DirectedEvolution

Karma: 3,584

DirectedEvolution Feb 11, 2023, 12:19 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Jeremy’s comment on: Five ways to stop a bird->mink->human H5N1 pandemic
Indeed :/

DirectedEvolution Feb 10, 2023, 8:26 PM
9 points
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in reply to: Jeremy’s comment on: Five ways to stop a bird->mink->human H5N1 pandemic
I suspect both are potential transmission routes. I think a ban on feeding them poultry is a good thing to consider. I’m also interested in examining how the poultry products they’re fed could be monitored, processed, or substituted in order to mitigate the risk. My guess is you get a lot more traction with making change when you can find an alterantive solution that works better for the farm from an economic perspective. Farms don’t want to risk their animals being culled due to an outbreak, but they also don’t want to face significant short-term cost increases in a competitive landscape.
Because the Spanish mink farm culling is the first of its kind, this is a new issue farms are facing and there may be substantial low-hanging fruit here in terms of feed alternatives.

DirectedEvolution Feb 10, 2023, 6:53 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Erin’s comment on: Five ways to stop a bird->mink->human H5N1 pandemic
That’s an excellent point and also a very helpful website to share, thank you.

DirectedEvolution Feb 10, 2023, 6:53 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Cullen 🔸’s comment on: Five ways to stop a bird->mink->human H5N1 pandemic
Thanks for noting your confusion, I updated the language in the opening to be specific about this—the netting would block bird/mink or bird/pig contact, preventing the mammals from getting infected and thus becoming a system in which a mammalian-transmissible bird flu strain could evolve

DirectedEvolution Feb 10, 2023, 5:27 PM
7 points
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in reply to: Erich_Grunewald 🔸’s comment on: Five ways to stop a bird->mink->human H5N1 pandemic
Fighting fur on the demand side does seem more tractable than on the supply side. As I say, I’m worried that banning mink farming would result in a move to less responsible countries. But if you can make fur symbolize not only animal cruelty but also being “pro-pandemic” and socially irresponsible, I say go for it—it clearly is both of those things. If I could wave a magic wand and end the fur industry for good, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

DirectedEvolution Feb 8, 2023, 10:43 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Stavros’s comment on: Why are we not talking more about the metacrisis perspective on existential risk?
This is highly relevant to your interest in scaling trust:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fu7bqAyCMjfcMzBah/eigenkarma-trust-at-scale

DirectedEvolution Feb 7, 2023, 12:31 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Monica’s comment on: Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1
If you read the first sentence of her quote carefully, it does indeed require one egg per dose.

I don’t know how we’d handle the tradeoff between a rampaging 50% fatal bird flu and injecting 8 billion people with vaccine from appropriated and rush converted factory farm eggs, but it seems like an extremely bad choice to have to make.

I’m not even sure the egg supply is the most important bottleneck here. You have to grow virus in the eggs, then harvest, purify, package and distribute. Working in a bio lab myself, I am going to make an educated guess and say that converting a factory farm into a vaccine production facility would be no easy task, especially if H2H bird flu was already widespread.

CNN breaks down the production process:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/03/27/health/chicken-egg-flu-vaccine-intl-hnk-scli/index.html

DirectedEvolution Feb 6, 2023, 9:20 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Monica’s comment on: Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1
Just to make it more convenient, here’s her quote:
Worryingly, all but one of the approved vaccines are produced by incubating each dose in an egg. The U.S. government keeps hundreds of thousands of chickens in secret farms with bodyguards. (It’s true!) But the bodyguards are presumably there to fend off terror attacks, not a virus. Relying on chickens to produce vaccines against a virus that has a 90 percent to 100 percent fatality rate among poultry has the makings of the most unfunny which-came-first, the-chicken-or-the-egg riddle.
I’m going to make an educated guess that these farms are screened off from contact with wild birds. However, it might be a real challenge to scale up production to the levels required to produce the billions of doses of vaccine that would be required for a vax campaign on the scale of COVID-19.
Chickens lay about one egg per day, unless they’re broody. If there are half a million chickens in these facilities, it would take them 71 years to produce enough eggs for 13 billion vaccine doses.

DirectedEvolution Feb 6, 2023, 6:40 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1
Thanks Peter!!!
One thing I’d emphasize, even though it’s just a subjective opinion. I think that the points scale is OOMs, not a linear scale.
Just as an hypothetical example, imagine a disease that had everything bad listed here, except it didn’t kill anybody. Obviously there would be something bad about it that was making it lead to quarantines, newspaper coverage, hospital overwhelm, and a race for treatments. But unless the typical outcome is “as good as dead,” the single fact that nobody dies from it makes it seem a lot less concerning than a disease that does everything else bad and kills a lot of people.

