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.)
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.)