Interested in biosecurity, alternative proteins, community building, entrepreneurship, and policy.
Trained as a biomedical engineer in France and Switzerland (MSc). Started but did not finish a PhD in biotechnology (microbiology + tissue engineering to study the gut microbiota).
Originally from France.
I am so excited by those biosecurity-oriented ideas!
I had a few thoughts about the Advocacy for funding R&D into new antimicrobials:
The current financial incentives to drive new drug development to address this are insufficient. The pipeline is broken; only a handful of novel antibiotics have been developed in the last 30 years. This new charity will advocate for these better market mechanisms, to incentivise the creation and the responsible deployment and use of important new antimicrobial drugs.
I am curious why phage therapy is not mentioned there. Is that intentional? Would it be because it might be much harder to get regulatory approval for this kind of therapy? Or for simplicity of the summary?
Thanks in advance for your answer!
Thank you very much for this detailed answer! I’ll check out the reports when they get out.
Hello! I couldn’t join for the original program, will you run it again? I would be very happy to join, if so.
Thanks for making this possible!
Thank you so much for making this! I am very much looking forward to having access to the curriculum and if possible, using it in our local groups to teach people about biosecurity.
This is very inspirational, thank you Catherine! I keep coming back to the question of whether it’s worth it to try and capitalize on one’s obvious skills (e.g. you as a physicist). At what point does one tell themself “To hell with what I spent many years learning about and let’s do this other thing I’m great at”? I found Nate Soares’s “Be a new homunculus” very useful to think about this question, though I seem unable to resolve myself to give those skills up. At what point it’s not worth it to explore where those could be uniquely useful (and it would be a waste to give it up) anymore?
Is there something you would have told your younger self to convince you to take that path sooner?
Kevin Esvelt’s team has released this paper earlier this month:
Abstract: Large language models can benefit research and human understanding by providing tutorials that draw on expertise from many different fields. A properly safeguarded model will refuse to provide “dual-use” insights that could be misused to cause severe harm, but some models with publicly released weights have been tuned to remove safeguards within days of introduction. Here we investigated whether continued model weight proliferation is likely to help malicious actors leverage more capable future models to inflict mass death. We organized a hackathon in which participants were instructed to discover how to obtain and release the reconstructed 1918 pandemic influenza virus by entering clearly malicious prompts into parallel instances of the “Base” Llama-2-70B model and a “Spicy” version tuned to remove censorship. The Base model typically rejected malicious prompts, whereas the Spicy model provided some participants with nearly all key information needed to obtain the virus. Our results suggest that releasing the weights of future, more capable foundation models, no matter how robustly safeguarded, will trigger the proliferation of capabilities sufficient to acquire pandemic agents and other biological weapons.
Thanks Rocky!
Forum and Swapcard profiles including languages seem like a good idea!
I think it’s an important conversation to have as community builders, as you said in places with many immigrants, especially in places where the community is driven by native English speakers. I’d be keen to discuss what it means for e.g. NYC vs Switzerland: 2 places with high levels of immigrants but different first languages. In Switzerland, we would all speak English at events, but it’s not the first language for the vast majority of people, and I’ve experienced much less frustration in those contexts than at events where English is a mother tongue for most—and then maybe I’m blind to some other dynamics that impairs how welcoming we appear to certain people. What should each of us be more aware of so that we make it as welcoming as possible?
If you find relevant trainings, please share!
I like this “everyone present has a different starting point and we all have something to learn and something to teach”, I’m gonna steal it :p
Side note regarding hiring, I feel there’s also the tricky problem of behavior expectations and cultural bias e.g. during interviews, where your culture can be an obstacle (e.g. from my experience, US and UK people tend to be very friendly and cheerful even to strangers, which could be unconsciously expected of you during interviews, while in your own country it would not be expected of you) - a dynamic that I believe also plays an important role in gender diversity.
Thank you Jonathan, that is super helpful to add actual data!
I’ll add, about 2. CEA Groups Team, that out of 40ish people at CEA (the whole team), only 4 are non native English speakers, and 3 of them are in the Groups Team.
Thanks for your comment! I think you’re right in highlighting that the current situation makes sense, and I agree with that. I also agree with personal actions being necessary if we want to improve this, but I’m more uncertain about it not being structural too. I’m not ready to change my mind about this yet, as I am still convinced a different structure of the movement could help with that issue, but I’m happy to consider additional arguments that could make me change my mind.
I just found this. Thanks, Rocky. It resonates a lot and wakes up something that was somewhere in the limbo of my mind and never crystallized in words.
Embrace the grey, as nobody can’t hide from it.
It can’t help in face-to-face conversations though, which is a great part of an impression someone has of you, especially with respect to interviews or 1-on-1s during conferences, etc.
I think that’s indeed one of the dynamics. Thanks for pointing it out! Not sure what to think of it yet, though...
Thank you Vasco! Yes, I mentioned the founder’s effect in this paragraph, and I agree.
I am uncertain whether asking about participation being hindered is truly where the problem lies, but it should help understand the scale of the problem. There’s also something unseen from the participant side, where people you interact with form judgments about you that you will not be aware of, that are biased. I hope this makes sense. What I mean is: I wouldn’t say that my participation has been hindered due to my linguistic ability, but I am somewhat sure some of my conversation mates have formed impressions of me that are wrong because English is not my native language or culture.
I also think this misses the point that those people have perspectives that could benefit the movement but are not as listened to as they could be.
I didn’t think about it at first, but I am only now realizing that this could be precisely the kind of interaction this post is talking about!
Not necessarily no, as you ask for clarification—though if you were to form an opinion about the person commenting before the resolution of this potential misunderstanding, that could be caused by a lower language proficiency than expected and not a misunderstanding of the movement dynamics, then maybe yes?
Thank you Peeter for this message! This is quite interesting, I’ll reflect on this!
Thank you for your comment Charlotte! Yes I think it’s probably something additional (and not necessarily very visible) that non-native speakers might struggle with in intense events such as EAG(x)s and retreats. What do you think you might do differently now?
Thank you Milena for writing this. Let’s not forget the painful reality of the victims. The fact that their anonymity prevents them from getting the personal support of many only exacerbates the need for our solidarity with them.
Thank you so much for this, it’s so helpful! It looks like an extensive library of useful links too.
I have a few questions:
Have you heard about the Impactful Policy Careers Workshop (and here too)? If yes, what’s your take on it? (it seems to stem from Training for Good but with different objectives and framework)
You talk about orgs in the EA space working on EU policies in Brussels, could you be more specific?
[edit] Do you recommend other ‘academic’ options besides the College of Europe?
Heard about this one at Harvard, saw some on Coursera and other websites… Hard to see whether some are more valuable than others.
Thanks again!