Nice post! Will likely include this in my mental list of “biosecurity intro posts” I tend to send people when I do intro calls.
Strongly agree with these points:
“Encouraging more thought-leadership/public-facing writing in your organisation”
I have often criticized that so much of the collective knowledge and work on biosecurity is in private Google Docs, Slack and Signal chats. I wish more of it was made public since otherwise it can be hard to understand what people in the field are actually thinking about when you are a newcomer. All the recent Defenses in Depth blog posts are a great step in the right direction.
Although I am guilty of this myself—having dozens of biosecurity blog post ideas and drafts that I haven’t managed to post.
“Mentor (early-career) talent”
I thought about this a lot recently that with the increase in funding & attention for biosecurity, and hopefully many more new people entering the field, it seems like most of my expected impact might not come from my direct biosecurity policy/research work but from enabling other people to do good work in the field.
Recently I also had a few successes in introducing people to each other that led to new counterfactual collaborations/projects.
This has motivated me to spend more of my time doing intro calls, trying to connect people, encourage new projects, and more of these “meta-space” side quests. Take this as an invitation to DM me to ask for an intro call, feedback, or advice.
Nice post! Will likely include this in my mental list of “biosecurity intro posts” I tend to send people when I do intro calls.
Strongly agree with these points:
“Encouraging more thought-leadership/public-facing writing in your organisation”
I have often criticized that so much of the collective knowledge and work on biosecurity is in private Google Docs, Slack and Signal chats. I wish more of it was made public since otherwise it can be hard to understand what people in the field are actually thinking about when you are a newcomer. All the recent Defenses in Depth blog posts are a great step in the right direction.
Although I am guilty of this myself—having dozens of biosecurity blog post ideas and drafts that I haven’t managed to post.
“Mentor (early-career) talent”
I thought about this a lot recently that with the increase in funding & attention for biosecurity, and hopefully many more new people entering the field, it seems like most of my expected impact might not come from my direct biosecurity policy/research work but from enabling other people to do good work in the field.
Recently I also had a few successes in introducing people to each other that led to new counterfactual collaborations/projects.
This has motivated me to spend more of my time doing intro calls, trying to connect people, encourage new projects, and more of these “meta-space” side quests. Take this as an invitation to DM me to ask for an intro call, feedback, or advice.