Should effective altruists care about the US gov't shutdown and can we do anything?

Ishaan

For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.

I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.

The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues could have huge negative impact down the line, perhaps delaying some key future discoveries by years. This event *might* be a small window of opportunity to prevent a lot of harm very cheaply.

So the question is:

1) Can we do anything to remedy the situation?

2) If so, is it worth doing it? (Opportunity costs, etc)

A) doing physics at a time when the size of budgets needed to make new discoveries was much smaller

I don't think that true.

If you take something like the highly useful discovery that taking vitamin D at the morning is more effective than at the evening that discovery was made in the last decade by amateurs without budjets.

Fermi estimates aren't easy but that discovery might be worth a year of lifespan. If you look at what the Google people are saying solving cancer is worth three years of lifespan. The people who publish breakthrough results in cancer research have replication rates of under 10 percent. Just as Petrov didn't get a nobel peace price, the people advancing human health don't get biology nobel prices.

Relying on other people's data is much easier know that it was in Einsteins time. Open science doesn't go as far as I would like but being able to transfer data easily via computers makes things so much easier.

The fact that most work in biology relies on experiments suggests that there are not enough people doing good theoretical work in the field it. I don't know much about particle phyiscs but I'm not sure whether we need as much smart people doing particle physics as we have at the moment.

So there are two distinct arguments being made: one is a resource allocation argument (it would be better to spend fewer resources right now on things like particle physics) and the second argument is that in many fields one can still make discoveries with few resources. The first argument may have some validity. The second argument ignores how much work is required in most cases. Yes, one can do things like investigate specific vitamin metabolism issues. But if one is interested in say synthesizing new drugs, or investigating how those drugs would actuall... (read more)