The Nonlinear Library EA - ALLFED's 2023 Highlights by Sonia Cassidy
Dec 1, 2023
48:51
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: ALLFED's 2023 Highlights, published by Sonia Cassidy on December 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Executive Summary
Welcome to ALLFED's 2023 Highlights, our annual update on what Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters has been up to this year. From advising Open Philanthropy on food security, to 6 new papers submitted for peer review, to writing preparedness/response plans for 3 governments, we have made substantial strides towards our mission to increase resilience to global food catastrophes.
There is much more we could do, as we are currently funding constrained. If you like what you read in this post, please see also our
2023 ALLFED Marginal Funding Appeal and consider donating to us
via our website this giving season.
Increasing geopolitical tensions have presented an opportunity to translate ALLFED's scientific research into actionable policy proposals with endeavors such as writing national preparedness and response plans against abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS, e.g. volcanic or nuclear winter) for various countries such as the United States, Australia, and Argentina.
We continue to explore further options for governments to plan and develop technology through pilots. We have worked towards producing the evidence base needed to inform decision making prior to and during global catastrophe, with 6 new core ALLFED papers submitted for peer review. We have also redoubled efforts in studying responses to potential mass infrastructure collapse scenarios, such as from large scale nuclear electromagnetic pulse, AI-powered cyberattacks, or extreme pandemics (e.g.
high transmissibility and mortality causing mass absenteeism). On this topic, we have produced around half a dozen papers over the years (including one this year).
Here is what we you can read about in these 2023 Highlights:
We kick off with a strategy section and some insights into our top-level thinking and ALLFED's Theory of Change.
We then report on our research, including 6 new papers submitted for peer review and some contraptions we have engineered. According to an
analysis of the
Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk paper database, ALLFED team members are the second, third, fourteenth, and twenty-first most prolific X-risk academic researchers in the world.
We talk about our policy work next, focusing on engagements with the governments of Australia and Argentina (through partnership with
the Spanish speaking GCR org) as well as the United States policy engagement (which included
endorsement of Senator Edward Markey's Health Impacts of Nuclear War Act).
We then move to communications, especially our GCR field-building and science communications. It has been gratifying to see ALLFED's work propagating and an increasing use of our field-defining terminology, which we give examples of here.
We follow up with events, circa 20 presentations and an account of a recent workshop that we gave at EAGx Australia.
We then move to operations, the backbone of ALLFED's day-to-day activities, and an important element of our organizational resilience for response in a GCR (one modality of our Theory of Change).
Our team section comes next, where we celebrate our team. ALLFED's multilingual team members are located around the globe and can talk about our work, and deliver workshops and presentations in a number of languages, including Spanish, German, French, Russian, Czech, Polish, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Filipino, Yoruba and more. In the team section, we also share with you a fun seaweed-eating experiment some of our team members participated in to experience a 10% seaweed diet.
We close with thanks and acknowledgements, to all our donors, collaborators and supporters. We would like to take this opportunity to especially thank Greg Colbourn and the Centre for Enabling EA Learning & Research (CEEALA...
Executive Summary
Welcome to ALLFED's 2023 Highlights, our annual update on what Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters has been up to this year. From advising Open Philanthropy on food security, to 6 new papers submitted for peer review, to writing preparedness/response plans for 3 governments, we have made substantial strides towards our mission to increase resilience to global food catastrophes.
There is much more we could do, as we are currently funding constrained. If you like what you read in this post, please see also our
2023 ALLFED Marginal Funding Appeal and consider donating to us
via our website this giving season.
Increasing geopolitical tensions have presented an opportunity to translate ALLFED's scientific research into actionable policy proposals with endeavors such as writing national preparedness and response plans against abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS, e.g. volcanic or nuclear winter) for various countries such as the United States, Australia, and Argentina.
We continue to explore further options for governments to plan and develop technology through pilots. We have worked towards producing the evidence base needed to inform decision making prior to and during global catastrophe, with 6 new core ALLFED papers submitted for peer review. We have also redoubled efforts in studying responses to potential mass infrastructure collapse scenarios, such as from large scale nuclear electromagnetic pulse, AI-powered cyberattacks, or extreme pandemics (e.g.
high transmissibility and mortality causing mass absenteeism). On this topic, we have produced around half a dozen papers over the years (including one this year).
Here is what we you can read about in these 2023 Highlights:
We kick off with a strategy section and some insights into our top-level thinking and ALLFED's Theory of Change.
We then report on our research, including 6 new papers submitted for peer review and some contraptions we have engineered. According to an
analysis of the
Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk paper database, ALLFED team members are the second, third, fourteenth, and twenty-first most prolific X-risk academic researchers in the world.
We talk about our policy work next, focusing on engagements with the governments of Australia and Argentina (through partnership with
the Spanish speaking GCR org) as well as the United States policy engagement (which included
endorsement of Senator Edward Markey's Health Impacts of Nuclear War Act).
We then move to communications, especially our GCR field-building and science communications. It has been gratifying to see ALLFED's work propagating and an increasing use of our field-defining terminology, which we give examples of here.
We follow up with events, circa 20 presentations and an account of a recent workshop that we gave at EAGx Australia.
We then move to operations, the backbone of ALLFED's day-to-day activities, and an important element of our organizational resilience for response in a GCR (one modality of our Theory of Change).
Our team section comes next, where we celebrate our team. ALLFED's multilingual team members are located around the globe and can talk about our work, and deliver workshops and presentations in a number of languages, including Spanish, German, French, Russian, Czech, Polish, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Filipino, Yoruba and more. In the team section, we also share with you a fun seaweed-eating experiment some of our team members participated in to experience a 10% seaweed diet.
We close with thanks and acknowledgements, to all our donors, collaborators and supporters. We would like to take this opportunity to especially thank Greg Colbourn and the Centre for Enabling EA Learning & Research (CEEALA...