All of Max Görlitz's Comments + Replies

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 d... (read more)

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. 

It's fantastic to see that this is public now; thanks, Lin!

Brilliant work, as always; thank you! It is great to easily access these graphs and the infographic for future "intro to biosecurity" or similar presentations. 

Welcome Toby :)

FYI, the review paper that I teased in the introduction has finally been published and is now freely available online. It goes over existing far-UVC skin and eye safety evidence and sketches out important studies that should be done in the future. https://doi.org/10.1111/php.13866

Also, check out these X threads on the paper by Lenni Justen and Kevin Esvelt. 

I didn't know that! Thanks for the info.

In the meantime, I have created an MVP google doc of the biosecurity landscape. 

Thanks, Luca!

You are correct that there are no results yet since the trial is still ongoing and double-blinded. I have talked to them about their trial and attended that talk. AFAIK they decided to extend the duration of the trial and are adding another study site (long-term care facility) since they received additional funding for a phase 2. 

In this next phase of the trial, they will also be monitoring ozone and volatile organic compounds, which could provide some useful real-world data about those questions. 

Another data point from a post on Reflective Altruism about biorisk:

This post begins a sub-series, “Biorisk” arguing that levels of existential biorisk may be lower than many effective altruists suppose.

I have to admit that I had a hard time writing this series. The reason for that is that I’ve had a hard time getting people to tell me exactly what the risk is supposed to be. I’ve approached high-ranking effective altruists, including those working in biosecurity, and been told that they cannot give me details, because those details pose an information haz

A related point that I have observed in myself: 

I think dual-use technologies have a higher potential for infohazards. I have a preference for not needing to be "secretive," i.e., not needing to be mindful about what information I can share publicly. Probably there is also some deference going on where I shied away from working on more infohazard-y seeming technologies since I wasn't sure how to deal with selectively sharing information. Accordingly, I have preferred to work on biorisk mitigation strategies that have little dual-use potential and, thu... (read more)

(Side note: it's always both flattering and confusing to be considered a "senior member" of this community. I suppose it's true, because EA is very young, but I have many collaborators and colleagues who have decade(s) of experience working full-time on biorisk reduction, which I most certainly do not.)

I think part of this is that you are quite active on the forum, give talks at conferences, etc., making you much more visible to newcomers in the field. Others in biosecurity have decades of experience but are less visible to newcomers. Thus, it is understandable to infer that you are a "senior member."

I agree with Jasper and don't expect impacts on the skin microbiome to be a big deal, but it would, of course, be good to get some more data. 

One useful comparison is that healthcare workers use alcohol-based hand sanitizers many times a day, which are quite potent and can kill microbes in areas inaccessible to Far-UVC. 

In this review paper, they only saw changes to the composition of the skin microbiome after extremely frequent daily hand disinfection: 

“Overall microbe diversity on hands was unchanged with alcohol-based hand rub use or hand

Hi Sanjay, thanks for the comment!

sounds like a pretty great cherry on the cake

Indeed, I think part of the path to impact for far-UVC will be that adoption will hopefully be driven by, e.g., employers like Google equipping their offices with far-UVC lamps because they expect this to reduce the total number of sick days of their workers and therefore increase productivity + profits. Getting this type of evidence for efficacy would be great since it would be an excellent sales pitch to companies whose employees earn a lot, meaning sick days are costly. Ideal... (read more)

I agree. Getting more data on risks (safety) and real-world efficacy to formulate a more comprehensive and convincing cost-benefit calculus is probably the biggest priority for far-UVC right now.

This is the hottest topic in the far-UVC field right now. There were also a bunch of talks about it at the recent ICFUST conference. You can watch recordings of those talks here.

Also, see this helpful list of existing studies around far-UVC and indoor air chemistry: http://bit.ly/guv-chem

While I haven't read all of the studies in detail, my impression is that some of the results seem to disagree with each other, and the issue isn't settled yet. 

Some thoughts from a draft for a forum post I wrote:

• Undoubtedly, far-UVC has a substantial impact on in

Awesome! I have been wanting something like this for a while and am looking forward to trying it out.

See this previous comment of mine for some potentially interesting suggestions:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/cbtoajkfeXqJAzhRi/metaculus-year-in-review-2022?commentId=dotzeW2wxM5Avm7jL

(Excuse formatting; on mobile)

Just pointing out quickly that this was also posted on Lesswrong and that there are 39 comments with additional discussion over there (as of July 2023).

I would recommend just shooting them an email :)

http://sandhoefner.github.io/animal_suffering_calculator

This tool is similar. I think I have seen another very similar one, but I might be confusing them.

Yea, that could be the case, although I assume having Elon Musk sign could have generated 2x the publicity. Most news outlets seem to jump on everything he does. 

Not sure what the tradeoff between attention and controversy is for such a statement. 

