All of Tessa's Comments + Replies

I was part of a youth delegation to the BWC in 2017, and I think the greatest benefit I got was that it raised my aspirations. I'm not sure I'd previously conceived of myself as the sort of person who could speak at the UN. I also heard an expert bowing out of dinner early because they had to go finish their slides for the next day, and realized there isn't some upper echelon of governance and society where everyone is hypercompetent and on top of things; even at the friggin' United Nations people are making their slides the night before.

I don't know how m... (read more)

+1 on "specialist experts are surprisingly accessible to enthusiastic youth", cf some relevant advice from Alexey Guzey

Thanks for this comment, and thanks to Nadia for writing the post, I'm really happy to see it up on the forum!

Chris and I wrote the guidance for reading groups and early entrants to the field; this was partly because we felt that new folks are most likely to feel stuck/intimidated/forced-into-deference/etc. and because it's where we most often found ourselves repeating the same advice over and over.

I think there are people whose opinions I respect who would disagree with the guidance in a few ways:

• We recommend a few kinds of interpersonal interventions,

This is more a response to "it is easy to build an intuitive case for biohazards not being very important or an existential risk", rather than your proposals...

My feeling is that it is fairly difficult to make the case that biological hazards present an existential as opposed to catastrophic risk and that this matters for some EA types selecting their career paths, but it doesn't matter as much in the grand scale of advocacy? The set of philosophical assumptions under which "not an existential risk" can be rounded to "not very important" seems common in th... (read more)

Happy to pitch in with a few stories of rejection!

• 2010: I applied for MIT and Princeton for undergraduate studies and wasn't accepted to either. Not trying harder to get into those schools was a major regret of mine for about 5 years (I barely studied for the SATs, in part because I was the only person I knew who took them... it's uncommon for Canadians to attend university in the states). I later ended up working on teams with people who had gone to fancy US schools, such that I no longer believe this had a clearly negative impact on my trajectory.
• 2018

Maybe there’s a huge illusion in EA of “someone else has probably worked out these big assumptions we are making”. This goes all the way up to the person at Open Phil thinking “Holden has probably worked these out” but actually no one has.

I just wanted to highlight this in particular; I have heard people at Open Phil say things along the lines of "... but we could be completely wrong about this!" about large strategic questions. A few examples related to my work:

• Is it net positive to have a dedicated community of EAs working on reducing GCBRs, or woul

I recall meeting Karolina M. Sulich, the VP of Osmocosm, at EAGxBerlin last year, and thought some of her machine olfaction x biosecurity ideas were really cool! I'd be stoked for more people to look into this.

A few more you might share:

• Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction mailing list
• Biological Security (Weekly Updates) from Parlimentarians for Global Action

This is great! I think that project-based learning is simply a way more effective way to learn about a cause area than going through a reading list (I know you've written about this before). Cold Takes has quite a lot of writing about how just reading stuff is probably not the best way to form a view and robustly retain things.

It's also super generous of you to offer to review people's fit-test projects :)

Another poem about loss that moves me, this one specifically about grieving a dear friend:

It's what others do, not us, die, even the closest
on a vainglorious, glorious morning, as the song goes,
the yellow or golden palms glorious and all the rest
a sparkling splendour, die. They're practising calypsos,
they're putting up and pulling down tents, vendors are slicing
the heads of coconuts around the Savannah, men
are leaning on, then leaping into pirogues, a moon will be rising
tonight in the same place over Morne Coco, then
the full grief will hit me and m... (read more)

This was a beautiful remembering, thank you for sharing it. Often how I want to grieve people is just to remember them in detail, saying: they were here, not like anyone else, but specifically this is the way they were; I remember, and I wish they were still in the world. This post felt like that sort of grief.

This is my favourite poem about grief, which I often return to when grieving the people I've lost (most especially my partner Zach):

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has... (read more)

Thanks for this post! I agree with your point about being careful on terms, and thought it might be useful to collect a few definitions together in a comment.