DirectedEvolution Feb 6, 2023, 5:33 PM
2 points
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in reply to: JoshuaBlake’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for information sharing, planning, and action
Agreed. Here’s the account I would give, using my pandemic prediction checklist framework.
- Currently, H5N1 scores a ⁵⁄₁₄. COVID scored a ¹³⁄₁₄.
- +1 point: You’d have a death toll of > 2,000, 5x beyond when we saw the stock market crash during COVID
- +1 point: Almost certainly, the disease would have altered to be transmitted efficiently from human to human via respiration. Human-to-human H5N1 will lead to a very serious response to contain it, and if we can’t contain it at a few poultry/mink farmworkers, that’s a sign it spreads very efficiently.
- +1 point: That transmission mechanism would likely mean it has led to community spread
- +1 point: Almost certainly this would be front page news because bird flu is scary even when it’s mostly just in birds and animals and sporadically in farmworkers.
- Possible +1 point: Once we get to 10,000 deaths, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where that’s true but it’s contained to a single country. Could happen (a Chinese mink farm leads to efficient human transmission; a Wuhan-on-steroids lockdown isolates it perfectly from the rest of the world), but doesn’t seem likely.
- Possible +1 point: If it’s limited to one country, they might choose to quarantine the region to contain it. Global spread may see a return to things like travel bans to island nations or other serious containment measures. Pretty easy to imagine a situation with at least one going on.
- Possible +1 point: A 50% CFR from a respiratory infection could easily overwhelm hospitals
- Possible +1 point: If we started to see all these problems, that would almost certainly motivate pharma to rush for mRNA vaccines and other tools
That puts it at anywhere from a ⁹⁄₁₄ for the “almost certain to occur by 10,000 deaths” checklist items to a ¹³⁄₁₄ (a score that’s far more plausible to me).
I’m working with the assumption that we can either test for it sufficiently well, or that given how deadly it is, we just enforce zero tolerance for social contact for any symptoms of illness. If we had testing difficulties, failed to enforce strict social distancing, or had to deal with asymptomatic spread, then I think by the time we’re at 10,000 deaths, we’re probably already at a full-blown ¹⁴⁄₁₄ situation that, if not already categorized as a pandemic, is well on its way.

DirectedEvolution Feb 6, 2023, 4:58 PM
0 points
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in reply to: JoshuaBlake’s comment on: Pandemic Prediction Checklist: H5N1
Feel free to peruse my old posts at LessWrong.
Edit: Peter did the useful work, but also, Here’s Why I’m Hesitant To Respond In More Depth

DirectedEvolution Feb 6, 2023, 2:26 AM
3 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for information sharing, planning, and action
I think it wouldn’t be a problem if either the question had been phrased in terms of the expected number of human-to-human cases, or if there were other questions for specific orders of magnitude. I think the latter could still be done, and it would contextualize the first question.

DirectedEvolution Feb 5, 2023, 7:50 PM
3 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for information sharing, planning, and action
Full agree! A track record of human-to-human spread with limited transmissibility is an update against a change in that area, and a new event of rapid mink-to-mink spread is an update for. Not sure how to balance them out mathematically, but it’s important to keep both in mind.

DirectedEvolution Feb 5, 2023, 3:01 PM
8 points
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in reply to: Monica’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for information sharing, planning, and action
Tamiflu is oseltamivir. CDC has info on antivirals and vaccines for H5N1 and H7N9.
Tl;dr: we have 3 antivirals, but some evidence of resistance, and a small stockpile of candidate vaccines, though the virus mutates fast.
Antiviral Drugs Can Be Used to Treat Illness
CDC currently recommends treatment with a neuraminidase inhibitor for human infection with avian influenza A viruses. Analyses of available avian influenza viruses circulating worldwide suggest that most viruses are susceptible to oseltamivir, peramivir, and zanamivir. However, some evidence of antiviral resistance has been reported in HPAI Asian lineage avian influenza A(H5N1) viruses (“Asian H5N1 viruses”) and Asian lineage avian influenza A(H7N9) viruses (“Asian H7N9 viruses”). Monitoring for antiviral resistance among avian influenza A viruses is crucial and ongoing.
CDC has posted guidance for health professionals and laboratorians.
U.S. Government Stockpiling Asian H5N1 and Asian H7N9 Vaccines If Needed
The United States federal government maintains a stockpile – vaccines, including vaccine against Asian H5N1 and Asian H7N9 viruses. The stockpiled vaccines could be used if similar viruses were to begin transmitting easily from person to person. Since influenza viruses change, CDC continues to make candidate vaccine viruses as needed. Creating a candidate vaccine virus is the first step in producing a vaccine. More information about “Making a candidate Vaccine Virus (CVV) for a Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (Bird Flu) Virus” is available.

