This is perhaps even more important post SBF scandal, where putting out a large amount of positive information for the public to find is quite crucial.
RayTaylor
Hi David, I think I follow your thinking, but I’m not hopeful that there is a viable route to “ending the community” or “ending community-building” or ending people “identifying as EAs”, even if a slight majority agreed it was desirable, which seems unlikely.
On the other hand, I vary much agree that a single Oxford or US-based organisation can’t “own” and control the whole of effective altruism, and aiming not for a “perfect supertanker” but a varied “fleet” or “regatta” of EA entities would be preferable, and much more viable. Then supervision and gatekeeping and checks could be done in a single timezone, and the size of EA entities and groups could be kept at 150 or less. Also different EA regions or countries or groups could develop different strengths.
We’d end up with a confederation, rather like Oxfam, the Red Cross, Save the Children etc. (It’s not an accident that the federated movements often have a head office in the Netherlands or Switzerland, where the laws on what NGOs/charities can and can’t do are more flexible than in the UK or USA, which is kinda helpful for an ‘unusual’ movement like EA.)
Oxfam themselves also formed INTRAC as a training entity, and one could imagine CEA doing something similar, offering training in (for example)
- lessons learned
- bringing in MEv trainers for evaluation training
- PLA trainers for participatory budgeting etc.
Does this have implications for preference utilitarianism?
I’m fine with external measures of health, income etc. My concern about most wellbeing and life satisfaction theories would be a failure to distinguish between specific desires/wants and universal needs/values. Work in psychology by Abraham Maslow and Marshall Rosenberg points to positive wellbeing coming from satisfying a rather limited but universal list of needs or values. Economist Manfred-Max Neef has assembled these into a list of just 9 needs.
This seems to me much better than a single hedonic scale or global desire rating, and it also avoids the problem of how to deal with long term issues like climate change.
Just a note that under the Sendai Process, UNDRR is now considering Xrisks, largely thanks to input from James Throup of ALLFED and Prof Virginia Murray, and will go on to consider cascading risks, sometimes called the “Boring Apocalypse” (ref EA Matthjis Maas).
I appreciate your post Brandon. I think there’s a clear case that education and being able to exit survival level of poverty and knowing that your health and your children’s education are secure enables people to focus on other things (demonstrated again in recent Basic Income research).
Development and poverty reduction is very helpful but perhaps not sufficient: response capacity and good leadership is also needed, as we have seen in the pandemic?
Thank you for this excellent post and analysis Ian—I’ve been working on the pandemic since January and still learned a lot.
1. This “crisis” seems to me a huge opportunity for changes in how we do education. I’d love to see posts on that, or does someone have links?
2. I think working on covid could more broadly help with preparedness for cascading risks, GCR and Xrisk. Sahil Shah at ALLFED.info is learning and doing a lot on this, with FAO, WFP and others, but it would be great to see metta level work also, pulling out lessons learned from an actual response, which is a rare opportunity.
One useful thing could be to itemise and appreciate and learn from institutions, individuals and media that have done 1 or more really useful thing during the pandemic, because the chances are they would be good for the next pandemic, GCR or Xrisk event too?
3. I had great support here in India from Katriel Friedman and Fiona Conlon and team at Charity Science (Health). They are well-networked and could be worth funding in themselves, as could ALLFED (I’m biased!) and Indian animal charities (ask EA Aditya SK for suggestions) as could the Indian EA network itself: Varun Deshpande has been working up a competent proposal which I think is ready for funding: a small amount could make a. huge difference and be really encouraging and fertile. I also see a huge need for an Asian 80,000hours, and I’m supporting 2 universities who want a Foresight/Futures/Xrisk institute. The pandemic is making it very easy to see the need!
4. Lessons learned, but not implemented. For example, how come lots of countries including UK derived lessons learned from SARS-1, but only a few actually implemented those lessons (e.g. HK, Korea)?
In India, having 50kg of food vouchers ready and printed in every large city (+ some preparedness and training exercises) would have enabled a more subtle lockdown to happen without disrupting food supply (and causing lots of involuntary migration, with much suffering and death) and the cost would have been tiny.
Are there high leverage things we could do now, as we propose projects for funding, that could action the lessons learned more robustly and lastingly?
Should we be aiming more towards corporations and institutes, city regions and central banks than governments, who can “forget” or reverse or unfund preparedness when it becomes old news?
Is there a science of preparedness/recovery finance and preparedness nudge? Should it be part of the emerging fields of resilience and scaling/implementation science?
or should recovery be its own field, as it’s always going to be the most neglected “last part” of any broader field such as resilience or DRR disaster risk reduction?
