All of Alex D's Comments + Replies

Outstanding piece, kudos!

Flagging a minor error: in Table 1 first column last row seems to be truncated.

1
slg
23d
Thanks for flagging, fixed!

Good shower thought! A few people have come to this idea independently for swine CAFOs.

There are a fair number of important "production-limiting diseases" in swine that are primarily spread via respiratory transmission, so this seems to me like a plausible win-win-win (as you've described).

This is all very "shower thought" level on my side as well, and I'd be keen for someone to think this through in more depth. Very happy to talk it through with anyone considering a more thorough investigation!

(Note my understanding is influenza is primarily a gastrointes... (read more)

This is a pretty good overview: https://www.decodingbio.com/p/decoding-biosecurity-and-biodefense

I know the space reasonably well, happy to connect and discuss with anyone interested!

Outsized Influence of Small Countries in Multilateral Orgs: This isn’t about middle and low income countries specifically, but I think CEA and Open Phil should specifically invest in community building focused on careers in government in a country with a very small population, to help the country advocate for good ideas in multilateral organisations.

I'm pretty entrenched in Camp Narrow, but this is a very good point in favour of "Global EA" that I have not previously encountered (the other arguments are also compelling, just not new-to-me).

The moderator team is (IMO) the most valuable part of ProMED, and they seem to have fundamental strategic disagreement with ISID leadership. It's not obvious to me that an influx of donations would solve this problem, even temporarily.

3
Sanjay
8mo
A summary based on the quotes which I included in a separate comment: * Larry Madoff, who served as editor of the program from 2002 to 2021, said he was “forced out” by the organization’s CEO, Linda MacKinnon, according to STATnews.  * It seems likely that something unfortunate is happening here, but I'm unclear what. * There was a letter written by several ProMED moderators, it appears that they objected to: * A letter going out to all ProMED subscribers proposing a subscription model;  * this was signed by "The ProMED team" without the moderators being informed in advance; I don't know much about what's going on here, but this seems like a management issue; * they didn't say it explicitly, but I'm guessing they are opposed to the subscription model, not just to the way the process was managed. * I don't know enough to know whether the subscription model is a good idea. * They also objected to not receiving pay in a timely manner. * ISID CEO Linda MacKinnon's response statement said: "this is unfortunately not a unique situation because ProMED has always operated on a shoestring budget. <...> We have addressed this more recently by stabilizing the predictability of payments. However, as we are currently in a funding pinch, we communicated in July to the ProMED team that some payments would be delayed, potentially up to two months." * I'm unclear on what it could mean for them to have stabilised the predictability of payments (maybe they opted not to explain that for brevity?) Whatever it is, I'm unclear on how it could have been effective given the communications about payments being delayed for up to two months. * The moderators/editors who wrote the letter took the apparently strong action of suspending their work, even though they described it as a labour of love. * One of the details mentioned in Linda MacKinnon's statement is that they plan to decommission scrapers. I'm confused by this, since I would have guessed that scrapers w
4
Sanjay
8mo
I'm also concerned about the internal strife within ISID/ProMED. I've copied and pasted some quotes below. Here's an excerpt from the STATnews article that this post links to: The letter linked to by Alex D above is also interesting. I've copied in some excerpts below, but the full letter is not loads longer and worth a read. There's a statement from the ISID CEO Linda MacKinnon which went up yesterday:
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freedomandutility
8mo
The disagreement appears to stem entirely from decisions made around managing the financial difficulties - ProMED implemented a subscription model without consulting all the moderators because of financial difficulties, and hasn’t paid moderators because of financial difficulties. An influx of funding would solve both these problems.

(just noting it does not actually appear to be fixed)

3
freedomandutility
10mo
Thanks, should work now!
Answer by Alex DApr 06, 20231
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I typically refer to this as "EA+", and people seem to understand what I mean.

Fair point. I'm actually pretty comfortable calling such reasoning "non-EA", even if it led to joining pretty idiosyncratically-EA projects like alignment.

