All of Spiracular's Comments + Replies
Thanks for the thoughtful response!
I want to start with the recognition that everything I remember hearing from you in particular around this topic, here and elsewhere, has been extremely reasonable. I also very much liked your paper.
My experience has been that I have had multiple discussions around disease shut down prematurely in some in-person EA spaces, or else turned into extended discussions of infohazards, even if I'm careful. At some point, it started to feel more like a meme than anything. There are some cases where "infohazards" were brought up a
... (read more)Hello Spiracular,
Is it your impression that whenever you -or talented friends in this area- come up with a reasonably-implementable good idea, that after searching around, you tend to discover that someone else has already found it and tried it?
I think this is somewhat true, although I don't think this (or the suggestions for bottlenecks in the paragraph below) quite hits the mark. The mix of considerations are something like these:
1) I generally think the existing community covers the area fairly competently (from an EA perspective). I think the main... (read more)
Now that we've gone over some of the considerations, here's some of the concrete topics I see as generally high or low hazard for open discussion.
Good for Open Discussion
- Broad-application antiviral developments and methods
- Vaccines
- Antivirals proper
- T-cell therapy
- Virus detection and monitoring
- How to report lab hazards
- ...and how to normalize and encourage this
- Broadly-applicable protective measures
- Sanitation
- Bunkers?
- The state of funding
- The state of talent
- What broad skills to develop
- How to appeal to talent
- Who talent should talk to
Thanks! For me, this does a bit to clear up why buy-in is perceived as such a key bottleneck.
(And secondarily, supporting the idea that other areas of fairly-high ROI are likely to be centered around facilitating collaboration and consolidation of resources among people with a lot of pre-existing experience/expertise/buy-in.)