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Anyone know when they will resolve these markets?

This is hardcore end of the world survivalist stuff! I think the funding calculation needs to pay careful attention to probability when deciding which issues to prioritise. For example, another major disease pandemic will almost certainly happen in the next 10 years. For this project to achieve any actual utility the world basically has to end, and soon! Then we have to factor in its chances of success, which are never going to be 100%. If it succeeds, its findings would only be a tiny part of the puzzle for survival. Even if humanity needs extinction shelters in 100 or 200 years, the results of this project will be long-lost or technology will have moved forward. Although this project sounds interesting, I don’t think it actually ranks highly on impact at all.

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“At this point, it seems very doubtful that people in refuges would be the sole survivors of a period of intense destruction, and somewhat doubtful that they would play a crucial role in recovering from a global food crisis or social collapse….”

https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/1-s2.0-S0016328714001888-main.pdf

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More and more evidence that the core mission of Allfed makes sense (producing food in a nuclear winter) but that this project is way off target (not material, worse than competing alternatives, overbudgeted, under-ambitious, etc.)

They seem very strong at thinking about industrial/food-supply collapse—cases where you need and can support advanced tech; would blank-check fund that work regardless of their approach being completely unsuited to situations that benefit from low-tech/extant solutions (the rarer the event and less plausible it is, the simpler and more robust the solutions should be)

Let the Antarctic base designers (and the entire prepper ecosystem) build the shelters, and save the advanced tech for more than three people being alive.

Requested funding seems perhaps too high, but Clearer Thinking may offer a grant at a lower amount. I would easily buy YES at 68% if the requested funding was $100K or less. If the resolution criteria required funding the full amount, I'd lean toward NO.

This seems to be very much up the funders' street so probably will get something. Difficult to assess how much duplication there will be though with the whole food preservation industry.

This remains an egg-head project, specifically the ask is for $500k for a “feasibility analysis” without creating anything.

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The issues they propose to tackle (especially “nutritional analysis”) are somewhere between trivial and irrelevant—because existing solutions that are vastly more robust and cost-efficient already exist.

The fact they start with fragile, deep-tech engineering instead of giving any thought to basic solutions means they’d be a fine contractor to a serious organization studying the issue—but this would be about 1% of the budget, and not even really core to the overall proposal.

To the extent someone wanted to host an XPRIZE-style competition for major advances in human survivability, while shipping actual products, it still does not sound like this would be in the running.

While they do seem earnest, they’re just too disconnected from reality—it’s a like a 1990s era startup back when they wrote 50-page business plans instead of starting with the most important areas and iterating.

Nothing successful has ever been built this way (“send us money, and we’ll come back in two years with some hints of whether we think it’s a good idea to give us more money”); and the incentives are terrible.

If they proposed to develop something, or showed any signs of picking the most important issues to study—using robust, simple systems like in any crisis (war, famine, et. al.) meaning storing existing food, medicine, oxygen, and proven solutions in exiting natural shelters, it could be very interesting.

As proposed, you’d have to have no operating or real-world shipping experience to like what they’re offering here.

@Gigacasting
> While they do seem earnest, they’re just too disconnected from reality—it’s a like a 1990s era startup back when they wrote 50-page business plans instead of starting with the most important areas and iterating.
less "Startup", more "Raytheon Statement of Work"

@Gigacasting I second this for sure. I think this project only sounds good to people who don’t know about the space it’s in or competing alternatives.

Reading through the doc:

• I am a bit surprised that the project doesn't involve other participants from the SHELTER conference (<https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZkkeLBwRGgxmsiqrh/apply-to-join-shelter-weekend-this-august>). Naïvely I would expect this project to be a bit better if it incorporated/played nicely a few of the people/projects who've been working on this topic throughout EA, rather than making it an ALLFED-specific project. Maybe something I'm missing. I'd guess I'd prefer a centralized funder which is able to actually understand community dynamics here.

• I'd expect this project to be informative regardless

• The condition to not support organizations in general but only specific projects seems needlessly restrictive.

