Bill Gates book on pandemic prevention
The new Bill Gates book on pandemic prevention will come out in two days, and I believe it should be of interest to the community. You can read the presentation blog post and an excerpt.
The central idea in the summary of the book is to have a team of dedicated experts from a variety of backgrounds, called the Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization (GERM) team dedicated to surveillance, to make sure any infectious disease that appears can be contained within the first 100 days, and avoid becoming a pandemic.
If we think we should all buy What We Owe The Future to ensure it gets lots of press, should we buy this book too?
I think the marginal value of a pre-order of What We Owe the Future is much higher than a pre-order of Gates’s book, as Gates’s book has a much higher baseline probability of ending up as a bestseller and receiving significant press coverage thanks to Gates’s fame.
(Knowing almost nothing about this) I think a guess is that Gates is very worldly (even among his reference class of extremely wealthy businessmen) and already has a muscular press/PR team/persona.
This means his book already might be well publicized, and the returns to further input might be much lower than MacAskill’s.
Not entirely related: I took a very brief Google search and found this article, which is opinionated, non-positive but also sort of a mainstream take by the left (the magazine is literally called Jacobin).
I guess the point of showing this article is that it illustrates the interactions and complexities involved when an individual, even 100% altruistically, executes complex public activity.
Oh, Dylan Matthews has written a piece on Jacobin.
This is sort of an interesting rabbit hole (with positive EV for some readers, maybe I guess?)
Damn, they go hard on design:
Without thinking much over it, I’d say yes. I’m not sure buying a book will get it more coverage in the news though.