What are the uncomfortable questions and truths you are talking about?
COVID-19 is airbone. Biosafety level 2 is not sufficient to protect against airbone infections. The Chinese did gain-of-function research on coronoviruses under biosafety level 2 in Wuhan and publically said so in their published papers. This is the most likely reason we have the pandemic. There are strong efforts to cover that up the lab leak, from the Chinese, the US and other parties.
Is there a path you have in mind whereby Open Phil (or anyone else in EA) could have spent that kind of money in a way that would likely have prevented the pandemic, given the information that was available to the relevant parties in the years 2015-2019?
Fund a project that lists who does what gain-of-function research with what safety procautions to understand the threat better. After discovering that the Chinese did their gain-of-function research at biosafety level 2, put public pressure on them to not do that.
After being done with putting pressure on shutting down all the biosafety level 2 gain-of-function research attempt to do the same with biosafety level 3 gain-of-function research. Without the power to push through a global ban on the research pushing for only doing it in biosafety level 4 might be a fight worth having.
If you had done even a bit of homework, you’d see that there was money going in to all of this. iGem and the Blue ribbon panel have been getting funded for over half a decade, and CHS for not much less. The problem was that there were too few people working on the problem, and there was no public will to ban scientific research which was risky. And starting from 2017, when I was doing work on exactly these issues—lab safety and precautions, and trying to make the case for why lack of monitoring was a problem—the limitation wasn’t a lack funding from EA orgs. Quite the contrary—almost no-one important in biosecurity wasn’t getting funded well to do everything that seemed potentially valuable.
So it’s pretty damn frustrating to hear someone say that someone should have been working on this, or funding this. Because we were, and they were.
If you would have done your research you would know that I opened previous threads and have done plenty of research.
I haven’t claimed that there wasn’t any money being invested into “working on biosecurity” but that most of it wasn’t effectively invested to stop the pandemic. The people funding the gain-of-function research are also seeing themselves as working in biosafety.
The problem was that there were too few people working on the problem, and there was no public will to ban scientific research which was risky.
The position at the time shouldn’t be to target banning gain-of-function research in general given that’s politically not achievable but to say that it should only happen under biosafety 4.
It would have been possible to have a press campaign about how the Trump administration wants to allow dangerous gain-of-function research that was previously banned to happen under conditions that aren’t even the highest available biosafety level.
It’s probably still true today that “no gain-of-function outside of biosafety level 4” is the correct political demand.
The Chinese were written openly in their papers that they were doing the work under biosafety level 2. The problem was not about a lack of monitoring of their labs. It was just that nobody cared about them openly doing research in a dangerous setting.
iGem and the Blue ribbon panel have been getting funded for over half a decade, and CHS for not much less.
iGem seems to a be a project about getting people to do more dangerous research and no project about reducing the amount of dangerous research that happens. Such an organization has bad incentives to take on the virology community to stop them from doing harm.
CHS seems to be doing net beneficial work. I’m still a bit confused about why they ran the Coronovirus pandemic exercise after the chaos started in the WIV. That’s sort of between “someone was very clever” and “someone should have reacted much better”.
I can go through details, and you’re wrong about what the mentioned orgs have done which matters, but even ignoring that, I strongly disagree about how we can and should push for better policy, and don’t think that even giving unlimited funding (which we effectively had,) there could have been enough people working on this to have done what you suggest (and we still don’t have enough people for high priority projects, despite, again, an effectively blank check!) and think you’re suggesting that we should have prioritized a single task, stopping Chinese BSL-2 work, based purely on post-hoc information, instead of pursuing the highest EV work as it was, IMO correctly, assessed at the time.
But even granting prophecy, I think that there is no world in which even an extra billion dollars per year 2015-2020 would have been able to pay for enough people and resources to get your suggested change done. And if we had tried to push on the idea, it would have destroyed EA Bio’s ability to do things now. And more critically, given any limited level of public attention and policy influence, focusing on mitigating existential risks instead of relatively minor events like COVID would probably have been the right move even knowing that COVID was coming! (Though it would certainly have changed the strategy so we could have responded better.)
iGem seems to a be a project about getting people to do more dangerous research and no project about reducing the amount of dangerous research that happens. Such an organization has bad incentives to take on the virology community to stop them from doing harm.
Or would you prefer that safety people not try to influence education and safety standards of people actually doing the work? Because if you ignore everyone with bad incentives, you can’t actually change the behaviors of the worst actors.
I don’t think that funding this work is net negative. On the other hand, I don’t think it can do what’s necessary to prevent the Coronavirus lab leak in 2019 or either or the two potential Coronavirus lab leaks in 2021.
It took the White House Office of Science and Technology to create the first moratorium because the NIH wasn’t capable and it would also need outside pressure to achieve anything else that’s strong enough to be sufficient to deal with the problem.
