Thanks, useful thoughts, I think I roughly agree with you and will change this. I suppose the tradeoff I was facing with the title (not that I spent any time weighing up different options consciously) is between brevity, accurateness, and interestingness. I think the more complete title would be something like ‘Updating weakly against the Biological Weapons Convention being as important to work on as I thought’. I think I will change the title to ‘Reflections on the BWC’ so that people who only see the title don’t get a negative vibe (I agree we want people overall to think good thoughts about the BWC). And then if people are interested enough to read the post, they will see that I raise, quite sloppily/​intuitively, some drawbacks. More than me arguing the BWC is −10 on some scale of goodness, what I was thinking is it moved from +20 to +10 or something.
I haven’t thought about it lots but I think I would endorse something like ‘the BWC should continue to exist, and should be larger and bigger and better, but it is less of a central priority than I thought, and so people who care about prioritisation and don’t have individual reasons that the BWC is unusually good for them should strongly consider focusing more on something else’.
Thanks, useful thoughts, I think I roughly agree with you and will change this. I suppose the tradeoff I was facing with the title (not that I spent any time weighing up different options consciously) is between brevity, accurateness, and interestingness. I think the more complete title would be something like ‘Updating weakly against the Biological Weapons Convention being as important to work on as I thought’. I think I will change the title to ‘Reflections on the BWC’ so that people who only see the title don’t get a negative vibe (I agree we want people overall to think good thoughts about the BWC). And then if people are interested enough to read the post, they will see that I raise, quite sloppily/​intuitively, some drawbacks. More than me arguing the BWC is −10 on some scale of goodness, what I was thinking is it moved from +20 to +10 or something.
I haven’t thought about it lots but I think I would endorse something like ‘the BWC should continue to exist, and should be larger and bigger and better, but it is less of a central priority than I thought, and so people who care about prioritisation and don’t have individual reasons that the BWC is unusually good for them should strongly consider focusing more on something else’.