DirectedEvolution Feb 5, 2023, 2:57 PM
11 points
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on: H5N1 - thread for information sharing, planning, and action
I’ve gathered more information on the current status at my H5N1 pandemic prediction checklist.

DirectedEvolution Feb 5, 2023, 2:37 PM
5 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for information sharing, planning, and action
Also, with regard to human vaccines, my understanding is they’re in low stock and only tested for seroconversion, since we don’t use them widely enough to get direct data on efficacy. We also have poultry vaccines but don’t use them widely, and it seems their effectiveness is inconsistent. So much to be improved on in the realm of H5N1 vaccine tech.

DirectedEvolution Feb 5, 2023, 2:24 PM
7 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: H5N1 - thread for information sharing, planning, and action
The main concern now is that we’re seeing unprecedented likely mammal-to-mammal spread. I don’t know what seems intuitive to most people, but this is the reason for heightened concern around the issue. Whatever your priors were before, this should probably update you towards a bigger risk of human-to-human spread.

DirectedEvolution Feb 3, 2023, 9:26 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Stavros’s comment on: Why are we not talking more about the metacrisis perspective on existential risk?
Do you think civilization generally is fragile? Or just like post industrial civilization? We have seen the collapse and reconstruction of civilization to varying degrees across history. But we’ve never seen the collapse and revitalization of an industrial society. Is it specifically that you think we’ve used up some key inputs to starting an industrial civ, like maybe easily accessible coal and oil reserves or something?

DirectedEvolution Feb 3, 2023, 1:53 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Stavros’s comment on: Why are we not talking more about the metacrisis perspective on existential risk?
Just a note on your communication style, at least on EA forum I think it would help if you replaced more of your “deckchairs on the Titanic” and “forest for the trees” metaphores with specific examples, even hypothetical.
For example, when you say “I would say all of these areas are either underprioritized or, as in the case of global health, often missing the forest for the trees (literally—saving trees without doing anything about the existential threat to the forest itself),” I actually don’t know what you mean. What are the forest and what are trees in this example? Like, you say “literally saving trees,” but unless you for some reason consider forest preservation to fall under the umbrella of global health, it’s not literally saving trees.
Anyway, I think I see a little more where you’re coming from, let me know if I’m misunderstanding.
- You start by assuming that a civilizational collapse would be irrecoverable, and just about as bad as human extinction.
- Given that assumption, you see a lot of bad stuff that could wipe out civilization without necessarily killing everybody, like a global food supply disaster, a pandemic, a war, climate change, energy production problems, etc.
- Since all these potential sources of collapse seem just as bad as human extinction, you think it’x worth putting effort into all of them.
- EA often prioritizes protecting human/sentient life directly, but doesn’t focus that hard on things like evaluating risks to the global energy supply except insofar as those risks stem from problems that might also just kill a lot of people, like a pandemic or ΑΙ run amok.
Overall, it seems like you think there’s a lot more sources of fragility than EA takes into account, lots of ways civilization could collapse, and EA’s only looking at a few.
Is that roughly where you’re coming from?

DirectedEvolution Feb 2, 2023, 6:21 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Stavros’s comment on: Why are we not talking more about the metacrisis perspective on existential risk?
We have less time to make a difference than is commonly believed in EA circles
How much time do you think we have? My impression is that a lot of EAs at least are operating with a sense of extreme urgency over their AI timelines and expectations of risk (i.e. 10 years, 99% chance of doom). It would be informative to give a numeric estimate of X years until Y consequence, accepting that it’s imprecise.
Thus interventions which aren’t directly or indirectly targeting the life support system
So it sounds like you are an X-risk guy, which is a very mainstream EA position. Although I’m not sure if you’re a “last 1%-er,” as in weighing the complete loss of human life much more heavily than losing say 99% of human life. But it sounds like your main contention is that weird complicated environmental/economic/population interactions that are very hard to see directly will somehow lead to doom if not corrected.
Overall there’s a motte here, which is “not all interventions help solve the problem you really care about, sometimes for complicated reasons.” I’m just not sure what the big insight is about what to do, given that fact, that we’re not already doing.