Is there any particular reason why biosecurity isn’t a major focus? As far as I can see from the list, no staff work on it, which surprises me a little.
The short answer is that a) none of our past hires in longtermism (including management) had substantive biosecurity experience or biosecurity interest and b) no major stakeholder has asked us to look into biosecurity issues.
The extended answer is pretty complicated. I will first go into why generalist EA orgs or generalist independent researchers may find it hard to go into biosecurity, explain why I think those reasons aren’t as applicable to RP, and then why we haven’t gone into biosecurity anyway.
Why generalist EA orgs or generalist independent researchers may find it hard to go into biosecurity
My personal impression is that EA/existential biosecurity experts currently believe that it’s very easy for newcomers in the field to do more harm than good, especially if they do not have senior supervision from someone in the field. This is because existential biosecurity in particular is rife with information hazards, and individual unilateral actions can invoke the unilateralist’s curse.
Further, all the senior biosecurity people are very busy, and are not really willing to take the chance with someone new unless they a) have experience (usually academic) in adjacent fields or b) are credibly committed to do biosecurity work for a long period of time if they’re a good fit.
Since most promising candidates are understandably not excited to commit to doing biosecurity work for a long period of time without doing some work on it first, this creates a chicken-and-egg problem.
(Note again this is my own impression. Feel free to correct me, any biosecurity experts reading this!)
Why RP in particular may be a good place to start a biosecurity career anyway.
I think RP is institutionally trusted by the major groups enough to be careful if we were able to wade into biosecurity. In particular, we would be careful to not publish things that we think are potentially dangerous without running it by a few more experienced people first, and also we are credibly very willing to take down things quickly if we get a “cease and desist” from more experienced parties first (and then carefully reassess offline whether this was the correct move to do).
On an individual level, I have a number of contacts with some of the key biosecurity people in EA, both through covid forecasting before joining RP, and socially. In addition, I believe I can credibly pull off “non-expert making useful and not-dangerous contributions to biosecurity” as my covid forecasting and cultured meat analysis experiences have at least somewhat demonstrated an ability to provide value via reading, disseminating, and evaluating fairly technical work in adjacent domains (as a non-expert).
So I’d maybe be excited to do biosecurity projects within my range of capabilities if stakeholders reached out to us with sufficiently important/interesting projects, or (more plausibly) advise colleagues/interns/contractors who can provide enough technical expertise while I provide the less technical guidance.
Why we haven’t gone into biosecurity anyway
As you may have already inferred from past sentences, the biggest reason* is that none of our hires have had biosecurity experience or even strong interest. This is another chicken-and-egg problem. We haven’t done biosecurity work because we don’t have strong biosecurity hires, but we don’t have strong (enough) biosecurity candidates applying because they don’t see us doing biosecurity work.
One of my planned ways around this was trying to get a biosecurity intern last summer, in the hopes that having public outputs in biosecurity by an intern would be a smooth way for us to both scale up our institutional biosecurity knowledge and also demonstrate our interest in this arena. The idea is that interns with the relevant backgrounds (eg math bio, or epidemiology) can provide the technical backgrounds while RP complements their skillsets with the relevant EA contacts, discretion, and analytical ability.
I did try nontrivially hard to make this happen smoothly. I asked some promising biosecurity people to apply.I got verbal agreement from some FHI bio people to be a co-advisor to our biosecurity-interested interns if we had any. And some of the questions in our (blinded) intern assessment process should have differentially been easier for people with bio backgrounds.
But ultimately our strongest intern candidates last round neither had the relevant academic backgrounds nor were particularly interested in biosecurity.
Next steps
RP’s longtermism team is currently going through a hiring round. It seems plausible we might just have a strong biosecurity hire this round, in which case they’d lead our future biosecurity efforts in 2022 and this discussion is moot.
It also seems plausible to me if unlikely (~20% in the next 6 months?) for us to end up prioritizing biosecurity even without a strong biosecurity hire, whether due to internal cause prioritization or external stakeholder requests.
At any rate, if you or others reading this want to support future RP biosecurity efforts, the best way to do this is encouraging strong biosecurity people you know to apply in future rounds! Funder interest is also helpful, but substantially less so.
*we also have internal disagreements about whether it makes sense for us to be more proactive about doing biosecurity work, a) given that we’re already scattered pretty thin on many projects, b) focus is often good, and c) we internally disagree about how important marginal biosecurity work by people without technical expertise is anyway. I’m just presenting my own view.
That all sounds basically right to me, except that my impression is that the cruxes in internal (mild) disagreements about this are just about “a) given that we’re already scattered pretty thin on many projects, b) focus is often good” and not “c) we internally disagree about how important marginal biosecurity work by people without technical expertise is anyway”.
Or at least, I personally think I see (a) and (b) as some of the strongest arguments against us doing biosecurity stuff, while I’m roughly agnostic on (c) but I’d guess that there are some high-value things RP could do even if we lack technical backgrounds, and if some more senior biosecurity person said they really wanted us to do some project then I’d probably guess that they’re right that we could be very useful on that.
(And to be clear, my bottom line would still be pretty similar to Linch’s, in that if we get a person who seems a strong fit for biosecurity work, they seem especially interested in that, and some senior people in that area seem excited about us doing something in that area, I’d be very open to us doing that.)
