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Dec 29, 2021Edited
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Except for the adopted ones, the ART-conceived (assisted reproductive technology) kids wouldn’t exist otherwise. And besides, the whole point of IVG (in-vitro gametogenesis) is to reduce the need for donor gametes.

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How is being conceived in a different way to the norm being 'commodified'? I want to have kids with my partner, and right now that's not possible for us. If the Ivy Natal Fertility group succeed, it would be. The ability to have biological children is no more than what straight couples have, with the added bonus that all children born of this method would be intentional and desperately wanted.

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Dec 29, 2021
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Biostatistician who is allowed to look at VA data.

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I am a statistician who meets the latter requirement. I have done biostats, though I don't know that I'm A Biostatistician. Is he still looking for help?

Edit: I guess there's enough grading in level of access that my comment might not be super-helpful. Does he need someone *at* the VA who can query their database directly, or somebody who's clear to stare at such data?

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He's retired now, but if you're really interested I can query whoever he passed his project to.

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Thanks for the reply - I think for now I've got enough on my plate that I probably can't squeeze in another project without a sprinkle of the "Great Family" glamour. ;)

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Did your Dad apply for a grant?

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Such an impressive and inspiring range of projects. I am excited to live in the world where these dreams become reality. What a cool project, Scott.

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Yes. And people seeing these get funded and what happens as a consequence may well be amazing. :)

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Definitely bookmarking this post. Excited to follow up over the next few months and years to see where a lot of them end up :)

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Scott has some interesting thoughts outside the mainstream such that I am tentatively excited for some of these grants. If 20%+ end up paying off at least somewhat that would considerably raise the prestige and interest in later ACX grants I'd think.

I assume Scott has already done a forecasting success thing that he will reveal some years from now about which ones he feels most confident about. Of course like start ups having a 1 or even 2 in 10 hit rate is actually quite good.

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I love the beetle one. Can we make that an ACX meme somehow?

(I also like that a nuclear war one showed up. EAers have always rated nuclear war and pandemic/bioterrorism as two of the 3 worst existential risks, but generally had an attitude that those two big problems were mostly better left to establishment government & science. Covd-19 suggests that this may have been misplaced confidence when it came to public health; perhaps we have misplaced confidence in the other one too.)

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Finally a scientific advance related to insects that doesn't require me to eat them! Here's hoping it works.

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Amen.

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Of course we wouldn't eat the beetles. Obviously.

Unless we ran out of other food or something.

Of course we wouldn't eat the beetles, except to fend off starvation in desperate🪲circumstances. Obviously.

But then, there's some elasticity around what counts as "desperate circumstances," depending on how the beetles taste.🪲And we can't very well claim to know the exact hedonic exchange rate between eating the beetles versus other🪲food sources, if we haven't tried them even once...

🪲Of course we wouldn't eat the beetles, except for experimental purposes, to determine under what circumstances🪲we should reconsider our anti-beetle-eating🪲stance. Obviously.

Also we should take the relative supply🪲🪲of beetles and other goods into consideration.🪲We do produce a lot of plastic waste,🪲after all. Look at them. Just crawling around,🪲not🪲being put to any better use...🪲🪲🪲

🪲🪲Of course🪲we should🪲put🪲🪲the beetles🪲to the🪲most🪲🪲🪲economically efficient🪲use.🪲Obviously.🪲And if that🪲🪲means eating them,🪲well,🪲it's not like🪲they🪲were so🪲bad that🪲one🪲🪲time...🪲🪲🪲🪲

🪲🪲🪲🪲Of🪲course🪲we should🪲🪲eat🪲the🪲beetles.🪲🪲🪲Obviously.🪲What🪲🪲else🪲are🪲🪲🪲our🪲🪲beetle-suppression🪲🪲🪲🪲crews🪲going🪲to🪲🪲eat?🪲🪲It's just🪲a🪲🪲🪲temporary emergency🪲🪲🪲measure.🪲The🪲🪲tide🪲🪲🪲🪲of🪲🪲🪲beetles🪲🪲will🪲🪲🪲recede🪲🪲once🪲🪲🪲🪲they🪲🪲🪲run out🪲🪲of🪲🪲🪲plastic🪲🪲to🪲🪲eat.🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲

🪲🪲🪲🪲Unless🪲🪲🪲they🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲turn🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲to🪲🪲🪲another🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲food🪲🪲🪲source.🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲

🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲Of🪲🪲🪲course🪲🪲🪲🪲the🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲beetles🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲wouldn't🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲eat🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲us.🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲Obviously.🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲🪲

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A beetle like that, you wouldn't eat all at once.

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That was strangely disturbing. Good job.

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Big Food has been feeding us bugs for decades. Ground red beetle is the standard red food coloring.

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Half of me loves the beetle one and half of me is thinking, if 20 years from now we're looking back on this and one of these has gone horribly wrong it's going to be that one.

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step 1: use plastic for almost everything, everywhere

step 2: breed beetles that can digest plastic

step 3: beetles escape from the lab, civilization collapses

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Beetles mutate to digest crude oil, quickly consume all remaining oil reserves.

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How would they get to the deep sea reserves?

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Yellow submarine.

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This comment is amazing

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There are already many species of bacteria that consume crude oil. They're all over the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, for example, where oil seeps from the sea floor and has for umpty millions of years. They're sometimes used to hasten the breakdown of oil when it's spilled accidentally.

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Estimated total plastic ever produced: c. 8.3bn tonnes (https://www.unep.org/interactive/beat-plastic-pollution/#:~:text=Researchers%20estimate%20that%20more%20than,landfill%20or%20the%20natural%20environment.).

CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels per year: c.35bn tonnes (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions)

So about three months equivalent of fossil fuel burning - not really a material consideration for a one-off even assuming a full plastic to CO2 conversion.

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I think the main concern is less the CO2 and more the plastic not being plastic anymore.

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Thank you. (Hmm I think there is a math mistake here. One ton of CO2 is 12/(12+2*16) tons of carbon, call it 1/3, so total carbon in plastic is equal to carbon (w/ hydrogen) that we burn every year. We should just burn all plastic and get whatever energy we can out of it.

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Yes, you're right, I didn't take into account the combustion chemistry (albeit it's not an order of magnitude difference).

You joke about burning plastic (I assume) but some forms are reasonably good feedstock for energy from waste power plants (assuming you've got all your filters up to date to clean out the toxic emissions resulting from it). That said, it's not a particularly efficient fuel by any means, but it's just a way to get some use out of what would otherwise go to landfill.

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I specifically came here to say the same thing - these are generally great, but the plastic beetle one seems the most perfect fit for this kind of grant. Some smart biologist just needs a bit of funding for some equipment to keep beetles in; low probability of success, potentially hugely impactful.

To address a comment below, I'm not too concerned about catastrophic risk on this one as the plastic itself is unlikely to be nourishing enough to sustain explosive population growth. Perhaps the ideal outcome is that there is some kind of cheap spray that makes the plastic much more digestible to the beetles, thereby controlling spread (but that's a problem that only happens if this project is *wildly* successful).

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I'm not even sure the probability of success is very low...

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Covid-19 has boosted my skepticism of establishment government & science so much as to make me fear for the entire EA project - I feel like if we don't find a way to address rampant demosclerosis nothing else matters, nothing else will work. I'd feel a lot happier if any of Scott's grants or Zvi's grants explicitly addressed the issue. Or if I had an idea of my OWN to address it - I might then have applied for a grant myself!

I just keep noticing that in areas of concern for which people successfully "raise awareness" the government's response is to build a bureaucracy to "address" the issue...and that bureaucracy near-inevitably makes the problem WORSE.