Actually, I guess there could be people attracted to specific EA projects from "non-EA" lines of reasoning across basically all cause areas?

2
Jeff Kaufman
1y
Very reasonable, since it's not grounded in altruism!

A further attempt at categorization that I think complements your "Respectable <-> Speculative" axis.

I've started to think of EA causes as sharing (among other things) a commitment to cosmopolitanism (ie neutrality with respect to the distance between the altruistic actor and beneficiary), but differing according to which dimension is emphasized i) spatial distance (global health, development), ii) temporal difference (alignment), or ii) "mindspace" distance (animal welfare).

I think a table of "speculativeness" vs "cosmopolitanism type" would classify initiatives/proposals pretty cleanly, and might provide more information than "neartermism vs longtermism"?

2
Jeff Kaufman
1y
I like this categorization, but I'm not sure how well it accounts for the component of the community that is worried about x-risk for not especially cosmopolitan reasons. Like, if you think AI is 50% likely to kill everyone in the next 25y then you might choose to work on it even if you only care about your currently alive friends and family. Which isn't to say that people in this quadrant don't care about the impact on other people, just that if the impact on people close to you is large enough and motivating enough then the more cosmopolitan impacts might not be very relevant?

There's a real issue here but I dislike the framing of this post.

Throughout the text it casts neartermism as "traditional EA" and longtermism as an outside imperializing force. I think this is both historically inaccurate, and also rather manipulative.

Answer by Alex DFeb 05, 20232
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Longdistancers (emphasizing neutrality wrt spatial distance from beneficiaries, vs temporal distance for longtermism)

Amazing, yes I know of the West African initiative and wondered if they were related. Will reach out, thanks!

Sentinel biosecurity program in Guatemala

This sounds really cool, but I can't seem to find any details on it outside of this post. Could you point me to a resource (or should I just email Paulina)?

9
Michelle Bruno Hz
1y
Hi Alex! Thank you for your interest.  Our project is inspired by Sentinel, an ambitious and large-scale pandemic prevention effort in West Africa driven by Dr. Pardis Sabeti (co-founder of Sherlock Biosciences) and Jonathan Jackson (CEO of Dimagi).  Here is the paper about their work:  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34452470/  and if you want our formal proposal for the LATAM  project you can ask it by email to Paulina!   

I thought this might be the output of an LLM (it just has that 'feel'), but ChatGPT actually produced an IMO better essay when prompted with the title of this post:

Complexity science is the study of complex systems, which are systems that consist of many interacting parts that can give rise to emergent behavior. Effective altruism is the idea of using evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others, and taking action based on that evidence.

In recent years, effective altruism has become an increasingly popular movement, with a

... (read more)

This is wonderful.

Plausibly very high impact, certainly neglected, and (crucially) not a particularly weird research program for a neuro/global health focussed epidemiology department.

Have you had any interest from funders or researchers?

3
Hauke Hillebrandt
1y
It received the honorable mention prize and the winner of the contest had a similar proposal and also commented in this thread. So it's on Openphil's radar.
2
Linch
1y
Sort of! Sage did some questions for me and then I never got around to reviewing them. 😅 DM'd you.  

I'm actively learning Spanish but am nowhere near fluency, would my presence be disruptive/counterproductive to community building goals?

To be clear, from my perspective this is a plus (since part of what's exciting to me is some foreign language immersion), but I wouldn't want to make folks feel like they needed to default to English.

8
Sandra Malagon
2y
Hi Alex, one of the goals of the fellowship is to give the opportunity to EAs in Mexico and LATAm to be in contact with the international community, so we are keeping in mind that English will be used commonly in the activities.  Also, as Pablo mentions in another comment, in the Spanish speakers' community we often have conversations in English, and the majority of the members are comfortable with both. So Non-Spanish speakers are completely welcome and, we will offer Spanish lessons for people interested in learning.

I am! Would love to discuss, will DM you!

Very cool! I'm an epidemiologist, but I've long had the sense that most of the questions I find most interesting and relevant are actually OR! Your biosecurity list really resonated, many real-world problems reduce to where to position assets.

