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)

I think our disagreement comes (at least partially) from the different views on what does publishing research mean.

I see your position as looking on publishing as something like "We did A, B, and C. We got the results X and Y. Take it for what it is. The end."

I'm looking on publishing more like this: "We did multiple experiments which did not give us the magical 0.05 number so we won't tell you about them. But hey, try #39 succeeded and we can publish it: we did A39, B39, and C39 and got the results X39 and Y39. The results are significant so we believe them to be meaningful and reflective of actual reality. Please give our drug to your patients."

The realities of scientific publishing are unfortunate (and yes, I know of efforts to ameliorate the problem in medical research). If people published all their research ("We did 50 runs with the following parameters, all failed, sure #39 showed statistical significance but we don't believe it") I would have zero problems with it. But that's not how the world currently works.

P.S. By the way, here is some research which failed replication (via this)

The realities of scientific publishing are unfortunate (and yes, I know of efforts to ameliorate the problem in medical research). If people published all their research ("We did 50 runs with the following parameters, all failed, sure #39 showed statistical significance but we don't believe it") I would have zero problems with it. But that's not how the world currently works.

That would be a better world. But in this world, it would still be true that there is no universal, absolute, optimal percentage of experiments failing to replicate, and the optimal percentage is set by decision-theoretic/economic concerns.