The TSA, created to make travel statistically safer, makes airports SO "safe" as to become so inconvenient/expensive/annoying it causes more people to drive instead of fly. The increased driving means more car accidents; net effect (at least on the current margin) is to make travel statistically less safe.

Nuclear power regulations, created to make power generation safer, require SO MUCH "safety" that nuclear power plants are unaffordable and take too long to develop, so states end up relying more on coal/oil/gas for baseline power. Which is more polluting and kills more people (mining accidents and air pollution); net effect is to make power generation less safe.

The FDA/CDC/WHO, created to make us healthier, have killed over 100,000 Americans in the last few years (and a great many foreigners) by postponing vaccine approval, by preventing cheap instant covid tests or challenge tests, by not letting firms update vaccines to new variants or letting them optimize dosage levels to produce more doses or letting them optimize vaccine timing to improve effectiveness etcetera; net effect is to make us less healthy. (and fewer of us alive).

If we can't fix this dynamic I have to expect the result of *successfully* bringing more attention to nuclear war prevention or asteroid strike prevention or unfriendly AI prevention or what-have-you is that once we show the way - once we demonstrate progress along a promising path toward improving things - our government will make these issues a priority and form an Official Department to be in charge of each issue whereupon said departments will end up making THESE problems worse too.

We might be better off trying to fix these kind of problems IN SECRET to avoid regulatory attention! A private EA cabal with secret symbols, handshakes, meetings. Like the FreeMasons.

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I hadn't thought about the net effects of nuclear power regulations and TSA hassles. But you have to think about the public reaction to those: how would the public feel about having a nuclear reactor built if the government wasn't endorsing it as safe to an extreme extent? And would people be willing to fly in a post-9/11 world without the security theater of TSA? It's true that the regulatory agencies may have swung the pendulum too far toward safety, but the public probably wouldn't accept is as far the other way as you might like.

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Without the TSA (especially once we privatize the airports and air control) it would be between airlines, their insurers, and their customers what level of security is chosen. Security measures that aren’t cost-effective (eg taking off shoes because one crazy guy once tried a thing involving shoes that failed and couldn’t possibly have worked) would tend to fall by the wayside. Measures which *actually matter* (eg, hardening the cockpit doors) would tend to stay. The reason the dumb measures would go away is that companies could offer lower prices by getting rid of that stuff.

Personally I would pay EXTRA for a flight with NO SECURITY AT ALL at the customer level. Let people walk straight to the gate without lining up anywhere at all. Let ‘em even have open-carry or concealed-carry guns if they like!

The funny thing is that this level of security *already exists* in the form of small-airport private planes. Very rich people CAN get on a plane with no security; it’s just us plebes in the cattle-car planes that can’t!

Allow companies to COMPETE on security and some may pick more, others less. If everybody LIKES getting felt up by wand-wielding morons after a Rapiscan pass then that will remain the standard but maybe one or two lines experiment with less to drop prices; if it works then more follow.

The main argument FOR federalizing this stuff is externality-based - if a low-security plane gets hijacked and hits a building that affects the people in the building too. But that specific kind of attack became impossible moments after 9/11 and remains so; it’s just not worth worrying about.

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9/11 revealed the massive externalities possible from unsecured plane flight, and not just hijacking - also bombing, or bargaining with passenger lives. That security theater wasn't just for passengers' peace of mind, but for everyone in a building that might be struck by a runaway plane. I don't think the mass public would tolerate a full libertarian approach.

Also, how are businesses even going to learn which security measures are effective and which aren't? Counting the number of terrorist attacks that happen under each security regime? I don't think that would be tolerable either.

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Fun fact about the TSA: The transporter booth you have to stand in spread-eagled every time you want to board a flight is an X-ray backscatter scanner. When the TSA introduced them, I got a copy of the paper cited to justify the claim that they were safe (which sadly I can't discover the title of now). The paper had shown that if you divide the amount of ionizing radiation shot at a passenger by the volume of the passenger, you got a radiation density considerably lower than levels considered safe for that particular type of radiation.

