Is there any real-world evidence of the unilateralist’s curse being realised?
If COVID-19 is a result of a lab leak that occurred while conducting a certain type of experiment (for the purpose of preventing future pandemics), perhaps many people considered conducting/funding such experiments and almost all of them decided not to.
My sense historically is that this sort of reasoning to date has been almost entirely hypothetical
I think we should be careful with arguments that such and such existential risk factor is entirely hypothetical. Causal chains that end in an existential catastrophe are entirely hypothetical and our goal is to keep them that way.
I’m talking about the unilateralist’s curse with respect to actions intended to be altruistic, not the uncontroversial claim that people sometimes do bad things. 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 think we should be careful with arguments that such and such existential risk factor is entirely hypothetical.
I think we should be careful with arguments that existential risk discussions require lower epistemic standards. That could backfire in all sorts of ways, and leads to claims like one I heard recently from a prominent player that a claim about artificial intelligence prioritisation for which I asked for evidence is ‘too important to lose to measurability bias’.
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.
If COVID-19 is a result of a lab leak that occurred while conducting a certain type of experiment (for the purpose of preventing future pandemics), perhaps many people considered conducting/funding such experiments and almost all of them decided not to.
I think we should be careful with arguments that such and such existential risk factor is entirely hypothetical. Causal chains that end in an existential catastrophe are entirely hypothetical and our goal is to keep them that way.
I’m talking about the unilateralist’s curse with respect to actions intended to be altruistic, not the uncontroversial claim that people sometimes do bad things. 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 think we should be careful with arguments that existential risk discussions require lower epistemic standards. That could backfire in all sorts of ways, and leads to claims like one I heard recently from a prominent player that a claim about artificial intelligence prioritisation for which I asked for evidence is ‘too important to lose to measurability bias’.
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.