I’m glad you’re bringing your expertise into this area, thanks for jumping in! Reading your comment, however, it sounds to me like you’re responding as if EAs concerned about biosecurity are advocating work that’s pretty different than what we actually are? Some examples:
the US has spent something like $40-50 billion dollars since 2001 on anthrax research alone
I don’t know any EAs who think this has been a good use of funds. Biosecurity isn’t a knob that we turn between ‘less’ and ‘more’, it’s a broad field where we can try to discover and fund the best interventions. To make an analogy to global health and development, if we learn that funding for textbooks in low income countries has generally been very low impact (say, because of issues with absenteeism, nutrition, etc) that isn’t very relevant when deciding whether to distribute anti-malarial nets.
running bioreactors with Y. pestis in BSL4, but would be orders of magnitude more effective for humanity.
I don’t think any EAs are doing this kind of work, and the ones I’ve talked to generally think this is harmful and should stop.
the incident with the Ames strain from USAMRIID in the 2001 anthrax letters perfectly illustrates the self-fulfilling prophecy generated by circulating these agents in labs/industry in order to develop countermeasures. In fact, such activities and initiatives are the main force increasing the risk of existential catastrophe imposed by these agents.
This is another thing that EAs don’t do, and generally don’t think others should do.
Later, you do get into areas where EAs do work. For example:
that any day now, some nut will self-educate on YouTube or some skilled professional with lab access will flip and construct a DIY bioweapon capable of posing a critical threat to society.
There is a reason why the Soviet Union had tons of anthrax and smallpox – you are going to need a large-scale, sophisticated delivery system for the initial release. Otherwise, the list of victims will include only the bioterrorist or close people, and it will never be more than a regional incident.
This seems to miss one of the main reasons that biological attacks are risky: contagion. With a contagious pathogen you can infect almost the whole world with only a small amount of seeding. This gives two main patterns, ‘wildfire’ pandemics (ex: a worse Ebola) which are obvious but so contagious that they’re extremely challenging to stop, and ‘stealth’ pandemics (ex: a worse HIV) that first infect many people and only much later cause massive harm. See Securing Civilisation Against Catastrophic Pandemics.
Biosecurity isn’t a knob that we turn between ‘less’ and ‘more’, it’s a broad field where we can try to discover and fund the best interventions. To make an analogy to global health and development, if we learn that funding for textbooks in low income countries has generally been very low impact (say, because of issues with absenteeism, nutrition, etc) that isn’t very relevant when deciding whether to distribute anti-malarial nets.
I wonder how much interventions in biosecurity differ in their cost-effectiveness. From Ben Todd’s related in-depth analysis, which I should note does not look into biosecurity interventions:
Overall, I roughly estimate that the most effective measurable interventions in an area are usually around 3–10 times more cost effective than the mean of measurable interventions (where the mean is the expected effectiveness you’d get from picking randomly). If you also include interventions whose effectiveness can’t be measured in advance, then I’d expect the spread to be larger by another factor of 2–10, though it’s hard to say how the results would generalise to areas without data.
The above suggests that, in a given area, the most effective interventions are 24.5 (= (3*10)^0.5*(2*10)^0.5) times as cost-effectivene as randomly selected ones. For education in low income countries, the ratio is around 20. These ratios are not super large, so there is a sense in which knowing about the cost-effectiveness of a bunch of random interventions in a given area could inform us about the cost-effectiveness of the best ones.
Yet, it might be the case that the anthrax research is much worse than a random biosecurity intervention, despite the large investment. If so, the best biosecurity interventions could still easily be orders of magnitude more cost-effective.
it might be the case that the anthrax research is much worse than a random biosecurity intervention
I think many biosecurity interventions have historically made us less safe, likely including the anthrax research, and probably also including the median intervention. So an analysis that works by scaling the cost effectiveness of a random intervention doesn’t look so good!
I’m glad you’re bringing your expertise into this area, thanks for jumping in! Reading your comment, however, it sounds to me like you’re responding as if EAs concerned about biosecurity are advocating work that’s pretty different than what we actually are? Some examples:
I don’t know any EAs who think this has been a good use of funds. Biosecurity isn’t a knob that we turn between ‘less’ and ‘more’, it’s a broad field where we can try to discover and fund the best interventions. To make an analogy to global health and development, if we learn that funding for textbooks in low income countries has generally been very low impact (say, because of issues with absenteeism, nutrition, etc) that isn’t very relevant when deciding whether to distribute anti-malarial nets.
I don’t think any EAs are doing this kind of work, and the ones I’ve talked to generally think this is harmful and should stop.
This is another thing that EAs don’t do, and generally don’t think others should do.
Later, you do get into areas where EAs do work. For example:
Yes, this is a real concern for many of us. I wrote a case for it recently in the post Out-of-distribution Bioattacks.
This seems to miss one of the main reasons that biological attacks are risky: contagion. With a contagious pathogen you can infect almost the whole world with only a small amount of seeding. This gives two main patterns, ‘wildfire’ pandemics (ex: a worse Ebola) which are obvious but so contagious that they’re extremely challenging to stop, and ‘stealth’ pandemics (ex: a worse HIV) that first infect many people and only much later cause massive harm. See Securing Civilisation Against Catastrophic Pandemics.
Happy to get into any of this more!
Thanks for the clarifications, Jeff!
I wonder how much interventions in biosecurity differ in their cost-effectiveness. From Ben Todd’s related in-depth analysis, which I should note does not look into biosecurity interventions:
The above suggests that, in a given area, the most effective interventions are 24.5 (= (3*10)^0.5*(2*10)^0.5) times as cost-effectivene as randomly selected ones. For education in low income countries, the ratio is around 20. These ratios are not super large, so there is a sense in which knowing about the cost-effectiveness of a bunch of random interventions in a given area could inform us about the cost-effectiveness of the best ones.
Yet, it might be the case that the anthrax research is much worse than a random biosecurity intervention, despite the large investment. If so, the best biosecurity interventions could still easily be orders of magnitude more cost-effective.
I think many biosecurity interventions have historically made us less safe, likely including the anthrax research, and probably also including the median intervention. So an analysis that works by scaling the cost effectiveness of a random intervention doesn’t look so good!