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: Coronavirus Research Ideas for EAs, published by Peter Wildeford on the effective altruism forum. write a Review COVID-19 is a tragedy with more everyday social implications in the developed world than anything since World War II. Many EAs are wondering what, if anything, to do about COVID to help the world. To try to investigate further, I am helping articulate possible research ideas for further discussion and consideration. The kind of research we need to do in this situation is very different from the kind of research EA is used to doing well. We normally spend several months carefully researching a single topic that doesn’t change very much. With COVID, everything about this is reversed—the situation currently requires us to rapidly get up to speed and produce research in a matter of days in a situation that is rapidly changing. There is an exponentially growing “speed premium”—much more than we’ve ever seen. As such, please note that we have waived our normal review and quality check standards to get this out ASAP and there may be considerable mistakes in this article. On the other hand, I do urge some degree of caution and humility. Let’s not all collectively lose our minds. We should worry at least some about armchair epidemiology from non-experts (though also see this) and properly recognize what our skills are and aren’t, where we can contribute and where we shouldn’t. We should also be careful that research done at breakneck speed is more likely to be wrong. I'm a bit worried that many people will want to work on this topic just so they don't feel helpless in the face of the pandemic, or because there’s a lot of attention being paid to it now, or that it feels high-status and urgent, or many other reasons unconnected from EA-related impact. It can be really tough to see your community, friends, family, and self hurting and not feel like there’s much you can do. However, the work EA was doing before this pandemic still remains of importance now. If you can contribute to the anti-COVID effort that is great, but it is also fine (sometimes even preferable!) to continue to research what you were researching before. Naturally, these research questions were put together rapidly and may continue to evolve rapidly. I numbered the questions to make them easier to reference and discuss. They’re grouped by topic. Note that the numbering system may get a bit weird as I add new questions without wanting to renumber all the other questions. I am trying to keep numbers stable so they can be referred to as shorthand. Questions vary a lot in their urgency, importance, tractability, and neglectedness. If you’re already up to speed, I think questions 1, 3, 4, 14, 15, 19, 21, 22 and 33 are particularly important and urgent to look into right now. I’m not sure how best to coordinate around these and other questions... the question of coordination itself should be the subject of active research (see question 3). For now, feel free to comment here, or centralize on LessWrong and the “Effective Altruism Coronavirus Discussion” FB group. If you intend to dedicate significant effort to any of these questions, it might also be worth you joining our cross-org Slack group—comment here or email me (peter@rethinkpriorities.org) to be added. I do think we should try to communicate early and often about our progress and aim to produce results quickly and share with others. Note that this isn’t the only compilation of coronavirus research questions. I also know of LessWrong’s agenda and this list of questions. I will try to keep this all up to date as rapidly as I can. Meta-Research 1.) Just how bad are things right now? How bad might we expect it to get? What is the current state of play and what are various plausible scenarios forward? [PRIORITY] The COVID-19 pandemic is a rapidly escalat...