Obviously preparedness and recovery is core work for ALLFED.info (interest: I cofounded). Sahil Shah is leading the work on cascading risks and financial mechanisms and direct support to Ethiopia and Tanzania, with support from myself, Sonia Cassidy (director of operations in London) and Prof David Denkenberger, EA and philanthropist.
5. At the moment it’s very hard for any country to mount a humanitarian response to the next hurricane/cyclone—how can you put hundreds of people onto a ship or train and send. them into a disaster zone, where they could infect or be infected, and all the ICUs are flooded?
An obvious solution would be to do the safest possible Challenge Trial, and if I was a young Red Cross worker I would absolutely want to volunteer, for my own safety. The blockage is the wariness of doctors, who tend to consider only the narrow risk to the persons they treat, and not the broader consequences of no action (a variant on trolley problem, but with much. bigger consequences for no action). So I think there is an important legal/ethical issue around Challenge Trials, and probably a need for a new or adapted and faster ethical approval process, enabling proposals like those from Robin Hanson/Pete Singer/vaccinologists/C-TIG googlegroup to happen. At the moment there are too many restrictions/blocks which mean only high risk unofficial routes are available, and no competent research/tracking/publishing gets done, so we don’t learn whether Challenge Trials have a safe protocol or not, and can’t go to scale. Matthjis Maas in Copenhagen Law centre has worked on cascading scenarios (which he calls “boring apocalypse”) so he might be a good collaborator, especially as neighbouring Sweden is, in effect, doing a wild and risky national Challenge Trial, with the virus itself. This is a bit dense and deserves a thread of it’s own, with 3 authors—of someone is interested, please message Dr Aaron Stupple or Robin Hanson.
If anyone wants to reach me about any of this, WhatsApp +447765477305 while I’m in India and messages to www.facebook.com/andyraytaylor are robust, otherwise via www.ALLFED.info.
I’d also love a volunteer or three to run a crowdfunder?
Thanks Aaron!
“what’s the path to reaching policymakers?”
I like this question, and obviously we don’t want a Yellow Brick Road, leading to a grand figure with no practical power.
[A quick reply, without references, so please read as illustrative/descriptive rather than definitive. This isn’t a full answer to your question Aaron, but I hope it gives some impressions of how things are developing in our approach.]
Initially we were keen on reaching policymakers, and we still are to a considerable degree, but we’ve discovered the following:
Reaching actual policymakers is a long chain: …. first the science >> then economic justification >> then it has to be affordable in the present policy climate, and no serious political risk >> whatever is proposed has to make it through congress/parliament before the administration changes >> nothing deflects the previous effort or funding after that.
The UN is not able to coordinate globally for a long list of reasons, including that USA and China would do their own thing, with allies/neighbours. The UN, mainly via WFP/FAO and UNHCR/UNICEF, may have a role with the 40-60 LDCs (who are used to getting famine relief or refugess support in the event of local/national/regional disasters) but those four UN agencies too need preparedness for a new approach in a scenario where they would have no food to deliver as emergency relief, once pre-positioned stocks were exhausted.
Preparedness ASAP for a century / millennium of risks is what we want, but thinking on that time scale it isn’t a high priority on electoral cycles or in finance ministries: “no one is expecting the Spanish Inquisition” (ie no one expects to get blamed for not preparing for a GCR/X-risk event) and food security, GCR or disaster preparedness have rarely been an electoral issue, except when disasters are managed badly (as Hurricane Katrina)
In scenario/simulation exercises, both we and WWF/US Navy have found governments are mainly occupied with themselves, with each other and with the media in the crucial initial weeks of a shock/crisis, and they are typically not thinking ahead to failed harvests some months away. I’ve been told by a State Department academic, that historical records and cabinet minutes reflect similar behaviour in real world events.
This increases the relative importance of preparedness over response.…
.… and of financial markets (who do respond fast to emerging media and science), reinsurers (ditto), industry and academics over government.
To a considerable degree, all of these non governing institutions can think longer term, and have a better “institutional memory” than the Oval Office or the Cabinet Office (UK). [An exception is the military, who are typically strong on scenarios and have them stored and accessible, but in democracies they can’t decide priorities outside their own remit.]
If you reflect, this makes perfect sense: few Western / major countries have a living memory of famine (China and Netherlands are among the exceptions, and this is reflected in policy) and governments are by necessity generalists, so one would indeed expect specialists like futures markets, reinsurers, the military, academics, and even some industry players (eg “business continuity” consultants) to be in a better position to focus on this kind of issue, and that is indeed what we have found.
