Results for “80,000 hours”
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80,000 Hours’ package of anti-COVID articles

by  Tyler Cowen

From a Robert Wiblin email:

  1. Good news about COVID-19 (our most viral article in a while)
  2. How to best crush COVID-19 through work and volunteering
  3. List of 200 specific job vacancies, volunteering opportunities & funding sources
  4. Top donation options
  5. Essential facts and figures about the virus
  6. Podcast on the 12 best policy steps to stop pandemics including this one
  7. The case for and against attempting suppression
  8. Howie Lempel and Rob Wiblin explain the crisis
  9. How to reduce global catastrophic biological risks more generally
  10. Landing page for all 80,000 Hours COVID-related research (including a few things not on this list)

What should I ask Will MacAskill?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I will be doing a Conversation with him.  From Wikipedia:

William MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford,[ and Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research.

MacAskill is also the co-founder and president of 80,000 Hours, the co-founder and vice-president of Giving What We Can, and the co-founder and president of the Centre for Effective Altruism.

Here is Will’s home page.  Will also has an exciting new book coming out, namely What We Owe the Future.  So what should I ask him?

Where are the Variant Specific Boosters?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I wasn’t shocked at the failures of the CDC and the FDA. I am shocked that our government still can’t get its act together in the third year of the pandemic. Consider how lucky, yes lucky, we have been. Here’s Eric Topol:

…the original vaccines were targeted to the Wuhan ancestral strain’s spike protein from 2019. The spike protein, no less the rest of the original SARS-CoV-2 structure, is almost unrecognizable now in the form of the Omicron strain (see antigenic drift from prior post). While there’s naturally been much focus on the extraordinary number of mutations in the receptor binding domain and the rest of the spike protein, over 50 mutations are spread out throughout Omicron, making the prior major variants of concern (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta) lightweights with respect to changes in structure that are not just linear or uni-dimensional. Each mutation can interact with others (epistasis); any mutation or combination of mutations has the potential to change the 3D structure of the virus. In this sense, Omicron is an overwhelming reboot of the ancestral strain.

Omicron is very different from the Wuhan ancestral strain and it’s only a matter of luck that the vaccines continue to work and that Omicron is likely less severe than Delta. Don’t tell me that viruses evolve to be less severe over time–that isn’t correct in theory or practice. The most one might say is that a very deadly virus may be difficult to transmit but that only closes off a small part of the evolutionary design-space. There is plenty of room for transmission and lethality to both increase. So the vaccines continue to work well. We got lucky. But for how long will our luck last? Do we really have to wait for a more transmissible, more deadly, more vaccine escaping variant before we act?

Where are the variant-specific boosters? The FDA has said they would approve them quickly, without new efficacy trials so I don’t think the problem is primarily regulatory. Why not catch-up to the virus and maybe even get a jump ahead with pan-coronavirus vaccines?

More generally, in our February 2021 paper in Science my co-authors and I argued that we were still leaving trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk by not investing in more vaccine capacity. I am sorry to say that we were right. Why the failure to invest more broadly?

Mostly I blame American lethargy. After 9/11 the country was angry and united and we had troops in Afghanistan within a matter of weeks and we had taken over the country in a matter of months. For better or worse, we acted quickly and with resolve. Yet, when the virus was killing at 9/11 levels every day the public never reached the same level of anger or resolve. Even now Congress has spent trillions on unemployment insurance, business protection, money for schools and stimulus but has not passed the American Pandemic Preparedness Plan, a pretty decent, mostly science-based investment plan.

80,000 hours ranks research and investment against Global Catastrophic Biologic Risk (GCBR) as among the most pressing and yet tractable problems to work on and yet they estimate that quality-adjusted only about a billion dollars is being spent on these risks. Moreover, COVID doesn’t even count as a GCBR, i.e. 80000 hours at least recognizes that things could be much worse.

I understand that future people don’t vote but even so I expected a little bit more foresight.

Effective Altruism: An Introduction

by  Alex Tabarrok

Effective Altruism: An Introduction is a collection of ten top episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast, specifically selected to help listeners quickly get up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism.

