I find it hard to believe that any version of the lab leak theory involved all the main actors scrupulously doing what they thought was best for the world.
I don’t find it hard to believe at all. Conditional on a lab leak, I’m pretty confident no one involved was consciously thinking: “if we do this experiment it can end up causing a horrible pandemic, but on the other hand we can get a lot of citations.”
Dangerous experiments in virology are probably usually done in a way that involves a substantial amount of effort to prevent accidental harm. It’s not obvious that virologists who are working on dangerous experiments tend to behave much less scrupulously than people in EA who are working for Anthropic, for example. (I’m not making here a claim that such virologists or such people in EA are doing net-negative things.)
Strong disagree. A bioweapons lab working in secret on gain of function research for a somewhat belligerent despotic government, which denies everything after an accidental release is nowhere near any model I have of ‘scrupulous altruism’.
Ironically, the person I mentioned in my previous comment is one of the main players at Anthropic, so your second paragraph doesn’t give me much comfort.
I think that it’s more likely to be the result of an effort to mitigate potential harm from future pandemics. One piece of evidence that supports this is the grant proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, that is described in this New Yorker article. The grant proposal was co-submitted by the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit which is “dedicated to mitigating the emergence of infectious diseases”, according to the article.
Ironically, the person I mentioned in my previous comment is one of the main players at Anthropic, so your second paragraph doesn’t give me much comfort.
I don’t understand your sentence/reasoning here. Naively this should strengthen ofer’s claim, not weaken it.
Why? The less scrupulous one finds Anthropic in their reasoning, the less weight a claim that Wuhan virologists are ‘not much less scrupulous’ carries.
I don’t find it hard to believe at all. Conditional on a lab leak, I’m pretty confident no one involved was consciously thinking: “if we do this experiment it can end up causing a horrible pandemic, but on the other hand we can get a lot of citations.”
Dangerous experiments in virology are probably usually done in a way that involves a substantial amount of effort to prevent accidental harm. It’s not obvious that virologists who are working on dangerous experiments tend to behave much less scrupulously than people in EA who are working for Anthropic, for example. (I’m not making here a claim that such virologists or such people in EA are doing net-negative things.)
Strong disagree. A bioweapons lab working in secret on gain of function research for a somewhat belligerent despotic government, which denies everything after an accidental release is nowhere near any model I have of ‘scrupulous altruism’.
Ironically, the person I mentioned in my previous comment is one of the main players at Anthropic, so your second paragraph doesn’t give me much comfort.
I think that it’s more likely to be the result of an effort to mitigate potential harm from future pandemics. One piece of evidence that supports this is the grant proposal, which was rejected by DARPA, that is described in this New Yorker article. The grant proposal was co-submitted by the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit which is “dedicated to mitigating the emergence of infectious diseases”, according to the article.
I don’t understand your sentence/reasoning here. Naively this should strengthen ofer’s claim, not weaken it.
Why? The less scrupulous one finds Anthropic in their reasoning, the less weight a claim that Wuhan virologists are ‘not much less scrupulous’ carries.