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QALY/$ for promoting zinc as a common cold intervention
Epistemic status: Fun speculation. I know nothing about public health, and grabbed numbers from the first source I could find for every step of the below. I link to the sources which informed my point estimates.
Here’s my calculation broken down into steps:
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Health-related quality of life effect for one year of common cold -0.2
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Common cold prevalence in the USA 1.2/yr
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Modally 7 days of symptoms having -0.2
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~1.5 million QALY burden per year when aggregated across the US population
- This is the average of estimating from the above (1e6) with what I get (2e6) when deriving the US slice of the total DALY burden from global burden of disease data showing 3% global DALYs come from URI
- There’s probably a direct estimate out there somewhere
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50% probability the right zinc lozenges with proper dosing can prevent >90% of colds. This comes from here, here, and my personal experience of taking zinc lozenges ~10ish occasions.
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15% best case adoption scenario, from taking a log-space mean of
- Masks 5%
- General compliance rate 10-90%
100,000 QALYs/year is my estimate for the expected value of taking some all-or-nothing action to promote zinc lozenges (without the possibility of cheaply confirming whether they work) which successfully changes public knowledge and medical advice to promote our best-guess protocol for taking zinc.
$35 million is my estimate for how much we should be willing to spend to remain competitive with Givewell’s roughly 1 QALY/$71. This assumes a 5 year effect duration. I have no idea how much such a thing would cost but I’d guess at most 1 OOM of value is being left on the table here, so I’m a bit less bullish on Zinc than I was before calculating.
EDIT: I calculated the cost of supplying the lozenges themselves. Going off these price per lozenge, this 5 year USA supply of lozenges costs ~35 million alone. Presumably this doesn't need to hit the Givewell spending bar, but just US government spending on healthcare.
It feels like this is still a research problem needing larger scale trials. If the claims are true (i.e. the failures to achieve statistically significant results were due to not preparing and consuming lozenges in a particular way, rather than the successes being the anomalies) there are plenty of non-philanthropic entities (governments and employers and media as well as zinc supplement vendors) that would be incentivised to publicise more widely.
Lifeextension cites this https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24715076/ claiming "The results showed that when the proper dose of zinc is used within 24 hours of first symptoms, the duration of cold miseries is cut by about 50%" I'd be interested if you do a dig through the citation chain. The lifeextension page has a number of further links.
Here's the Cochrane withdrawal notice.
Looks like they plagiarized from this paper, which found:
Results: Thirteen placebo-controlled comparisons have examined the therapeutic effect of zinc lozenges on common cold episodes of natural origin. Five of the trials used a total daily zinc dose of less than 75 mg and uniformly found no effect. Three trials used zinc acetate in daily doses of over 75 mg, the pooled result indicating a 42% reduction in the duration of colds (95% CI: 35% to 48%). Five trials used zinc salts other than acetate in daily doses of over 75 mg, the pooled result indicating a 20% reduction in the duration of colds (95% CI: 12% to 28%).
what I get (2e6) when deriving the US slice of the total DALY burden from global burden of disease data showing 3% global DALYs come from URI
I'm seeing 0.25% globally and 0.31% for the US for URI in the GBD data, ~1 OOM lower (the direct figure for the US is 3.4e5, also ~1 OOM lower). What am I missing?
Medium term AI forecasting with Metaculus
I'm working on a collection of metaculus.com questions intended to generate AI domain specific forecasting insights. These questions are intended to resolve in the 1-15 year range, and my hope is that if they're sufficiently independent, we'll get a range of positive and negative resolutions which will inform future forecasts.
I've already gotten a couple of them live, and am hoping for feedback on the rest:
1. When will AI out-perform humans on argument reasoning tasks?
2. When will multi-modal ML out-perform uni-modal ML?
3. (Not by me) When will image recognition be made robust against unrestricted adversary?
4. (WIP) When will reinforcement learning methods achieve sample efficiency within four orders of magnitude of human efficiency?*
5. (WIP) When will unsupervised learning methods achieve human level performance on image classification?
The more questions the better, so please make suggestions. Of course we have to avoid burdening the good folks working at metaculus, so 8-10 questions is probably the maximum I'd be willing to personally submit.
*I am not very familiar with reinforcement learning, so input here would be particularly helpful! What is the best way to operationalize this question? How many orders of magnitude? Is there a relevant benchmark? etc. I'd be happy for someone else to take the credit, and post the question themselves as well!
Curated and popular this week
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Epistemic status: This post — the result of a loosely timeboxed ~2-day sprint[1] — is more like “research notes with rough takes” than “report with solid answers.” You should interpret the things we say as best guesses, and not give them much more weight than that.