In scenario/sim work, we are finding that major global media have several important roles to play.
So for these and more reasons ALLFED is working:
in London, on financial mechanisms that would enable industry to do preparedness work that doesn’t wait for government either on preparedness or in actual GCRs
with academics, starting with UCL and Bristol volcanologists as they have such a nice clear GCR example, but stretching across to agriculture and supply chain people, in order to present a well formed case for better preparedness, and response systems that are flexible, and a food system recovery strategy that is also flexible
in India, with those already working on district / national scale disasters and on multiple monsoon failure / multiple breadbasket failure, but encouraging them to think “even-worse-case” scenario
on the technologies themselves, open sourcing as far as possible
on expert networking eg at GCF Stockholm, Oxford Martin School, Climate and Security Initiative in the Hague (an annual conference by Clingendaal, the diplomat training school)
with individuals in politics/government/civil service who demonstrate a long term interest in these issues, eg the “Black Sky Lord”, Lord Harris in the UK, and Cabinet Office civil servants who are asking for response protocols as they just don’t have them, or the time to create them: so these are topics of discussion with the volcanologists, who already have channels because of the threat to aviation even with smaller eruptions
etc
Nevertheless, government will almost certainly be important in an event, and getting GCR/X into disaster preparedness (aka “mainstreaming”) would be great.
One way to do this is via NASA into the UN’s Sendai process, and I will working on text for that in
later this year.Overall, policy people do often rely on the seniority of scientists to tell them who to choose to listen to about which risks to take on and how. (Obviously, seniority is not necessarily the best criteria, especially with emerging tech! But that’s the realpolitik, and what we have to work with.) So ALLFED needs a bigger repertoire, more heavyweight policy institutes backing us, and a wider network of academics who have “bought in” to our line on cost effectiveness and duty-of-care (for nations to protect their population).
Academics, like everyone else, can be conservative and scared of ridicule, so ALLFED is emphasising GCR more than X-risk, not because we think X-risk is less important, but because in order to reach policymakers you have to
(a) be able to communicate about things that they can conceive of and grapple with
(b) help them not fear attack in the press for being too sci-fi
(c) give them clear “realistic” justifications for their own finance people.
And again, the volcanic GCR example is very helpful here because we have a clear historical precedent or two (Tambora and Laki) that politicians can relate to. It’s also easy to convince them that another VEI7 (or worse) is certain to happen some day.
We are also working on fall back strategies in case there is a GCR/X-risk event in the next year or two, so that ALLFED is of immediate and practical usefulness to some governments/media and industry.
One area it would be great to have specific funding for, as a self-contained project, is a self-updating GCR/X expert directory. Almost everyone we network with wants one of these, and no one has cash/staff to do it. I’d like to see an India EA project funded to do it.
Isn’t that “sunk cost fallacy” ?
If it’s the right decision to sell and use the money a better way, that still applies, whether or not there is a small loss. To have a loss might be somewhat embarrassing, but truth is truth.Anyway, in the UK you can put a property up for sale at an ideal price, and see what offers come in. It’s hard to know for sure what price you will get without doing that.
Concerning translation, it can be a mistake to imagine it’s necessary to translate the whole of texts, or large texts.
Instead, translating a title and summary, or first paragraphs, or a contents page or back cover of a book, can be enough to help people decide in if they want to translate the whole thing into their own language, or read with the help of google/dictionary.
Great Evan! Will try to contact you.
On Global Catastrophic Risks, relative risk of extreme weather vs abrupt climate change etc and health+food system recovery it’s worth contacting Prof David Denkenberger an EA from GCRI.
(I work with him on www.FoodSystemShock.com, and before I came to EA on www.globalcoolingproject.com, which is an alternative to climate engineering, more like climate restoration, with support from NASA and Prof Peter Cox and others—difficult but possible.)
I think you should maybe include a section on common weaknesses of both EAs and the environmental movement
for example:
naivetee of idealists in relation to power, realities of implementation, finance and effectiveness of lobbying, denialism, media/mass psychology strategies, post-factual socio-political realities
western cultural blind spots / lack of awareness of own hypocrisies
lack of awareness of just how much we are a minority
poor communication and psychology awareness and strategies
the things I’ve missed, because I’m both an EA and an environmentalist, and have been for too long
If EAs don’t talk to journalists they will miss out on one really important learning:
.… how to talk to journalists!
