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"?
From the linked article:
if the NSF misses one or two weekly payments to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, the facility would be forced to close, disrupting long-term research, says facility director Tony Beasley.
also
At NASA, one casualty could be the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which until 1 October was being prepared at Cape Canaveral in Florida for an 18 November launch. MAVEN’s principal investigator, Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder, says that his team can accommodate a brief work stoppage. But if MAVEN, which will study the Martian atmosphere, misses its three-week launch window, it will be delayed until 2016,
(A 3 year wait for something that was going to launch next month probably means wasted resources. There's also a chance that it becomes a sunk cost as better tech. comes by.)
the FDA has put 45% of its staff on leave and will cut back on food-safety programmes
Given the number of programs being effected, I think it's really unlikely that no projects will be shut down anywhere because of this.
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.
Bad example. Einstein was A) doing physics at a time when the size of budgets needed to make new discoveries was much smaller B) primarily doing theoretical work or work that relied on other peoples data. Many areas of research (e.g. much of particle physics, a lot of condensed matter, most biology) require funding for the resources to simply to do anything at all.
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.
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 conce...
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.
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?
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.
Write a letter to your congresspeople, and do it on paper to maximize the impact. Beyond that, you're looking at going up against big money, and the efficiency is gone.
Can we do anything to remedy the situation?
Well, it might be a bit frivolous, but a large number of people are planning on trolling Congress on Friday the 11th.
I would have gone, but DoD employees were given permission to return to work today :)
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)