All of Tessa's Comments + Replies

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

Some recent-ish resources that potential applicants might want to check out:

David Manheim and Gregory Lewis, High-risk human-caused pathogen exposure events from 1975-2016, data note published in August 2021.

As a way to better understand the risk of Global Catastrophic Biological Risks due to human activities, rather than natural sources, this paper reports on a dataset of 71 incidents involving either accidental or purposeful exposure to, or infection by, a highly infectious pathogenic agent.

Filippa Lentzos and Gregory D. Koblentz, Mapping Maximum Bio... (read more)

One now-inactive past project in this space that I would highlight (since I would very much like something similar to exist again) is The Sunshine Project. Quoting its (sadly very short) Wikipedia page:

The Sunshine Project worked by exposing research on biological and chemical weapons. Typically, it accessed documents under the Freedom of Information Act and other open records laws, publishing reports and encouraging action to reduce the risk of biological warfare. It tracked the construction of high containment laboratory facilities and the dual-use act

I logically acknowledge that: "In some cases, an extravagant lifestyle can even produce a lot of good, depending on the circumstances... It’s not my preferred moral aesthetic, but the world’s problems don’t care about my aesthetics."

I know that, but... I care about my aesthetics.

For nearly everyone, I think there exists is a level of extravagance that disgusts their moral aesthetics. I'm sure I sit above that level for some, with my international flights and two $80 keyboards. My personal aesthetic disgust triggers somewhere around "how dare you spend $100... (read more)

You might be interested to know that iGEM (disclosure: my employer) just published a blog post about infohazards. We currently offer biorisk workshops for teams; this year we plan to offer a general workshop on risk awareness, a workshop specifically on dual-use, and potentially some others. We don't have anything on general EA / rationality, though we do share biosecurity job and training opportunities with our alumni network.

On passive technologies, I imagine the links from Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists would be informative. The areas highlighted there under "physical protection from pathogens" are:

• Improving personal protective equipment (PPE)
• Suppressing pathogen spread in the built environment
• Improving biosafety in high-containment labs and clinics
• Suppressing pathogen spread in vehicles

For spread in vehicles and the built environment, my sense (based on conversations with others, not independent research) is that lots of folks are excited about a... (read more)

On cyberbiosecurity:

• I enjoyed Defining “Cyberbiosecurity” and why we should stop using the term, a skeptical 2019 blog post from Alexander Titus, which basically argues that "cyberbiosecurity" is a term that ends up discouraging work because no one knows where to start!
• The winners of the 2021 NTI Next Generation for Biosecurity contest wrote Towards Responsible Genomic Surveillance: A Review of Biosecurity and Dual-use Regulation which focuses on data privacy issues related to pandemic genomic surveillance
• Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered dr

Under Solutions to deal with misinformation, Tara Kirk Sell at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has done a bunch of related work (her list of publications includes things like a National Priorities to Combat Misinformation and Disinformation for COVID-19 and Future Public Health Threats: A Call for a National Strategy and Longitudinal Risk Communication: A Research Agenda for Communicating in a Pandemic). She was also interviewed for the 80,000 Hours podcast in May 2020, though I suspect her thinking has evolved since then.

(For all of these com... (read more)

I have strong "social security number" associations with the acronym SSN.

Setting those aside, I feel "scale" and "solvability" are simpler and perhaps less jargon-y words than "impact" and "tractability" (which is probably good), but I hear people use "impact" much more frequently than "scale" in conversation, and it feels broader in definition, so I lean towards "ITN" over "SSN".

Thank you for highlighting this opportunity, which seems like the sort of cool research that this community is into funding (including me, I chipped in a little bit), as well as for doing so much investigation of the project in order to write up this report.

Man, I find it so difficult (on, like, an emotional level) to think clearly about the dollar value of an hour of my time (I feel like it is overvalued?? because so many people make so much less money than me, a North American???) but I agree that adopting some kind of clear heuristic here is good, and that I should more frequently be doing explicit trades of "I will spend up to 2 hours on trying to find a cheaper option, because I think in expectation that's worth $60".