Summary
There’s been some discussion of what “transformative AI may arrive soon” might mean for animal advocates.
After a very shallow review, we’ve tentatively concluded that radical changes to the animal welfare (AW) field are not yet warranted. In particular:
* Some ideas in this space seem fairly promising, but in the “maybe a researcher should look into this” stage, rather than “shovel-ready”
* We’re skeptical of the case for most speculative “TAI<>AW” projects
* We think the most common version of this argument underrates how radically weird post-“transformative”-AI worlds would be, and how much this harms our ability to predict the longer-run effects of interventions available to us today. Without specific reasons to believe that an intervention is especially robust,[2] we think it’s best to discount its expected value to ~zero.
Here’s a brief overview of our (tentative!) actionable takes on this question[3]:
✅ Some things we recommend❌ Some things we don’t recommend
* Dedicating some amount of (ongoing) attention to the possibility of “AW lock ins”[4]
* Pursuing other exploratory research on what transformative AI might mean for animals & how to help (we’re unconvinced by most existing proposals, but many of these ideas have received <1 month of research effort from everyone in the space combined — it would be unsurprising if even just a few months of effort turned up better ideas)
* Investing in highly “flexible” capacity for advancing animal interests in AI-transformed worlds
* Trying to use AI for near-term animal welfare work, and fundraising from donors who have invested in AI
* Heavily discounting “normal” interventions that take 10+ years to help animals
* “Rowing” on na
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About the program
Hi! We’re Chana and Aric, from the new 80,000 Hours video program.
For over a decade, 80,000 Hours has been talking about the world’s most pressing problems in newsletters, articles and many extremely lengthy podcasts.
But today’s world calls for video, so we’ve started a video program[1], and we’re so excited to tell you about it!
80,000 Hours is launching AI in Context, a new YouTube channel hosted by Aric Floyd. Together with associated Instagram and TikTok accounts, the channel will aim to inform, entertain, and energize with a mix of long and shortform videos about the risks of transformative AI, and what people can do about them.
[Chana has also been experimenting with making shortform videos, which you can check out here; we’re still deciding on what form her content creation will take]
We hope to bring our own personalities and perspectives on these issues, alongside humor, earnestness, and nuance. We want to help people make sense of the world we're in and think about what role they might play in the upcoming years of potentially rapid change.
Our first long-form video
For our first long-form video, we decided to explore AI Futures Project’s AI 2027 scenario (which has been widely discussed on the Forum). It combines quantitative forecasting and storytelling to depict a possible future that might include human extinction, or in a better outcome, “merely” an unprecedented concentration of power.
Why?
We wanted to start our new channel with a compelling story that viewers can sink their teeth into, and that a wide audience would have reason to watch, even if they don’t yet know who we are or trust our viewpoints yet. (We think a video about “Why AI might pose an existential risk”, for example, might depend more on pre-existing trust to succeed.)
We also saw this as an opportunity to tell the world about the ideas and people that have for years been anticipating the progress and dangers of AI (that’s many of you!), and invite the br
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I donated my left kidney to a stranger on April 9, 2024, inspired by my dear friend @Quinn Dougherty (who was inspired by @Scott Alexander, who was inspired by @Dylan Matthews). By the time I woke up after surgery, it was on its way to San Francisco. When my recipient woke up later that same day, they felt better than when they went under. I'm going to talk about one complication and one consequence of my donation, but I want to be clear from the get: I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Correction: Quinn actually donated in April 2023, before Scott’s donation. He wasn’t aware that Scott was planning to donate at the time. The original seed came from Dylan's Vox article, then conversations in the EA Corner Discord, and it's Josh Morrison who gets credit for ultimately helping him decide to donate. Thanks Quinn!
I met Quinn at an EA picnic in Brooklyn and he was wearing a shirt that I remembered as saying "I donated my kidney to a stranger and I didn't even get this t-shirt." It actually said "and all I got was this t-shirt," which isn't as funny. I went home and immediately submitted a form on the National Kidney Registry website. The worst that could happen is I'd get some blood tests and find out I have elevated risk of kidney disease, for free.[1]
I got through the blood tests and started actually thinking about whether to do this. I read a lot of arguments, against as well as for. The biggest risk factor for me seemed like the heightened risk of pre-eclampsia[2], but since I live in a developed country, this is not a huge deal. I am planning to have children. We'll just keep an eye on my blood pressure and medicate if necessary.
The arguments against kidney donation seemed to center around this idea of preserving the sanctity or integrity of the human body: If you're going to pierce the sacred periderm of the skin, you should only do it to fix something in you. (That's a pretty good heuristic most of the time, but we make exceptions to give blood and get pier
Here's the Cochrane withdrawal notice.
Looks like they plagiarized from this paper, which found: