Thanks Claire! Are you able to point to some newer opportunities you think are especially promising?

Assuming we're only talking about the post Richard linked (and the user's one recent comment, which is similar), I agree with this.

I didn't say a lot of arms. 😛

But it's a fair point. Of course, in the absence of testing moderna could have ramped up production much faster. But I'm not sure they would have even if they were allowed to - that's a pretty huge reputational risk.

I think the two-day meme is badly misleading. Having a candidate vaccine sequence on a computer is very different from "having the vaccine".

It looks like Moderna shipped its first trial doses to NIH in late February, more than a month later. I think that's the earliest reasonable date you could claim that "we had the vaccine". If you were willing to start putting doses in arms without any safety or efficacy testing at all, that's when you could start.

(Of course, if you did that you'd presumably also have done it with all the vaccine candidates that didn't work out, of which there's no shortage.)

I think you're probably wrong, but I hope you're right.

I'm not sure which, but in one of Will's 80k podcast interviews he discusses the origins of EA and mentions Yudkowsky and LessWrong as one of three key strands (as well as the GWWC crew in Oxford and Holden/GiveWell).

I saw it when it first went up and it was nonymous, though I don't remember what the user name was.

It wasn't anonymous when the post went up, but it became so when the user deactivated their account.

Fair enough re the link!

Cigarettes are called fags in the UK and other commonwealth countries, yeah. I don't think it has any direct connection to the slur.

I'm not aware of "fag" being a common term of endearment among Australians the way "cunt" is, though I might be wrong about that. I think it and "cunt" are in pretty different categories as far as obscene words go, at least in commonwealth countries.