DURC (Dual-Use Research of Concern)

DURC is defined differently by different organizations. The WHO defines it as:

research that is intended to provide a clear benefit, but which could easily be misapplied to do harm

while the definition given in the 2012 US government DURC policy is:

life sciences research that, based on current understanding, can be reasonably anticipated to provide knowledge, i

Just echoing the experience of "it's been a pretty humbling experience to read more of the literature"; biosecurity policy has a long history of good ideas and nuanced discussions. On US gain-of-function policy in particular, I found myself particularly humbled by the 2015 article Gain-of-function experiments: time for a real debate, an adversarial collaboration between researchers involved in controversial viral gain-of-function work and biosecurity professionals who had argued such work should face more scrutiny. It's interesting to see where the contours of the debate have changed and how much they haven't changed in the past 7+ years.

Yeah, my impression from Canada is that master's degrees are not all scams. A totally normal path for an academic is to do a (poorly) paid, research-based master's in one lab, then jump over to another lab for a (maybe slightly shorter than in the USA) PhD.

That said, the most academically impressive researchers I knew at my Canadian school (i.e. already had solid publications and research experience as undergrads) went straight to US-based PhDs, even if they were hoping to return to Canada as academics after getting their doctorate.

One thing that sort of did this for me at EAGxBerlin, which I wonder if we could have some kind of infrastructure for, was hosting "unofficial office hours" where I put my name on a piece of paper and sat in a specific place for two hours, and talked with people who came past. (I was also able to tell people  in Swapcard that we could talk during that time as well as or instead of in a 1:1.)

I could imagine unconference-y or "host your own conversation table" infrastructure for this as well (instead of or in addition to "unoffical office hours with X").

Related to some recent posts about linguistic inclusion ― allow people to indicate on Swapcard if they're open to having 1:1s in non-English languages?

A few I'd add:

• CBW Events (daily reports from Bioweapons Convention meetings) → subscribe here
• You might also find it useful to keep up with developments in biotechnology, for which I'd point you at:
  • The Century of Biology
  • Codon
  • SynBioBeta (I usually skim this one)
• There are a lot number of interesting public health and epidemiology newsletters as well; I don't feel like I have an amazing recommendation here, though I've recently been skimming Force of Infection

Items 1 through 4 rhyme with the advice in the Learning By Writing post on Cold Takes, which I found quite inspiring (emphasis in the original):

[During this process I am] trying to “always have a hypothesis” and re-articulating it whenever it changes. By doing this, I try to continually focus my reading on the goal of forming a bottom-line view, rather than just “gathering information.” I think this makes my investigations more focused and directed, and the results easier to retain. I consider this approach to be probably the single biggest difference-ma

For virtual contexts, you can also try turning on auto-captioning, which Zoom (https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-auto-generated-captions/) and Google Meet (https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9300310) support. It helps!

In terms of trivial inconveniences / perception and gratitude for the work people are doing to speak English, one other small note: there may be more native English speakers than you realize who have spent periods speaking another language?

In EA contexts, it's pretty much always the case that the shared level of English between myself and my conversation partner is higher, since my Spanish is around a B2 level and my French around B1... but I have spent ~6 months each in countries that speak those languages and know it's hard!

I've gotten feedback before wh... (read more)

I love the subject line suggestion, this seems really helpful! A few other suggestions (also based on my experiences as a native English speaker living in non-English-speaking countries):

1. Slow (especially with distinct gaps between words) makes more of a difference than simple, and is MUCH better than loud, which mostly distorts what you're trying to say.
2. Be careful about mistaking accent for content; if you're not careful, you might assume someone isn't putting together fluent sentences when in fact they are just mispronouncing some words.
3. Speaking in yo

Thanks for this post!

I wanted to link a few previous discussions of this topic on the EA Forum, as I think the discussion there might also be relevant to this issue:

• English as a dominant language in the movement: challenges and solutions, 2019-09-03
• Native languages in the EA community (and issues with assessing promisingness), 2021-12-26

+1, thanks for designing this! Another thing that wasn't entirely clear to me was whether questions like "Have you made professional decisions based on wanting to escape a particular group of coworkers or company culture?" and "Have you ever experienced any of these behaviors while at work, or from your coworkers, managers, or other individuals you knew in a professional setting?" were meant to refer to my current role, or my entire career.

Thanks for writing out a reaction very similar to my own. As I wrote in a comment on a different topic, "it seems to me that one of the core values of effective altruism is that of impartiality― giving equal moral weight to people who are distant from me in space and/or time."

I agree that "all people count equally" is an imprecise way to express that value (and I would probably choose to frame in in the lens of "value" rather than "belief") but I read this as an imprecise expression of a common value in the movement rather than a deep philosophical commitment to valuing all minds exactly the same.

