EA - More than Earth Warriors: The Diverse Roles of Geoscientists in Effective Altruism by chanakin

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: More than Earth Warriors: The Diverse Roles of Geoscientists in Effective Altruism, published by chanakin on August 31, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.A global community of and for Effective Geoscientiststl;drWe, a small group of geoscientists want to gather a supportive community for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and placing geoscientists EAs in high impact roles.The use of geospatial data and spatial analysis is underrated. Four out of eight top charities from GiveWell have used geospatial data as part of their research. Particularly, we can have a significant impact in catastrophe resilience.We would like to advocate for more researchers and effective charities to consider including a geospatial dimension when conducting their studies.Currently, we will gather on channel role-geoscientists on EA Anywhere slack. Please join us if you are interested.We listed a few distilled topics that geoscientists EA might be interested in.AcknowledgementThe completion of this post would not have been possible without the extensive insight, advice, and knowledge shared by the following individuals: Prof. David Denkenberger, Ewelina Hornicka, Petya Kangalova, Leon Mayer, Dr. Kajetan Chrapkiewicz. Any mistakes or oversights in this post are solely my responsibility.Context and reason for establishmentFigure 1. Both expected impact and personal fit in our career choice reflect a power law.We want to gather an online community to bring together geoscientists of diverse disciplines. There are two motivations for starting this community. Firstly, we believe that geoscientists and geospatial data can offer value in multiple EA cause areas and intercause research. Secondly, we found that services of current EA infrastructure (e.g. High Impact Professional) did not adequately address the need for our niche speciality and comparative advantage of geoscientists. We want to inform the EA world that we geoscientists exist and our skills and domain expertise can contribute to high impact cause areas. Furthermore, we would like to advocate for more researchers to consider including a geospatial dimension when conducting their studies. Therefore, we would like to bring together geoscientists, current and future, that work in environmental anthropology, epidemiology, remote sensing, geophysics and more.We want to use this community to highlight existing geospatial research happening in the various cause areas, to support each other in interdisciplinary collaboration and place each other in high impact roles.What is geospatial data?We use geospatial data everyday, to track our movement, plan our commute. Geospatial data is any information with an addition of locality attached to it, this is usually represented by Longitude and Latitude. Geospatial data can come from many sources, from the satellite images and radar backscatter to submarine bathymetric surveys.Figure 2. Alexander von Humboldt's "A Portrait of Nature" in his famous book Der Kosmos (1849).The development of geospatial science and geospatial data emerged out of necessity. Cartography, the making of maps is the central activity of collecting and distilling geographical knowledge. Initially we made maps for navigation and exploration, then the map became a tool for managing communities, resources, and people, often involuntarily. The map room eventually became the centre of European colonialism in the Age of Discovery (Cresswell T., 2013), and the map room has remained a mainstay of today's military units' control and command. Nowadays, geospatial data are used broadly by ecologists and palaeontologists, by sailors and urban planners, by militaries and humanitarian workers alike. While people talk about the temporal component often, the spatial component often goes unnoticed. This post will attempt to demonstr...