RyanCarey
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A potential failure mode is that applicants believe the camp is a guaranteed way of being hired. Participants should not expect that this camp is guaranteeing, or making any promises whatsoever, about increasing the chances of getting a relevant position.
Yep! Although I’d emphasise that issue can also be solved by being more selective. If you pick some combo of: 1) reasonably strong candidates straight out of university who are happy to work on entry-level admin jobs, and 2) candidates with some PM experience, who are prepared to work as a PM at an EA org, including a community org, then that cohort is reasonably likely to leave happy (versus, I don’t know, if you pick a bunch of people with lower levels of employment, who are strongly location restricted or are otherwise particular about the kinds of jobs they would accept). I think the impact from recruiting, identifying, filtering, and referring the already—semi-strong candidates is already something to get excited about!
Yeah I agree with Jan that you should take things slowly. Also, my advice is that the following two bottlenecks are important, but also relatively easy to relieve: buy-in from community leaders, and support from EA institutions. So you should invest in these by having meetings and getting some people in relevant organizations take on advising roles.
Ultimately, I think you have the right general idea though. Current community-based orgs are capacity limited, and so some major projects like this should stand-alone.
He’s just saying he thinks there’s a 0.005 chance of detecting a real effect.
If you use a two tailed test and find a positive effect with p<0.05 it’s <0.025 likely you’d get a positive effect that big by chance. If you don’t understand that then you should look up two tailed tests.
“A cheap cure for Crohn’s could save some large fraction of the $33B spent on Crohn’s per year, and these funds could save thousands of lives per year if spent on other diseases.”
I mostly agree with this, but I think it’s also wrong in a couple of places.
Crohn’s disease is not a spondyloarthritis! (and neither is psoriasis, ulcerative colitis, or acute anterior uveitis). As the name suggests, spondyloarthritides are arthritides (i.e. diseases principally of joints—the ‘spondylo’ prefix points to joints between vertebrae); Crohn’s a disease of the GI tract.
I think this is just restating the hypothesis, that Crohn’s shares (most of) its pathophysiology with the spondyloarthritides… Which is a well-known open possibility. The incidence of Crohns is >10% in people with AS and vice versa. They share heredity, HLA-B27. Apparently 2⁄3 of those with AS also have silent gut signs [1].
Also, I think the following is off the mark:
Although these are imperfect, if the person behind the project doesn’t have credentials in a relevant field (bioinformatics rather than gastroenterology, say), and/or a fairly slender relevant publication record, and scant/no interest from recognised experts, these are also adverse indicators. (Remember the nobel-prize winner endorsed Vit C megadosing?)
Note that the author did manage to co-author his latest piece with an ophthalmologist/rheumatologist with a professorship in inflammation research and 20k cites.
Overall, the parts of the objection that I agree most with are i) that it seems very unlikely that one or two fungi would be implicated with all of these 14 various diseases, and that treating the fungus would cure the inflammatory disease (rather than the fungus just acting as an initial trigger), and ii) that there are mistakes, especially semantic ones, and especially on malassezia.org (as opposed to in the papers), with some of the medical science.
The interesting questions seems to me to be whether an overconfident-seeming author could nonetheless be correct about the minimal prediction that some antifungals would work well in at least Crohn’s disease. I don’t yet see why this is <1% likely.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2996322/
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29675414, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_T._Rosenbaum
33000⁄7 * 25 is 120k not 1.2M.
Hm, I don’t have enough expertise to efficiently evaluate this. But I think someone should.
Hm, RA + Prostate Ca seems to be 0.3% of all DALYs and 1.2% of those in rich North America, based on Table A2 here. So the important matter seems to be evaluating the plausibility of the fungal hypothesis.
Hmmm.. this post seems overconfident. Also it’s a seriously way out there hypothesis. But between RA+AS+IBD+prostate Ca we’re probably talking about a few percent of first-world morbidity, or at least health expenditures. The authors’ include some folks with great credentials, and the written argument in Laurence 2018 is seemingly reasonable (on a skim). Very plausible that I’ve missed glaring mistakes in their analysis, but if not this seems like a high EV experiment.
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Even if you do think possible doom is near, you might want an intermediate simplification like “some people think about consequentialist philosophy while most mitigate catastrophes that would put this thinking process at risk”.
I’d guess that we don’t have to think much about which world we’re saving. My reasoning would be that the expected value of the world in the long-run is mostly predictable from macrostrategic—even philosophical—considerations. e.g. agents more often seek things that make them happier. The overall level of preference fulfilment that is physically possible might be very large. There’s not much reason to think that pain is easier to create than pleasure (see [1] for an exploration of the question), and we’d expect the sum of recreation and positive incentivization to be more than the amount of disincentivization (e.g. retribution or torture).
I think a proper analysis of this would vindicate the existential risk view as a simplification of maximize utility (modulo problems with infinite ethics (!)). But I agree that all of this needs to be argued for.
we just need to bear in mind that these roles require a very unusual skill-set, so people should always have a good back-up plan
Hmm, if EA work is valuable but the selection bar excludes most EAs, that could actually mean some/many of the following:
many people should just have a different plan A.
we need to get much better at selecting the best talent
we need to recruit much more selectively
EAs should have stronger backup plans
Is it fair to summarize the thesis as: there is heaps of super-valuable talent out there but the main reason we can’t cash it is that it can’t be absorbed into existing managerial structures?
If so, then shouldn’t we be advocating aggressively for absorbing the talent through greater funding of and more infrastructure for new EA orgs and EA contractor roles?
I agree that special issues are the sensible intermediate step.
Even for GCR, we ought to check that the special issues are not just using up the backlog of decent content (a first-album-syndrome where the first few issues are great). So I’d like to see us sticking with special issues for a little longer, and to see an ongoing improvement in quality and volume of content before we commit to a standalone journal of 2-4 issues per year. But opinions can reasonably differ, of course!
Thanks Jai! I thought this piece was outstanding. I also loved What Almost Was.
Agreed. You could get a higher effective ROI by mission-hedging—investing AI-risk funds in things like Google. But even then, the returns seem like a pretty second-order issue.
Is this likely to occur again in 2018?
Hey Jorgen,
That would honestly be my guess. Some people would call this cynical, but I think the amount of skills you’re going to impart in 4 days, or even with a very long ~5 week camp, are pretty limited compared to the variation in people’s innate dispositions, and the experience gained in their whole lifetime beforehand.