Recent Discussion
We are in the process of implementing a major project on the Forum — turning our current system of tags into a full-fledged “EA wiki”.
Under this system, many of the tags used for posts will also serve as articles in the wiki. Many articles in the Wiki will also serve as tags that can be applied to articles.
However, there are exceptions in both directions. Some tags don’t make sense as wiki articles (for example, “EA London Update”). And some articles are too narrow to be useful tags (for example, Abhijit Banerjee). These will be marked as “wiki only” — they can be found with the Forum’s search engine, but can’t be used to tag posts.
The project is made possible by the work of Pablo Stafforini, who received an EA Infrastructure Fund grant to create an initial set of articles.
Why is an EA wiki useful?
EA content mostly takes the form of...
Longer title: Better evaluation of non-pharmaceutical interventions as a possible cause area within pandemic preparedness and response
~3,500 words
Many thanks to Aaron Gertler for commenting on a draft of this post.
Here I outline why I think a neglected and important aspect of pandemic preparedness and response is evaluation of the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). NPIs are also known as behavioural, environmental, social and systems interventions (BESSIs) or non-drug interventions (NDIs). They include interventions like mask wearing, hand-washing, social distancing, quarantining, school openings, and interventions that aim to change behaviour with regards to any of those things.
This post is specifically about the evaluation of NPIs to reduce transmission or severity of disease during a pandemic, rather than interventions to improve “by-products” of pandemics (e.g. mental health due to isolation).
My motivations for writing are i) I could feasibly work on some of the research avenues I’ve suggested, so I would like feedback...
I liked the post (I have worked a lot on RCTs, and a little on NPIs, but not together alas!). Here's another paper that I didn't see mentioned (although maybe I missed it) which I think roughly falls into the category you're considering?https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27496/revisions/w27496.rev0.pdf
I feel like there are also some behavioral econ papers looking at e.g. social distancing in queues, but off the top of my head I'm not certain if there are actual randomized field experiments in that space...
-julian
In the recent article Some promising career ideas beyond 80,000 Hours' priority paths, Arden Koehler (on behalf of the 80,000 Hours team) highlights the pathway “Become a historian focusing on large societal trends, inflection points, progress, or collapse”. I share the view that historical research is plausibly highly impactful, and I’d be excited to see more people explore that area.
I commented on that article to list some history topics I’d be excited to see people investigate, as well as to provide some general thoughts on the intersection of history research and effective altruism. Arden suggested I adapt that comment into a top-level post, which led me to write this.
Note that:
- As zdgroff points out, you don’t actually have to be a historian to do this sort of historical research. (I’d add that you don’t even necessarily have to be in academia at all.)
- I’m sure there’s at least some
A friend of mine said, essentially, that:
- A lot of the topics in this post seem like just "the history of EA-related idea X"
- For some (but not all) of these topics, my friend doesn't really see a clear path to impact, and they think one would need to flesh out the case for why the history of X is particularly important to understand
I think those are basically fair points, but I'm fairly excited about research into these topics despite them. Here's the response I wrote to that friend of mine, which might be useful to other people who are trying to think about... (read more)
This tag is for posts associated with or about theThe Future of Humanity Institute, (FHI) is a multidisciplinary research institute at the University of Oxford University studying big picture questions for human civilization. It was founded in 2005 by Nick Bostrom, who is also its current Director.
The structure of brains and the nature of intelligence may affect:(Read More)
This tag, just like the sentience & consciousness tag, is overly broad and encompasses a very eclectic collection of posts. So I've followed a similar approach as I did for that tag and re-tagged each of the posts with a more specific and suitable tag. These are the tags I used:
- animal cognition
- cluster headaches
- cognitive enhancement
- computational power of the human brain
- evolution heuristic
- psychedelics
- psychology research
As with the other tag, my suggestion is to delete this tag after everyone is satisfied with the reclassification
Human beings are evolved organisms, whose traits have been optimized by a process lasting millions of years. Attempts to enhance such systems undertaken with imperfect understanding of their inner workings are likely to backfire. This insight may be expressed as an evolutionary optimality challenge (Bostrom & Sandberg 2009: 378):
If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?
The evolution heuristic holds that a failure to provide an answer to that question creates a presumption against the proposed intervention. But the heuristic also identifies three types of considerations that could answer the question, and hence defeat the presumption (Bostrom & Sandberg 2009: 378–380):
- Changed tradeoffs
- Value discordance
- Evolutionary restrictions
Bibliography
Bostrom, Nick & Anders Sandberg (2009) The wisdom of nature: an evolutionary heuristic for human enhancement, in Julian Savulescu & Nick Bostrom (eds.) Human Enhancement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 375–416.
The computational power of the human brain is the number of operations per unit time performed by the adult brain of a typical human.
"Insider giving" is sad to learn about and certainly inflates donation figures.
Quoting from the abstract of 'Insider Giving' (71 Duke Law Journal (Forthcoming 2021; UCLA School of Law, Law-Econ Research Paper No. 21-02):
Corporate insiders can avoid losses if they dispose of their stock while in possession of material, non-public information. One means of disposal, selling the stock, is illegal and subject to prompt mandatory reporting. A second strategy is almost as effective and it faces lax reporting requirements and legal restrictions. That second method is to donate the stock to a charity and take a charitable tax deduction at the inflated stock price. “Insider giving” is a potent substitute for insider trading. We show that insider giving is far more widespread than previously believed.
I think sometimes they can write into the donation various stipulations around how fast they sell it. If you were looking to avoid scrutiny, you might take advantage of that.
In March 2020, I wondered what I’d do if - hypothetically - I continued to subscribe to longtermism but stopped believing that the top longtermist priority should be reducing existential risk. That then got me thinking more broadly about what cruxes lead me to focus on existential risk, longtermism, or anything other than self-interest in the first place, and what I’d do if I became much more doubtful of each crux.[1]
I made a spreadsheet to try to capture my thinking on those points, the key columns of which are reproduced below.
Note that:
- It might be interesting for people to assign their own credences to these cruxes, and/or to come up with their own sets of cruxes for their current plans and priorities, and perhaps comment about these things below.
- If so, you might want to avoid reading my credences for now, to avoid being anchored.
- I was just aiming to honestly convey my
It sounds like part of what you're saying is that it's hard to say what counts as a "suffering-focused ethical view" if we include views that are pluralistic (rather than only caring about suffering), and that part of the reason for this is that it's hard to know what "common unit" we could use for both suffering and other things.
I agree with those things. But I still think the concept of "suffering-focused ethics" is useful. See the posts cited in my other reply for some discussion of these points (I imagine you've already read them and just think that th... (read more)
Moral circle expansion is the attempt to expand the perceived boundaries of the category of moral patients. It has been proposed as a priority cause area and as a heuristic for discovering cause X.(Read More)
Suggestion to change this tag's URL from "/moral-circle-expansion-1/" to "/moral-circle-expansion/".
There is already a (clunky) feature that enables this.
If you hyperlink text with a tag url with the url parameter
?userTagName=true, the hyperlinked text will be replaced by whatever the current name of the tag is.E.g. If the tag is called "Global dystopia" and I put in a post or other tag with the hyperlink url
/global-distoptia?useTagName=trueand then it gets renamed to "Dystopia":See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E6CF8JCQAWqqhg7ZA/wiki-tag-fa... (read more)