They cover:

  • What effective altruism is — the use of evidence and careful analysis to do as much good as possible
  • The strategies for improving the world that are most popular within the effective altruism community, and why they’re popular
  • The key disagreements between researchers in the field
  • How to ‘think like an effective altruist’
  • How you might figure out how to make your biggest contribution to solving the world’s most pressing problems

The only thing I would say is that Robert Wiblin has a funny idea about “quickly get up to speed”! But you won’t go wrong with any of these podcast episodes.

Allegedly Unique Events

by  Alex Tabarrok in

One common response to yesterday’s post, What is the Probability of a Nuclear War?, was to claim that probability cannot be assigned to “unique” events. That’s an odd response. Do such respondents really believe that the probability of a nuclear war was not higher during the Cuban Missile Crisis than immediately afterwards when a hotline was established and the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed?

Claiming that probability cannot be assigned to unique events seems more like an excuse to ignore best estimates than a credible epistemic position. Moreover, the claim that probability cannot be assigned to “unique” events is testable, as Phillip Tetlock points out in an excellent 80,000 Hours Podcast with Robert Wiblin.

I mean, you take that objection, which you hear repeatedly from extremely smart people that these events are unique and you can’t put probabilities on them, you take that objection and you say, “Okay, let’s take all the events that the smart people say are unique and let’s put them in a set and let’s call that set allegedly unique events. Now let’s see if people can make forecasts within that set of allegedly unique events and if they can, if they can make meaningful probability judgments of these allegedly unique events, maybe the allegedly unique events aren’t so unique after all, maybe there is some recurrence component.” And that is indeed the finding that when you take the set of allegedly unique events, hundreds of allegedly unique events, you find that the best forecasters make pretty well calibrated forecasts fairly reliably over time and don’t regress too much toward the mean.

In other words, since an allegedly unique event either happens or it doesn’t it is difficult to claim that any probability estimate was better than another but when we look at many forecasts each of an allegedly unique event what you find is that some people get more of them right than others. Moreover, the individuals who get more events right approach these questions using a set of techniques and tools that can be replicated and used to improve other forecasters. Here’s a summary from Mellers, Tetlock, Baker, Friedman and Zeckhauser:

In recent years, IARPA (the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity), the research wing of the U.S. Intelligence Community, has attempted to learn how to better predict the likelihoods of unique events. From 2011 to 2015, IARPA sponsored a project called ACE, comprising four massive geopolitical forecasting tournaments conducted over the span of four years. The goal of ACE was to discover the best possible ways of eliciting beliefs from crowds and optimally aggregating them. Questions ranged from pandemics and global leadership changes to international negotiations and economic shifts. An example question ,released on September 9, 2011, asked, “Who will be inaugurated as President of Russia in 2012?”…The Good Judgment Project studied over a million forecasts provided by thousands of volunteers who attached numerical probabilities to such events (Mellers, Ungar, Baron, Ramos, Gurcay, et al., 2014; Tetlock, Mellers, Rohrbaugh, & Chen, 2014).

In the ACE tournaments, IARPA defined predictive success using a metric called the Brier scoring rule (the squared deviation between forecasts and outcomes,where outcomes are 0 and 1 for the non-occurrence and occurrence of events, respectively; Brier, 1950). Consider the question, “Will Bashar al-Assad be ousted from Syria’s presidency by the end of 2016?” Outcomes were binary; Assad either stays or he is ousted. Suppose a forecaster predicts that Assad has a 60% chance of staying and a 40% chance of being ousted. If, at the end of 2016, Assad remains in power, the participant’s Brier score would be [(1-.60)^2 + (0-.40)^2] = 0.16. If Assad is ousted, the forecaster’s score is [(0 -.60)^2 + (1 -.40)^2] = 0.36. With Brier scores, lower values are better, and zero is a perfect score.

…The Good Judgment Project won the ACE tournaments by a wide margin each year by being faster than the competition at finding ways to push probabilities toward 0 for things that did not happen and toward 1 for things that did happen. Five drivers of accuracy accounted for Good Judgment’s success.They were identifying, training, teaming, and tracking good forecasters, as well as optimally aggregating predictions. (Mellers, et al., 2014; Mellers, Mellers, Stone, Atanasov, Rohrbaugh, Metz, et al., 2015a; Mellers, Stone, Murray, Minster, Rohrbaugh, et al., 2015b).

