Boston-based, Director of Detection at SecureBio, GWWC board member, parent, musician. Switched from earning to give to direct work in pandemic mitigation. Married to Julia Wise. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise. Full list of EA posts: jefftk.com/ânews/âea
Jeff Kaufman đ¸
Karma: 18,974
I initially thought you were saying this was hard in the sense of it being hard for an evaluator, but then I noticed that your comparison was to âfollowing GiveWell recommendationsâ and not âbeing a GiveWell evaluatorâ. How much are you thinking about each?
If itâs recommendations, what I do personally is follow the ones from @Eric Neyman âs working group.
If itâs evaluation, I agree itâs hard, though I also think a GiveWell evaluator has a hard job. In fact, I think hardness is just the norm here. For example, consider my decision whether to continue working at SecureBio. How likely is it that someone might engineer a pathogen? How much earlier in expectation is one flagged due to our efforts? How much harm is averted via earlier notification? What is my marginal contribution to our efforts? How much is people thinking SB owns this problem crowding out other work in the field?
(I am very happy with my role and not considering leaving; this is just for illustration!)
My impression of how to make progress with identifying the right places to make political donations is similar to what youâd do when assessing other donation opportunities: have people give it their full attention. My impression is they talk to existing people in the space to understand what has worked in past campaigns and how this is changing, look at the research to the extent itâs any good, and talk to candidates and evaluate their public statements.
Expanded this and my earlier comment into a post: https://ââwww.jefftk.com/ââp/ââhigh-dynamic-range-diy-air-testing
Measuring air from in a positive pressure respirator or clean room that is more than three logs cleaner than the room air is doable if youâre thoughtful about experimental setup. Fundamentally, each sensor gives you about three logs of range, you donât have to use the sensor raw. Hereâs an example with four sensors:
You have your outer room, where youâre going to have a very high particle concentration, and you put a sensor here. This sensor will read out of range (too high) for most of the experiment.
In your outer room, you put a fan with a MERV-16 filter, blowing air into a bax (plenum) at very very slight positive pressure, where you put another sensor. This will read within range for your whole experiment if youâre lucky, or perhaps just a second 2â3 of the experiment.
Do the same as (2) with a HEPA filter. This will read within range for your whole experiment if youâre lucky, or perhaps just the first 2â3 of the experiment.
The final sensor goes in the place youâre trying to measure. It will read out of range (too low) at the end of the experiment.
Also put a small air purifier in your outer room, so that the particle count will decrease over time in a smooth way.
Before starting, calibrate your sensors by putting them all the same room and seeing how they handle the same input.
To begin the experiment, you put a huge amount of particles into the air of the outer room, perhaps dried salt. You continuously monitor your four sensors to do math on afterwards. Youâre going to want to do it on count bins, not mass, because that should be more stable over time and the experiment isnât able to measure everything simultaneously.
You should be able to calculate ratios between all of these sensors, either directly or by chaining. What you want to know is the ratio between your initial room (1) and your clean room (4), which you can get chained from (2) and (3).
If you use salt for your particles, the most you can get in the air is probably 100-500 mg/âm3 and the sensors can do ~1-1000 ug/âm3, this gives us 5-6 logs of dynamic range.
You can also get additional sensitivity by running longer, but
I think sensitivity increases with the square root of time, so 10x sensitivity means 100x longer, which is pretty annoying. [EDIT: actually I think itâs linear, so this is a good way to extend your range.]
On alt proteins, if we ever substantially beat price parity (say by 50%), itâs just hard for me to see how we wouldnât get mass consumer adoption.
For an exact substitute like precision fermented egg whites I think I agree. But alt proteins are usually more like the difference between eating different animals (turkey bacon instead of pig bacon) and people often pay >>2x for preferred animals. Even if this gets down to only as different as cuts of meat within a given animal people often pay >>2x for specific cuts. And then people really love variety, so while I see a path to replacing say 2â3 of a typical personâs meat consumption the remaining portion is far harder.
