We're in a bit of a pitchforks mood, but I don't think whether Austin and Caroline would have transferred this particular bit of money is a good target.

Adds additional context to https://revive.blog/b/worldoptimization on Manifold's new Blog Revival Project, with Austin pledging towards reviving his then-anonymous coworker's blog.

(Just found this interesting and mildly funny, not saying the pledging or project is bad. Though I agree with others that handling finances at a tiny org is very clearly a bad role for someone convicted of financial fraud )

It would be possible, though I do think we get quite a lot of value from being a more general biosecurity organization, including cross-pollination of ideas.

That's a great question, and I'm sorry it has taken so long to get an answer for you! We think we can achieve a three day end-to-end time by mid-2027. This will be close to the limit of what is possible to do with current technology, when you count time for shipping samples (~3/4 day), preparing them to go on the sequencer (~1/2 day), running the sequencer (1 day), and processing the output (a few hours).

I do think it's worth it to continue looking for ways to improve from there, and I expect improvements in sequencer technology to allow us to eventually cut off another ~half day. On the other hand, getting down to a day or lower is less important than you might think. Say you have a detection system with sensitivity S and end-to-end time E, and you're trying to flag a pathogen that doubles every Td days. Unless S is so high that you can flag something when the very first people are infected, this system will have approximately the same real-world performance as one with sensitivity 2S that runs in E + Td days. Now, doubling sensitivity can be an expensive proposition: after you've picked the low-hanging fruit it's approximately doubling the cost of your detection system. But it means that unless you're targeting a sensitivity high enough to identify outbreaks when only a handful of people have been infected (which would be fantastic of course, but isn't economically feasible with current technology) you can get to a given sensitivity target without pushing end to end time to near zero.

I think there’s another category before 9

Edited the post to add this.

I think most cuts should be something that we could replicate without significant price difference.

Sorry, I was a little fuzzy in my wording. My claim is (a) meat eaters have preferences + variety seeking even at the level of differences between cuts, (b) meat replacements will likely get very close to animal meat but not as close as some of these differences, and so (c) humans without a moral objection to eating animals will still eat some animal meat for variety.

For example, people still eat rutabaga, even though for any given rutabaga use other options (usually potato) are tastier and cheaper. People still eat red delicious and other kinds of apples that I think are basically obsolete. Iceberg lettuce is still widely eaten even though there are multiple options with simultaneously better flavor and nutrition. And I don't think there's much of a case for lima beans. There are some obsolete vegetables that we've stopped eating, but they basically need to be significantly worse, either in the "not worth eating" sense or "too expensive for what you get sense". In my model a food keeps some market as it still wins on some axis: cost, convenience, storage, flavor, texture, maybe tradition. And to disappear it needs to be beaten on every axis at once (or close enough that it's not worth the extra cost).

Also probably cultivated gives you more freedom to explore conventionally infeasible options.

I think that's right, but I think that doesn't get factory farming to zero: it gives people more options, but a drive for variety keeps all the options in play.

I think it goes well beyond species: meat eaters have strong preferences over specific portions ("cuts"). They have very different tastes and textures that I think will be very challenging to replicate. Instead, my expectation is that we'll get something more similar to the introduction of vegetable shortening: products that replace many animal uses, but not all.

Assuming we end factory farming before 2100, which factor will have contributed the most?

I expect these will not be exact substitutes, and so absent moral changes people would eat factory farmed meat for variety,

A bunch of objections!

• My largest is that I don't think we should rely heavily on the outside view. The whole EA project is trying to figure out where we can have the largest impact, and this involves thinking carefully about the effects of actions. What happened when people tried things in the past is some evidence, but there are also important differences between what we're trying and what people have done before (we can learn!), and between previous and current situations (the world changes).

• I don't think this analogy fits: I'm donating to people in both US parties who look like they'd do good work to reduce risk from AI and bio. I don't really see a way describing these folks as "my Group" makes sense.

• It also doesn't look to me like this cuts cleanly even if we do accept the analogy: there's also historical precedent for "try to help poor people effectively" going poorly.

I initially thought you were saying this was hard in the sense of it being hard for an evaluator, but then I noticed that your comparison was to "following GiveWell recommendations" and not "being a GiveWell evaluator". How much are you thinking about each?

If it's recommendations, what I do personally is follow the ones from @Eric Neyman 's working group.

If it's evaluation, I agree it's hard, though I also think a GiveWell evaluator has a hard job.  In fact, I think hardness is just the norm here.  For example, consider my decision whether to continue working at SecureBio. How likely is it that someone might engineer a pathogen? How much earlier in expectation is one flagged due to our efforts? How much harm is averted via earlier notification? What is my marginal contribution to our efforts? How much is people thinking SB owns this problem crowding out other work in the field?

(I am very happy with my role and not considering leaving; this is just for illustration!)

My impression of how to make progress with identifying the right places to make political donations is similar to what you'd do when assessing other donation opportunities: have people give it their full attention. My impression is they talk to existing people in the space to understand what has worked in past campaigns and how this is changing, look at the research to the extent it's any good, and talk to candidates and evaluate their public statements.