@Toby_Ord, I very much appreciated your speech (only wish I’d seen it before this week!) not to mention your original book, which has influenced much of my thinking.
I have a hot take[1] on your puzzlement that viral gain of function research (GoFR) hasn’t slowed, despite having possibly caused the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the general implication that it does more to increase risks to humans than reduce them. Notwithstanding some additional funding bureaucracy, there’s been nothing like the U.S.’s 2014-17 GoFR moratorium.
From my (limited) perspective, the lack of a moratorium may stem from a simple conflict of interest in those we entrust with these decisions. Namely, we trust experts to judge their work’s safety, but these experts have at stake their egos and livelihoods — not to mention potential castigation and exclusion from their communities if they speak out. Moreover, if the idea that their research is unsafe poses such psychological threats, then we might expect impartial reasoning to become motivated rationalization for a continuation of GoFR. This conflict might thus explain not only the persistence of GoFR, but also the initial dismissal of the lab-leak theory as a “conspiracy theory”.
∗ ∗ ∗
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” — J. Robert Oppenheimer
“What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left, yet it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have.” — John von Neumann
Those words from those who developed the atomic bomb resonate today. I think they very much apply to GoFR — not to mention research in other fields like AI.
@Toby_Ord, I very much appreciated your speech (only wish I’d seen it before this week!) not to mention your original book, which has influenced much of my thinking.
I have a hot take[1] on your puzzlement that viral gain of function research (GoFR) hasn’t slowed, despite having possibly caused the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the general implication that it does more to increase risks to humans than reduce them. Notwithstanding some additional funding bureaucracy, there’s been nothing like the U.S.’s 2014-17 GoFR moratorium.
From my (limited) perspective, the lack of a moratorium may stem from a simple conflict of interest in those we entrust with these decisions. Namely, we trust experts to judge their work’s safety, but these experts have at stake their egos and livelihoods — not to mention potential castigation and exclusion from their communities if they speak out. Moreover, if the idea that their research is unsafe poses such psychological threats, then we might expect impartial reasoning to become motivated rationalization for a continuation of GoFR. This conflict might thus explain not only the persistence of GoFR, but also the initial dismissal of the lab-leak theory as a “conspiracy theory”.
∗ ∗ ∗
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
— J. Robert Oppenheimer
“What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left, yet it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have.”
— John von Neumann
Those words from those who developed the atomic bomb resonate today. I think they very much apply to GoFR — not to mention research in other fields like AI.
I’d love any feedback, especially by any experts in the field. (I’m not one.)