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!”
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!”