I wonder if it might be possible to get volunteers to help find some of opportunities to save money, in the genre of

putting students up in cheaper hotels, booking flights further in advance, or selecting cheaper flights where inconvenience is minimal (rather than treating money as no object).

I am not confident that this is true, because coordinating with volunteers is a lot of work and coordination-time is limited, but I could imagine a world where you could be like "here is my BATNA for booking flights for these speakers, if someone can improve upon this in the next 12 hours, I will donate the difference in money to the charity of their choice".

+1, the frugality options seem like a nice way to "make the opportunity cost of funding more salient" without necessarily requiring huge changes from event organizers.

This project sounds great! You said this is focused on "high-priority emerging technologies, especially AI and cybersecurity". My network is mostly composed of synthetic biologists, would this also be an appropriate opportunity for them?

I just want to pipe in to say that I think this is a cool example; the structure of "extremely small prize for doing the thing at all" seems like a nice way to build up the funnel of new blogs in a more even-handed way.

Screen and record all DNA synthesis 
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe

Screening all DNA synthesis orders for potentially serious hazards would reduce the risk that a dangerous biological agent is engineered and released. Robustly recording what DNA is synthesized (necessarily in an encrypted fashion) would allow labs to prove that they had not engineered an agent causing an outbreak. We are interested in funding work to solve technical, political and incentive problems related to securing DNA synthesis.

Meta note: there are already some cool E... (read more)

yeah, to expand upon this:

Best practices for assessment and management of dual-use infohazards
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe, Values and Reflective Processes

Lots of important and well-intended research, including research into AI alignment and pandemic prevention, generates information which may be hazardous if misused. We would like to better understand how to assess and manage these hazards, and would be interested in funding expert elicitation studies and other empirical work on estimating information risks. We would also be interested in funding... (read more)

One interesting and somewhat-related story here: an airport spa chain called XPresSpa launched a COVID-testing service called XpresCheck and have been working alongside Concentric by Ginkgo on airport biosurveillance for specific countries:

“For the past 3 months, XpresCheck and their testing partner, Concentric by Gingko, demonstrated that a traveler-based SARS-CoV-2 viral genomic surveillance program can help detect emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants in the United States,” said Dr. Cindy R. Friedman, chief of CDC’s Travelers’ Health Branch. “In fact, follo

Hi, I work on biosecurity at iGEM, can confirm we care quite a lot about it. A lot of these projects don't seem obviously best solved through synthetic biology (cf. Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists) but iGEMers often surprise me! 

I think many teams are already motivated to work on medical countermeasures, though I maybe see a somewhat greater number of exciting diagnostics projects than therapeutics projects (for example, two of the winners of the 2020 competition worked on rapid point-of-care diagnostics (https://2020.igem.org/Tea... (read more)

Continuous sampling for high-risk laboratories
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe

We would be excited to fund efforts to test laboratory monitoring systems that would provide data for biosafety and biosurveillance. The 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax leak happened because a clogged air filter had been removed from the bioweapons laboratory's exhaust pipe and no one informed the night shift manager. What if, by default, ventilation ducts in high-containment laboratories were monitored to detect escaping pathogens? Establishing a practice of continuous sampling wou... (read more)

Reducing risks from laboratory accidents
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe

Some life sciences research, such as gain-of-function work with potential pandemic pathogens, poses serious risks even in the absence of bad actors. What if we could eliminate biological risks from laboratory accidents? We'd like to see work to reduce the likelihood of accidents, such as empirical biosafety research and human factors analysis on  laboratory equipment. We'd also like to see work that reduces the severity of accidents, such as warning systems to inform scientists if a pathogen has not been successfully deactivated and user-friendly lab strains that incorporate modern biocontainment methods.

You might find some answers in the question on computational biology thesis topic suggestions or some ideas in this post on project ideas in biosecurity, but/and I second Will's idea of moving this into its own question post if you want to solicit more suggestions.

I think you're right that the human-health-via-nutrition case for GMOs is pretty weak. Advocating for non-GMO food fortification (e.g. the work of the Food Fortification Initiative, who have been written up by GiveWell but are not a top charity) seems more tractable than pushing for GMOs.

