All of jvb's Comments + Replies

This is great! You should consider doing a whole series of posts like this, especially focusing on common misconceptions--the time cost thing was something I fuzzily knew about, but hadn't ever explicitly considered as the single major cost of a policy, such that money cost can be basically ignored.

I'm surprised that a policy only fails the cost-benefit test if the FTE cost five times more expensive than the benefit, and anything less ineffective than that is simply not a priority. What's the reasoning behind that? 

We discussed this, but it might make more sense to add/expand the section of the main GUV article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_germicidal_irradiation Maybe opening a discussion in wikitalk about whether it merits its own page, too?

Anecdotally, some of the worst conditions I've seen were on "pasture-raised" farms.

I'm very surprised by that anecdote actually! Would you mind elaborating? I was prepared for "better than other certifications, but still awful" but not "worse, actually"

I'm also curious for your personal take on "beef and dairy only" diets from a welfare impact perspective

I just wanted to note that I'm very glad people are still producing evocative, classic-EA-style pieces like this. Thank you!

Thank you for doing this. However, there are some inaccuracies and misconceptions in the UVC section. I won't list them all here--chief among them is the equivocation between far-UVC and conventional UVC--but if I had comment access I could go through it. 

I wrote a few of the reports you link to (though the executive summary is deprecated and does not represent our current thinking--this one does) so I will go ahead and answer the questions you asked in the doc to avoid unnecessary duplicated work:

What makes inexpensive, energy-efficient  UVC lig

Could you elaborate on what you consider to be the specific marginal improvements of newer UV-C technologies?

We (the biosecurity team at Convergent Research) also have curated a number of specific, tarmac-ready far-UVC projects with teams and timelines attached, that range from a few 100k to a few million and address various bottlenecks in far-UVC adoption. We've got a whole catalogue of 1-pagers if any funders reading this are interested :P 

I think I have a slightly different read on USGOV's interest in far-UVC than Gavriel does. ~Every agency we've spoken to so far has gone "cool, but not our problem," which I understand to mean that  far-UVC is not b... (read more)

I think karma is awarded more by generality of subject matter than writing style per se? This post I spent a few hours on (including the hour I spent rereading the book) has x3 the karma of another post I put up around the same time that represents the outcome of about a year of part-time research. 

And this is perfectly natural! Everyone on the EA forum has some reason to care about good writing, only some small subset of people on the EA forum  have some reason to care about genetic engineering detection.  

Very good to know! I've never heard of a US master's program being paid. 

I wonder if the interest in US-based PhDs has something to do with the larger US academic offerings--or maybe it's just that unusually energetic people are both more likely to have early research experience and more likely to go to the US.

It's actually quite remarkable--the way we teach writing to students is anti-useful.  You could possibly do a worse job than we're currently doing but I don't immediately see how. 

There's something of a pepperoni airplane effect here. Everyone wants to think they're Proust.  I analogize it to the Picasso thing--you need to "learn the rules" before you can usefully take the training wheels off and start "breaking" them. Scare quotes intentional. 

I disagree re: Murakami (haven't read the others). I find him to be communicating extremely clearly. The actual book is full of specific examples of things that we think of as artful and indirect but that are actually bending the full force of themselves  into conveying  a very bright and specific concept.

I worked with Cass on the project mentioned and moving the needle on PPE seems much harder than I initially thought. The demand/scale thing is a real killer. There might be some solution here but it seems really muddled to me and I don't think it's throwing scrappy young engineers at it. Though of course the funding situation is different now too.

Good post--not least because I think this gives me insight into what the skeptics of EA-in-politics are thinking. I have a few responses:

It seems to me that two things are being conflated here: EAs individually running for office, and EA as a movement exercising political power. The latter, I agree, sounds like a terrible idea, for all the reasons you point out. But most of the arguments you bring up don't apply to the former. My model of EA in electoral politics looks a lot more like individual EAs (who are themselves pre-selected for being unusually char... (read more)

Completely agree, and I'll second the impression that EA marketers primarily activate and recruit other EA marketers. 

Another way to frame this dynamic - 

If someone is making the claim to you that these problems are the overwhelmingly most important things to do with your life, then why aren't they working on them? In a way it almost feels self-defeating. The people who best activated and motivated me to work directly on hard problems were people who themselves were working on them.

This is all anecdotal, of course, but I do think we need an epistemically healthier model of community building, for these and other reasons.

I think this is pretty much the case for many (especially non-STEM)  fields in the US, too--my sense is that it's a consequence of funding/competition. 

I totally agree that they're not useless--prestige/signalling in general is useful! And I think the median student is probably not going to be the kind of person who can fail out and still be wildly successful. 

But, I think they are way overvalued. If the choice is between getting straight A's and honor societies and awards, or getting B's and also  getting paid to do research,  I think too many people choose the former over the latter.

Thanks for this wonderful comment! Let me try and address your questions:

• I’m uncertain about the compensation/signaling/networking value for the research tech role. It's not clear why it offers more returns than available to a few years in industry, even as a non-prestigious, entry level graduate.

I think actually a few years in industry is almost certainly better, though I think there's a lot of overlap, and of course heavily depends on the field/industry. Major cruxes include I would say that if you have a substantial interest in later pursuing a PhD, tha... (read more)