Unfortunately, most of the radiation is absorbed or scattered by the first 1.5 cm of human, so the radiation density in the parts actually irradiated (mostly skin and subq fat) is much greater than the average over the entire body's volume.

EDIT: BUT not nearly as much greater as I thought when I began typing this. Approximating myself as a perfect sphere of radius 120mm, I find that the average radiation density in the outmost 15mm of spherical me, which gets half of the radiation, is only 1.5 times as great as the average over my entire spherical volume.

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But why not termites? They already have the gut biome that breaks down wood.

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The chemical problems are very different. The problem with digesting cellulose is prying apart the tightly-wound fibers to get access to the individual polysaccharide chains, and then cutting some of the glycosidic links (C-O-C linkages). That is, wood is chemically quite different from oil.

If you want to digest the most common plastics, the problem is that (1) they are not soluble, so it must be done in the gut by something that can digest things outside its body fluids, i.e. bacteria, and (2) your organism must be able to oxidize C-C bonds without any kind of chemical "handle" to hold onto them. (Our own mitochondria can oxidize them easily, but only if they have a carboxyl group at the head to grab onto.) Note that it can't oxidize just any old C-C bond, because of course then it would destroy itself.

Even then, it's going to be difficult to find or breed something that can break the benzene rings in polystyrene. They are very sturdy, and it is possible your bacteria, fed polystyrene, might only excrete a variety of small substituted benzenes, which would be worse than useless, since they have a decent chance of being carcinogens.

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Thanks Carl, so you predict no plastic eating bugs in the near future.

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Yes, that would be my odds-on guess.

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I think this whole process is awesome. I am excited to see follow-ups with the projects, and would also be interested in seeing which projects weren't funded but might still be interesting, like "runner-ups or honorary ideas". The beetle project and automated / hybrid tutoring seemed very cool to me; I don't know too much about biotech. but it would be cool if someone did a project to modify bacteria/insects/algae to be more nutritious (e.g., altering the taste of crickets or consumable-bacterial-growths) / produce more energy / consume-convert wastes into useful things.

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My impression has always been that 4-7 or so, if you select them well, is a superior option for small scall education creating amazing outcomes. 1 on 1 is well ahead of 1-35 and has some advantages in curriculum tailoring, though.

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>Despite the growing importance of this field, there are relatively few technical biosecurity centers in the US, and the West Coast is underrepresented. This causes serious problems like poor pandemic readiness, limited understanding of biowarfare risks, and the biosecurity grad student who I'm dating living 3,000 miles away from me.

One of these problems is not like the other ones 😂

Here in Boston, to me it seems like there are lots of biotech people but few biosecurity specialists. I think they're concentrated around Washington DC.

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Washington D.C. makes sense. Why is Boston such a biotech hub? My initial hypothesis is proximity to a certain pair of prestigious universities, but I imagine there could be other reasons.

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Development at Kendall Square (right behind MIT) has been targeted to biotech for a few years now. (This may be more of a description than an explanation, or half/half.)

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The universities started it, but then comes clustering effects and targeted development. We just lost a beloved long-time food market to new lab space. What's really weird is driving around Cambridge and Watertown seeing billboards advertising reagents, next to the usual ads for fast food.

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>What's really weird is driving around Cambridge and Watertown seeing billboards advertising reagents

Oh yeah, the first time I saw it, I was shocked.

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The other Cambridge (uk) is also a biotech hub.

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the universities help, but we also have a number of really great hospitals.

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Before this Pandemic, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins were the only two universities that had a decent program in it I could find. Not surprising the experts would concentrate in DC, if that's where they studied. I predict many more will appear in coming years.

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Scott is usually so private! I'm so surprised he snuck that in there!

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Congrats Scott!

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I'm glad to see several worthy projects got funded! I'm especially looking forward to Michael Todhunter's results.

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You are a cool dude

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This is delightful to see and makes me feel optimistic about the rationalist community having a growing, positive impact on the world.

