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)

Here at a major research-focused university, work goes on as if nothing happened for now.

There are however possibly going to be snarls in the grant-application process if this goes on for a while and much of my lab's funding does come from the federal government in one way or another, causing further problems in the event of truly long showdowns. I don't know the grant distribution schedule off the top of my head.

Luckily we have all our new expensive equipment on hand as of a few months ago and ongoing costs are for things like yeast extract and disposable test tubes and tiny bits of custom DNA. And all our pay, of course...

EDIT as of 10-5-13 It would appear that those of us who have grants paid out for multiple years as lump sums from the NIH are doing okay. Those of us who charge things to an external account are having a difficult time. And those of us who get yearly infusions of money and get the infusion in the fall are doing particularly badly. My lab seems to fall in the first two categories, thankfully enough.

So, a lot of people here have been saying that my notion that there is a high probability that this entire thing has had lots of very negative effects (taking into account the exponential returns on research) are hyperbolic and silly.

And those of us who get yearly infusions of money and get the infusion in the fall are doing particularly badly.

When I read this, I feel like I was right about the negative impact, even if I was wrong about the possibility of effecting the outcome. (My notion was that perhaps labs which were in keen need of small funds t... (read more)