Buck Shlegeris: What’s an example of the world being good at dealing with a high stakes problem?
Rohin Shah: I feel like biotech seems reasonably well handled, relatively speaking.
I think I did not actually communicate my point of view well in this section. I don’t think that we’re doing “as well as we should be” on biosecurity, and I do think it is very worthwhile for people to focus on improving biosecurity.
The fact that seems surprising and worth updating on is that despite the fact that we study dangerous pathogens, we perform gain-of-function research, and we have / had bioweapons programs, we still haven’t had any catastrophic accidents from biosecurity (as measured by number of people who died) -- I think the worst one was the 1971 Sverdlovsk anthrax which left ~100 dead.
(For this comment I’m going to assume that COVID was a “natural” pandemic and didn’t e.g. escape from a Chinese lab where it was being studied. If actually COVID was a failure of biosecurity, that would be a significant update on my views about biosecurity.)
It’s possible that this is actually explained by the fact that there haven’t been many opportunities for catastrophic accidents to arise, because the diseases we study couldn’t have caused a catastrophe (e.g. while anthrax is extremely lethal, it isn’t very transmissible). In that case, I think there shouldn’t be much of an update. (You would still update on the lack of catastrophes with nuclear weapons, where it does seem like they definitely could have caused a catastrophe, but somehow haven’t for several decades.)
For now I’m going to assume that COVID was a “natural” pandemic and didn’t e.g. escape from a Chinese lab where it was being studied. If actually COVID was a failure of biosecurity, that would be a significant update for me.
If your epistemic state is “I’m very confident (90%+) that this was a natural pandemic” then you can make some money betting on this.
It’s not; I haven’t looked into it all and don’t have an opinion on it. I’m more flagging “this is an important bit I would want to know”, and thinking about what my opinion should be whichever way the bit comes out, and deferring to the future to figure out the value of the bit (because knowing the answer sooner doesn’t matter that much).
Tbc, when this podcast was recorded, I hadn’t encountered the hypothesis that the pandemic wasn’t natural (or perhaps I thought it wasn’t credible at the time, there was some period of time where it seemed to mostly be a conspiracy theory), or I probably wouldn’t have said anything about biosecurity.
I agree there’s a good chance the bet wouldn’t resolve. That said, you’d probably pick a trusted arbiter and a date and let that person say if they have more than 80% confidence on that date then the bet resolved to what they believe. Or something like that, there are other setups.
I think I did not actually communicate my point of view well in this section. I don’t think that we’re doing “as well as we should be” on biosecurity, and I do think it is very worthwhile for people to focus on improving biosecurity.
The fact that seems surprising and worth updating on is that despite the fact that we study dangerous pathogens, we perform gain-of-function research, and we have / had bioweapons programs, we still haven’t had any catastrophic accidents from biosecurity (as measured by number of people who died) -- I think the worst one was the 1971 Sverdlovsk anthrax which left ~100 dead.
(For this comment I’m going to assume that COVID was a “natural” pandemic and didn’t e.g. escape from a Chinese lab where it was being studied. If actually COVID was a failure of biosecurity, that would be a significant update on my views about biosecurity.)
It’s possible that this is actually explained by the fact that there haven’t been many opportunities for catastrophic accidents to arise, because the diseases we study couldn’t have caused a catastrophe (e.g. while anthrax is extremely lethal, it isn’t very transmissible). In that case, I think there shouldn’t be much of an update. (You would still update on the lack of catastrophes with nuclear weapons, where it does seem like they definitely could have caused a catastrophe, but somehow haven’t for several decades.)
If your epistemic state is “I’m very confident (90%+) that this was a natural pandemic” then you can make some money betting on this.
It’s not; I haven’t looked into it all and don’t have an opinion on it. I’m more flagging “this is an important bit I would want to know”, and thinking about what my opinion should be whichever way the bit comes out, and deferring to the future to figure out the value of the bit (because knowing the answer sooner doesn’t matter that much).
Tbc, when this podcast was recorded, I hadn’t encountered the hypothesis that the pandemic wasn’t natural (or perhaps I thought it wasn’t credible at the time, there was some period of time where it seemed to mostly be a conspiracy theory), or I probably wouldn’t have said anything about biosecurity.
How would you settle the bet?
I agree there’s a good chance the bet wouldn’t resolve. That said, you’d probably pick a trusted arbiter and a date and let that person say if they have more than 80% confidence on that date then the bet resolved to what they believe. Or something like that, there are other setups.