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)
Bad example. Einstein was A) doing physics at a time when the size of budgets needed to make new discoveries was much smaller B) primarily doing theoretical work or work that relied on other peoples data. Many areas of research (e.g. much of particle physics, a lot of condensed matter, most biology) require funding for the resources to simply to do anything at all.
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 ... (read more)