TL;DR
* GOAL 3 is a social enterprise that created IMPALA, a patient monitoring and digital platform system for low-resource settings. There is also a GOAL 3 foundation that raises funds to ensure underserved communities will be reached.
* A recently completed report from Rethink Priorities calculated IMPALA to have a cost per DALY averted of $7–17 in paediatr...
This month effective altruism has gotten lots of attention, including a cover story in The Economist. It feels pretty surreal to be on the receiving end of it. But I feel grateful these ideas have caught on, and even more grateful for the drive, earnestness, and compassion of so many people who took strange but well-argued ideas seriously and then actually acted on them....
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...
Two neglected X-risks
I've been going through various listings of x-risks (and GCR's, to account for some uncertainty re: climate and nuclear) by prominent organisations, and after a brief scanning have found that the usual list includes:
No list that I came across (explicitly) includes either:
I would make the case that both of these are potential X-risks, and should be taken seriously as objects of research. There appears to be credible reasons to believe that APM is not currently an urgent risk (see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gjEbymta6w8yqNQnE/risks-from-atomically-precise-manufacturing by Michael Aird), but the same cannot be said of SETI/METI. After reading through some longtermist/EA and non-EA community research into SETI/METI risks, it seems to be an open question as to just how probable the risk of finding/being found by hostile ETI might be.
In the face of deep uncertainty around a number of key questions (one of which is the small matter of how likely it is that ETI's exist and their likely proximity to us, another of which is a question of ETI behaviour which we must investigate and estimate based on a sample size of 0), I suggest that this risk be considered alongside the 'big four', both due to its potentially devastating scope and its potentially high likelihood.
We need to spend time fully researching this risk and identifying the most prudent course of action, even if the end result is that we find it can be safely discounted.