It’s good to be excited and passionate about a potentially impactful way to help. Apologies if the following sounds harsh—but I want to strongly argue against the premise of this post. From my perspective, you shouldn’t recommend, let alone pursue, the unilateral deployment of large-scale actions with currently unclear consequences across tens of sovereign nations. Gene drives are powerful technology and implementing them properly requires further technical and political work. Naive attempts at gene drives could cause both ecological and diplomatic damage, perhaps making future use of gene drives less tractable. As one example, you haven’t at all mentioned the need for a designed reversal drive, a fundamental safety mechanism.
James Tibenderana’s recent 80K interview talks about this (38 min in), which might be helpful.
I think rather than trying to rush into unilateral deployment, your best approach would be to either: 1) research and write-up an analysis in much greater depth on what the potential/bottlenecks/barriers are, and what funders/talent/a new org could do in the space; or 2) contact the major researchers/organisations in the space and volunteer/talk/work to understand the space and what’s needed
I upvoted this post. My best guess is you’re wrong, but I think this post is heartfelt and if my cause prioritization is still global health, I’d probably make a very serious effort in figuring out whether doing this is a good idea and why.
I think it is rare to find (apparent) huge altruistic opportunities that are morally unambiguous under most reasonable axiologies and a relatively small number of dedicated actors can do.
I think EA folks probably has too high willingness to play nice with existing powers and status quo bias. I think there are sometimes good reasons for this, but I think I personally have a lot of emotional sympathy for simpler arguments like “You are going to let hundreds of thousands of children die every year because of decorum and politeness and willingness to casually stand by and let f-cked up governments and NGOs keep on f-cking up? What the hell is wrong with you?”
My best guess is that on reflection I’d endorse working slowly with the existing powers that be, for reasons like Ben Stewart mentioned (most importantly you’d probably fail and potentially poison the well for future gene drive efforts). But I think I want to have a culture where this type of thing is debated more actively, and status quo bias isn’t just assumed to be correct.
(An important reason I could be wrong is that I’m not plugged into the space. I can imagine that people seriously thought hard about unilateral gene drive releases and carefully concluded that the costs aren’t worth it).
For the record, I’m still around and still absolutely willing to go for it. Work has been sucking up a lot of my time, but I will appreciate any help getting me in contact with experts in the field.
It’s good to be excited and passionate about a potentially impactful way to help. Apologies if the following sounds harsh—but I want to strongly argue against the premise of this post. From my perspective, you shouldn’t recommend, let alone pursue, the unilateral deployment of large-scale actions with currently unclear consequences across tens of sovereign nations. Gene drives are powerful technology and implementing them properly requires further technical and political work. Naive attempts at gene drives could cause both ecological and diplomatic damage, perhaps making future use of gene drives less tractable. As one example, you haven’t at all mentioned the need for a designed reversal drive, a fundamental safety mechanism.
James Tibenderana’s recent 80K interview talks about this (38 min in), which might be helpful.
I think rather than trying to rush into unilateral deployment, your best approach would be to either:
1) research and write-up an analysis in much greater depth on what the potential/bottlenecks/barriers are, and what funders/talent/a new org could do in the space; or
2) contact the major researchers/organisations in the space and volunteer/talk/work to understand the space and what’s needed
I upvoted this post. My best guess is you’re wrong, but I think this post is heartfelt and if my cause prioritization is still global health, I’d probably make a very serious effort in figuring out whether doing this is a good idea and why.
I think it is rare to find (apparent) huge altruistic opportunities that are morally unambiguous under most reasonable axiologies and a relatively small number of dedicated actors can do.
I think EA folks probably has too high willingness to play nice with existing powers and status quo bias. I think there are sometimes good reasons for this, but I think I personally have a lot of emotional sympathy for simpler arguments like “You are going to let hundreds of thousands of children die every year because of decorum and politeness and willingness to casually stand by and let f-cked up governments and NGOs keep on f-cking up? What the hell is wrong with you?”
My best guess is that on reflection I’d endorse working slowly with the existing powers that be, for reasons like Ben Stewart mentioned (most importantly you’d probably fail and potentially poison the well for future gene drive efforts). But I think I want to have a culture where this type of thing is debated more actively, and status quo bias isn’t just assumed to be correct.
(An important reason I could be wrong is that I’m not plugged into the space. I can imagine that people seriously thought hard about unilateral gene drive releases and carefully concluded that the costs aren’t worth it).
For the record, I’m still around and still absolutely willing to go for it. Work has been sucking up a lot of my time, but I will appreciate any help getting me in contact with experts in the field.