So overall I haven't spent all that much time thinking about this, but I'm pretty confident that e.g., $50-$100k for an associate researcher to work on this specifically would be worth it. Less sure about the full $500k, but again this is because I haven't spent that much time.

I would give essentially ~no credence to the comments by Gigacasting on this thread; they seem like the come from a system 1 that I don't particularly trust.

Also, I think that there is a difference between "is this project worth it" and "do I buy ALLFED's excitement/hype/...". Last time I looked at it, and it was a while ago (<https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xmmqDdGqNZq5RELer/shallow-evaluations-of-longtermist-organizations#Disagreements_and_Uncertainties>), I disagreed with their own numbers but still thought they were doing good work.

Sheltering Humanity against Existential Risks (SHELTER)

Disappointing that this is not an actual acronym.

Might be better to call them “Non-Extinction Shelters” (still doubt anyone writing this grant could survive a weekend of camping, and think it’s worse than 🔥 💵…)

There are cave systems with more miles than all the subways in the US; they obviously have heat shielding and handle plenty of full-lifecycle water/waste.

Whatever this project is—completely detached from reality or just grifty—there are already “survivalists” who have figured out the food storage part, and using “high tech” astronaut tech for water/waste would be insane.

Spend the $500k storing food in a cave systems but these authors would be the last people capable of surviving if they haven’t realized none of their proposals connect at all with reality.

@Gigacasting I strongly, strongly disagree with

none of their proposals connect at all with reality.

and the burden of proof for this is huge.

@NuñoSempere I think you are throwing too much shade. This makes some sense, because prediction markets are action markets, but it doesn't seem all that elegant.

Plausible but once again so grifty.

“Filling this knowledge gap would allow informed decision making to either rule out shelters as a cost effective x-risk intervention or catalyze development and deployment, estimated at 100 million to 1 billion USD (high value of information).”

Doing nutritional research (??) is about the least important aspect of figuring out how the last two people on earth would survive.

At what depth? Why did everyone die? What’s the exit plan from the shelter? How did they get there in time? Who goes in the shelter?

Just mismatched in every way. Make-work that moves no needles or answer none of the important questions.

(leaving aside that long-term storable food is a billion dollar industry already !)

@Gigacasting There is still uncertainty regarding whether all existing resilient communities and bunkers would suffice to protect against certain classes of threats, particularly a long latency extreme pandemic. If many people already are infected before society even realizes it's a pandemic, bunkers that are not continuously inhabited would not be effective. Proposals for surface independent refuges would have continuous staffing and very long quarantine time, such as 6 to 12 months. Also, even Cheyenne Mountain only has one year of stored food, while nuclear winter could last 10 years. Furthermore, it is not surface independent, so it is vulnerable to attack. Once one goes to the high probability of survival surface independence, then one cannot just burn diesel fuel and draw breathing oxygen from the atmosphere. It needs to be a closed system, so the typical proposal is using artificial light grown plants. However, this is extremely inefficient and expensive. Therefore, finding more efficient ways of converting electricity into food would dramatically reduce the overall cost of the systems. Furthermore, the problem of heat rejection if there is surface independence is difficult, so increasing food efficiency helps with that as well. If you would like more detail, please see these journal articles:

• https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3640731

• https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/publications/beckstead-n-2015-how-much-could-refuges-help-us-recover-from-a-global-catastrophe-futures-72-36-44/

• See also the many reports that were created and shared around the recent SHELTER event, linked in the full application.

Please also note that the first part of our project would be performing a probabilistic cost effectiveness analysis from the perspective of the long-term future (similar to this or this). This would take into account the probability of success of existing bunkers for a variety of scenarios. Since it has been proposed that EA spend $1 billion on a refuge, we think it is high priority to rigorously estimate whether this is a good way of improving the long-term future.

While you're correct that there are other crucial considerations (see that we had the ones you brought up in our research agenda https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m3KfmZCgYxCODSqx9eqluNX565jlWLECQtA22IfxrfI), we're not aiming to address every single uncertainty with this project.