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.)
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.)