RadicalXChange, March 22-24

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Robert Wiblin of 80,000 hours has an excellent podcast with Glen Weyl on Radical institutional reforms that make capitalism & democracy work better. Weyl’s diagnosis of the problems of capitalism and democracy strike me as wrongheaded but on the other hand his solutions are interesting.and original. Wiblin does a good job of gently but decisively pushing back in places, e.g. in the discussion of high modernism.

RadicalXChange is hosting a big conference March 22-24 in Detroit. In addition to Weyl, speakers include Vitalik Buterin, Margaret Levi and Zooko Wilcox among others. I will be talking about open borders and also about city development on a panel with Devon Zuegel, Mwiya Musokotwane and Mark Lutter.

What should Robert Wiblin ask Tyler Cowen?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Robert will be interviewing me later this week, as an installment of Conversations with Tyler, just as Patrick Collison once interviewed me a while back.  At least part of the interview will focus on my forthcoming book Stubborn Attachments: A Vision of a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals.  (And we will do 2.5 hours, a Robert specialty!)  Here is part of Robert’s bio:

I studied both genetics and economics at the Australian National University (ANU), graduated top of my class and was named Young Alumnus of the Year in 2015.

I worked as a research economist in various Australian Government agencies including the Treasury and Productivity Commission.

I then moved to Oxford in the UK to work at the Centre for Effective Altruism, first as Research Director and then Executive Director.

I then became Research Director for 80,000 Hours. In 2015 the project went through Y Combinator, and in 2016 we moved from Oxford to Berkeley, California in order to grow more quickly.

He is renowned for his thorough preparation and he runs a very good podcast of his own.  So what should he ask me?

Against Foreign Language Education

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Bryan Caplan is on fire in this excellent podcast with Robert Wiblin of 80,000 hours:

Bryan Caplan: In the U.S. I’ve heard so many times – I learned Latin and it really improved my score on the SAT because of all the Latin roots of the English vocabulary words. How about you learn some English vocabulary words, wouldn’t that be a little easier?

Robert Wiblin: I’m just… I’m pulling out my hair here.

Bryan Caplan: Well if you wanna pull out your hair a little bit more. Out of all my ultra moderate reforms that I suggested, the one that I stand behind more strongly than any other is abolishing foreign language requirements in the United States. Because there, we’ve got a bunch of facts, which are: hardly any jobs use foreign languages, it takes a lot of time to get any good. And furthermore, in this book I’m able to go and snap together a bunch of pieces of data to show that virtually zero Americans claim to… even claim to speak a foreign language very well in school.

So I say, look, even if it did have these big payoffs, the system is just a waste of time, and people spend years doing it for nothing. And even here, I just run against a brick wall and people say, well in that case we should just improve the teaching of the foreign language.

Well, how about you do that and then get back to me, but continuing to fund the thing that we have, this is garbage!

And again, Washington state from what I understand, now allows kids to use a computer language in place of foreign language. Like, why not do that? Then it’s like, “No, no we need to do both.” People don’t have an unlimited amount of time, and shouldn’t teenagers be able to have a frigging childhood! Like how much of their childhood do you want to destroy with jumping through these stupid hoops?

As someone who was educated in Canada I can attest to the waste of much foreign language instruction. I had at least 6 years of instruction in French but my French today is perhaps on par with two or three days worth of Berlitz and that mostly because I’ve been to France a few times. For reasons of national unity and ideology, almost all Canadians have years of French instruction but most of the little of what is learned is quickly forgotten. Looking at bilingual cereal boxes is not enough to maintain skill. If you are French in Quebec there are good reasons to learn English but outside of Quebec there are few reasons to learn French. As a result, the large majority of bilingual speakers are native French speakers (plus a few budding politicians). Indeed, among the Canadians who speak English there could well be more Hindi or Chinese bilinguists than French bilinguists.

Don’t make the mistake of arguing that knowing a second language has many benefits. The point is that foreign language instruction in schools doesn’t teach a second language.

Addendum: And don’t forget this.

What Should You Do to Make an Impact?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Suppose you want to help the world, what sort of problems should you work on? The good folks at 80,000 Hours recommend looking for big, neglected, solvable problems. Sounds obvious when written down but bringing these issues up to system-two thinking often results in changed perspectives and new approaches. The video has interesting examples.

Vaping Saves Lives

by  Alex Tabarrok in

E-cigarettes are less dangerous than cigarettes but are equally effective at delivering nicotine. Levy et al. estimate that if smokers switched to e-cigarettes millions of life-years would be saved, even taking into account plausible rates of non-smokers who start to vape. (It’s worth noting that the authors are all cancer researchers, statisticians and epidemiologists concerned with reducing cancer deaths.)