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> This is the part where I post applications publicly on the blog (if you gave me permission) and readers can look at them and decide to support them or not. About 500 of you gave me permission to do this, and your applications together total about 1,500 pages of text. Substack probably won’t let me write a blog post this long, and you guys won’t read it even if I do, so I’m still thinking about how I want to handle this. Please give me until sometime in January to work something out, but rest assured, I haven’t forgotten about this.

I have a suggestion here. You have 500 ACX++ grants. I'd first weed out the ones you find objectionable. That not only do you not want to fund but you think lack merit. Then I'd pair them in small groups of highly different proposals. Then I'd let each person do a paragraph in a public Open Thread and tell them to be there to answer questions. The ones who won't agree are forfeiting their right to be included in ++.

I suspect this will cut down the number significantly. Those that remain will be rationed out over a year. But in exchange the grantees will get more exposure than people hunting through 2,000 pages or a huge database. And if you like it you can do this on a rolling basis instead of making it into a huge Christmas nut to be cracked like you did this year. (It'll also give you more content for however you weigh that.)

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Seconding this. You need some kind of filter and this one has several advantages.

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Thirding. As one of the 500 people, I would be in favor of some kind of “write an additional paragraph explaining your project” (perhaps a condensation of the original proposal) and I definitely want to second of the above commentor suggestion of an open thread participation for the AC X plus plus people.

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Agreed. As someone with a rather speculative proposal that consumes almost no money apart from my own time, I was planning to post in an open thread if I didn't get "funded" anyway. (I already noted in my application that attention and "signal boosting" is more relevant for my project than money)

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500 paragraphs is a whole lot of paragraphs. Even if half of them are meritless, 250 paragraphs is a whole lot of paragraphs. And lots of people never bother with comments on posts, especially open threads.

I think a better idea might be a single post, sorted into categories, with a very short sentence description of each grant as a link to the pages of text in the application, hosted somewhere else. It'd be a very long post, but if it's sorted into categories, people can peruse it for ideas they find interesting, link to the outside information to read more on it, and decide what to do. And maybe the links could include a place to ask and answer questions from founders.

It would probably take a lot of work to set this up, but Scott could probably pay someone to do it.

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I like the idea, but this approach would require someone to read 500 ask-me-anything threads, summarize and interpret them, and then pick winners. I recommend also using some other web platform that can automatically collect votes or ratings from paying ACX subscribers, in order to circumvent the Scott-reads-10,000-comments step.

(Paying subscribers in order to reduce potential fraud, to get more paying subscribers, and because having the people who provide the money get to say where it goes would, by some long-standing but now aggressively-disputed standards, be more just, and motivate them to think more carefully.)

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Earlier today Matthew Yglesias had a tweet about how despite widespread belief that numerous government institutions failed during the pandemic, there's been virtually no legislative effort to change anything. So I'm really glad to see ACX putting $100k toward a better FDA. Trying to fix what's broken instead of just having fun complaining. Hell yeah!

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Oh, and as a biologist I want to strongly endorse the cell culture media testing project. This is the exact kind of thing that is 1) really important and 2) in a kind of hole where it's not the kind of thing any science funding agency would like to fund.

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Strong agree - this one is tied with the beetle one for best application in my view. Making the process of doing science less onerous/painful is huge (not to mention the waste in having extremely smart people spending >50% of their time fiddling with petri dishes and whatnot, and another 20% writing grant applications...)

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Kinda disagree on 2) Nsf funded Dr block $3.5million, part of which is on cell culture media optimisation.( https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/uc-davis-establishes-research-training-cultivated-meat). Will be intresting to see how this builds on existing academic work that uses genetic algorithms and robotic handling machined.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-019-0296-7

Optimization of muscle cell culture media using nonlinear design of experiments

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Agreed.

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A lot of the stuff that did fail is just not sexy enough for politics to care. Stuff that might be handled by MY's "secret congress" but even there not a huge priority.