I'm mildly surprised that Elon Musk hasn't signed, given that he did sign the FLI 6-month pause open letter and has been vocal about being worried about AI x-risk for years.

Probably the simplest explanation for this is that the organizers of this statement haven't been able to reach him, or he just hasn't had time yet (although he should have heard about it by now?). 

The Overedge catalog looks extremely interesting. Thanks!

Do you know of any research institutes that provide no-strings-attached, multi-year funding and are committed to open science? I’m looking for examples of metascience, where they experiment with new ways of doing and funding science. 

Institutions like Bell Labs or the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study are the historical reference class.

Based on this article in the Atlantic, I am aware of these 3 and am looking for similar examples:

• Arc Institute — A new institution for curiosity-driven biomedical science and technology
• New Science is a 501c3 resear

Yea, the way I recall it is that coronaviruses are more susceptible than other viruses. I first tried to recheck this in Appendix B of Kowalski (2009), but the values provided there vary extremely widely. I suspect the experimental quality varies a lot between those estimates, and coronaviruses were, of course, of much less interest back then. 

[...]

IMO, the easiest way to read these values is the D90 (J/m^2) value, the dose required to inactivate 90% of viruses in a sample. This is equivalent to speaking about a "1 log reduction".

Blatchley et al. (202... (read more)

Thanks for your transparency and for updating this report; I think it is tremendously valuable. I have only skimmed so far, but I will hopefully read through it completely soon.

I also tried to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the cost-effectiveness of 254 nm upper-room GUV per eACH a while ago. I estimated higher numbers in my model, more on the order of $100/eACH/year (For context: the report estimates ~$14/eACH/year). Note that the model is pretty rough, but I'll post it anyway in case it proves useful for others. 

I think this difference com... (read more)

Great post! I also believe in the need to get our air clean ASAP. 

Self-promotion: check out SecureBio's work on far-UVC. We will hopefully publish more write-ups soon. 

Minor point: In an informal survey of experts in the field, most people preferred the term germicidal UV (GUV) over Ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI). I also think that UVGI is a bit unwieldy, and "irradiation" sounds scary (although in Rethink Priorities' survey on this, the name didn't seem to matter much for people's impressions of the technology). 

Interesting obser... (read more)

I have also had some success with https://www.perplexity.ai/, but I have only queried it a handful of times so far. 

Thanks for the analysis! I only skimmed it so far, but I was wondering whether you have any thoughts on the possible intervention of advancing statins and PCSK9-inhibitors, making them much cheaper and more widely distributed? I have encountered a few maximalists dreaming of "putting them in the tap water". 

There is also a lot of hype around PCSK9 gene therapy.

That's fair. It was unreasonable of me to imply that their work is epistemically sound without engaging with it more. I flagged that I had only stumbled upon it and hadn't engaged with it, but that should have restrained me from implying their criticism being epistemically sound.  

In general, my idea of this post was more, "How curious, this sociology-ish institute is studying something related to x-risk and has engaged with EA in some way. Let me just share this and see what other people think." and not "The criticism of this group is correct and very important, EA needs to engage with it to improve." 

Awesome, thanks for giving useful context!

The website is currently down for me. Might just be a temporary issue but fyi

I am looking forward to this! I have used a bunch of these tools before but have long suspected that they could be used much more effectively. 

I work on far-UVC safety. Dm me if you want to get in touch :)

Seems highly dependent of the subject, how established the field is

Thanks for this update. I like Metaculus and have started forecasting more in 2022.

Something I would enjoy seeing is the ability to have a very quick UI for creating private questions, similar to what Nathan proposes here: https://www.super-linear.org/prize?recordId=recYHpvvGFmiFq9tS

Here is what I imagine this could look like: 

1. I pull up https://quick.metaculus.com 
2. I only see an empty command line, and when I type in, e.g. "Will Putin still be President of Russia at the end of 2023? 1y", it instantly creates a private binary question that closes a

This is so awesome, much cooler than Spotify Wrapped!!

Cross-posting this from my blog because the philosophical issues around egoism and altruism will be of interest to some people here.

Until I was ~16, I used to believe that there was no altruism and that everything anybody does is always for purely egoistical reasons. As far as I can remember, I grew confident of this after hearing an important childhood mentor talk about it. I had also read about the ideas of Max Stirner and had a vague understanding of his notion of egoism.

I can't remember what made me change my mind exactly, but pondering thought e... (read more)

I was referring to the one Sarah pointed out :)

Thanks for replying! 

Yes, that is the one! Thanks, Sarah. I wasn't able to find it. 

I remember there was this forum post with a list of selfish/egoistic reasons to be into effective altruism. I can't find it right now, can anyone point me to it?

It contains things like:

1. EA gives me meaning in my life
2. EA provides me with an ingroup where I can have a high  social status
3.  I get to be friends with smart people
4. I can feel superior to most other people because I know that I am doing something to improve the world

etc. 

Thanks, I was only aware of two of these!