All of kyle_fish's Comments + Replies
What is your process for identifying and prioritizing new research questions? And what percentage of your work is going toward internal top priorities vs. commissioned projects?
[This is like commentary on your second question, not a direct answer; I'll let someone else at RP provide that.]
Small point: I personally find it useful to make the following three-part distinction, rather than your two-part distinction:
- Academia-like: Projects that we think would be valuable although we don't have a very explicit theory of change tied to specific (types of) decisions by specific (types of) actors; more like "This question/topic seems probably important somehow, and more clarity on it would probably somehow inform various important decisio
A few things that jump to mind:
- Data on the development of EA-related fields (e.g. growth of AI safety/alignment as an academic discipline, including things like funding, number of publications, number of faculty/graduate students, etc.)
- Data on the history of philanthropy (e.g. how much have private philanthropists spent over the years, and on what?)
This is great to see! Do you have a sense of what fraction of the EA community is engaging with the forum? I'm curious how much of this growth is driven by the increased size of the EA community, versus an increased percentage of community members using the forum.
Really helpful, thank you!
This is huge, congrats on the launch! I'm so excited for this fund to exist. How did you decide on the growth targets for the different phases? And will the balance be visible publicly (á la EA Funds) or disclosed some other way?
Could you elaborate on your definition of "high impact professionals" as your target audience? I'm not sure I understand who exactly you're hoping to reach. Some examples (real or fictitious) of the types of people you have in mind would be helpful!
Hi Kyle, thanks for your question. With ”High Impact Professionals” we mean working EAs who understand their main path to impact as NOT through their day-to-day work and want to increase their impact besides their regular jobs.
We can imagine a lawyer or a web-designer who wants to offer pro-bono services, a banker or consultant doing earning to give, a successful entrepreneur who wants to mentor growing charities or someone at a startup or a big tech company who wants to promote impactful initiatives in their company, like hosting fundraising events or introducing donation matching.
The core of our disagreement seems to be here:
This estimate assumes that all biological functions in an organism can be replicated with technologies, and that these technologies can reach the same efficiency as the biological functions that reached high efficiency due to evolution and natural selection.
I don’t think this is realistic. Perhaps in isolation you could build systems that efficiently accomplish some of these functions, but in the case of cultured meat they all have to be compatible with/support the growth of animal cells and tissues. This is an... (read more)
Yes this is what I meant by "cars are not mechanical horses" in an earlier thread, thanks for putting it in more precise terms.
I think I have two related counterarguments to the OP:
1) the car vs horse and plane vs bird reference classes/analogies seems to me to be moderately strong or even very strong evidence that humans are eventually capable of something that can accomplish what nature does cheaply and well, but only weak evidence for any specific strategy. Maybe plant-based or cultured meat is how we get there, but maybe it'd look entirely differ... (read more)
We might not have to replicate the animal systems precisely, but we'd definitely need cheap solutions to the problems of contamination (3rd sentence), sensitivity/robustness (5th sentence), waste management (6th sentence), and scalability (7th and 8th sentences). All of these are currently huge issues for any biomanufacturing.
I don't think cars, solar panels, and recombinant insulin are analogous technologies here. Cars and solar panels won out because they are completely new approaches to transportation and solar energy capture that are not constrained by the biology of the systems they're replacing. Cultured meat seems severely handicapped by its reliance on the growth of animal cells and tissues.
Recombinant insulin is still manufactured in biological systems (bacteria and yeast), but they are much simpler than mammalian cells and can efficiently express a protein that is only present in tiny amounts in the pig pancreases it used to be purified from.
There's been some discussion over the years of genetically engineering farm animals so they don't experience pain, but I don't know of any efforts to remove sentience entirely.
This is a good point. I don't want anyone to write off cultured meat on the basis of my argument alone, but I do want to push us toward much more nuanced conversations. Ideally, discussions of feasibility will include an evaluation of all relevant systems and the ways in which they could improve over animals, weighed against their limitations. I’d refer anyone who is interested in a more rigorous and technical evaluation to the Humbird report.
That said, for me the relevant question isn’t whether it’s strictly possible to make cultured meat competitive in t... (read more)
As a former cultured meat scientist, I think these predictions have been off in large part because the core technical problems are way harder than most people know (or would care to admit). However, I also suspect that forecasts for many other deep tech sectors, even ones that have been quite successful (e.g. space), have not fared any better. I’d be curious to see how cultured meat predictions have done relative to plant-based meat, algal biofuels, rocketry, and maybe others.
fidelity: their "open an account" page (https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/open-account.html) directs to their program guidelines (https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/content/dam/fc-public/docs/programs/fidelity-charitable-program-guidelines.pdf), with the relevant info on page 17. on closer inspection, it looks like disbursement of 5% of net assets per year could be a policy for fidelity charitable as a whole, not necessarily for each individual account. even so, they claim to require active grantmaking and say they will start making grants from any accoun... (read more)
even so, they claim to require active grantmaking and say they will start making grants from any account that hasn't disbursed anything for two years (top of page 18). i don't know if this policy is commonly applied, but at the very least it's a risk.
After a number of years Fidelity required me to make a $50 disbursement, so I think this requirement might be de minimis.
another relevant minimum is minimum account activity—have you or others incorporated this into your comparisons? for example, it looks like fidelity requires disbursement of 5% of net assets per year (averaged over 5 year periods), whereas vanguard requires at least one $500 grant every 30 months.
Wow, I’m thrilled about this! I’ve been wondering recently why EA “Campus Centres” aren’t more of a thing, and am delighted to see a big push in that direction. Thank you for an excellent plan and write-up!