Just to be clear and pull all of the Esvelt stuff together, are you saying he thinks that...
I can’t speak for him, but I’m pretty sure he’d agree, yes.
When he gets into a room with people with similar qualifications, how do they react to those ideas? Have you talked it over with epidemiologists?
I don’t know, sorry! My guess is that they are generally much less concerned than he is, primarily because they’ve spent their careers thinking about natural risks instead of human ones and haven’t (not that I think they should!) spent a lot of time thinking about how someone might cause large-scale harm.
If one disease provokes widespread paranoia and/or an organized quarantine, that affects all of them. Same if the population gets so sparse that it’s hard for any of them to spread.
Sorry, I was thinking about ‘independence’ in the sense of not everyone being susceptible to the same illnesses, because I’ve mostly been thinking about the stealth scenario where you don’t know to react until it’s too late. You’re right that in a wildfire scenario reactions to one disease can restrict the spread of another (recently: covid lockdowns in 2020 cutting the spread of almost everything else).
Anybody with limited resources is going to dislike the idea of having the work multiplied.
Probably depends a lot on how the work scales with more pathogens?
The two don’t seem incompatible, really. You could imagine something that played along asymptomatically (while spreading like crazy), then pulled out the aces when the time was right (syphilis).
I don’t think they’re incompatible; I wasn’t trying to give an exclusive “or”.
Which is not to say that you could actually create it. I don’t know about that (and tend to doubt it). I also don’t know how long you could avoid surveillance even if you were asymptomatic, or how much risk you’d run of allowing rapid countermeasure development, or how closely you’d have to synchronize the “aces” part. … Doesn’t that mean that every case has to “come out of incubation” at relatively close to the same time, so that the first deaths don’t tip people off? That seems really hard to engineer.
I think this is all pretty hard to get into without bringing up infohazards, unfortunately.
It kind of depends on what kind of resources you need to pull off something really dramatic. If you need to be a significant institution working toward an official purpose, then the supply of omnicidal actors may be nil. If you need to have at least a small group and be generally organized and functional and on-task, I’d guess it’d be pretty small, but not zero. If any random nut can do it on a whim, then we have a problem.
If we continue not doing anything then I think we do get to where one smart and reasonably dedicated person can do it; perhaps another Kaczynski?
Full disclosure: Bostromian species potential ideas don’t work for me anyhow. I think killing everybody alive is roughly twice as bad as killing half of them, not roughly infinity times as bad. I don’t think that matters much; we all agree that killing any number is bad.
While full-scale astronomical waste arguments don’t work for a lot of people, it sounds like your views are almost as extreme in the other direction? If you’re up for getting into this, is it that you don’t think we should consider people who don’t exist yet in our decisions?
I can’t speak for him, but I’m pretty sure he’d agree, yes.
Hrm. That modifies my view in an unfortunate direction.
I still don’t fully believe it, because I’ve seen a strong regularity that everything looks easy until you try it, no matter how much of an expert you are… and in this case actually making viruses is only one part of the necessary expertise. But it makes me more nervous.
I don’t know, sorry! My guess is that they are generally much less concerned than he is, primarily because they’ve spent their careers thinking about natural risks instead of human ones and haven’t (not that I think they should!) spent a lot of time thinking about how someone might cause large-scale harm.
Just for the record, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about humans trying to cause large scale harm (or at least doing things that could have large scale harm as an effect). Yes, in a different area, but nonetheless it’s led me to believe that people tend to overestimate risks. And you’re talking about a scale of effecicacy that I don’t think I could get with a computer program, which is a much more predictable thing working in a much more predictable environment.
If you’re up for getting into this, is it that you don’t think we should consider people who don’t exist yet in our decisions?
I’ve written a lot about it on Less Wrong. But, yes, your one-sentence summary is basically right. The only quibble is that “yet” is cheating. They don’t exist, period. Even if you take a “timeless” view, they still don’t exist, anywhere in spacetime, if they never actually come into being.
I can’t speak for him, but I’m pretty sure he’d agree, yes.
I don’t know, sorry! My guess is that they are generally much less concerned than he is, primarily because they’ve spent their careers thinking about natural risks instead of human ones and haven’t (not that I think they should!) spent a lot of time thinking about how someone might cause large-scale harm.
Sorry, I was thinking about ‘independence’ in the sense of not everyone being susceptible to the same illnesses, because I’ve mostly been thinking about the stealth scenario where you don’t know to react until it’s too late. You’re right that in a wildfire scenario reactions to one disease can restrict the spread of another (recently: covid lockdowns in 2020 cutting the spread of almost everything else).
Probably depends a lot on how the work scales with more pathogens?
I don’t think they’re incompatible; I wasn’t trying to give an exclusive “or”.
I think this is all pretty hard to get into without bringing up infohazards, unfortunately.
If we continue not doing anything then I think we do get to where one smart and reasonably dedicated person can do it; perhaps another Kaczynski?
While full-scale astronomical waste arguments don’t work for a lot of people, it sounds like your views are almost as extreme in the other direction? If you’re up for getting into this, is it that you don’t think we should consider people who don’t exist yet in our decisions?
Hrm. That modifies my view in an unfortunate direction.
I still don’t fully believe it, because I’ve seen a strong regularity that everything looks easy until you try it, no matter how much of an expert you are… and in this case actually making viruses is only one part of the necessary expertise. But it makes me more nervous.
Just for the record, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about humans trying to cause large scale harm (or at least doing things that could have large scale harm as an effect). Yes, in a different area, but nonetheless it’s led me to believe that people tend to overestimate risks. And you’re talking about a scale of effecicacy that I don’t think I could get with a computer program, which is a much more predictable thing working in a much more predictable environment.
I’ve written a lot about it on Less Wrong. But, yes, your one-sentence summary is basically right. The only quibble is that “yet” is cheating. They don’t exist, period. Even if you take a “timeless” view, they still don’t exist, anywhere in spacetime, if they never actually come into being.