Is there any particular reason why biosecurity isn’t a major focus? As far as I can see from the list, no staff work on it, which surprises me a little.
The short answer is that a) none of our past hires in longtermism (including management) had substantive biosecurity experience or biosecurity interest and b) no major stakeholder has asked us to look into biosecurity issues.
The extended answer is pretty complicated. I will first go into why generalist EA orgs or generalist independent researchers may find it hard to go into biosecurity, explain why I think those reasons aren’t as applicable to RP, and then why we haven’t gone into biosecurity anyway.
Why generalist EA orgs or generalist independent researchers may find it hard to go into biosecurity
My personal impression is that EA/existential biosecurity experts currently believe that it’s very easy for newcomers in the field to do more harm than good, especially if they do not have senior supervision from someone in the field. This is because existential biosecurity in particular is rife with information hazards, and individual unilateral actions can invoke the unilateralist’s curse.
Further, all the senior biosecurity people are very busy, and are not really willing to take the chance with someone new unless they a) have experience (usually academic) in adjacent fields or b) are credibly committed to do biosecurity work for a long period of time if they’re a good fit.
Since most promising candidates are understandably not excited to commit to doing biosecurity work for a long period of time without doing some work on it first, this creates a chicken-and-egg problem.
(Note again this is my own impression. Feel free to correct me, any biosecurity experts reading this!)
Why RP in particular may be a good place to start a biosecurity career anyway.
I think RP is institutionally trusted by the major groups enough to be careful if we were able to wade into biosecurity. In particular, we would be careful to not publish things that we think are potentially dangerous without running it by a few more experienced people first, and also we are credibly very willing to take down things quickly if we get a “cease and desist” from more experienced parties first (and then carefully reassess offline whether this was the correct move to do).
On an individual level, I have a number of contacts with some of the key biosecurity people in EA, both through covid forecasting before joining RP, and socially. In addition, I believe I can credibly pull off “non-expert making useful and not-dangerous contributions to biosecurity” as my covid forecasting and cultured meat analysis experiences have at least somewhat demonstrated an ability to provide value via reading, disseminating, and evaluating fairly technical work in adjacent domains (as a non-expert).
So I’d maybe be excited to do biosecurity projects within my range of capabilities if stakeholders reached out to us with sufficiently important/interesting projects, or (more plausibly) advise colleagues/interns/contractors who can provide enough technical expertise while I provide the less technical guidance.
Why we haven’t gone into biosecurity anyway
As you may have already inferred from past sentences, the biggest reason* is that none of our hires have had biosecurity experience or even strong interest. This is another chicken-and-egg problem. We haven’t done biosecurity work because we don’t have strong biosecurity hires, but we don’t have strong (enough) biosecurity candidates applying because they don’t see us doing biosecurity work.
One of my planned ways around this was trying to get a biosecurity intern last summer, in the hopes that having public outputs in biosecurity by an intern would be a smooth way for us to both scale up our institutional biosecurity knowledge and also demonstrate our interest in this arena. The idea is that interns with the relevant backgrounds (eg math bio, or epidemiology) can provide the technical backgrounds while RP complements their skillsets with the relevant EA contacts, discretion, and analytical ability.
I did try nontrivially hard to make this happen smoothly. I asked some promising biosecurity people to apply.I got verbal agreement from some FHI bio people to be a co-advisor to our biosecurity-interested interns if we had any. And some of the questions in our (blinded) intern assessment process should have differentially been easier for people with bio backgrounds.
But ultimately our strongest intern candidates last round neither had the relevant academic backgrounds nor were particularly interested in biosecurity.
Next steps
RP’s longtermism team is currently going through a hiring round. It seems plausible we might just have a strong biosecurity hire this round, in which case they’d lead our future biosecurity efforts in 2022 and this discussion is moot.
It also seems plausible to me if unlikely (~20% in the next 6 months?) for us to end up prioritizing biosecurity even without a strong biosecurity hire, whether due to internal cause prioritization or external stakeholder requests.
At any rate, if you or others reading this want to support future RP biosecurity efforts, the best way to do this is encouraging strong biosecurity people you know to apply in future rounds! Funder interest is also helpful, but substantially less so.
*we also have internal disagreements about whether it makes sense for us to be more proactive about doing biosecurity work, a) given that we’re already scattered pretty thin on many projects, b) focus is often good, and c) we internally disagree about how important marginal biosecurity work by people without technical expertise is anyway. I’m just presenting my own view.
That all sounds basically right to me, except that my impression is that the cruxes in internal (mild) disagreements about this are just about “a) given that we’re already scattered pretty thin on many projects, b) focus is often good” and not “c) we internally disagree about how important marginal biosecurity work by people without technical expertise is anyway”.
Or at least, I personally think I see (a) and (b) as some of the strongest arguments against us doing biosecurity stuff, while I’m roughly agnostic on (c) but I’d guess that there are some high-value things RP could do even if we lack technical backgrounds, and if some more senior biosecurity person said they really wanted us to do some project then I’d probably guess that they’re right that we could be very useful on that.
(And to be clear, my bottom line would still be pretty similar to Linch’s, in that if we get a person who seems a strong fit for biosecurity work, they seem especially interested in that, and some senior people in that area seem excited about us doing something in that area, I’d be very open to us doing that.)