You didn’t respond to my comment that addressed this, but; “even granting prophecy, I think that there is no world in which even an extra billion dollars per year 2015-2020 would have been able to pay for enough people and resources to get your suggested change done. And if we had tried to push on the idea, it would have destroyed EA Bio’s ability to do things now. And more critically, given any limited level of public attention and policy influence, focusing on mitigating existential risks instead of relatively minor events like COVID would probably have been the right move even knowing that COVID was coming!”
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.)
COVID-19 is airbone. Biosafety level 2 is not sufficient to protect against airbone infections. The Chinese did gain-of-function research on coronoviruses under biosafety level 2 in Wuhan and publically said so in their published papers. This is the most likely reason we have the pandemic. There are strong efforts to cover that up the lab leak, from the Chinese, the US and other parties.
Fund a project that lists who does what gain-of-function research with what safety procautions to understand the threat better. After discovering that the Chinese did their gain-of-function research at biosafety level 2, put public pressure on them to not do that.
After being done with putting pressure on shutting down all the biosafety level 2 gain-of-function research attempt to do the same with biosafety level 3 gain-of-function research. Without the power to push through a global ban on the research pushing for only doing it in biosafety level 4 might be a fight worth having.
It’s probably still worth funding such a project.
If you had done even a bit of homework, you’d see that there was money going in to all of this. iGem and the Blue ribbon panel have been getting funded for over half a decade, and CHS for not much less. The problem was that there were too few people working on the problem, and there was no public will to ban scientific research which was risky. And starting from 2017, when I was doing work on exactly these issues—lab safety and precautions, and trying to make the case for why lack of monitoring was a problem—the limitation wasn’t a lack funding from EA orgs. Quite the contrary—almost no-one important in biosecurity wasn’t getting funded well to do everything that seemed potentially valuable.
So it’s pretty damn frustrating to hear someone say that someone should have been working on this, or funding this. Because we were, and they were.
If you would have done your research you would know that I opened previous threads and have done plenty of research.
I haven’t claimed that there wasn’t any money being invested into “working on biosecurity” but that most of it wasn’t effectively invested to stop the pandemic. The people funding the gain-of-function research are also seeing themselves as working in biosafety.
The position at the time shouldn’t be to target banning gain-of-function research in general given that’s politically not achievable but to say that it should only happen under biosafety 4.
It would have been possible to have a press campaign about how the Trump administration wants to allow dangerous gain-of-function research that was previously banned to happen under conditions that aren’t even the highest available biosafety level.
It’s probably still true today that “no gain-of-function outside of biosafety level 4” is the correct political demand.
The Chinese were written openly in their papers that they were doing the work under biosafety level 2. The problem was not about a lack of monitoring of their labs. It was just that nobody cared about them openly doing research in a dangerous setting.
iGem seems to a be a project about getting people to do more dangerous research and no project about reducing the amount of dangerous research that happens. Such an organization has bad incentives to take on the virology community to stop them from doing harm.
CHS seems to be doing net beneficial work. I’m still a bit confused about why they ran the Coronovirus pandemic exercise after the chaos started in the WIV. That’s sort of between “someone was very clever” and “someone should have reacted much better”.
I can go through details, and you’re wrong about what the mentioned orgs have done which matters, but even ignoring that, I strongly disagree about how we can and should push for better policy, and don’t think that even giving unlimited funding (which we effectively had,) there could have been enough people working on this to have done what you suggest (and we still don’t have enough people for high priority projects, despite, again, an effectively blank check!) and think you’re suggesting that we should have prioritized a single task, stopping Chinese BSL-2 work, based purely on post-hoc information, instead of pursuing the highest EV work as it was, IMO correctly, assessed at the time.
But even granting prophecy, I think that there is no world in which even an extra billion dollars per year 2015-2020 would have been able to pay for enough people and resources to get your suggested change done. And if we had tried to push on the idea, it would have destroyed EA Bio’s ability to do things now. And more critically, given any limited level of public attention and policy influence, focusing on mitigating existential risks instead of relatively minor events like COVID would probably have been the right move even knowing that COVID was coming! (Though it would certainly have changed the strategy so we could have responded better.)
Did you look at what Open Philanthropy is actually funding? https://igem.org/Safety
Or would you prefer that safety people not try to influence education and safety standards of people actually doing the work? Because if you ignore everyone with bad incentives, you can’t actually change the behaviors of the worst actors.
I don’t think that funding this work is net negative. On the other hand, I don’t think it can do what’s necessary to prevent the Coronavirus lab leak in 2019 or either or the two potential Coronavirus lab leaks in 2021.
It took the White House Office of Science and Technology to create the first moratorium because the NIH wasn’t capable and it would also need outside pressure to achieve anything else that’s strong enough to be sufficient to deal with the problem.
You didn’t respond to my comment that addressed this, but; “even granting prophecy, I think that there is no world in which even an extra billion dollars per year 2015-2020 would have been able to pay for enough people and resources to get your suggested change done. And if we had tried to push on the idea, it would have destroyed EA Bio’s ability to do things now. And more critically, given any limited level of public attention and policy influence, focusing on mitigating existential risks instead of relatively minor events like COVID would probably have been the right move even knowing that COVID was coming!”
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.)