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It seems like the incentives in American democracy don't actually work toward effective government on the national level. If your local city council can't keep the streets clean, they might get voted out, but very rarely will people vote for a different congressperson or president based on how competent the FDA is.

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Agreed.

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Sadly, 100k would be a drop in the bucket regarding FDA lobbying.

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love everything about this, thank you for putting in so much effort Scott <3

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This is super amazing work from all involved.

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This is inspiring!

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Especially so when you consider that the initial announcement was made on November 12

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"SD, $5,000, to fund an honors' thesis on neutrino research. S is an undergraduate who wants to work on neutrino physics with one of his professors, but needs outside funding to be sure it will work."

SD, if you're out there and want any outside help / input / collaboration, please feel free to reach out. I'm a particle physics postdoc (mostly working on dark matter), know a thing or two about neutrinos, and think your idea is super interesting and useful. If nothing else I can connect you with people working in neutrino physics who may be more helpful than me. You can reach me at

joshaebyATgmailDOTCOM

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SD here! I've emailed you - thanks for the help! I always, always appreciate advice from people who have been doing this for longer than I have.

If anyone else has any input or just wants to talk about the project, feel free to email me at sd10(at)williams(dot)edu (maybe should have asked Scott to put this in the main post but I figure I'll do the self-promo thing at some point closer to the time I begin my work, which should do the trick).

Again, thanks a bunch!

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I've worked on various neutrino experiments during my (ongoing) career as a particle physicist, though neutrinos aren't my primary focus. Regarding your idea, i just wanted to make sure you're aware of WATCHMAN: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01132, http://svoboda.ucdavis.edu/experiments/watchman/, https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/physics/research/particle/neutrino/watchman. (Meant to be informative, not discouraging - new ideas in this realm or contributions to the existing project are both valuable!)

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Yeah, I actually mentioned WATCHMAN (and Nucifer, although I don't think they take Americans) in my grant application. I want to join them ASAP or at least work in parallel with them. Thanks!

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Well done Scott. It doesn’t look like being “outed” by the NYT was a bad thing in the end. I hope to do some small contribution. I’ll also sign up here.

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Thank you for this initiative, Scott. It has surfaced many worthwhile endeavors. It is admirable that you took on all the related effort, with the help of many supporters and funders.

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> if they're smart enough to attempt this project, they're smart enough to know about XYZ Grants which is better suited for them (...)

This sounds like the grant reviewers assume that "likely to succeed at project" is very strongly correlated with "able to navigate searching for funding". For some of the projects that got awarded this sounds eminently sensible to me (e.g. the affect public policy things), but not for others (e.g. most of biology-adjacent projects). I wonder if I'm wrong about the latter (i.e. if success at projects that ostensibly are not about influencing people is strongly correlated with ability to navigate social mazes). Thoughts?

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I think the grant reviewers already took that into account because they're domain specialists, judging by (for instance) the remark for Todhunter's grant: "I'm not sure anyone will use this, except for me personally I WOULD LOVE THIS SO MUCH", seconded by commenter and biologist Ivan Fyodorovich above: "I want to strongly endorse the cell culture media testing project. This is the exact kind of thing that is 1) really important and 2) in a kind of hole where it's not the kind of thing any science funding agency would like to fund"

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The bigger problem I have with this line of thinking is the assumption that

> if XYZ doesn't fund these people then that's strong evidence that they shouldn't be funded

If Scott doesn't fund an applicant, is that strong evidence they shouldn't be funded? It seems obvious the answer is no given the limited amount of people he can fund and the large number of applicants. Why should this not be true for other grantmakers? The assumption here seems to be some variant of the just world fallacy where P(is funded | should be funded) = 1, but it seems more likely that this number is quite low.

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I share this concern. It can be obviated with a note saying "Sorry ACX didn't fund you, but you should seriously consider applying for an XYZ grant".