Your "Other use cases of GMOs" section focuses on addressing other nutritional deficits. My (not deeply researched) sense is that the major benefits of agricultural GMOs are probably more about reduced famine via:

*  ability to survive climate extremes
* resistance to p... (read more)

This:

it is worth some eyebrow-raising if it turns out that the ingroup defense is something along the lines of “well, by bioethicists, we mean research ethicists, and by research ethicists we mean research bureaucrats, and by research bureaucrats, we mean research bureaucracy.”

has been roughly my impression of the curious EA bioethics hate, which I have tried to push back on when I've seen my friends expressing it. I liked the Rob Bensinger piece Thirty-three randomly selected bioethics papers that you linked.

My sense is that there are institutions making ... (read more)

I haven't read The Culture series but/and I really enjoyed this meta piece about it: Why The Culture Wins: An appreciation of Iain M. Banks for a really excellent discussion of meaning-seeking within a post-scarcity utopia. An excerpt:

In fact, modern science fiction writers have had so little to say about the evolution of culture and society that it has become a standard trope of the genre to imagine a technologically advanced future that contains archaic social structures. ... Such a postulate can be entertaining, to the extent that it involves a dramat

Is this necessary? I feel like many people judge their lives as worth living even though their day-to-day experiences contain mostly pain. I wonder if we're imagining different definitions  for "barely-net-positive". Maybe you mean "adding up the magnitude of moment-to-moment negative or positive qualia over someone's entire life" (hedonistic utilitarianism) whereas I am usually imagining something more like "on reflection, the person judges their life as worth living" (kinda preference utilitarian).

Yeah, I think you're right that a possible takeaway here is "try to minimize your leisure time, but leave yourself generous slack", and I like the idea of building up a "motivational runway" that you can burn down when you need to push really hard on something.

I just still think that most people (sure, probably not Sam Bankman-Fried) are going to cause themselves needless pain by aiming for minimum leisure/fun/etc instead of prioritizing more important uses of a smaller number of impact-oriented hours.

To reverse your financial metaphor, I feel like I see a... (read more)

Thanks, I appreciate this detailed response! My advice for what to do in practice is something like "focus on output against priorities, not marginal hours". I no longer believe that, for most people, there is a real trade-off between hours spent on self-care*  and amount of impact. If someone is making themselves miserable, I think "put real effort into becoming less depressed" is a likely good short-term bet for increasing productivity, but this post is meant to be about a general pattern, not just advice for people struggling with their mental heal... (read more)

I'm also familiar with this school of thought, but I'm not sure it's empirically validated? 

In the case of Dominic Cummings, I believe you are referring to this post which describes running successful political campaigns. Those seem like they might be an outlier, in that they are an extremely time-bound competition where "do things faster than your opponent" is an obvious win? As Samuel noted, running a startup is also a case where a marginal month of delivery matters, since you likely have <1 year of runway to demonstrate to investors that you sho... (read more)

Thank you for your kind words! I do find it really useful to have time that is intentionally free from obligation. I do still track my time, but I have an "endorsed chill" category (which I absolutely did not circa 2018).

You might enjoy the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown. It's written in a standard business-psych tone, so expect lots of inspiring anecdotes of corporate success and bolded subheadings, but/and it has a number of useful strategies for prioritizing. It also frames a bunch of things I was deficient in― e.g. dropping unnecessary commitments, ... (read more)

Fair enough! I have revised the title to include "self-care", which hopefully makes it clearer (the previous title, for later arrivals to this comment thread, was just "Aiming for the minimum is dangerous").

+1, distinguishing between "No degree requirement", "Bachelors", "Masters" all would be helpful. You could borrow from the 80k board and separate out the "Academic Degree" requirements from the "Relevant Experience" requirements (e.g. "< 1 Year", "1-2 years", "2 or more years")
 

If you're looking for resources on mental health, you might enjoy some of the upvoted posts under the self-care tag, including Mental Health Resources Tailored for EAs and Resources on Mental Health and Finding a Therapist.