A Status Quo Scenario, developed to project smoking rates and health outcomes in the absence of vaping, is compared with Substitution models, whereby cigarette use is largely replaced by vaping over a 10-year period. We test an Optimistic and a Pessimistic Scenario, differing in terms of the relative harms of e-cigarettes compared with cigarettes and the impact on overall initiation, cessation and switching. Projected mortality outcomes by age and sex under the Status Quo and E-Cigarette Substitution Scenarios are compared from 2016 to 2100 to determine public health impacts.

Compared with the Status Quo, replacement of cigarette by e-cigarette use over a 10-year period yields 6.6 million fewer premature deaths with 86.7 million fewer life years lost in the Optimistic Scenario. Under the Pessimistic Scenario, 1.6 million premature deaths are averted with 20.8 million fewer life years lost. The largest gains are among younger cohorts, with a 0.5 gain in average life expectancy projected for the age 15 years cohort in 2016.

Vaping saves lives but the FDA has in the past tried to impose severe regulations on the industry and to make vaping less pleasurable. (Aside: It’s interesting that liberals tend to favor other risk-reducing devices such as condoms in the classroom but disfavor vaping while conservatives often take the opposite sides. I don’t think either group is basing their choices on the elasticities.)

The FDA, for example, has tried to ban flavored e-cigarettes. In a new NBER paper, Buckell, Marti and Sindelar calculate that:

…a ban on flavored e-cigarettes would drive smokers to combustible cigarettes, which have been
found to be the more harmful way of getting nicotine (Goniewicz et al., 2017; Shahab et al., 2017).
In addition, such a ban reduces the appeal of e-cigarettes to those who are seeking to quit; ecigarettes
have proven useful as a cessation device for these individuals (Hartmann-Boyce et al.,
2016; Zhu et al., 2017), and we find that quitters have a preference for flavored e-cigarettes.

Fortunately, the new FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb has signaled a more liberal attitude towards vaping. It could be the most consequential decision of his tenure.

Hat tip: The excellent Robert Wilbin from 80,000 Hours.

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Can a cosmology do without dark matter?

2. The forthcoming Parag Khanna book on American democracy.  And 80,000 Hours, your career can make the world a better place.

3. Why doesn’t Canada innovate more?

4. Christopher Balding on the Taiwan phone call.

5. Carlos Lozada’s book picks.

6. The argument that the Italian bank situation is manageable.  Brad Setser adds on Twitter: “Challenge for Italy never size of recap. It has been managing politics of retail bail-in required alongside recap by state aid rules/ BRRD”

Advice on Choosing a Career

by  Alex Tabarrok in

One branch of the effective altruism movement emphasizes the rigorous evaluation of charities. A second branch is focused on a different but related aspect, career choice. Choosing a career to benefit others actually strikes me as a bit of a downer–get out the sackcloth and ashes, repent, renounce your sins and all that.

The 80,000 hours research charity, co-founded by William MacAskill, can be a bit preachy but they have assembled and reviewed a large amount of research on careers–not just on what makes a career useful but also what makes it enjoyable. Young people spend surprisingly little time thinking about a career. There’s a lot more advice about choosing and getting into a college than there is serious advice about choosing a major let alone figuring out a practical plan towards a career.

The 80,000 hours career guide, offers quite a bit of practical, scientifically-based advice and it’s not the usual join the Peace Corp kind of thing.

Here’s two lovely hard-headed graphs that skewer common wisdom and give a taste of their approach:

Follow-your-passion-1024x749

Passion-vs-jobs

If you know a young person nearing college, the career guide is well worth a few hours of their time.

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Sorry people, but I’m not convinced by the whole anti-cavities thing.  Stuart Richie also comments.

2. Thirty minute talk by the great Gašper Beguš. You need to remove timing between the clicks!

3. A recent paper on AI and labor markets.  I don’t quite follow the central intuitions, but possibly important?

4. Ukraine report.

5. The Budget Lab.

6. Bonobo revisionism?

7. “In its beta, gpt-vetting has already conducted 13,000 AI interviews, saving ~10k hours for software engineers who would otherwise be conducting technical interviews.”  Link here.