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I realized this actually makes sense IF it means "since the applications get passed to ACXG+ anyway, let's pick up the ones they're unlikely to fund", but otherwise I agree it's weird (see my top-level comment below)

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awesome

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2021: the year when a blog about medicine, rationality, and fighting Moloch funded a research program about breeding beetles.

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Seriously this is one of the ones I'm most interested in hearing follow-ups about

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I know right? I'm going to continue joking about beetle eugenics but the project is super interesting (also) for non-meme reasons.

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Beetles which can biodegrade plastic strike me as worryingly double-edged. Plus side, plastic not hanging out in the environment forever is probably better for us, and for the global ecosystem at large. Minus side, aren't there things made out of plastic where its non-biodegradingness is essential to their function? Is anyone in charge of knowing the full list of things which might fail catastrophically if plastic-biodegrading beetles were released into the environment?

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My thoughts exactly. Termites (wood eating insects) are a huge problem in some parts of the world. It would be awful if similar issues arose with plastic.

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"Society will be destroyed by a bug!" ... no, a literal bug.

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We could always go full on science apocalypse and have an island where we ship plastics loaded with beetles that eventually results in our destruction when they learn to cover the distance to the mainland, possibly through micro-evolution. There are worse apocalyptic scenarios. This one seems almost fun by comparison. Michael Crichton would have to be simulated on a super-computer to write the novel.

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According to the application, the beetles can only get a small amount of their subsistence from plastic and wouldn't be very good at this in any case. What the researcher actually wants is the gut microbes, with the hopes that once we understand them better we can figure out some way to use them at scale. Breeding the beetles in a plastic-enriched environment is a means to get better microbes. The microbes presumably can't escape the beetles without human help. At least this is my current understanding.

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I can't help side-eyeing the "presumably" there. If plastic-biodegrading bacteria gained the ability to survive independently of the beetles, there's an awfully rich ecological niche waiting for them out there.

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Seconded.

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This is more worrisome than what I originally thought: first I thought, "Well, if we need boats or landfill liners or nuclear waste containers or whatever to survive the beetles, I guess the beetles can't eat them without oxygen, and we can always lace them with insecticides." I don't insecticides that will work that well with bacteria, and gut bacteria are presumably already anaerobic. So maybe we'll have to resort to teflon or geopolymers or something in order to build bacteria-proof things in the Grim Beetle Future.

On the plus side, the bacteria probably smell better than darkling beetles do.

(Just to be clear, I think the research should definitely be done; I'm just not sure whether deploying the results in the wild would be good or bad.)

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Glass and metal still work good.

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I mean, anaerobic bacteria TYPICALLY are outcompeted by aerobic bacteria in situations with plenty of oxygen. Specialization is a big deal for bacteria, so I would expect it to be much much harder to get gut bacteria to thrive in a place they could digest plastic for us than it is to make efficient plastic-eating gut bacteria in the first place.

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A somewhat related alternative - making some plastics/materials more biodegradable eg. The BioMask https://www.canadianshieldppe.ca/blogs/the-canadian-shield-blog/the-biomask™-infographic

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I don't understand, isn't this just a much *better* outcome than the one projected in the grant? It seems increasingly clear that plastic was a terrible mistake from the get-go, and if Scott's grant intervention leads ultimately to a world where we have to go back to glass, steel, ceramics and tin with a small dash of bakelite (a resin) for flavor because any plastic will just get devoured by omnipresent microbes before you have time to use it, that will be a massive improvement on all fronts.

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My prior is that plastics are an integral part of modern life in such a way that we couldn't have much of what we have *at the price we have it for*. In other words, much of the world would be much worse off without the existence of plastics. The "terrible mistake" seems to be not using plastics judiciously, not that plastics exist.

That being said, I have no special insight or knowledge and could be convinced otherwise.

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"My prior is that plastics are an integral part of modern life in such a way that we couldn't have much of what we have *at the price we have it for*."

