Agreed! Questions like whether it's ok to be mean to Claude, how to square caring about animals with our normal "leave nature alone" attitude, or whether the people are gradually being hollowed out by having GPT do all their thinking, are all things I might talk about with contra dance friends or park parents. I wouldn't open a conversation with them, since they could get a bit intense, but they're all places that wouldn't feel out of bounds and I'd be happy to bring them up or steer a conversation that way. And when people ask what I work on and I say building a detection system for engineered pandemics, the normal response is something like "I'm glad someone is working on that!"

I think the standard argument here is:

• Most of the risk comes from intentional release

• If there's an adversary they can aim for the gaps in your system

• Reducing attacker options still helps, but helps less against more sophisticated adversaries

• Advances in AI are making adversaries more sophisticated across the board

For example, in biosurveillance, where I'm most familiar with the field (but speaking for myself), if the world built out something really good globally that could sensitively detect the top 20 most likely attacks, adversaries would be very interested in figuring out how to create pathogens the system wouldn't detect. If the system was using PCR, which is essentially exact match detection, bypassing the detection system could be as simple as 1-2 codon substitutions.

A separate piece of this is neglectedness, similar to what you raised: there are actually a lot of pathogen specific efforts already happening, and a lot of EA-ish biosecurity work is about shifting the specific/agnostic mix by adding more on the agnostic side. Back to biosurveillance again, traditional biosurveillance is all relatively pathogen specific, whether it's tracking norovirus outbreaks or wastewater PCR for specific known things. There's still effort needed here (ex: once something has been detected you want sensitive and cheap pathogen specific testing deployed widely and rapidly) but we need relatively much more effort in detecting pathogens existing systems won't pick up.

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 two-person org is very clearly a bad role for someone convicted of financial fraud, and "I felt a keen debt to the FTX Future Fund" should point the other way.)

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 and joint policy work.

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,