Quick takes

EU opportunities for early-career EAs: quick overview from someone who applied broadly I applied to several EU entry programmes to test the waters, and I wanted to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I'm still uncertain about, hoping to get some insights. Quick note: I'm a nurse, currently finishing a Master of Public Health, and trying to contribute as best I can to reducing biological risks. My specialisation is in Governance and Leadership in European Public Health, which explains my interest in EU career paths. I don’t necessarily think the EU is the best option for everyone. I just happen to be exploring it seriously at the moment and wanted to share what I’ve learned in case it’s useful to others. ⌨️ What I applied to & how it went * Blue Book traineeship – got it (starting October at HERA.04, Emergency Office of DG HERA) * European Committee of the Regions traineeship – rejected in pre-selection * European Economic & Social Committee traineeship – same * Eurofound traineeship – no response * EMA traineeship (2 applications: Training Content and Vaccine Outreach) – no response * Center for Democracy & Technology internship – no response * Schuman traineeship (Parliament) – no response * EFSA traineeship – interview but no feedback (I indicated HERA preference, so not surprised) If anyone needed a reminder: rejection is normal and to be expected, not a sign of your inadequacy. It only takes one “yes.” 📄 Key EA Forum posts that informed and inspired me * “EAs interested in EU policy: Consider applying for the European Commission’s Blue Book Traineeship” * “What I learned from a week in the EU policy bubble” – excellent perspective on the EU policymaking environment 🔍 Where to find EU traineeships All together here: 🔗 https://eu-careers.europa.eu/en/job-opportunities/traineeships?institution=All Includes Blue Book, Schuman, and agency-specific roles (EMA, EFSA, ECDC...). Traineeships are just traineeships: don’t underestimate what

Striking paper by Anant Sudarshan and Eyal Frank (via Dylan Matthews at Vox Future Perfect) on the importance of vultures as a keystone species.  To quote the paper and newsletter — the basic story is that vultures are extraordinarily efficient scavengers, eating nearly all of a carcass less than an hour after finding it, and farmers in India historically relied on them to quickly remove livestock carcasses, so they functioned as a natural sanitation system in helping to control diseases that could otherwise be spread through the carcasses they consume. In 1994, farmers began using diclofenac to treat their livestock, due to the expiry of a patent long held by Novartis leading to the entry of cheap generic brands made by Indian companies. Diclofenac is a common painkiller, harmless to humans, but vultures develop kidney failure and die within weeks of digesting carrion with even small residues of it. Unfortunately this only came to light via research published a decade later in 2004, by which time the number of Indian vultures in the wild had tragically plummeted from tens of millions to just a few thousands today, the fastest for a bird species in recorded history and the largest in magnitude since the extinction of the passenger pigeon.  When the vultures died out, far more dead animals lay around rotting, transmitting pathogens to other scavengers like dogs and rats and entering the water supply. Dogs and rats are less efficient than vultures at fully eliminating flesh from carcasses, leading to a higher incidence of human contact with infected remains, and they're also more likely to transmit diseases like anthrax and rabies to people. Sudarshan and Frank estimate that this led to ~100,000(!) additional deaths each year from 2000-05 due to a +4.2%(!) increase in all-cause mortality among the 430 million people living in districts that once had a lot of vultures, which is staggering; this is e.g. more than the death toll in 2001 from HIV/AIDS (92,000), malaria

Longtermist shower thought: what if we had a campaign to install Far-UVC in poultry farms? Seems like it could: 1. Reduce a bunch of diseases in the birds, which is good for: a. the birds’ welfare; b. the workers’ welfare; c. Therefore maybe the farmers’ bottom line?; d. Preventing/suppressing human pandemics (eg avian flu) 2. Would hopefully drive down the cost curve of Far-UVC 3. May also generate safety data in chickens, which could be helpful for derisking it for humans Insofar as one of the main obstacles is humans' concerns for health effects, this would at least only raise these for a small group of workers.

Trump recently said in an interview (https://time.com/6972973/biden-trump-bird-flu-covid/) that he would seek to disband the White House office for pandemic preparedness. Given that he usually doesn't give specifics on his policy positions, this seems like something he is particularly interested in. I know politics is discouraged on the EA forum, but I thought I would post this to say: EA should really be preparing for a Trump presidency. He's up in the polls and IMO has a >50% chance of winning the election. Right now politicians seem relatively receptive to EA ideas, this may change under a Trump administration.

Ajeya Cotra writes: Like Ajeya, I haven't thought about this a ton. But I do feel quite confident in recommending that generalist EAs — especially the "get shit done" kind —  at least strongly consider working on biosecurity if they're looking for their next thing.