I have some concrete problems that I'd love to discuss, will reach out!

1
Ulrik Horn
2y
Yes that is super relevant. Hopefully there would even be information coming out from such work that could help people working on refuges/shelters calculate likely reductions in biological risk. This would help both assess different proposed solutions against each other as well as help inform whether a refuge/shelter should be built at all (it seems initially that one would want a substantial reduction in the risk in order to proceed with something as ambitious as a refuge/shelter).

Here's a scenario:

Bob runs an emergency response organization, which needs cash to scale up when an emergency hits (to hire surge staff, ramp up response operations, etc etc). Bob want to use prediction markets as a hedge, but appropriate disaster markets don't always exist plus it's hard to place high-payoff bets without tying up all his assets in the interim.

Does HedgEverything make Bob happy?

2[comment deleted]2y

Co-location during the crisis could make sense, depends on the crisis.

One cool idea would be embedding a physical EOC into refuges, and calling reservists in once some crisis threshold was crossed.

Just thinking out loud, natural triggers in the longtermist biosecurity space (where I'm by far most familiar) would be:

  1. a disease event or other early warning signal from public health surveillance
  2. new science & tech development in virology/biotech/etc
  3. shifts in international relations or norms relevant to state bioweapons programs
  4. indications that a non-state group was pursuing existentially risky bio capabilities

... anything else?

Y'all are fully complementary I think. From Linch's proposal:

So the appropriate structure of an elite Forecasting Center might be to pair it up with a elite crisis response unit, possibly in a network/constellation model such that most people are very part-time before urgent crises, such that the additional foresight is guaranteed to be acted on, rather than tossing the forecasts to the rest of the movement (whether decisionmakers or community members) to be acted on later.

No one's quite sure exactly what the WHO's Pandemic Intelligence Hub is going to, like y'know, actually do... but it existing is probably a marginal boost in favour of Berlin for Biosecurity EAs.

To some degree these already exists (eg here's a description of Canada's system), but I'm certain they could be drastically expanded, standardized, synthesized, and otherwise improved.

My company seeks to predict or rapidly recognize health security catastrophes, and also requires an influx of capital when such an event occurs (since we wind up with loads of new consulting opportunities to help respond).

Is there currently any way for us to incentivize thick markets on topics that are correlated with our business? The idea of getting the information plus the hedge is super appealing!

My understanding is the Erasmus Programme was explicitly started in part to reduce the chance of conflict between European states.

EA Micro Schools

Effective Altruism

We would be excited to fund projects that make it easier to start up an EA-aligned, accredited private school.

As EA matures, there will be more and more parents. Kids of self-identified EAs are likely to be smart and neurodivergent, and may struggle with the default schooling system. They're also likely to grow into future adult EAs. Remote work options will free up location choice, and there could be major community-building gains if parents can easily find their ideal school in an EA hub.

Variation: develop an EA stream o... (read more)

Add-on: for natural epidemics, there are a number of “event-based surveillance systems” that monitor news, social media, and other sources for weak signals of potential emergencies. WHO, PAHO, and many national governments run such systems, and there are a few private ones (one of which I run).

One could set up such a system focussing exclusively on the regions immediately surrounding high containment labs.

There are only ~60 BSL-4 labs, so you could conceivably monitor each of these regions quite closely without an impossibly large team.

Direct monitoring would be much better, but this might be a useful adjunct.

Quick start kit for new EA orgs

EA ops

Stipe atlas for longtermist orgs. Rather than figuring out the best tools, registrations, and practices for every new org, figure out the best default options and provide an easy interface to start up faster.

7
Dawn Drescher
2y
I just read the the Charity Entrepreneurship handbook How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit. That seems to fit the bill. Maybe having country-specific versions of it and versions for longtermist orgs, would be even better.

Suggestion - start with a focus on eradicating Aedes mosquitoes (aegypti, albopictus, and maybe japonicus) from the Western hemisphere.

