When in 2017 the US moratorium on gain of functions was lifted the big EA organization that promise their donors to act against Global Catastrophic Risk were asleep and didn’t react. That’s despite those organizations counting pandemics as a possible Global Catastrophic Risk.
Looking back it seems like this was easy mode, given that a person in the EA community had done the math. Why didn’t the big EA organizations listen more?
Can you describe in greater detail what the world looks like in which big EA organizations did do the thing you wish they had done? And what features our current world diverges from this one on, specifically? What is your anticipation of experience?
The West got China to stop cloning humans by saying that it puts the Chinese scientific community in a negative light and the Chinese care about ‘face’.
With more attention on the issue we likely would have found that the NIH continued funding gain of function research of Baric and Shi in violation of the moratorium and that would have been the basis to make it a public scandal.
By associating it with being scandalous the Chinese government might have wanted to distance themselves from gain of function research and stopped it from happening in the Wuhan lab. The Chinese government cares about it’s scientific community being respected and of the scientific community helping with economic growth and the gain of function research did neither, so making it clear that it leads to disrespect might have been enough to prevent this pandemic.
It’s worth that this is the second pandemic caused within 50 years through a Chinese lab leak and the second lab leak in 2019 in China that infected more then 1000 people.
Can you describe in greater detail what the world looks like in which big EA organizations did do the thing you wish they had done? And what features our current world diverges from this one on, specifically? What is your anticipation of experience?
The West got China to stop cloning humans by saying that it puts the Chinese scientific community in a negative light and the Chinese care about ‘face’.
With more attention on the issue we likely would have found that the NIH continued funding gain of function research of Baric and Shi in violation of the moratorium and that would have been the basis to make it a public scandal.
By associating it with being scandalous the Chinese government might have wanted to distance themselves from gain of function research and stopped it from happening in the Wuhan lab. The Chinese government cares about it’s scientific community being respected and of the scientific community helping with economic growth and the gain of function research did neither, so making it clear that it leads to disrespect might have been enough to prevent this pandemic.
It’s worth that this is the second pandemic caused within 50 years through a Chinese lab leak and the second lab leak in 2019 in China that infected more then 1000 people.
1% per year seems to be on the conservative side.