FYI for anyone else who might crosspost Brian Tomasik posts: I learned thanks to a crosspost of The Importance of Wild-Animal Suffering that he doesn't like crossposting since it makes updating the content of posts more difficult. I have updated my crossposts from him to only include the summary paragraphs and a table of contents (with a caveat that the contents are as of the time of cross-posting).

When NTI launched the Biosecurity Innovation and Risk Reduction Initiative in 2018, five proposals were highlighted, which all seem to have translated into current initiatives:

• Common Mechanism to Prevent Illicit Gene Synthesis
• Financial Incentives for Biotechnology Investors to Improve Biosecurity
• Standards for Funders, Grantees, and Publishers to Identify and Mitigate Biological Risks
• Insurance Incentives for Reducing Biological Risks
• Establishing a Seal of Approval to Incentivize the Adoption of Biosecurity Norms

I'd be curious to hear you answers to ... (read more)

What do you think are the most important security (I'm especially interested in biosecurity) projects being done outside of the USA/UK? More generally, what are the organizations or projects you would suggest EAs based outside the USA or UK try to get involved with?

Well, thanks for leaving feedback despite being unsure! I appreciate it since this is my first time doing a bunch of crossposts, and I'm trying to figure out a good format.

The EA forum team is going to back-date these posts to their original dates so they can be voted on in the review. Would you still have benefited from the note being at the beginning if this post's date indicated that it's from 2014?

(On my first few cross-posts, I placed the "hey, this is a crosspost" note as a header, but I noticed it was removed when the forum team backdated the posts; decided to try entering it as a footer instead for my latest batch of crossposts.)

I messed around making an Airtable of biosecurity-related early-career opportunities earlier this year, more or less for my own reference.

Here's a link, which might be of interest both from a data design perspective and because you might not have all of the internships listed there (though note that it lists a bunch of non-internship things as well): https://airtable.com/shr1WyRk3o9PdbbIl

One thing that's a bit unclear to me from the form: is this more of a job board, or more of a list of regularly-occurring internships?

(If job board, some Boreal-summer internships I'd think to link will not be posted yet; if list of orgs / programs that regularly host internships, then the "Application Deadline" would be a time of year rather than a specific date.)

Linking the recent post about this: EA Internship & Research Opportunities for Undergraduates

Thanks for taking the time to put together this list, this is great! I found that a few of these were on the forum already:

• Why Charities Usually Don't Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness
• A post you can upvote about Sendwave: Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets
• New UK aid strategy – prioritising research and crisis response
• For the cage-free campaigns summarized in the vox article you linked, there are ~20 posts under the corporate cage-free campaigns tag, not sure which which you think is the best.
• Using th

I don't think I quite understand this reply. Are you saying that (check all that apply):

1. In your experience, the people involved in discussions do embrace redistribution and fairness as core values, they are just placing more value on future people.
2. Actual longtermists also advocate for near-term redistributive causes, so criticism about resource allocation within the movement away from the global poor and towards longtermism doesn't make sense (i.e. it's not zero-sum).
3. Redistributive commitments are only one part of the "foundational values", and Toby

I'm willing to do a few more crossposts― are there pieces of object-level content that you'd really like to see crossposted?

I would recommend this post over the GiveWell one as a case study / postmortem on charity entrepreneurship.

While it covers similar ground, the GiveWell post (which is essentially a metacommentary on this one) seemed to be written partly with the intention of reassuring donors to GiveWell that they shouldn't update too negatively. This post felt like a more straightforward summary of Evidence Action's decision-making process about No Lean Season.

I think this post also more clearly emphasizes the various factors that contributed to the decision to shut down ... (read more)

While making several of review crossposts for the Decade Review I found myself unhappy about the possibility that someone might think I had authored one of the posts I was cross-linking. Here are the things I ended up doing:

1. Make each post a link post (this one seems... non-optional).
2. In the title of the post, add the author / blog / organization's name before the post title, separated by an en-dash.
   • Why before the title? This ensures that the credit appears even if the title is long and gets cut off.
   • Why an en-dash? Some of the posts I was linking alrea