What best practices exist for responding to situations like COVID-19 (global, dynamic, hard to gather information around, etc) and how might they be applied?
nonzerosum
Karma: 355
How are decision makers and leaders deciding today? Based on what, what things could be built that would give them better inputs to their decisions in a way that they’d actually be likely to use and listen to?
Who/which type of people most need help right now related to the COVID response that most people are generally unaware of?
Based on human psychological biases, are there certain things that will almost always be handled irrationally in short-term urgent situations? If so, what potentially impactful project ideas does that imply?
Does the COVID pandemic present an opportunity for citizens to pressure leaders into using more effective decision making processes to decide what to do? And could some of those more effective decision making processes persist post-COVID, such that we end up with a lasting improvement in decision making at various levels of government?
Does the COVID pandemic present an opportunity to get around bureaucratic processes and make better software solutions for interfacing with government things—like PPP loans, unemployment, etc?
Who should be connected and collaborating where both parties would mutually want to, but they aren’t?
From a subjective well being and psychological perspective, are there “free” things we can do that reduce the quality adjusted life years lost for people, without actually changing the literal response? For example, changes in ways things are framed, messaged, etc?
How can we most effectively collect, organize, summarize, and generally manage all of the real time information so that people can benefit from the best available information rather than just the information that they’ve otherwise seen? e.g. I believe some Chinese pre-print papers extolled the benefits of proning patients a month before I started hearing about it on US-centric Twitter circles
How can we connect individuals that are solving the same problems separately so that they can learn from each other and find camaraderie? e.g. factory owners, small business owners, etc
Is Sweden’s approach working well and will it be working well in 1 month, and in 3 months?
Does COVID cause serious damage to people that recover?
Crisis leadership experts with mayors, governors, and other leaders
Psychologists/marketers with mayors, governors, and other leaders
Open Phil with mayors, governors and other leaders
Struggling business owners with each other
Doctors from different countries with each other (with translators to mediate perhaps)
Bill Gates with the prime minister of Israel
The heads of all major hospitals with each other, and with the President of the US
Factory owners with each other
It seems that if COVID causes long term fatigue (has been speculated but no strong evidence that I’m aware of) this could be negative for the EA community—i.e. if leaders of EA related orgs or key employees or other key EA contributors had fatigue issues and lower personal output, that seems bad.
A rough summary:
COVID response benefits from good information—and lots of the needed information is spread over many institutions, people, etc. It is beneficial to have up to date, accurate, and local data—this is hard.
COVID responses often involve/benefit from coordination across many different institutions/people/domains. This is hard.
COVID responses may benefit from extreme measures long after “corona fatigue” has set in and people and decision makers are sick of hearing about it, and just want things to “go back to normal”
Many people will need to make decisions about what to do as a result of / to respond to COVID. “Can you imagine conducting planning for an urban school district? A company with offices in multiple time zones? A company with a supply chain? A person responsible for industrial safety of a facility whose physical footprint includes one or more enclosed pockets of air?”
Many/most of these people don’t have training or experience in making decisions like this.
There will be lots of contexts where decisions are made related to COVID where the expected value delta between a great decision and a bad one will be big, which gives big opportunity for positive impact in helping all the people who will be making COVID related/influenced decisions and response plans make *better* decisions/response plans
See also: Bungalow, HubHaus, Common.
I wish someone would do shared living for people who want private living units (not just bedrooms) + shared common spaces, e.g. multiple houses on one block and a shared common space on that block. Makes co-living work for families or people who want a bit more privacy.
is anonymous_ea one person’s username, or is it a catch all username for some kind of anonymity feature on this forum? I’ve long wondered if anonymous_ea is a regular username or not
What makes you say it’s low on neglectedness?