I think this is almost certainly correct (notably, every post-celluloid data storage medium including film that doesn't burn your house down is plastic-based), and I'm willing to bite that bullet. To me, plastic seems like our time's equivalent of asbestos. It's no good telling people how practical it is that once your gloves get dirty you can just throw them into the fire and they're sparkling clean again.

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What would a world without plastic look like?

Non-OBSF*: "The Great Fog" by H. F. Heard, in which a very fast mildew takes over the world and rots everything that can rot. There's a fog which makes smoke stay and be intolerable. No wood, no paper... as I recall, humanity is limited to using glass and stone. Fortunately, the fog moderates temperatures and produces sufficient stuff that's good to eat.

* In rec.arts.sf.written, it was a custom to add OBSF (obligatory sf) to posts that weren't about sf.

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And SF in this case is... science fiction? So you're pointing out that this is science fiction, even when you're not obligated to point it out?

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Yes, SF is science fiction.

More that I'm pointing out that this is science fiction, even though I'm not obligated to include it. I tend to see the world through science fiction.

I reread the story. My description is mostly correct. except that I hadn't noticed that the climate-changing mold was the result of an effort to produce a fat-producing mold. Also, there was a big die-off of the people who couldn't handle living in a very humid environment. It was published in1943, so there was no notion of a high proportion of people dependent on medicine.

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Well, among other things, no hip replacements, no arterial grafts, no cardiac catheterization to stop heart attacks, no single-use medical instruments so loads more iatrogenic infection and death from same.

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The result of the great fog was presented as utopian, and it might actually be a net gain.

People couldn't see to go faster than four miles an hour, though I think Heard was underestimating how well people could go with cleared, familiar paths. It would still be running, at most. Horses couldn't see as well as people.

No war, no car accidents, nothing much to accumulate. Fine stone musical instruments might be about it for valuable items.

Note that this was written in the 1940s, so most of what you're mentioning didn't exist yet. If people are moving more slowly and not using a lot of edged tools, there would be fewer accidents of all sorts.

They live pretty much on food produced by the mold, so a lot of the less healthy food isn't there, and the premise seems to imply that the moss food is at least nutritionally adequate.

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Any and all plastic could be totally re-used if only we chose to invest a little bit of energy. It isn't currently economically cost-effective to do so, but if we really wanted to get rid of plastic we could. We just lack the will.

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Where can I read more about this? I was under the, likely mistaken, impression that we know how to reuse some plastics, but for vast majority of them once they are polymerized we don't have better ideas than "burn them at high temperature to recover simple compounds".

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So warning that I am not a chemist, so I probably don't have all the details quite correct, and am just giving my semi-educated opinion. Burn them at high temperature is basically what I am talking about, but why is that such a problem? Well, because it ends up costing energy.

The way we make plastics now is we start with petroleum, which contains lots of molecules that contain more than three carbon atoms, break them down into mostly molecules that contain less than three (ok, we keep a lot of hex rings too) then re-combine those smaller molecules into large chains of polymer. There is no particular reason we can't start with carbon-containing trash, and use similar processes as we use to crack/refine oil to turn it into the same chemical feed-stocks we use to make plastic.

The reason we don't do this is energy. Oil is actually insanely cheap. I know Americans like to complain when gas costs more than $4 a gallon but. $75 for a 55 gallon drum of oil is extremely cheap. Do you know how much a 55 gallon drum it? It's like the size of a person. If you could buy jugs of oil in the supermarket it would be cheaper than almost anything else, except maybe bottled water.

Because is so cheap, oil refineries burn a substantial amount of their cheapest products to generate the energy required to form their more expensive products that are used to make things like plastic. We can't really do this with garbage because it would generate tons of pollution and garbage isn't as energy dense as petroleum. But if we had much more abundant, cheap energy we could. We wouldn't even need to burn the garbage, we could heat it in a kiln to recover and re-use essentially all of the carbon and other toxins.

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