JoshuaBlake
Bio
Participation4
I am an (almost finished) PhD student in biostatistics and infectious disease modelling (population-level); my research focuses on Bayesian statistical methods to produce improved estimates of the number of new COVID-19 infections. During the pandemic, I was a member of SPI-M-O (the UK government committee providing expert scientific advice based on infectious disease modelling and epidemiology).
I enjoy applying my knowledge broadly, including to models of future pandemics, big picture thinking on pandemic preparedness, and forecasting.
How others can help me
I'm currently nearing PhD competition with nothing lined up for after. I'm interested in opportunities in biosecurity and global health, especially answering questions about cost-effectiveness and prioritisation using modelling / stats / epidemiology skills. Please DM if of even vague interest.
How I can help others
Happy to chat about my experience providing scientific advice to government, the biosecurity field, epidemic modelling, doing a PhD, or pretty much anything else!
Posts 5
Comments211
Governance, financing, and supply chain interventions can be randomised at state or district level
While I agree this is true in theory, is it practical? I imagine the size needed to power such a study is prohibitive except for the largest organisations, the answer still wouldn't be definitive (eg due to generalisation concerns), and there would be lots of measurement issues (eg residents in one district crossing to another district with better funded healthcare).
If you tell me I'm wrong, I'd definitely bow to your experience and knowledge in this field but this isn't obviously true.
Thanks for this post @alex lawsen, I continually revisit this as inspiration and to remember the usefulness of this process when I am making hard decisions, especially for my career.
From your blog, I know you are a big user of LLMs. I was wondering if you had successfully used them to replace, or complement, this process? When I feed one my Google Doc, I find the output is too scattergun or vague to be useful, compared to sharing the same Doc with friends.
If you've succeeded using LLMs, would you please share what prompts and models that have worked well for you?
I feel like the overall takeaway is very different though. I've not fully understood the details in either argument so this is a little vibes based. You seemed to be arguing that below subsistence wages were fairly likely while here it seems to be that even falling wages require a weird combination of conditions.
What have I misunderstood?
This seems like good work but the headline and opening paragraph aren't supported when you've shown it might be log-normal. Log-normal and power distributions often have quite different consequences for how important it is to move to very extreme percentiles, and hence this difference can matter for lots of decisions relevant to EA.
Naively, this seems like a great fit for EAIF, which is looking to fund more projects. Is there something I'm missing?
Rethink Priorities did a more comprehensive survey on models of future x-risk and population sizes.