The decision may be between IR melatonin and ER 5-HTP which is a precursor:
www.foodstuffs.ca/scrapbookmain/2017/5/14/5-htp-vs-melatonin
”For some people, taking melatonin will help induce and maintain sleep. However, melatonin supplements usually only work if a person has low levels of melatonin in their system (this situation is commonly found in elderly persons). In other words, if you have normal levels of melatonin, taking melatonin supplements won’t be as effective in helping you sleep.That’s where 5-HTP comes in. Since it works on serotonin as well (and indirectly on melatonin), it may be a better supplement to take for individuals with normal levels of melatonin that are suffering from insomnia. Because it interacts with serotonin, people who are already on anti-depressants or MAOIs should talk to their doctor before trying 5-HTP (melatonin, on the other hand, is generally safe to use with these other drugs when taken as directed).”
www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-taking-melatonin-and-5HTPGeneral intro to 5-HTP and uses:
www.mountsinai.org/health-library/supplement/5-hydroxytryptophan-5-htp
Thanks for opening this topic. It’s important to realise there are different kinds of sleep problem, so different people will need different solutions:
sleep onset
(which tends to be due to stimulation too late at night; CBT sleep hygiene works well for this, if done diligently, and limiting coffee etc)early morning waking
(which tends to be due to stress-anxiety-depression or large amounts of alcohol)low sleep quality
(which can be due to a range of things but alcohol and the wrong medication is a classic cause; Mirtazapine is popular, but has long term dangers like weight gain)
In the UK, melatonin* is no longer available without prescription, only 5-HTP, which is a precursor. Is this because people tended to take dangerously large doses of melatonin? (Precursors tend to be safer, because the body can convert the amount it needs, at the right time.)
Generally fresh air is a good thing but there are caveats especially during a pandemic winter. If you pull in too much very cold air (with low absolute humidity) you can quickly go below 40% RH which is bad for the protective mucus layer of the lung & airways, and the glycans+non-IgG antibodies which are important for innate immunity.
What makes you think slightly lower CO2 or higher O2 levels are good for sleep? Isn’t the converse equally or more likely? (If not, people who live in mountain areas are in trouble! And I sleep really well in the mountains.) I have noticed that people in higher CO2 environments seem drowsy. Of course, this too may not correlate with good quality sleep!Are you defining good sleep just by duration? For more on this, search < sleep architecture CBT >
On the SAD lighting, many people find the room lighting or boxes impractical. Much easierfor some is a visor or glasses which can be worn while preparing breakfast etc. I’ve been happy with an Australian brand (www.re-timer.com/the-science/research) but there are others that may look cooler!
* https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/news/20181112/as-melatonin-use-rises-so-do-safety-concerns
https://alaskaregional.com/blog/entry/4-reasons-to-be-cautious-about-melatonin
Yes interested, have messaged.
Another good model is EIA (Environmental Investigations Agency) and their very targeted policy and action work on HCFCs, which led to the ozone-depleting gas emissions being discovered in China recently.
I think World Bank, UNDP, UNICEF, WFP and IMF have a strong incentive to help prevent future pandemics, and they have much more money to deploy than WHO.
CMU Prof Loh is working on this and has a project: novid.org
Hi Alexei—I love it!
I notice I felt happier just seeing the title, so on hedonic grounds you’ve succeeded already :-)
I’m scared to mention these two additional options, but perhaps they should be there for overall completeness in a brainstorm which isn’t immediately requiring proofs on any of the options, and in a post where “Happy minds” is mentioned as an objective:
1. None of these solutions seem highly plausible, so that means we are not too far away from philosophies and concepts about immortality that are historically (but not exclusively) linked to major religions. Cultivating an “immortal soul” and going on to an “afterlife” may be high risk, and thought ridiculous by many, but on the plus side it is at least attemptable, within a single lifetime. The buddhist concept of “clear light” and “rebirth” (rather than reincarnation as in Hinduism) might also be interesting, as it doesn’t rely on the concept of a soul. See also Shankara’s “nonduality”.
NB I’m not asking or recommending anyone to “get religion” or saying religion is “true” but that their concepts sometimes find analogues in science and reality, so can be useful for brainstorming completeness, that’s all.
2. If we take a more reductionist / psychological approach and reduce the problem to …
(a) despair in the futility of doing anything in an impermanent universe or
(b) fear of death and so a desire for immortality …
… it might be worth considering despair work, distraction strategies, fear work, anti-depressants and other mind-altering strategies, so that these emotions become less problematic.
If someone suggested that these two strategies could also be psychological evasions, I’d have to agree, but maybe that applies to all of them?