These species are invasive/non-native to the Americas (so "ecological risks" arguments against are more tenuous), cause a tremendous burden of illness (Zika, Dengue, Yellow Fever, Chikungunya, ...), and have been subject to previous eradication efforts (so there's precedent).

There isn't particularly a "biorisk/GCBR" angle to this problem, but such projects being executed by a team that was very biosecurity-aware seems wise ... (read more)

It's going to be a tough sell. The scientists involved are saturated with cultural norms and deep beliefs that more information is always better, and academic and funding incentives are aligned with that understanding.

I don't know that the "open data movement" is, like, radically influencing the beliefs of scientists involved in this kind of work, but rather they're both products of the same (mostly great) culture of openness.

I think the actual long-term solution is to influence trainees and help them rise to positions of influence. In the meantime we nee... (read more)

Hope it isn't too on the nose, but that was my thinking behind this project proposal.

I'm a former emerging/zoonotic disease epidemiologist, EcoHealth Alliance fellow, generally was all-in on DEEP VZN/PREDICT pandemic prediction type work for the better part of a decade, turned biosecurity-pilled apostate. AMA!

2
Landis H.
2y
First, how much has COVID-19 played into your change of heart here? What do you think of Jeffrey Sachs, chair of the Lancet's COVID origins commission coming to the conclusion that a lab leak was the likely source and true investigation is being prevented?  https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/08/why-the-chair-of-the-lancets-covid-19-commission-thinks-the-us-government-is-preventing-a-real-investigation-into-the-pandemic Second, if there's a non-zero chance that virological research resulted in the current pandemic, I think that it's equivalent to that unbelievable fact about Chernobyl that the USSR kept other reactors of the same design online lest they admit that a fault in their design caused the meltdown. Except in this case, it seems to me that Deep VZN is the equivalent of rolling out thousands more reactors of the same design. If a lab leak indeed is the source of the current COVID pandemic, do you think that fact is necessary to turn the policy tide here? Do you agree with my metaphor here, couched in the fact that we're not 100% sure?   Third, how much should MRNA vaccine technology change our risk-benefit analysis of virology that introduces new and more dangerous viruses into imperfect human custody? Treatment or prevention seem like the only two hard arguments for such work, and it seems to me the Moderna 48-hour miracle is an argument that the upside is even more indiscernable. Fourth and finally, how do we effectively mount this argument when those who are advocating the risky approach are leading industry researchers who seem intent on snuffing out discussion that might pour cold water on their work? Cf. Daszak's coordination of the Lancet article and the Lancet commission member who helped approve EcoHealth grants recommending Sachs's recommendations be struck from the final report?   This is a several months old thread, but if you do see this I appreciate your input. I'm not in the field but desperately worried about this as an X-risk.
2
Alex Mallen
2y
To what extent are there already similarly dangerous pathogen genomes on the internet? I'm guessing that things like smallpox are less of a worry because we already have a vaccine for them, but if many novel, certified pandemic-grade pathogen genomes are already available then adding more seems significantly less harmful.
5
Gavin
2y
What will it take for bio people to treat dangerous information as if it was dangerous? Do they have a rosy view of the world, where no one would misuse it? Do they have incentives to spread the info? Is the open data movement unwittingly to do with it?

Oh that is good to know, I think that significantly reduces reputation risk to EA vs it being completely publicly accessible.

Monitoring and advocacy to make Zoonotic Risk Prediction projects safer

Biorisk and recovery from catastrophe

Following COVID-19, a great deal of funding is becoming available for "Zoonotic Risk Prediction" projects, which intend to broadly sample wildlife pathogens, map their evolutionary space for pandemic potential, and publish rank-ordered lists of the riskiest pathogens. Such work is of dubious biodefence value, presents a direct risk of accidental release in the field and lab, and the resulting information is a clear biosecurity infohazard.

We would be ... (read more)

Should this be posted on a public forum?

FWIW, when I tried to view this from one of my devices I got an error message that "This post is only visible to logged-in users," which I'd never seen before. I guess this is a new option for authors on the forum, which is good to know.

