Should effective altruists care about the US gov't shutdown and can we do anything?

-2 points

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Oct 1, 2013

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)

-2 points

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11 points

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The consequences have already been pretty disastrous.

Can we please not engage in public hysterics?

Under which definition of disaster have the consequences already been "pretty disastrous"?

11 points

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2 points

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I dunno, I think the interrupting of scientific experiments all across the US is pretty disastrous, in terms of long term effects. The positive downstream effects of scientific research should not be underestimated, and a large scale disruption of that seems bad.

As I said, I'm not terribly well informed about this. Is there something I'm not considering about the extent of the interruption?

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2 points

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Here at a major research-focused university, work goes on as if nothing happened for now.

There are however possibly going to be snarls in the grant-application process if this goes on for a while and much of my lab's funding does come from the federal government in one way or another, causing further problems in the event of truly long showdowns. I don't know the grant distribution schedule off the top of my head.

Luckily we have all our new expensive equipment on hand as of a few months ago and ongoing costs are for things like yeast extract and disposable test tubes and tiny bits of custom DNA. And all our pay, of course...

EDIT as of 10-5-13 It would appear that those of us who have grants paid out for multiple years as lump sums from the NIH are doing okay. Those of us who charge things to an external account are having a difficult time. And those of us who get yearly infusions of money and get the infusion in the fall are doing particularly badly. My lab seems to fall in the first two categories, thankfully enough.

2 points

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9 points

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Context: The United States Federal Government has shut down on 18 occasions since 1976 (Source)

9 points

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7 points

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public hysterics?

...

has shut down on 18 occasions

Is that why you thought I was doing public histerics? I am uninformed, but that much I did know. Just because something has been happening doesn't mean it's okay to let it keep happening.

I'm not implying that society will collapse. I'm saying that research has exponential returns, and as a consequence setbacks that seem small right now might actually be pretty bad. Each one of these 18 occasions could have potentially set us back several years.

I posted to get an estimate on how bad this damage is, and how preventable it is. It might be a stupid question to someone who knows what's going on, but I really don't understand the hostility towards the fact that it was asked.

7 points

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7 points

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I posted to get an estimate on how bad this damage is, and how preventable it is. It might be a stupid question to someone who knows what's going on, but I really don't understand the hostility towards the fact that it was asked.

Politics is the mind killer. If you happen to be cluless about a charged political issue you shouldn't be suprised when you encouter hostility when you talk about the issue.

I posted to get an estimate on how bad this damage is, and how preventable it is.

If you want to get an accurate estimate it's a bad idea to start by saying "The consequences have already been pretty disastrous". Rationality 101.

7 points

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3 points

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Politics is the mind killer. If you happen to be cluless about a charged political issue you shouldn't be suprised when you encouter hostility when you talk about the issue.

I suppose it could be interpreted that way. It's not like anyone wants research to shut down - everyone agrees that research should continue. There's no political faction that wants to cause trouble. We've talked about much more divisive things in the past.

If the question is clueless, I find it rather strange that no one is actually bothering to explain. I've seen much more uninformed questions talked about in the Discussion sections. I guess I seriously underestimated the whole "politics-mindkilling" thing...

If you want to get an accurate estimate it's a bad idea to start by saying "The consequences have already been pretty disastrous". Rationality 101.

Fair point.

3 points

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6 points

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Additional context: only one of those shutdowns has involved a significant fraction of the government suspending its operations for more than 5 days.

Before 1980, "shutdowns" followed different rules so that they did not affect government operations nearly as much. Since 1980, every shutdown but one has been 5 days or less. The Clinton-Gingrich shutdown, which began in late 1995, is the only one to last longer (first 5 days, and then 21 more days after a brief truce).

6 points

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7 points

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Should effective altruists care about the US gov't shutdown and can we do anything?

No to the second part. Certainly not without abandoning the "effective altruist" label. The US government is something that powerful entities already have huge motivation to influence. Your motivation to change it is laughably trivial. Comparative advantage.

7 points

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5 points

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I think that [CDC shutdown] is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths.

Did you, perchance, mean expected deaths? It seems to me that CDC is important iff there is an outbreak of a deadly epidemic. Then one can discuss what the delta-deaths is actually likely to be; but at any rate it does not appear obvious that losing CDC for a month is likely to increase the number of deaths in a non-epidemic (ie, business as usual) environment. So there's a small chance P(epidemic breaks out while shutdown) times a not-very-well-known but conceivably quite large delta-deaths (CDC handles epidemic versus improvised handling). The latter should likely be, instead, "CDC has a watch officer at first report versus CDC scrambles to get a response together once the epidemic is obvious through other channels".

As for doing something about it: Perhaps you could crowdfund together enough money that CDC could have a skeleton staff manning the phones? Kickstarter, for example?

NB: I would not contribute to such a thing, I'm modelling someone who thought the expected-deaths calculation above came out with rather a large number.

5 points

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5 points

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Perhaps you could crowdfund together enough money that CDC could have a skeleton staff manning the phones?

I am pretty sure CDC has people manning the phones...

Crucial agencies within HHS such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health will still be operating (Source)

5 points

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Jayson_Virissimo

3 points

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I called 800-232-4636 and verified that they are manning the phones. If you want to check for yourself without wasting 5 minutes, skip the phone tree by pressing 1 for English and then 0 for an operator.

3 points

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3 points

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It seems to me that CDC is important iff there is an outbreak of a deadly epidemic.

I was thinking of more mundane things, for example the yearly flu, which kills quite a few people yearly and would kill more but for careful monitoring of strains and preventative vaccination measures.

The CDC alone isn't what I'm concerned about. It's the small-to-medium inconvenience distributed over a very large number of research facilities, and the larger inconveniences to projects which are time sensitive.

3 points

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3 points

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No.
See #1.

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6 points

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You didn't provide any reasons, which is odd. Did you just want me to weigh your opinion by itself?

I see you as someone who generally knows stuff, so your opinion alone does have some weight. However, as it stands, I can't even tell whether the lack of an explanation is meant to imply that this is an obvious conclusion and I'm being silly, or whether you're just making a casual remark. Can you say how confident you are in this opinion?

6 points

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9 points

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this is an obvious conclusion and I'm being silly

Yes.

Can you say how confident you are in this opinion?

If I were to attach a probability, it would be far below 1%; even if the most prominent famous person connected to LW I can think of, billionaire Peter Thiel, were to intervene, I still would not expect as high as a 1% chance of meaningful influence on the outcome.

9 points

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5 points

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I think this is the important point people should be talking about; Why are you talking about politics? What possible benefit will come of talking and arguing over that which you can have no effect?

5 points

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4 points

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As the son of a company VP said after he observed his elders pontificating on politics:

It's fun to talk about things you can't do anything about.

4 points

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3 points

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Why is a mere statement of contradiction voted up to five? Something I'm missing here? I could understand if it was Clippy and there was some paperclip related subtext that took a minute to "get" but ...

3 points

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2 points

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We should care, the likely damage from this while mainly diffuse impacts will be large. But no, there's not much one can do about this. The effective altruist community is not large enough nor influential enough to have any substantial impact on this matter.

2 points

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