Outreach in groups with higher ratios of women: this is the one thing that comes to my mind every time I think about this. As long as EA is downstream of a few male-dominated disciplines/fields, it seems virtually impossible for the gender ratio to change.
Here's a diagram I made to explain my thinking. The width of the arrow represents how many people are coming from each field, and the colored surface in each figure represents the gender ratio in each field:
If correct, this picture shows that you'd need to do something against this very strong socie...
I disagree, because when I looked into gender dynamics in EA London, recruitment was not the issue. EA London 2016-2018 had as many women as men attending events as a first-time attendee, but they were much less likely to keep attending after their first, second or third event.
I would be interested in more data about what people in EA's professional backgrounds are to see if the gender ratios are different from the gender ratio of the wider (non-EA) professions. It seems plausible to me that the framing of EA (heavily data-centric, emotionally detached) could attract/appeal to men more, whereas the focus on social impact and doing good might attract more women.
Physical engineering lab to build capacity for prototyping hardware ideas with relevance to areas identified as important to the long-term future
Thanks again for this fantastic initiative. Here's the official link to the final Denkenberger publication for those interested.
Is there a way to get email alerts whenever a new UnJournal evaluation gets published?
I like the idea of being more intersectional in our thinking on how to approach the assessment of specific interventions.
On the topic of food, some ALLFED colleagues and I recently gave a workshop on the intersections between different EA cause areas:
On the topic of interventions improving various cause areas simultaneously, some of my colleagues have published scientific articles arguing that the type of work we're doing appears to be highly cost-effective for improving both the long-term future and saving lives in the short term / current generation. Obv...
I'd be happy to help explain how building capacity for responding to abrupt food catastrophes (nuclear winter, volcanic winter, collapse of electricity/industry, etc.) by rapidly increasing food production could help save lives and reduce the chance of civilizational collapse (see ALLFED - Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters)
Thanks so much for this effort. I just wanted to say again that EA engineers, including physical engineers, are always very welcome to apply for volunteering, internship and/or open positions at ALLFED - Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters.
It's worth mentioning that the new Charity Entrepreneuship book How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit does go into some of the "concrete issues" questions you're asking. Particularly, the one on legal structure receives very good treatment (though somewhat lacking for non-US/UK orgs). They also go in some depth into media/website/aesthetics.
I've seen a few people wondering how this relates to our work at ALLFED (@JoelMcGuire , @George Vii , @Brian Lui).
Bivalves can be grown in sinergy with seaweed in what is know as integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) systems, which promise a consistent feedstock, in situ, with the co-benefit of recycling aquaculture waste (ref). They are also resilient to food trade restriction and the pests that affect land crops. They look like they could be significantly more resilient to changes in climate than land crops, thus being useful to counter falli...
While you are correct that vegetable oil would be the most compact way of storing edible calories, we wouldn't be able to rely only on it as it misses several key nutrients, and it would still not solve the prohibitive cost of storing enough food to last for a multi-year catastrophe. We think strategic micronutrient supplement stocks could be cost-effective but haven't looked into it in depth yet.
Any type of food stock would be very useful on the onset of a catastrophe, but the cost-effectiveness of large-scale long-term food storage interventions is not great.
I agree the benefits of closed environments system that you bring up are considerable, in fact there are even more benefits than those mentioned (see this paper). I wanted to bring in some other considerations to enrich the discussion around this:
If the closed environment system depends significantly on sunlight-based renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, then it is not resilient to abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios such as nuclear winter.
There are many other possibilities outside of vertical farming for closed environment food productio
Has EA growth slowed? Has EA reached most of the people who were going to be interested in it? Where are you getting this from?
The Spanish-speaking community is growing fast. I assume there are other countries/languages that are yet to be significantly reached, all of which are bound to have some amount of people with significant E and A factors.
In response to the following parts of your post:
I know a scholar who heavily specializes in the study of Utopia from the social sciences perspective (history) rather than literaty ...
I think I see what you're getting at, let me add a couple of things:
Based on a conversation I had with an ex-Quorn scientist, the wholesale selling price of Quorn products is ~$3/kg wet (which makes sense given the intensive postprocessing and other additional steps). I'm...
Pretty much the only thing currently standing between us and bacterial SCP-based food (such as from methane or CO2/H2) is the lack of approval for use as a human food. Most or all of these companies have shown interest in the human food market, and a few of them are publicly pursuing it, such as Solar Foods. I expect they will be available in the next few years.
As Humbird mentions in the TEA and other sources confirm, the production cost of baker's yeast is well known (~$1.80/kg dry), so no need to run any numbers for that. I'm fairly confident SCP from m...
Then again, I do believe that you can culture simple cells for a lower cost. I estimated the cost of producing protein-rich single cells from methane at $1-2/dry kg. https://osf.io/94mkg/
However, those numbers are for a bacteria that feeds on gas. The yeast analogy is much closer to mammalian cultures.
I found this really interesting:
Humbird first models a Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) where all parameters are similar to baker’s yeast [...] The analysis comes to $3.87/kg of wet (70% water) cell mass for the constrained yeast process. As yeast production at scale is already a highly optimized process over many decades, and the additional constraints mentioned so far are pretty close to the fundamental biological nature of animal cells, it seems unlikely that we can do better than a lower bound of $3.87/kg. Unfortunately, there are other constraints.
I...
I like the idea, but I think this would be better without specific assertions of effectiveness. Very few people will agree that MIRI is 180% and ALLFED is 240% as effective as GiveDirectly, for example (many people would say much higher; many people would say much lower), and this assertion is totally unnecessary for the value of this image.
I suppose this was briefly touched upon as part of Objection number 1, but could you comment on the apparent coupling between economic growth and energy use? See for example: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/electric-power-and-natural-gas/our-insights/the-decoupling-of-gdp-and-energy-growth-a-ceo-guide#
Is there reason ro believe AI could produce a decoupling of the two?
Hello, Juan here. Here's the final version of the paper I mentioned we were working on during my talk for those who would like to know more: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2020.08.011
Thanks for taking the time to transcribe the talks
Potential of microbial protein from hydrogen for preventing mass starvation in catastrophic scenarios
My name is Juan B. García Martínez, research associate of the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). My colleagues Joseph Egbejimba, James Throup, Silvio Matassa, Joshua M. Pearce, David C. Denkenberger and I have researched the potential of microbial protein from hydrogen for preventing mass starvation in global catastrophic scenarios.
As members of ALLFED we are concerned by the fact that the current global food system is critically ...
One important caveat regarding flour fortification with vitamin D3 is that if the flour is used for baking bread, you could be losing 70% or even more of the added vitamin due to thermal degradation: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-3841.14764
Regardless, experts seem to think it is a cost effective measure even without accounting for the COVID-19 prevention potential. These researchers estimatd the effectiveness at £9.5 per QALY gained, which admittedly sounds too good to be true: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-019-0486-x
True, not only outreach but also sufficient engagement/retention is needed in order to reliably increase the ratio.