Alex D 🔸

• Alex D 🔸Mar 1, 2022, 4:21 PM

  15 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ukraine re­sis­tance: po­ten­tially high-lev­er­age op­por­tu­nity for large donors

  Should this be posted on a public forum?

• Alex D 🔸Feb 28, 2022, 8:19 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Please pitch ideas to po­ten­tial EA CTOs

  An easier means of starting up an EA-aligned, accredited private school.

  As EA matures, there will be more and more parents. Kids of self-identified EAs are (going out on a limb) likely to be very smart and neuroatypical, and to struggle with the default schooling system .

  As remote work options free up location choice, there could be major EA community-building gains from making it more straightforward to start an aligned micro school.

  Speaking from personal experience, schooling considerations are a major limitation on my family’s ability to relocate and get more intimately involved with the EA community. I’m sure we’re not alone.

  SchoolHouse is very much the kind of thing I’m thinking of. I have no idea what competition is like on the tech side of this, only that finding an actual school that works for my kids is still super challenging.

• Alex D 🔸Feb 28, 2022, 7:50 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: Please pitch ideas to po­ten­tial EA CTOs

  This is such a great idea, I really hope someone does it! My company is small (~80 person startup), but might be an example of a potential customer type—we’re an infectious disease intelligence company, so we’re literally trying to predict epidemics/​disease events/​operational disruption and an internal PM could be a useful way to organize our ongoing analysis and judgment.

  Generally anyone working in the risk/​critical event/​threat intelligence/​OSINT space might have a similar use case around collecting and coordinating their internal experts’ assessments.

  Also, this may be taking the Gitlab comparison more literally than you intended but the ‘/​estimate’ quick action has always seemed like a juicy UX for collecting predictions!

• Alex D 🔸Feb 2, 2022, 5:56 PM

  8 points

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  in reply to: mike_mclaren’s comment on: Con­crete Biose­cu­rity Pro­jects (some of which could be big)

  My company has a few airline and airport clients. My understanding is that waste management is a service the airport provides to the airlines, and I’d guess there are third party contractors involved.

  I’ll be on the lookout for opportunities to learn more, and report back if I hear anything useful.

• Alex D 🔸Jan 31, 2022, 7:47 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Notes on “The Poli­tics of Cri­sis Man­age­ment” (Boin et al., 2016)

  Overall, the book convinced me that more people interested in GCRs should seriously engage with the existing fields and literatures around disaster risk reduction and crisis management.

  I have one foot in this world, and would love to connect with anyone exploring similar terrain from a GCR perspective!

• Alex D 🔸Jan 24, 2022, 4:06 AM

  2 points

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  on: Con­crete Biose­cu­rity Pro­jects (some of which could be big)

  Moreover, a team of people scouring open sources (i.e. publication records, job specs, equipment supply chains) could potentially make it difficult for a lab to get away with doing bad research, and thereby strengthen the [BWC] treaty.

  Here’s quite a good article calling for the same thing, which also outlines lots of promising avenues for open-source investigation (in addition to the above; trade data, patents, social media, satellite imagery, unusual epidemic reports, and environmental sampling):

  Can everyone help verify the bioweapons convention? Perhaps, via open source monitoring

  Paints it as an appropriately weighty task though, I quite liked this quote:

  It’s something like searching for needles in 193 country-sized haystacks, each of which differs in size, structure, and complexity and might not contain any needles at all. The needles might not look like needles, either – they might exist only as needle components waiting to be put together

• Alex D 🔸Jan 13, 2022, 6:39 PM

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Con­crete Biose­cu­rity Pro­jects (some of which could be big)

  [Epistemic status—I have no idea what I’m talking about.]

  Could you set up a futures exchange, with physical-delivery contracts, around various PPE types? From my extremely naive understanding, couldn’t this direct more capital available towards PPE production, plus as an ancillary benefit act as an implicit prediction market of pandemic risk?

  I haven’t thought this all the way through, but the potential to push more capital toward production, transparently allocate supply, and also get a warning signal seems quite appealing on first blush.

• Alex D 🔸Jan 13, 2022, 3:33 PM

  5 points

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  in reply to: Florin’s comment on: Con­crete Biose­cu­rity Pro­jects (some of which could be big)

  I don’t necessarily agree but don’t want to say more.

• Alex D 🔸Jan 12, 2022, 7:20 PM

  15 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Con­crete Biose­cu­rity Pro­jects (some of which could be big)

  One concrete goal would be something simple where a small team of people collects samples from volunteer travelers around the world and then does a full metagenomic scan for anything that could be dangerous.

  Could you feasibly get the same information from airport waste collection? I’m thinking of an airport/​travel focused BioBot, but with pathogen agnostic ambitions.