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Alex D

228 karmaJoined Oct 2021

Participation
4

  • Attended an EA Global conference
  • Attended more than three meetings with a local EA group
  • Received career coaching from 80,000 Hours
  • Completed the AGI Safety Fundamentals Virtual Program

Comments
47

Outstanding piece, kudos!

Flagging a minor error: in Table 1 first column last row seems to be truncated.

Good shower thought! A few people have come to this idea independently for swine CAFOs.

There are a fair number of important "production-limiting diseases" in swine that are primarily spread via respiratory transmission, so this seems to me like a plausible win-win-win (as you've described).

This is all very "shower thought" level on my side as well, and I'd be keen for someone to think this through in more depth. Very happy to talk it through with anyone considering a more thorough investigation!

(Note my understanding is influenza is primarily a gastrointestinal illness in poultry, so I don't think this intervention is as promising in that context.)

This is a pretty good overview: https://www.decodingbio.com/p/decoding-biosecurity-and-biodefense

I know the space reasonably well, happy to connect and discuss with anyone interested!

Outsized Influence of Small Countries in Multilateral Orgs: This isn’t about middle and low income countries specifically, but I think CEA and Open Phil should specifically invest in community building focused on careers in government in a country with a very small population, to help the country advocate for good ideas in multilateral organisations.

I'm pretty entrenched in Camp Narrow, but this is a very good point in favour of "Global EA" that I have not previously encountered (the other arguments are also compelling, just not new-to-me).

The moderator team is (IMO) the most valuable part of ProMED, and they seem to have fundamental strategic disagreement with ISID leadership. It's not obvious to me that an influx of donations would solve this problem, even temporarily.

(just noting it does not actually appear to be fixed)

Answer by Alex DApr 06, 20231
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I typically refer to this as "EA+", and people seem to understand what I mean.

Fair point. I'm actually pretty comfortable calling such reasoning "non-EA", even if it led to joining pretty idiosyncratically-EA projects like alignment.

Actually, I guess there could be people attracted to specific EA projects from "non-EA" lines of reasoning across basically all cause areas?

A further attempt at categorization that I think complements your "Respectable <-> Speculative" axis.

I've started to think of EA causes as sharing (among other things) a commitment to cosmopolitanism (ie neutrality with respect to the distance between the altruistic actor and beneficiary), but differing according to which dimension is emphasized i) spatial distance (global health, development), ii) temporal difference (alignment), or ii) "mindspace" distance (animal welfare).

I think a table of "speculativeness" vs "cosmopolitanism type" would classify initiatives/proposals pretty cleanly, and might provide more information than "neartermism vs longtermism"?

There's a real issue here but I dislike the framing of this post.

Throughout the text it casts neartermism as "traditional EA" and longtermism as an outside imperializing force. I think this is both historically inaccurate, and also rather manipulative.

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