1
mxwdm
2y
The text was vetted by the group organiser before I published it.

An easier means of starting up an EA-aligned, accredited private school.

As EA matures, there will be more and more parents. Kids of self-identified EAs are (going out on a limb) likely to be very smart and neuroatypical, and to struggle with the default schooling system .

As remote work options free up location choice, there could be major EA community-building gains from making it more straightforward to start an aligned micro school.

Speaking from personal experience, schooling considerations are a major limitation on my family's ability to relocate and ge... (read more)

I’m Alex’s wife and this came out of a conversation during our Saturday night date watching the SERI conference.

An important point is that the kids of EAs are way more likely than others to grow up to become EAs. We certainly share these values with our children.

If the EA community is taking a long term view, we should be investing in the children of EAs as likely future EAs. Adding support for EA families may sow the seeds for future EA generations. Should EA be supporting their peers’ parental leave?

This is such a great idea, I really hope someone does it! My company is small (~80 person startup), but might be an example of a potential customer type - we're an infectious disease intelligence company, so we're literally trying to predict epidemics/disease events/operational disruption and an internal PM could be a useful way to organize our ongoing analysis and judgment.

Generally anyone working in the risk/critical event/threat intelligence/OSINT space might have a similar use case around collecting and coordinating their internal experts' assessments.... (read more)

2
Yonatan Cale
2y
Hey! [I somehow missed this comment from 6 months ago!] Are you still interested in something like this?

My company has a few airline and airport clients. My understanding is that waste management is a service the airport provides to the airlines, and I'd guess there are third party contractors involved.

I'll be on the lookout for opportunities to learn more, and report back if I hear anything useful.

1
mike_mclaren
2y
Great!

Overall, the book convinced me that more people interested in GCRs should seriously engage with the existing fields and literatures around disaster risk reduction and crisis management.

I have one foot in this world, and would love to connect with anyone exploring similar terrain from a GCR perspective!

Moreover, a team of people scouring open sources (i.e. publication records, job specs, equipment supply chains) could potentially make it difficult for a lab to get away with doing bad research, and thereby strengthen the [BWC] treaty.

Here's quite a good article calling for the same thing, which also outlines lots of promising avenues for open-source investigation (in addition to the above; trade data, patents, social media, satellite imagery, unusual epidemic reports, and environmental sampling):

Can everyone help verify the bioweapons convention? Perha... (read more)

[Epistemic status - I have no idea what I'm talking about.] 

Could you set up a futures exchange, with physical-delivery contracts, around various PPE types? From my extremely naive understanding, couldn't this direct more capital available towards PPE production, plus as an ancillary benefit act as an implicit prediction market of pandemic risk? 

I haven't thought this all the way through, but the potential to push more capital toward production, transparently allocate supply, and also get a warning signal seems quite appealing on first blush.

I don't necessarily agree but don't want to say more.

-1
HStencil
2y
I would say the same.

One concrete goal would be something simple where a small team of people collects samples from volunteer travelers around the world and then does a full metagenomic scan for anything that could be dangerous.

Could you feasibly get the same information from airport waste collection? I'm thinking of an airport/travel focused BioBot, but with pathogen agnostic ambitions.

7
Tessa
2y
One interesting and somewhat-related story here: an airport spa chain called XPresSpa launched a COVID-testing service called XpresCheck and have been working alongside Concentric by Ginkgo on airport biosurveillance for specific countries: I think Concentric is aiming to continue running airport biosurveillance; the idea of working from airport waste (rather than needing to directly sample travellers) is super interesting!
3
mike_mclaren
2y
Potentially - this is something myself and others working on metagenomic monitoring have discussed and would like to investigate the practicalities of. If anyone has connections to international airlines or knows about the legalities/ownership of airline waste, I'd be interested in chatting.
3
slg
2y
This could be easier, yes. I know of one person who models the defensive potential of different metagenomic sequencing approaches, but I think there is space for at least 3-5 additional people doing this.