This is not a comment on the cheapness point, but in case this feels relevant, private vehicles are not necessary to access this venue― from the Oxford rail station you can catch public buses that drop you off about a 2-minute walk from the venue. It's a 20 minute bus ride, and the buses don't come super often (every 60 minutes, I think?) but I just wanted to be clear that you can access this space via public transport.

I don't plan to engage deeply with this post, but I wanted to leave a comment pushing back on the unsubtle currents of genetic determinism ("individuals from those families with sociological profiles amenable to movements like effective altruism, progressivism, or broad Western Civilisational values are being selected out of the gene pool"), homophobia ("cultures that accept gay people on average have lower birth rates and are ultimately outnumbered by neighboring homophobic cultures", in a piece that is all about how low birth rates are a key problem of o... (read more)

I definitely don't think "sounds bad" (I really, really would like it to be easier for publishers to adopt dual-use screening best practices) but I do think "sounds partly duplicative of other work" (there are other groups looking into what publishers need / want, seems good to collaborate with them and use their prior work) and "should be done thoughtfully" (for example, should be done with someone who has a good appreciation for the fact that, right now, there does not exist a set of "dual use best practices" that an organization could simply adopt).

I'm ... (read more)

A few other recommended attractions, from someone who lived in Oakland and Berkeley for a few years:

• Indian Rock Park (Berkeley): an incredible sunset point, one of my all-time favourite parks, great for a rock scramble or a picnic or serious bouldering if you're into that
• The Pacific Pinball Museum (Alameda): If you like pinball at all you should go there. You pay entry and then their like 100 pinball machines are free to play.
• The Exploratorium (SF): Highly interactive science museum. If you go on Thursday night, you won't have to elbow children out of

There is definitely a lot of further research on some of these specific ideas (I tried to link out to a few projects), but I don't know of a ton of comparative research on them. It's possible there are internal ITN estimates at some grantmaking orgs? And this graph from  Technologies to Address Global Catastrophic Risk is in the right direction (but doesn't focus on neglectedness):

Additionally, I believe some organizations in the EA community (e.g. Open Philanthropy and Convergent Research) working on deeper strategic / comparative investigations of p... (read more)

I don't know how much of her time Jennifer Doudna spends thinking about bioweapons, but I do think she spends a lot of time thinking about the ethical implications of CRISPR. If you read things like this NYT interview with her from last week she's saying things like:

Interviewer: It’s also easy to imagine two different countries, let alone two different people, having competing ideas about what would constitute ethical gene editing. In an optimal world, would there be some sort of global body or institution to help govern and adjudicate these decisions? I

You say "we can't control drugs, guns, or even reckless driving". I don't think that's entirely true. For example, the RAND meta-analysis What Science Tells Us About the Effects of Gun Policies shows moderate evidence that violence crime can be reduced by prohibitions associated with domestic violence, background checks, waiting periods, and stand-your-ground laws. Similarly, I believe that progress in car safety engineering has radically reduced the human suffering caused by reckless driving. I have heard biosecurity professionals use cars as an example o... (read more)

I would love to see other more targeted and ambitious efforts to influence others where the KPI isn't the number of highly-engaged EAs created.

+1, EA is a philosophical movement as well as a professional and social community.

I agree with this post that it can be useful to spread the philosophical ideas to people who will never be a part of the professional and social community. My sense from talking to, for example, senior professionals who have been convinced to reallocate some of their work to EA-priority causes is that this can be extremely valuable. Or... (read more)

This feels very related to the recent post Most Ivy-smart students aren't at Ivy-tier schools, which notes near the beginning: 

I don't address/argue the normative claim that EA should focus less on college rank at the individual (e.g., hiring) and/or community (e.g., which schools' EA groups to invest more resources in developing) levels, but that would indeed be a non-crazy takeaway if the post makes you update in the direction I expect it to, on average!  

While referencing the 7 Generations principle, I would credit it to "the Iroquois confederacy" or "the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacy" rather than "the Iroquois tribe". There isn't one tribe associated with that name; it's an alliance formed by the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca (and joined  by the Tuscarora in 1722).

(Aside: In Ontario, where I'm from, we tend to use the word "nation" rather than "tribe" to refer to the members of the confederacy, but it's possible this is a US/Canada difference, and the part that bothered me was the inaccuracy of the singular more than the specific word choice.)

