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https://guzey.com/how-life-sciences-actually-work/
Summary: academia has a lot of problems and it could work much better. However, these problems are not as catastrophic as an outside perspective would suggest. My (contrarian, I guess) intuition is that scientific progress in biology is not slowing down. Specific parts of academia that seem to be problematic: rigid, punishing for deviation, career progression; peer review; need to constantly fundraise for professors. Parts that seem to be less of a problem than I initially thought: short-termism; lack of funding for young scientists.
For me, a research organization that can set a global research agenda and direct the research, foster collaborations and give funding for the type of research that is underfunded in academia will be very helpful.
I see two different goals. One is coordination of researchers. The other is to have a safety net that allows to reduce the academic incentives to publish and to be more of a specialist.
Thanks for the summary. I have two takeaways:
1. EA is (in part) claiming that there are several ongoing moral catastrophes caused by inaction against global poverty, animal suffering, x-risk,... (some of them are definitely caused by action, but that does not matter as much on consequentialist grounds). Unknown ongoing moral catastrophes are cause-X.
2. The possibility of working to increase our capability to handle undiscovered ongoing moral catastrophe in the future as a major goal. The idea I saw here was to reserve resources, which is a very interesting argument to invest in economic growth.
From the onset I was expecting that in the last section you would ask for help from EAs with experience in design or advertising or something on that route. I guess that you have capable people on that front. Figured it is interesting to note that, regarding career paths in design.
And thank you for your amazing work :)
What is known about how these ideas were recieved?
For anyone interested, the Horizon Europe Survey took me about 40 minutes to complete but could have been faster. It seems like a place to raise important EA-aligned topics.
Not sure how impactful this is, but I assume that there won't be too many replies. Anyway it was a chance for me to understand the Horizon Europe program better and my attitude toward many relevant topics.
The "Updates" page is actually at https://ought.org/blog (but is displayed as https://ought.org/updates ).
So that took 18 minutes... Spent a lot of time on making sure I'm not making important mistakes and to make it as readable as I could. Would it be valuable if it was even less readable and more likely to contain mistakes?
Hypersonic missiles are An example of a possible game changing weapon.
Laura Deming: I'm very interested in the tradeoff and relation between investing more in basic science (with the goal of major theoretical breakthroughs) and developing technology and products (which can have immediate impact but perhaps not as important in the long term).
For example,
1. What is the role of the Academia in progress on aging, as opposed to private research groups? In general, how much resources do they have and what are they incentivized to?
2. What are the current bottlenecks in longevity research and tech?
3. How do you view the market and general public view of longevity in the near future?
Thanks Vox's Future Perfect newsletter for curating this :)
Seems almost identical to a recent post.
Actually, it is from Robin Hanson, encountered recently when reading this interesting post from someone who recreated GPT2 and considered publishing the result :)
Very interesting and well written, thank you for this important idea!
Playing around with toy examples, I noticed another version of this consideration. The success of some actions might imply that there is a higher likelihood of a dangerous world (for which there might be better alternative actions).
For example, consider allocating resources for handling bio-terrorism. One important question is how likely is it that there will be individuals that want to cause massive harm and are able to. If this resource allocation does indeed stop a global extinction, this means that we should update our estimated likelihood for such an individual. In this world, there may better alternatives than focusing on something specific to current biological techniques and instead to put effort into methods which can help against any individual that wants to cause massive harm by any technology.
One thing which causes me and probably many others to avoid writing more on the forum, is the feeling of writing posts which "spams" or lowers the standards of the forum. This is not mentioned here as a reason not to post. I guess that the voting system and the option of writing on the personal blog solves most of this issue, and that we prefer to encourage more people to write more instead of focusing on quality for now?
My main takeaway from this post is that people who are on a clear path to becoming world-class (or already are) can be great advocates for EA or for effective giving among their (fringe/prestigious) peer group, and that the EA community should be welcoming and encouraging them to be active members of the community. I do think that the concerns raised and the framing of the conclusion are apt.
Engaging with the prompt, I am considering an academic career. This may not lead to me being world class (say, win a Nobel Prize), but this is a likely path to becoming high status which has similar merits. I guess that in the technical or research oriented world, it is easier to have both high status and to do EA-aligned work, so I do not think of this as a major consideration.
I find it interesting that the three arguments given also apply somewhat to the value of high social skills:
1. Better social skills lead to stronger connections. People with exceptional social skills can also be more likely to connect with high status individuals.
2. Being more charismatic helps one be more persuasive (in a different manner than written above).
3. Having more people with high social skills in the community can help newcomers feel more at ease and engaged with EA.