I was surprised to learn about the COVID human trials which were advocated for by the 1DaySooner project. The counterintuitive idea for me was advocating for infecting individuals with a disease with unknown consequences.

I went on a quick search to learn:

1. It's not a usual practice to infect people with a new, unresearched disease (usually they do it only for well-researched ones):
   1. one recent case is the Zika virus in 2017, where the ethics panel of American health organizations NIAID and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research declined to allow it
      1. because of the unknown consequences for the participants
      2. and because, unlike the COVID case, it was harder to contain (it can be transmitted sexually to a partner, and from a pregnant woman to her fetus, and it stays in semen for weeks to months, so quarantine doesn't help
2. The COVID trial went ok, with 18 out of 34 getting infected, everyone being young (36 people, 18–29 years) and noone dying or getting severely ill.

Overall, I seem to be ok with people taking on an additional risk for payment and signing informed consent, especially when the benefits outweigh the risks. I'm still a little uncomfortable when it's a new disease. At a limited scale it seems ok — there are much more stupid ways to risk people's lives, like wars — but it still made me think.

I'd be interested to learn about the philosophical approaches to these kinds of dilemmas. Trolley problem, anyone?

@Lizka Hi! Thanks for the post. My Claude Code suggested this post as a starting point, so here I am.

For a newcomer like me whose first language is not English it can be intimidating to start posting — as are perfectionism and the need to bring value from day one. Your post helps by encouraging me to write.

I saw that you have been contributing actively on the Forum since this post. As motivation for a newcomer like me, I would be grateful if you shared:

1) How did you progress from post to post? Did the quality improve — subjectively, or by any metric you could point to? 
2) Did you have a routine that helped you write regularly?
3) One thing I noticed: you were already inside the EA network early on (research fellowship, then CEA). Did Forum writing add anything on top of that you can point to explicitly — a connection, an opportunity, the job switch — or is it hard to separate from working at CEA? I'm asking because I'm deciding whether Forum writing is a good investment of time for an outsider whose goal is to land a job at an EA organization.