The leverage argument for working on COVID-19 rather than existential risk (x-risk) seems weak by itself. My guess is that working on COVID-19 has about 7 orders of magnitude more tractability than x-risk (2 for knowing which risk you’re working on, 2 for understanding it, and 3 for less prior effort), but that the scale of x-risk is more than 10 orders of magnitude higher than the direct disease burden of COVID-19.
I’m unsure if world-ending pandemics look like this one, but it’s a good point.
The civilisational threat point seems pretty legitimate, but I’m unsure how to weigh it.
The harms done by factory farming of non-human animals seem comparable to the direct disease burden of COVID-19 to me.
OpenPhil may be funding some forecasting work with the Good Judgement Project, which is what I was referring to, but as far as I’m concerned, Metaculus (which I’m involved in) is doing better forecasting (and might also be funded by OpenPhil?). See this dashboard of predictions.
This situation seems like it reveals a lot of information about governance, but if all one wants to do is learn from the situation, it seems better to document it a bit now and wait later. However, if one wants to contribute to a probable effort to improve governance of pandemics at the tail end of this outbreak, that would require careful analysis and action now.
If I mostly wanted to raise the status of the effective altruism movement, I wouldn’t push a policy proposal as unpopular as variolation—but it might become more popular as people become better at marketing it?
Overall, I now think that it’s worth the full time of a small contingent of effective altruists to focus on policy responses to COVID-19 as well as broadly understanding it, and that we are probably assigning too little focus to this (although within the portfolio of attention, I wish more were directed towards neglected high-leverage interventions). Most of the arguments presented I find convincing, except for the one that I said was convincing during the call.
If I mostly wanted to raise the status of the effective altruism movement, I wouldn’t push a policy proposal as unpopular as variolation—but it might become more popular as people become better at marketing it?
Doing variolation without doing animal trials first is going to be unpopular as it’s an untested and potentially dangerous procedure.
The popular way to do it would be to call for animal trials of variolation.
It depends on what you mean by “unpopular”. If you mean that someone is going to ignore the lives that would be saved and accuse you of being uncaring, then that’s certainly true and you would need to be ready to deal with that.
On the other hand, if you mean that everyone would actually be against this idea then I think you’re wrong. I’ve been floating the idea every time I end up in a discussion about this virus, and while my conversations can’t be taken as completely representative, it’s worth noting that not once have I had anyone say it’s a bad idea. The most negative I’ve gotten was “that’s interesting”, and most of the other people I’ve talked to have said that they would do it right now and that so would a lot of their friends.
In a situation where the risks for healthy young people are low and eventual infection is likely anyway, “If people are going to get sick anyway, let them do it on their terms so that it can be as safe as possible” is not a hard argument to win, and the people who need to be convinced are likely far more sympathetic to such ideas than you think.
We just need to create the common knowledge that such ideas are thinkable and doesn’t have to be a politically losing stance. A lot of “common knowledge” stances have turned out to be wrong and to flip overnight, and you’d be offering people a chance to be ahead of the curve and the first to jump on the winning team that saved the day. It’d have to be done deliberately and carefully, but if you do it right people will take it.
Thoughts re: my question and the responses:
The leverage argument for working on COVID-19 rather than existential risk (x-risk) seems weak by itself. My guess is that working on COVID-19 has about 7 orders of magnitude more tractability than x-risk (2 for knowing which risk you’re working on, 2 for understanding it, and 3 for less prior effort), but that the scale of x-risk is more than 10 orders of magnitude higher than the direct disease burden of COVID-19.
I’m unsure if world-ending pandemics look like this one, but it’s a good point.
The civilisational threat point seems pretty legitimate, but I’m unsure how to weigh it.
The harms done by factory farming of non-human animals seem comparable to the direct disease burden of COVID-19 to me.
OpenPhil may be funding some forecasting work with the Good Judgement Project, which is what I was referring to, but as far as I’m concerned, Metaculus (which I’m involved in) is doing better forecasting (and might also be funded by OpenPhil?). See this dashboard of predictions.
This situation seems like it reveals a lot of information about governance, but if all one wants to do is learn from the situation, it seems better to document it a bit now and wait later. However, if one wants to contribute to a probable effort to improve governance of pandemics at the tail end of this outbreak, that would require careful analysis and action now.
If I mostly wanted to raise the status of the effective altruism movement, I wouldn’t push a policy proposal as unpopular as variolation—but it might become more popular as people become better at marketing it?
Overall, I now think that it’s worth the full time of a small contingent of effective altruists to focus on policy responses to COVID-19 as well as broadly understanding it, and that we are probably assigning too little focus to this (although within the portfolio of attention, I wish more were directed towards neglected high-leverage interventions). Most of the arguments presented I find convincing, except for the one that I said was convincing during the call.
Doing variolation without doing animal trials first is going to be unpopular as it’s an untested and potentially dangerous procedure.
The popular way to do it would be to call for animal trials of variolation.
It depends on what you mean by “unpopular”. If you mean that someone is going to ignore the lives that would be saved and accuse you of being uncaring, then that’s certainly true and you would need to be ready to deal with that.
On the other hand, if you mean that everyone would actually be against this idea then I think you’re wrong. I’ve been floating the idea every time I end up in a discussion about this virus, and while my conversations can’t be taken as completely representative, it’s worth noting that not once have I had anyone say it’s a bad idea. The most negative I’ve gotten was “that’s interesting”, and most of the other people I’ve talked to have said that they would do it right now and that so would a lot of their friends.
In a situation where the risks for healthy young people are low and eventual infection is likely anyway, “If people are going to get sick anyway, let them do it on their terms so that it can be as safe as possible” is not a hard argument to win, and the people who need to be convinced are likely far more sympathetic to such ideas than you think.
We just need to create the common knowledge that such ideas are thinkable and doesn’t have to be a politically losing stance. A lot of “common knowledge” stances have turned out to be wrong and to flip overnight, and you’d be offering people a chance to be ahead of the curve and the first to jump on the winning team that saved the day. It’d have to be done deliberately and carefully, but if you do it right people will take it.