It is a social movement that broadly aims to do the ‘most good’ in the world with limited resources. They advocate for making career choices and charitable donations that maximise altruistic impact. Their activities include writing research papers on ethics, analysing effectiveness of charitable organisations, giving career advice, and promoting pledges to donate a proportion of one’s income to charity. The main individuals who are credited with starting the movement are Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, both at the University of Oxford, and Australian moral philospher Peter Singer, at Princeton university.
Myself and a team of collaborators including Stuart Bedston at the University of Swansea, Declan Bradley at Queen’s University Belfast and Mark Joy at the University of Oxford recently published a paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology studying waning of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness. One of the major findings of the paper is that for first and second dose of AstraZeneca and first dose of Pfizer, effectiveness of the vaccine against COVID-19 hospitalisation or death reached zero by approximately day 60-80 after receiving the vaccine, and then went negative.
It’s an economic theory which, in a nutshell, says that full employment and funding of various other government programmes can be guaranteed by printing money, and the inflation that would normally ensue can be kept under control by taxation.
Indeed.
What if I told you there was a well-known, 100-year old theory of gravity that reproduces all empirical successes of Einstein’s general relativity, and may solve a who’s who of major oustanding problems in theoretical physics?
Its called Einstein-Cartan theory, or sometimes Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble (ECSK) theory. By the way, the eponymous Kibble is my “physics grandfather” - my PhD supervisor’s PhD supervisor.
Academics who code are, I think, somewhat known for their less than stellar creations. I have certainly written code that I would prefer didn’t see the light of day. A recent example that attracted a great deal of attention is Professor Neil Ferguson’s CovidSim. As the name suggests, it is a simulator of COVID-19 transmission that works by creating artificial agents representing people and environments that they interact with, in much the same way as the SimCity series of games but without the funky graphics. It was the basis of a paper that is credited with fundamentally altering the course of the UK’s COVID-19 policy. The paper predicted that even under the optimal ‘mitigation’ strategy that was considered, the peak surge capacity of ICU beds in the UK would be exceeded 8-times over due to the pandemic. As of the date of writing, it has 3,910 citations.