All of Jack Cunningham's Comments + Replies

To my mind, the piece is a welcome response to the recent (imo) irresponsible hyping of cross-strait risk by influential US actors. To the extent that anyone's expectation of the risk of cross-strait violence was influenced by such voices, this piece should help recalibrate down. But of course the fundamental risk remains, even if there are reasons to doubt its immimence as represented by China hawks.

You could do a Straussian reading of this piece such that it is in fact saying 'China won't bomb TW next week so let's calm down' in order to "avoid having th... (read more)

Great read!  Am I the only one who heard Will's Scottish brogue in my ear as I was reading?

I'm pleased to hear that you're running this fellowship again and extremely excited about applying!

A question about the application process: For the think tank tracks, you require a writing sample. "Applicant should be the sole or main author, ≤5 pages, can be an excerpt. Required for think tank track, optional for congressional and federal track.  Please do not create new material." Can you give more feedback on what you're looking for, especially as far as content and style go? Would a well-researched EA Forum post qualify, or more of an academic paper? Should it relate to tech policy explicitly?

Thanks for the clarification! I've edited the post to reflect your feedback.

"I think this high success rate [at receiving meeting requests] was due to a few key things:"

It might not be due to such key things at all! I was at EAGx Boston this weekend and I also had quite a high success rate at scheduling 1:1 meetings. And I don't have much in common with your experience - most of my messages were no more than a couple days out from the conference, I mostly asked people for how they could help me, and I have no full-time EA projects at the moment.

Plausibly, it might just be the case that EAs who attend such conferences are inclined ... (read more)

Thanks Akhil!

There are a couple good reasons to think that more fine grained monitoring could be effective. For one thing, PM2.5 conditions are often much more localized than we realize, so some neighborhoods and microregions are exposed to much higher conditions than others. And they are time-dependent, meaning that some days and times that are much worse than others. So this more fine grained data can improve our understanding of the hardest hit regions at the neighborhood level, while giving local residents better information as well - imagine if everyo... (read more)

Note: I wrote a post recently that tries, in part, to answer this question. The post isn't a 2 minute answer, more like a 15 minute answer, so I've adapted some of it below to try and offer a more targeted answer to this question.

Let’s agree that the 8 billion people alive right now have moral worth - their lives mean something, and their suffering is bad. They constitute, for the time being, our moral circle. Now, fast forward thirty years. Billions of new people have been born. They didn’t exist before, but now they do.

Should we include them in our moral... (read more)

I love that you are celebrating your successes here! Your parenthetical apologizing for potentially sounding self-congratulatory made me think, "Huh, I'd actually quite like to see more celebration of when theory turns to action." The fact that your work influenced FP to start the Patient Philanthropy Fund is a clear connection demonstrating the potential impact of this kind of research; if you were to shout that from the rooftops, I wouldn't begrudge you! If anything, clarity about real-world impacts of transformational research into the long-term future likely inspire others to pursue the field (citation needed).

I'm quite sympathetic to your mission of developing a robust understanding of the parameters of cause prioritization. I do have a maybe-dumb question: what is your Theory of Change? You write,

"In GPI’s first few years, we have made a good start on producing high-quality and mission-aligned research papers. In 2022 we are planning to continue the momentum and have set ourselves ambitious targets on the number of papers we want to get through different stages of the publishing pipeline, as well as that we want to post as working papers on our website."

What d... (read more)

Open questions:

What's the incentive structure here? If I'm following the money, it seems likely that there's a much higher likely return if you hype up your plausibly-really-important product, and if you believe in the hype yourself. I don't see why Musk or Zuckerberg should ask themselves the hard questions about their mission given that there's not, as far as I can see, any incentive for them to do so. (Which seems bad!)

What can be done? Presumably we could fund two FTE in-house at any given EA research organization to red-team any given massive corporat... (read more)

What should one do now if one wants to be hired by Rethink Priorities in the next couple years? Especially in entry-level or more junior roles.

I realize this is a general question; you can answer in general terms, or specify per role.