All of asolomonr's Comments + Replies
Thank you so much for putting this together, I really appreciate seeing this type of work getting such serious attention! Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but are the sources compiled somewhere? I thought that maybe they would be linked in the spreadsheet, but at least for me whenever I click on a hyperlink in the spreadsheet it just opens the same sheet in a different tab. Thanks!
Focusing on people who’ll live centuries or millennia from now can definitely feel weird, especially when there’s so much going on in the world today that seems so pressing. But I like to think about our current situation in the context of the history that got us here. There’s a lot to commend about our world and we owe much of that to people who came before us, and at least some of them were thinking pretty selflessly about prosperity. And likewise, there’s a lot that seems like it could’ve been better if previous generations had acted with a bit more for...
Hi everyone! I've been reading the forum for over a year now but have only very recently joined. I'm an undergrad student in the US studying Public Health and Earth Science. I was first introduced to EA through my interest in animal welfare advocacy, and now my current top focuses are international stability, civilizational collapse/resilience, and biosecurity. I have experience with EA community building, working on issues related to food security and civilizational collapse, and paleoclimate research. I hope that joining the forum will be a way to connect with more people in the broader EA community and for me to explore current uncertainties in my cause prioritization and possible career trajectory.
I wonder if a heavy dose of skepticism about longtermist-oriented interventions wouldn't result in a somewhat similar mix of near termist and longtermist prioritization in practice. Specifically, someone might reasonably start with a prior that most interventions aimed at affecting the far future (especially those that don't do so by tangibly changing something in the near term so that there could be strong feedbacks) come out as roughly a wash. This might then put a high burden of evidence on these interventions so that only a few very well founded ones w...
The Food Systems Handbook was started at the beginning of the pandemic as an EA aligned organization (branching off of ALLFED). Not to speak too much for the org, but roughy its initial focus was collating case studies, new articles, and other useful resources about the emerging (pandemic-induced) food crisis, targeting decision makers. Now much of the focus is investigating future drivers of food insecurity (i.e. various aspects of climate change, trade restrictions, conflict, etc.) and doing lit reviews and talking with experts to see what policies they ...
(I'm putting this as a comment and not an answer to reflect that I have a few tentative thoughts here but they're not well developed)
A really useful source that explains a Bayesian method of avoiding Pascal's mugging is this GiveWell Post. TL;dr much of the variation in EV estimates for situations that we know very little about comes from "estimate error", so we'd have very low credence in these estimates. Even if the most likely EV estimate for an action seems very positive, if there's extremely high variance due to having very little evidence on which to...
Ah I see now, thank you so much!