The Next EA Global Should Have Safe Air

are there candidate interventions that only require mobile equipment and not (semi-)permanent changes to buildings?

Fortunately, yes. Within-room UVC (upper-room 254nm and lower-room 222nm) can be provided by mobile lights on tripod stands.

This is what the JHU Center for Health Security did for their IAQ conference last month. (Pictures at https://twitter.com/DrNikkiTeran/status/1567864920087138304 )

Yeah there are considerations on both sides. On the one hand, you can't install permanent changes and it's a short period of time. On the other, events where large numbers of people mix from a wide number of locations probably have a unique role in spreading infectious disease + conferences have a unique need to prove COVID safety and venues might compete on those grounds, so establishing a model in that context could be particularly useful.

It's not that I think "get all EA offices to implement optimal indoor air safety" is a bad idea (or necessarily a worse idea than EA Global doing it), and I'll probably send some emails today in that vein. But the EA Global version  appeals to me for two reasons: 1. It is a shared space for the EA community (unlike particular offices owned by particular organizations), which makes it a chance for us to express our values; and 2. the fact that it's an event on a specific date creates a deadline, which i think has a lot of value in improving productivity and forcing decisions. 

At EAGx Berlin just now, I and a few others discussed 80/20 interventions.

My first suggestion was mandatory FFP2 or better masks indoors and many outdoors activities, ideally with some sort of protection from rain – a roof or tent.

Another participant anticipated the objection that people would probably object to that that it’s harder to read facial expressions with masks, which could make communication harder for those people who are good at using and reading facial expressions. A counter-suggestion was hence to mandate masks only for the listeners during talks since that is a time when they might fill a room with Covid spray but don’t need to talk.

Improving the air quality is another good option that I do a lot at home but haven’t modeled. It feels like one that is particularly suitable to EA offices and group houses.

The Less Wrong Community Weekend in Berlin was successful with very rigorous testing every day with the most sensitive test that is available.

All in all I would just like to call for a lot more risk modeling to get a better idea of the magnitude of the risks to EA and EAs, and then proportionate solutions (technical or social) to mitigate the various sources of risk. Some solution may be better suited for short events, some for offices and group houses.

This seems all easily important enough that someone should quantitatively model it. 

I did the math for the last EAG London, though I underestimated the attendee count by 3–4x. (Does someone know the number?)

Without mask, the event cost 6 years of EA time (continuous, so 24 hours in a day, not 8 h). Maybe it was worth it, maybe not, hard to tell. But if everyone had worn N95 or better masks, that would’ve been down to about 17 days. They could’ve kept about 100% of the value of EAG while reducing the risk to < 1%.

If the event really had more like 900 attendees, then that’s almost 20 years of EA time that is lost in expectation through these events. I’m not trying to model this conservatively; I don’t know in which direction I’m erring.

One objection that I can see is that maybe this increases the time lost from EAGs by some low single digit factor, and since the event is only 3 days long, that doesn’t seem so bad on an individual level. (Some people spend over a week on a single funding application, so if it’s rejected, maybe that comes with a similar time cost.)

Another somewhat cynical objection could be that maybe there’s the risk that someone doesn’t contribute to the effective altruism enterprise throughout two decades of their life because they were put off by having to wear a mask and so never talked to someone who could answer their objections to EA. Maybe losing a person like that is as bad as a few EAs losing a total of 20 years of their lives. This seems overly cynical to me, but I can’t easily argue against it either.

My Guesstimate model is here.

Sorry, that was not my intention: I'm not at all casting aspersions on EA Global or claiming that EA Global is less safe than other conferences or average spaces with commercial ventilation. I just think we can do better, and this is a worthy challenge to take on. 

Another way of stating my intuition here (apart from the view that piloting indoor air safety interventions has a unique value at this moment in time) is that 1. EA spaces should make a deliberate effort to vacuum out infectious disease risk from the community* rather than be a passive medium through which infection spreads and 2. that this risk vacuum norm would be a  good one to model for other spaces/actors to adopt.

*By which I mean something vaguely like either: 1. in a world with optimal indoor air safety measures, someone's presence in an EA space should not increase the risk of respiratory disease transmission vs. their presence in a comparable space, 2. spending time in this space should reduce the risk of transmitting infection vs. other ways a person could spend their time, or 3. assuming it were possible to establish how spending time in different spaces contributed to transmitting respiratory infection and a risk budget for daily life could be created such that the effective rate of transmission for (all?) respiratory infection were below ~0.9, spending time in this space would not spend a person's budget at a rate greater than other social behavior. 

