Thanks for sharing a specific answer! I appreciate the detail and willingness to engage.
I don’t have the requisite biopolitical knowledge to weigh in on whether the approach you mentioned seems promising, but it does qualify as something someone could have been doing pre-COVID, and a plausible intervention at that.
My default assumptions for cases of “no one in EA has funded X”, in order from most to least likely:
No one ever asked funders in EA to fund X.
Funders in EA considered funding X, but it seemed like a poor choice from a (hits-based or cost-effectiveness) perspective.
Funders in EA considered funding X, but couldn’t find anyone who seemed like a good fit for it.
Various other factors, including “X seemed like a great thing to fund, but would have required acknowledging something the funders thought was both true and uncomfortable”.
In the case of this specific plausible thing, I’d guess it was (2) or (3) rather than (1). While anything involving China can be sensitive, Open Phil and other funders have spent plenty of money on work that involves Chinese policy. (CSET got $100 million from Open Phil, and runs a system tracking PRC “talent initiatives” that specifically refers to China’s “military goals” — their newsletter talks about Chinese AI progress all the time, with the clear implication that it’s a potential global threat.)
That’s not to say that I think (4) is impossible — it just doesn’t get much weight from me compared to those other options.
FWIW, as far as I’ve seen, the EA community has been unanimous in support of the argument “it’s totally fine to debate whether this was a lab leak”. (This is different from the argument “this was definitely a lab leak”.) Maybe I’m forgetting something from the early days when that point was more controversial, or I just didn’t see some big discussion somewhere. But when I think about “big names in EA pontificating on leaks”, things like this and this come to mind.
*****
Do you know of anyone who was trying to build out the gain-of-function project you mentioned during the time before the pandemic? And whether they ever approached anyone in EA about funding? Or whether any organizations actually considered this internally?
See my reply above, but this was actually none of your 4 options—it was “funders in EA were pouring money into this as quickly as they could find people willing to work on it.”
And the reasons no-one was pushing the specific proposal of “publicly shame China into stopping [so-called] GoF work” include the fact that US labs have done and still do similar work in only slightly safer conditions, as do microbiologists everywhere else, and that building public consensus about something no-one but a few specific groups of experts care about isn’t an effective use of funds.
Thanks for the further detail. It sounds like this wasn’t actually a case of “no one in EA has funded X”, which makes my list irrelevant.
(Maybe the first item on the list should be “actually, people in EA are definitely funding X”, since that’s something I often find when I look into claims like Christian’s, though it wasn’t obvious to me in this case.)
Thanks for sharing a specific answer! I appreciate the detail and willingness to engage.
I don’t have the requisite biopolitical knowledge to weigh in on whether the approach you mentioned seems promising, but it does qualify as something someone could have been doing pre-COVID, and a plausible intervention at that.
My default assumptions for cases of “no one in EA has funded X”, in order from most to least likely:
No one ever asked funders in EA to fund X.
Funders in EA considered funding X, but it seemed like a poor choice from a (hits-based or cost-effectiveness) perspective.
Funders in EA considered funding X, but couldn’t find anyone who seemed like a good fit for it.
Various other factors, including “X seemed like a great thing to fund, but would have required acknowledging something the funders thought was both true and uncomfortable”.
In the case of this specific plausible thing, I’d guess it was (2) or (3) rather than (1). While anything involving China can be sensitive, Open Phil and other funders have spent plenty of money on work that involves Chinese policy. (CSET got $100 million from Open Phil, and runs a system tracking PRC “talent initiatives” that specifically refers to China’s “military goals” — their newsletter talks about Chinese AI progress all the time, with the clear implication that it’s a potential global threat.)
That’s not to say that I think (4) is impossible — it just doesn’t get much weight from me compared to those other options.
FWIW, as far as I’ve seen, the EA community has been unanimous in support of the argument “it’s totally fine to debate whether this was a lab leak”. (This is different from the argument “this was definitely a lab leak”.) Maybe I’m forgetting something from the early days when that point was more controversial, or I just didn’t see some big discussion somewhere. But when I think about “big names in EA pontificating on leaks”, things like this and this come to mind.
*****
Do you know of anyone who was trying to build out the gain-of-function project you mentioned during the time before the pandemic? And whether they ever approached anyone in EA about funding? Or whether any organizations actually considered this internally?
See my reply above, but this was actually none of your 4 options—it was “funders in EA were pouring money into this as quickly as they could find people willing to work on it.”
And the reasons no-one was pushing the specific proposal of “publicly shame China into stopping [so-called] GoF work” include the fact that US labs have done and still do similar work in only slightly safer conditions, as do microbiologists everywhere else, and that building public consensus about something no-one but a few specific groups of experts care about isn’t an effective use of funds.
Thanks for the further detail. It sounds like this wasn’t actually a case of “no one in EA has funded X”, which makes my list irrelevant.
(Maybe the first item on the list should be “actually, people in EA are definitely funding X”, since that’s something I often find when I look into claims like Christian’s, though it wasn’t obvious to me in this case.)