thoughtful back and forth in this thread. As someone coming from a place somewhere in the middle but having spent less time thinking through these considerations, I found getting to hear your personal perspectives very helpful.
Last week, Science published four responses to the original article,
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaay8060
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaay7976
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaaz0388
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaay8334
along with a reply to the responses from the original authors,
(hat tip to the Future Perfect newsletter)
This version that has been making the rounds on twitter makes the point even plainer:
sourceThe syntax for embedding images is
. For this and other forum formatting issues, try googling along the lines of “markdown insert image” or “markdown cheatsheet” (still what I do despite using markdown regularly)
Thanks for writing this and posting it here on the forum. Beyond the helpful suggestions, I feel that both managers and those experiencing imposter syndrome need reminders that many people experience this, likely including many who they themselves view as highly competent. I imagine that imposter syndrome also affects many people not working at EA organizations but who are working towards applying to an EA org or taking another form of career move for EA reasons, especially for orgs or cause areas that are high-profile within the community. (It certainly affects me in this way.) Regarding therapy options for anxiety related to imposter syndrome or more generally—if you’re currently in college or graduate school then you likely have easy access to cheap/free therapy through your university’s student health services.
~1h sounds like the time to make a CV and cover letter personalized for Charity Science starting from an at least semi-relevant CV and cover letter for a previous job application.
Thanks for posting this! Very interesting to see effective altruism being directly discussed in this context. I was curious whether EA had been discussed in other academic biology journals. Entering “effective altruism” into the Pubmed search bar brings up four articles,
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Funding Conservation through an Emerging Social Movement. Freeling BS, Connell SD. Trends Ecol Evol. 2019 Oct 12. pii: S0169-5347(19)30276-9. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2019.09.002. [Epub ahead of print]
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Impediments to Effective Altruism: The Role of Subjective Preferences in Charitable Giving. Berman JZ, Barasch A, Levine EE, Small DA. Psychol Sci. 2018 May;29(5):834-844. doi: 10.1177/0956797617747648. Epub 2018 Apr 16.
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Effective altruists ought to be allowed to sell their kidneys. Tonkens R. Bioethics. 2018 Mar;32(3):147-154. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12427. Epub 2018 Jan 25.
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Framework for integrating animal welfare into life cycle sustainability assessment. Scherer L, Tomasik B, Rueda O, Pfister S. Int J Life Cycle Assess. 2018;23(7):1476-1490. doi: 10.1007/s11367-017-1420-x. Epub 2017 Nov 20.
The last three fall into categories I might have expected—psychology, ethics, and animal welfare. But I find #1 particularly notable because it is going to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (also known as TREE), which is a high impact review journal that is widely read within ecology and evolution. I suspect this TREE article will be more widely seen by scientists than the Phytopathology article in the OP, though perhaps the title of the article will only appeal to the subset of TREE readers working in conservation biology.
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Regarding the breakdown by subject, I agree that this would be very valuable, but that having a bunch of subforums probably isn’t the answer. To me, the obvious solution is having keyword/tag support, where authors and/or mods set the keywords for their article, and users can view all posts with a given tag. This feature is built into popular blog-building platforms like Hugo (through Hugo “taxonomies”); I have no idea how hard it would be to implement in the LW/EA forum software. But the ability to filter to posts relating to AI, wild-animal suffering, community building, cause prioritization, etc. seems to be an important feature for making forum posts on a given topic remain relevant long after they have fallen off the Latest Posts list.
For the record, you can see all of GPI’s papers at https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/papers/, and seminars by the authors presenting some of these papers can be seen on GPI’s YouTube channel.
(and thanks to the OP for helping bring them to my attention!)
Thanks for clarifying! Perhaps clicking the “Blog post” button could autofill a standard note for this, that one could choose to delete. That way new users will be able to understand how this works right away. (Unless the idea is to phase out / discourage / remove this feature)
Something that seems to be missing from this (very valuable) conversation is that many people also spend months looking for non-EA jobs that they have a personal fit for. I’m mainly aware of people with science PhDs, either applying for industry jobs or applying for professorships. It is not uncommon for this to be a months long process with multiple 10s of applications, as being reported here for EA job searching. The case of where this goes faster in industry jobs tends to be because the applicant is well established as having a key set of skills that a company needs and/or a personal network connection with people involved in hiring at the company. Some academics get lucky just applying for a few professorships, but others apply to 50+ jobs, which easily takes 100+ hours, perhaps many more. And in both cases you spend lots of time over the preceding years learning about the job search process, how to write cover letters, teaching statements, etc.