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.

Expanded this and my earlier comment into a post: https://www.jefftk.com/p/high-dynamic-range-diy-air-testing

Measuring air from in a positive pressure respirator or clean room that is more than three logs cleaner than the room air is doable if you're thoughtful about experimental setup. Fundamentally, each sensor gives you about three logs of range, you don't have to use the sensor raw. Here's an example with four sensors:

1. You have your outer room, where you're going to have a very high particle concentration, and you put a sensor here. This sensor will read out of range (too high) for most of the experiment.
2. In your outer room, you put a fan with a MERV-16 filter, blowing air into a bax (plenum) at very very slight positive pressure, where you put another sensor. This will read within range for your whole experiment if you're lucky, or perhaps just a second 2/3 of the experiment.
3. Do the same as (2) with a HEPA filter. This will read within range for your whole experiment if you're lucky, or perhaps just the first 2/3 of the experiment.
4. The final sensor goes in the place you're trying to measure. It will read out of range (too low) at the end of the experiment.

Also put a small air purifier in your outer room, so that the particle count will decrease over time in a smooth way.

Before starting, calibrate your sensors by putting them all the same room and seeing how they handle the same input.

To begin the experiment, you put a huge amount of particles into the air of the outer room, perhaps dried salt. You continuously monitor your four sensors to do math on afterwards. You're going to want to do it on count bins, not mass, because that should be more stable over time and the experiment isn't able to measure everything simultaneously.

You should be able to calculate ratios between all of these sensors, either directly or by chaining. What you want to know is the ratio between your initial room (1) and your clean room (4), which you can get chained from (2) and (3).

If you use salt for your particles, the most you can get in the air is probably 100-500 mg/m3 and the sensors can do ~1-1000 ug/m3, this gives us 5-6 logs of dynamic range.

You can also get additional sensitivity by running longer, but I think sensitivity increases with the square root of time, so 10x sensitivity means 100x longer, which is pretty annoying.  [EDIT: actually I think it's linear, so this is a good way to extend your range.]

On alt proteins, if we ever substantially beat price parity (say by 50%), it’s just hard for me to see how we wouldn’t get mass consumer adoption.

For an exact substitute like precision fermented egg whites I think I agree. But alt proteins are usually more like the difference between eating different animals (turkey bacon instead of pig bacon) and people often pay >>2x for preferred animals. Even if this gets down to only as different as cuts of meat within a given animal people often pay >>2x for specific cuts. And then people really love variety, so while I see a path to replacing say 2/3 of a typical person's meat consumption the remaining portion is far harder.

It seems to me very unlikely to be that these big, thoughtful orgs are directionally wrong

That doesn't seem so unlikely to me. There are many patterns that push towards doing things over research: donors prefer it, volunteers prefer it, hard to justify research when that means doing nothing about atrocity today, things that looked good on BOTEC often don't get more investigation as reliance increase, etc. Add on top of this the poor epidemics of the animal welfare movement and I really wouldn't be surprised at all.

I've been thinking more about #5, Develop rigorously tested DIY protocols for converting bedrooms into cleanrooms, and Adin's It May Be Possible to Improvise A High Grade Bioshelter, which both primarily address environment-to-human risks (E2H).  It seems to me that the impact case for both of these depends on (a) a limited duration of the threat and (b) electricity.

On (a), my impression is that for E2H we wouldn't expect the pathogen to just go away on its own very quickly, and so we'd need a many people with good equipment working to develop countermeasures.  Is that also something you see as a critical component?  Is humanity in a good place on this?  Are you looking to fund work here?

On (b), it looks like the assumption is that the power grid continues functioning, and so DIY methods built on standard electric fans keep working.  I don't know if the thought is that the power grid is so critical that if it goes down we lose anyway?  But it seems to me that even if it mostly still works it might be much less reliable in this situation, and any power outage means loss of positive pressure and filtration.  Perhaps some combination of fossil fuel generators, portable power supplies, electric cars, bicycle attachments, and repurposing rooftop solar could be worth exploring?

This line of thought also suggests a project (11) which looks like:

1. Figure out what prep it is cost-effective for people to do ahead of time as individuals.
2. Produce resources that make this as easy as possible (what to buy, what to test ahead of time, what to have locally on paper)
3. Clearly and persuasively make this case publicly.

Benefit is a combination of some people being directly protected by having prepped better, plus higher capacity supply chains for scaling this up quickly in an emergency.

My top reason for not relocating is that I'm working on preventing this kind of bad outcome, which I think I can do most effectively from Boston.

But even if I were doing work that could be done from anywhere, I don't think I'd relocate: that only helps in a small fraction of the doomy futures, I think there are also a lot of good futures, and I really like living in Boston.

I would be pretty surprised if things failed in that particular way? We do legally own the entire house, and that wouldn't be in dispute. Having money left on the mortgage means that we owe money to the bank, secured by the house. In most kinds of kind of disaster, if ownership becomes unclear, I expect it to be primarily resolved by possession.

I think things are unlikely to fall apart in this particular way, but to the extent that they do, I think it mostly argues for renting over owning, over being an absentee landlord.

The full list is on our donations page. Lately we've been prioritizing political donations (argument, mechanism).