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)
Actually, no. A federally-employed scientist can't "still use their brains" during a shutdown; see the Antideficiency Act.
See above. Grants have to be written eventually; not being able to work part of the year just makes the proportion of working time that has to be devoted to writing grants larger.
Huh? How does this stop them from using their brains? Nothing there is going to stop them from continuing to think about their work, mentally desigining new experiments or new hypotheses.