Convincing a venue to implement it well (or rewarding one that has already done that) will have benefits that last more than three days.

It's 3 days, but it's hundreds of people mixing with people from all over (so high chance someone has something other people don't), many of whom arrived in mass transit (last minute chance to catch something), are sleeping less and eating worse than normal (stressing the immune system), continuously talking in mostly crowded rooms (easy spreading).

Even if you don't think covid is unusually dangerous, I think standard cold and flu risk, and the fact that high co2 reduces efficacy, justifies caring a lot about air quality.

This is a problem where I think we can get some returns with minimal investment. For example, maybe just ask volunteers to bring in their air purifiers from home and hook them up during the day. That won't be a perfect solution, but it will provide cleaner air than having no purifiers. This seems like a space where we can get something like logarithmic returns on effort, which means even doing a little can be quite impactful.

(1) I do want to note that I don't think one should evaluate microcovid as though it was an altruistic action selected by a prioritization process! It was more like a selfish and friend-oriented project, which we made scalable enough to unlock big positive externalities in our broader community and beyond. The first version of the system was purely to save my own group house! (That said, I do think it's well-described as a project in the spirit of rationality, and a good example of rationality in action.)

I think that microCOVID probably looks pretty good on EA grounds just via saving a bunch of EAs a bunch of time worrying about what their COVID policies should be. But I like your point.

a virus that at the time was considered to not be that dangerous to young and healthy people

I don't think this was true at the time. Not even for a young, healthy person only caring about themselves.

But I think the following categories probably cover 30-90% of participants in EA events anyway:

• People who have a health issue that makes them more susceptible
• People who aren't that young
• People who are close to someone in one of the above categories
• People who don't want to catch the disease because they know there's a high chance they'd infect other people

I also don't think an efficient tool to help EAs with personal exercise would be a bad thing.

In the end, you have a community of EAs, and you want people who'll do impactful work to come from that community. If the community is unhealthy, less people would join, and out of those who do join less people would be able to make an impactful contribution. Community health is a meta cause, but that doesn't make it inferior to "direct work" cause areas.

Edit: with all of this said, I don't actually mean this as an endorsement of microCOVID. I didn't find it very useful, both because I wasn't sure what meaning I should really assign to the numbers, and because I didn't have much choice over my environment at EA Global.

(2) Much more cantankerously: "If your dear friends are suffering deeply, and you have created a system that can help, do not spend any spare time (outside your EA day job) on teaching them the system. You need to spend that spare time on altruistic things, not your friends' suffering. Certainly do not allow any motivated non-EA friends to spend THEIR time helping you build a scalable version for your entire community" is not a moral system or set of community norms I can get behind.

It helped me know how much I should change my behaviour in a global pandemic, which I think was pretty beneficial to me and many other EAs. I can believe it saved a lot of EA time.

I like this take. Seems like this fits in a broader discussion of how rigorously we should try to line up actions with principles, ex: going vegan, not flying for climate, or more extreme things like going zero waste

Hi Niklas, Thanks for your comment. I’m the program lead for EAGs. I’ve put a few of my thoughts below:

• I definitely would like to reduce the chances of people getting ill at EAGs!
• I think adding air purification could be more logistically challenging than it seems – e.g., I think given the size of our spaces, we’d need more like 100+ air purifiers. This then also needs quite a lot of coordination in terms of power supplies, delivery and movement.
• It does unfortunately tradeoff against other marginal EAG improvements, as we have limited organiser capacity to invest in new improvements.
• I feel unsure about what the net benefit of air purifiers would be (e.g., this initial post and the Berlin talk you reference seem to be discussing UVC lamps as opposed to air purifiers).
• If anyone did provide or point to a more fleshed out estimate of costs and benefits, I could definitely imagine prioritising this more, and it is on the list of things we would like to look into more!

From my read it's more like: Try to be more hardcore about it, because that has some value of information, e.g., about how well current techniques work.

Organizational response like upper-room UV isn't about how participants act. I think Josh is pushing for the organizers to try to do things to keep people safe, regardless of mask wearing. (And that has other benefits as well, as a proof-of-concept.)

That is true, but I also do think that the symbolic value of doing it is very high. If you're a community that believes that the government should do [policy] it is not only good PR but also makes you understand your beliefs better if you also pursue that policy (to the extent that you can scale it down)

flights is one of the highest risk activity for getting sick via air-borne diseases

Link?