Thanks for putting together the summary, I enjoyed reading it!

I really liked this post, and resonate strongly with the sentiment of "Nothing can take donating away from me, not even a bad day". 

Although I do direct work on biosecurity,  my donations (~15% gross income) go almost entirely to global health and wellbeing, and some of this is because I want to be reassured that I had a positive impact, even if all my various speculative research ideas (and occasional unproductive depressive spirals) amount to nothing.

I would be curious how you feel that intersects with the wording of the GWWC pledge, which incl... (read more)

Relatedly, an area where I think arXiv could have a huge impact (in both biosecurity and AI) would be setting standards for easy-to-implement manged access to algorithms and datasets.

This is something called for in Biosecurity in an Age of Open Science:

Given the misuse potential of research objects like code, datasets, and protocols, approaches for risk mitigation are needed. Across digital research objects, there appears to be a trend towards increased modularisation, i.e., sharing information in dedicated, purpose built repositories, in contrast to suppl

The paper Existential Risk and Cost-Effective Biosecurity makes a distinction between Global Catastrophic Risk and an Existential Risk in the context of biological threats:

One thing I find hopeful, under the "Consensus-finding on risks and benefits of research" idea, is that the report Emerging Technologies and Dual-Use Concerns (WHO, 2021) includes two relevant governance  priorities:

• Safety by design in dual-use research projects: "A comprehensive approach to identifying the potential benefits and risks of research may improve the design and flag potential pitfalls early in the research. "
• Continued lack of a global framework for DURC: "Previous WHO consultations have highlighted the lack of a global framework as a crit

I had recent cause to return to this post and will note that I am currently working on a short paper about this.

I think people are also unaware of how tiny the undergraduate populations of elite US/UK universities are, especially if you (like me) did not grow up or go to school in those countries.

Quoting a 2015 article from Joseph Heath, which I found shocking at the time:

There are few better ways of illustrating the difference than to look at the top U.S. colleges and compare them to a highly-ranked Canadian university, like the University of Toronto where I work. The first thing you’ll notice is that American schools are miniscule. The top 10 U.S. universities c

In terms of needing such a system to be lightweight and specific: this also implies needing it what is sometimes called "adaptive governance" (i.e. you have to be able to rapidly change your rules when new issues emerge).

For example, there were ambiguities about whether SARS-CoV-2 fell under Australia Group export controls on "SARS-like-coronaviruses" (related journal article)... a more functional system would include triggers for removing export controls (e.g. at a threshold of global transmission, public health needs will likely outweigh biosecurity concerns about pathogen access)

Freakonomics also currently in Global Poverty!

I want to especially +1 item (3) here― the best actions for a skill-focused group will be very different depending on how skilled its group members are. Using my own experience organising a biosecurity-focused group (which fizzled out because the core members skilled up and ended up focused on direct work... not a bad outcome).

Some examples of the purposes of skill-focused groups, at different skill levels:

Newcomer = learn together

• Member goals: Figure out if you are interested in an area, or what you are interested in within it.
• Core Activities: Gettin

a rhetorical move that introduces huge moral stakes into the world-view in order to push people into drastically altering their actions and priorities

What is the definition you'd prefer people to stick to? Something like "being pushed into actions that have a very low probability of producing value, because the reward would be extremely high in the unlikely event they did work out"?

The Drowning Child argument doesn't seem like an example of Pascal's Mugging, but Wikipedia gives the example of:

"give me five dollars, or I'll use my magic powers from out

I haven't looked into this in detail (honest epistemic status: saw a screenshot on Twitter) but what do you think of the recent paper Association of Influenza Vaccination With Cardiovascular Risk?

Quoting from it, re: tractable interventions:

The effect sizes reported here for major adverse cardiovascular events and cardiovascular mortality (in patients with and without recent ACS) are comparable with—if not greater than—those seen with guideline-recommended mainstays of cardiovascular therapy, such as aspirin, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, β-

Minor elaboration on your last point: a piece of advice I got from someone who did psychological research on how to solicit criticism was to try to brainstorm someone's most likely criticism of you would be, and then offer that up when requesting criticism, as this is a credible indication that you're open to it. Examples:

• "Hey, do you have any critical feedback on the last discussion I ran? I talked a lot about AI stuff, but I know that can be kind of alienating for people who have more interest in political action than technology development... Does th