The ultimate truth may turn out to be, “nothing works, and all life is doomed!” So perhaps we need ….
3. Acceptance therapy?
>I like the idea of building “resilience” instead of going after specific causes.
That’s almost exactly the approach we took in ALLFED, treating the more likely GCR and Xrisk scenarios as a “basket of risks”...
… and then looking at how to build resilience and recovery capacity for all of them, with an initial focus on recovering food supply.
We now have more than 20 EA volunteers at ALLFED, in a range of disciplines from engineering to history, so clearly this makes sense to people.
>For instance, if we spend all of our attention on bio risks, AI risks, and nuclear risks, it’s possible that something else weird will cause catastrophe in 15 years.
Indeed!
Most likely a “cascading risk scenario” … (as covid is, without yet being a GCR) …
.… or what EA Matthijs Maas calls a “boring apocalypse”.
>So experimenting with broad interventions that seem “good no matter what” seems interesting. For example, if we could have effective government infrastructure, or general disaster response, or a more powerful EA movement, those would all be generally useful things.
yes the DRR (disaster risk reduction) discipline gave us structures and processes, and enabled us to bridge across to UNDRR, a profession of disaster people, insights into preparedness-response-recovery which we are scaling up to whole-continent and whole-planet scale, etc
It’s nice to see the photo—is that the team, and are there more details about the people doing the project somewhere?
What will be the monitoring and evaluation of outcomes, and how will spending be accounted and tracked.
For me, the ones we should worry about are the ones which are most likely in the next 5-9 years.
If I understand the history (eg. several occasions when a USSR-USA nuclear war was almost triggered due to software errors) and the scenario analysis (ie. all the ways something similar could happen via the smaller nuclear powers) - the biggest near term likelihood is of an “accidental” regional nuclear war in the Middle East, perhaps because one country erroneously believes it is being attacked, or because one country has had its chain of command hacked or hijacked in an unexpected way.
I believe that the high likelihood from the smaller Middle East powers comes not from high likelihood of any one given scenario, but rather from the large number of pathways to a nuclear exchange, a “basket of risks”, each one individually being of low likelihood, but collectively adding up to a likelihood far bigger than any one scenario.
In case anyone thinks that a regional nuclear exchange wouldn’t be too bad, Robock et al have discussed direct consequences such as “nuclear autumn”, and cascading scenarios are obviously a risk.
Paul Ingram (www.basicint.org/our-staff/paul-ingram) would be excellent to discuss this with, as he specialises in this area and has done since the late 1980s.
I think a step back might help.
First we might decide that effective campaigning on climate might have more per dollar effectiveness in medium and long term than local action. Jim Hanssen himself, or WWF, or EIA, or Operation Noah, or COIN, or Plane Stupid might therefore be better causes even if they cant demonstrate short term carbon reduction.
Second, carbon is not the only or even the most powerful warming gas, so in the long term, we might think organisations like WWF and EIA (UK) working on super-powerful greehouse gases like HCFCs have done more than most of the 200 year time scale.
There are other climate forcings such as Black Carbon, reduction of water in landscapes (ref NASA’s GLACE study and UK’s AMMA 1 & 2), urban albedo and so on, any of which could be more tractable currently.
Mass behaviour change and local action has been singularly ineffective against climate chage in the face of massive industrial devlopment and government pro-growth policies, so clearly some action is needed at government level. And again, governments have been ineffective because of powerful lobbying and effective “the science is uncertain” campaigns by the coal lobby, using lobbyists like Fred Singer who previously worked for Big Tobacco.
COINnet.net is a small Oxford NGO that has done a lot of work on this, and George Marshall now works directly with big corporate type people to try to establsh a communication bridge.
It may be that our political and econmic systems are so structured that nothing truly effective can be done on climate until people in wealthy countries are much more impacted. In that case, research on recovery, restoration and geoengineering (ie things that can be implemented in 20 / 40 / 60 years time) might be more on-point, so that we are ready to act effectively when the will is really there?
That leaves us with a gap of time, in which there may be severe consequences. ALLFED.info has an approach to try to mitigate such consequeces, by recovering food systems as fast as possible. (Declaring an interest: I co-founded and work for ALLFED.)
Great post, very comprehensive—I’m sad it got less response.
Thanks for sharing your thinking.
You must have got some interesting applications, and individual EAs might want to fund or help fund them.
Could there be a way now or in future to facilitate exchange of info to maker this possible? (With politeness?)
I imagine this has come up before. What were the unsolved blocks?
[Declaring an interest: I submitted and didn’t get funded.]