Nice post! Will likely include this in my mental list of "biosecurity intro posts" I tend to send people when I do intro calls. 

Strongly agree with these points: 

• "Encouraging more thought-leadership/public-facing writing in your organisation"
  • I have often criticized that so much of the collective knowledge and work on biosecurity is in private Google Docs, Slack and Signal chats. I wish more of it was made public since otherwise it can be hard to understand what people in the field are actually thinking about when you are a newcomer. All the recent Defenses in Depth blog posts are a great step in the right direction.
  • Although I am guilty of this myself -- having dozens of biosecurity blog post ideas and drafts that I haven't managed to post.
• "Mentor (early-career) talent"
  • I thought about this a lot recently that with the increase in funding & attention for biosecurity, and hopefully many more new people entering the field, it seems like most of my expected impact might not come from my direct biosecurity policy/research work but from enabling other people to do good work in the field.
  • Recently I also had a few successes in introducing people to each other that led to new counterfactual collaborations/projects.
  • This has motivated me to spend more of my time doing intro calls, trying to connect people, encourage new projects, and more of these "meta-space" side quests. Take this as an invitation to DM me to ask for an intro call, feedback, or advice. 

I haven't tried it yet but I reckon a combination of DJI Mic Mini (or another microphone) and Granola AI on your phone could work really well since then you can also go for a walk. Might give it a go at the next EAG. 

I very much appreciate all the blog posts coming out from the Coefficient Giving biosecurity team at the moment. It is very helpful that you’re doing more public communication of your worldview and current priorities. The community now has better common knowledge. 

This is, of course, very tempting, and sounds very exciting. It would be a glorious coincidence if, of all possible things I could be doing, the thing that is most intellectually interesting and fun and increases my status the most also happens to be the most impactful thing I could do with my life. Similarly, why is it that taking a high-paying, high-power job where the promise of impact is a vague sense of “influence” at the cost of progress on a difficult, high-risk, and concrete intervention is so appealing?

Reminds me of this classic: Beware surprising and suspicious convergence.

Meta comment: It's fantastic to see some technical biosecurity discussion on the forum - I feel like that's been relatively rare the last 1-2 years. 

I disagree with the EA Forum's approach to life

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

Thanks for referring to these blog posts!

Very useful comment, thanks! 

hedging against uncertainty: we're just very uncertain about what a future pandemic might look like and where it will come from

I fully agree with this; I think this was an implicit premise of mine that I failed to point out explicitly. 

... though I think for it to work you have to also add a premise about the relative risk of substitution, right?

Great point that I actually haven't considered so far. I would need to think about this more before giving my opinion. It seems really context-dependent, though, and hard to determine with any confidence.

Also, the Maginot line analogy is cool; I hadn't seen that before. (I guess I really should read more of your report 🙂)

That sounds reasonable! Thanks for adding your impression.

Very cool thanks for pointing that out! I think I might have seen it before but had forgotten about it—will check it out again.

Xander, lmk if you have thought about this, and we can chat.