All of chelsea_liang's Comments + Replies

My impression of the general EA (policy) community and in particular EA funders is that there is some reservation about using EA as a vehicle/label or having EA-branded candidates in politics. e.g. accidentally polarising existential risk reduction, making it a partisan issue and creating a deadlock.

I think there needs to be some thought on how the European parliament differs from other jurisdictions (see below) where attempts have been made at getting EA ideas to be represented in elected positons. Then additonal thought on what those differences entail, ... (read more)

Thanks for writing this up Sofya!

Thank you for going through the effort of writing this up!

Ditto this experience of a successful stall (we've also been iterating on a set up similar to yours) but difficulty translating that into regular event attendance (about a handful). EA UNSW (Australia). New member influx tends to come from catching folks who have discovered EA via internet or through event collaborations with other related societies. Tabling at the start of the year has caught such EA internet lurkers.

I was curious about your suggestion that a lot of researchers think that basically all biomedical research is gain/loss of function.

Not completely clear on what the context the researchers were speaking to but a standard strategy in figuring out what genes do is to knock out (loss of function) the gene of interest in a model organism and observe what happens. Synthetic biology also has a lot of 'gain of function' engineering e.g. make microbes produce insulin.

Thank you for the write up. Really appreciate the pops of in the weeds explainers in the forum. Will take the time to read/skim the full report!

I definitely wouldn't mind being reminded of this list once a quarter!

Just wanted to say thank you for going to the effort of compiling this. I have now subscribed to a bunch and created an email filter!