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!”
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!”