Project Manager for the Research Scholars Programme at FHI. Previously part of the 2018-2020 cohort of that programme and Executive Director of the Foundational Research Institute (now Center on Long-Term Risk), a project by the Effective Altruism Foundation (but I don't endorse that organization's 'suffering-focused' view on ethics).
Yes, I think it is very likely that growth eventually needs to become polynomial rather than exponential or hyperbolic. The only two defeaters I can think of are (i) we are fundamentally wrong about physics or (ii) some weird theory of value that assigns exponentially growing value to sub-exponential growth of resources.
This post contains some relevant links (though note I disagree with the post in several places, including its bottom line/emphasis).
I feel very similarly FWIW.
Two Summer Research Fellows - Joshua T. Monrad and Jonas B. Sandbrink - and collaborator Neil G. Cherian have since published a paper they worked on during SRF in Nature: Promoting versatile vaccine development for emerging pandemics.
My very quick take:
I think in this case mostly informal personal conversations (which can include conversations e.g. within particular org's Slack groups or similar). It might also have been a slight overstatement that the paper was "widely discussed" - this impression might be due to a "selection effect" of me having noticed the paper early and being interested in such work.
I don't think this would be a good reaction because:
Thanks! I really appreciate you sharing your thinking on this.
(And suspect it would be good if more orgs did more of this on the margin.)
I really like the idea of working on a women's issue in a global context.
Me too. I'm also wondering about the global burden of period pain, and the tractability of reducing it. Similar to menopause (and non-gender-specific issues such as ageing), one might expect this to be neglected because of a "it's natural and not a disease, and so we can't or shouldn't anything about it" fallacy.
I'd love to hear any advice from how that charity decided which courses would be best for people to do! Also whether there are any specific ones you recommend (if any are applicable in the UK).
I'm afraid that I'm not aware of specific courses that are also offered in the UK.
I think that generally the charity actually didn't do a great job at selecting the best courses among the available ones. However, my suspicion is that conditional on having selected an appropriate topic there often wasn't actually that much variance between courses because most of the benefits come from some generic effect of "deliberately reflecting on and practicing X", with it not being that important how exactly this was one. (Perhaps similar to psychotherapy.)
For courses where all participants were activists from that same charity, I suspect a significant source of benefits was also just collaborative problem solving, and sharing experiences and getting peer advice from others who had faced similar problems.
Another observation is that these courses often involved in-person conversations in small groups, were quite long in total (2 hours to 2 days), and significant use of physical media (e.g. people writing ideas on sheets of paper, and then these being pinned on a wall). By contrast, in my "EA experience" similar things have been done by people spending at most one hour writing in a joint Google doc. I personally find the "non-virtual" variant much more engaging, but I don't know to what extent this is idiosyncratic.
And yes, wasting or misusing resources due to competitive pressure in my view is one of the key failure modes to be mindful of in the context of AI alignment and AI strategy. FWIW, my sense is that this belief is held by many people in the field, and that a fair amount of thought has been going into it. (Though as with most issues in this space I think we don't have a "definite solution" yet.)