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William_Quixote comments on 2014 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Once again pandemic is the leading cat risk. It was the leading cat risk last year. http://lesswrong.com/lw/jj0/2013_survey_results/aekk It was the leading cat risk the year before that. http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/7xz0
Pandemics are the risk LWers are most afraid of and to my knowledge we as a community have expended almost no effort on preventing them.
So this year I resolve that my effort towards pandemic prevention will be greater than simply posting a remark about how it's the leading risk.
Clearly, we haven't been doing enough to increase other risks. We can't let pandemic stay in the lead.
Get to work on making more AIs everyone!
Pandemics may be the largest risk, but the marginal contribution a typical LWer can make is probably very low, and not their comparative advantage. Let the WHO do its work, and turn your attention to underconsidered risks.
Money can be donated.
Givewell has looked into global catastrophic risks in general, plus pandemic preparedness in particular. My impression is that quite a bit more is spent per year on biosecurity (around 6 billion in the US) than is on other catastrophic risks such as AI.
I'm not so sure about that. Isn't the effective altruist focus on global poverty/disease reducing the risk of pandemic? I know very little about epidemiology, but if seems as if a lot of scary diseases (AIDs, ebola...) would never have spread to the human population if certain regions of the third world had better medical infrastructure.
That's fair. It's certianly true that poverty reduction also reduces pandemic risk. But it does so inditectly and slowly. There are probably faster ways to reduce pandemic risk than working on poverty.