I’ve seen a few people in the LessWrong community congratulate the community on predicting or preparing for covid-19 earlier than others, but I haven’t actually seen the evidence that the LessWrong community was particularly early on covid or gave particularly wise advice on what to do about it. I looked into this, and as far as I can tell, this self-congratulatory narrative is a complete myth. Many people were worried about and preparing for covid in early 2020 before everything finally snowballed in the second week of March 2020. I remember it personally. In January 2020, some stores sold out of face masks in several different cities in North America. (One example of many.) The oldest post on LessWrong tagged with "covid-19" is from well after this started happening. (I also searched the forum for posts containing "covid" or "coronavirus" and sorted by oldest. I couldn’t find an older post that was relevant.) The LessWrong post is written by a self-described "prepper" who strikes a cautious tone and, oddly, advises buying vitamins to boost the immune system. (This seems dubious, possibly pseudoscientific.) To me, that first post strikes a similarly ambivalent, cautious tone as many mainstream news articles published before that post. If you look at the covid-19 tag on LessWrong, the next post after that first one, the prepper one, is on February 5, 2020. The posts don't start to get really worried about covid until mid-to-late February. How is the rest of the world reacting at that time? Here's a New York Times article from February 2, 2020, entitled "Wuhan Coronavirus Looks Increasingly Like a Pandemic, Experts Say", well before any of the worried posts on LessWrong: The tone of the article is fairly alarmed, noting that in China the streets are deserted due to the outbreak, it compares the novel coronavirus to the 1918-1920 Spanish flu, and it gives expert quotes like this one: The worried posts on LessWrong don't start until weeks after this article was p

AIxBio looks pretty bad and it would be great to see more people work on it * We're pretty close to having a country of virologists in a data center with AI models that can give detailed and accurate instructions for all steps of a biological attack — with recent reasoning models, we might have this already * These models have safeguards but they're trivial to overcome — Pliny the Liberator manages to jailbreak every new model within 24 hours and open sources the jailbreaks * Open source will continue to be just a few months behind the frontier given distillation and amplification, and these can be fine-tuned to remove safeguards in minutes for less than $50 * People say it's hard to actually execute the biology work, but I don't see any bottlenecks to bioweapon production that can't be done by a bio undergrad with limitless scientific knowledge; on my current understanding, the bottlenecks are not manual dexterity bottlenecks like playing a violin which require years of practice, they are knowledge bottlenecks * Bio supply chain controls that make it harder to get ingredients aren't working and aren't on track to work * So it seems like we're very close to democratizing (even bespoke) bioweapons. When I talk to bio experts about this they often reassure me that few people want to conduct a biological attack, but I haven't seen much analysis on this and it seems hard to be highly confident. While we gear up for a bioweapon democracy it seems that there are very few people working on worst-case bio, and most of the people working on it are working on access controls and evaluations. But I don't expect access controls to succeed, and I expect evaluations to mostly be useful for scaring politicians, due in part to the open source issue meaning we just can't give frontier models robust safeguards. The most likely thing to actually work is biodefense. I suspect that too many people working on GCR have moved into working on AI alignment and reliability issues and

There is a natural alliance that I haven't seen happen, but both are in my network: pandemic preparedness and covid-caution. Both want clean indoor air. The latter group of citizens is a very mixed group, with both very reasonable people and unreasonable 'doomers'. Some people have good reason to remain cautious around COVID: immunocompromised people & their household, or people with a chronic illness, especially my network of people with Long Covid, who frequently (~20%) worsen from a new COVID case. But these concerned citizens want clean air, and are willing to take action to make that happen. Given that the riskiest pathogens trend to also be airborne like SARS-COV-2, this would be a big win for pandemic preparedness. Specifically, I believe both communities are aware of the policy objectives below and are already motivated to achieve it:   1) Air quality standards (CO2, PM2.5) in public spaces. Schools are especially promising from both perspectives, given that parents are motivated to protect their children & children are the biggest spreaders of airborne diseases. Belgium has already adopted regulations (although very weak, it's a good start), showing that this is a tractable policy goal. Ideally, air quality standards also incentivize Far UVC deployment, which would create the regulatory certainty for companies to invest in this technology. Including standards for airborne pathogen concentrations would be great, but has many technical limitations at the moment I think.   2) Public R&D investments to bring down cost & establish safety of Far UVC Most of these concerned citizens are actually aware of Far UVC and would support this measure. It appears safe in terms of no radiation damage, but may create unhealthy compounds (e.g. ozone) by chemically reacting with indoor air particles.  I also believe that governments have good reasons to adopt these policies, given that they would reduce the pressures on healthcare and could reduce the disease burde