William_Quixote comments on 2014 Survey Results - Less Wrong

87 Post author: Yvain 05 January 2015 07:36PM

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Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 07 January 2015 11:42:14PM *  2 points [-]

we as a community have expended almost no effort on preventing them.

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.

Comment author: William_Quixote 09 January 2015 06:37:23PM 1 point [-]

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.