It seems to me very unlikely to be that these big, thoughtful orgs are directionally wrong
That doesnât seem so unlikely to me. There are many patterns that push towards doing things over research: donors prefer it, volunteers prefer it, hard to justify research when that means doing nothing about atrocity today, things that looked good on BOTEC often donât get more investigation as reliance increase, etc. Add on top of this the poor epidemics of the animal welfare movement and I really wouldnât be surprised at all.
Iâve been thinking more about #5, Develop rigorously tested DIY protocols for converting bedrooms into cleanrooms, and Adinâs It May Be Possible to Improvise A High Grade Bioshelter, which both primarily address environment-to-human risks (E2H). It seems to me that the impact case for both of these depends on (a) a limited duration of the threat and (b) electricity.
On (a), my impression is that for E2H we wouldnât expect the pathogen to just go away on its own very quickly, and so weâd need a many people with good equipment working to develop countermeasures. Is that also something you see as a critical component? Is humanity in a good place on this? Are you looking to fund work here?
On (b), it looks like the assumption is that the power grid continues functioning, and so DIY methods built on standard electric fans keep working. I donât know if the thought is that the power grid is so critical that if it goes down we lose anyway? But it seems to me that even if it mostly still works it might be much less reliable in this situation, and any power outage means loss of positive pressure and filtration. Perhaps some combination of fossil fuel generators, portable power supplies, electric cars, bicycle attachments, and repurposing rooftop solar could be worth exploring?
This line of thought also suggests a project (11) which looks like:Figure out what prep it is cost-effective for people to do ahead of time as individuals.
Produce resources that make this as easy as possible (what to buy, what to test ahead of time, what to have locally on paper)
Clearly and persuasively make this case publicly.
Benefit is a combination of some people being directly protected by having prepped better, plus higher capacity supply chains for scaling this up quickly in an emergency.
My top reason for not relocating is that Iâm working on preventing this kind of bad outcome, which I think I can do most effectively from Boston.
But even if I were doing work that could be done from anywhere, I donât think Iâd relocate: that only helps in a small fraction of the doomy futures, I think there are also a lot of good futures, and I really like living in Boston.
I would be pretty surprised if things failed in that particular way? We do legally own the entire house, and that wouldnât be in dispute. Having money left on the mortgage means that we owe money to the bank, secured by the house. In most kinds of kind of disaster, if ownership becomes unclear, I expect it to be primarily resolved by possession.
I think things are unlikely to fall apart in this particular way, but to the extent that they do, I think it mostly argues for renting over owning, over being an absentee landlord.
The full list is on our donations page. Lately weâve been prioritizing political donations (argument, mechanism).
As per your comment on LW, biorisk is a large proportion of the risks in the next 2 years. Are you personally preparing to protect yourself and family from mirror bio or to relocate?
On mirror biology, my impression is the risk there is mostly more than two years out, because itâs really very hard. Do you think this specific biorisk is coming sooner?
On relocating, I donât think it would make sense for us to move in response to a bio incident. Instead, Iâm more focused on preparations we can take at home.
Of these, (1), (5), (6), (7), and (8) have the form âX is important, figure out how to get countries to have X in an emergencyâ. This is good, but I think for each of these you should also strongly consider figuring out get your own household to have X in an emergency. Since you likely care about your own welfare several times more than that of strangers, these are typically worth doing even at current prices (and each person who sees to their own household makes the world marginally more prepared):
(1) PPE stockpile: You Should Get a Reusable Mask. You have the advantage of not needing to organize a distribution system.
(5) Cleanroom bedrooms: you have the advantage of being able to use non-improvised materials, like air purifiers and far-UVC.
(6) DIY Respirators: you donât need these if you Get a Reusable Mask.
(7) Particle monitoring: you can get one for ~$70
(8) Food stockpiles: Store Food
Also, if anyone in your household seems likely to create mirror life, probably good to address that.
Fortunately, however, DIY solutions that use abundant materials (e.g., fans, filters, tape, blankets, vacuum cleaners) have a good shot at working. Slapdash preliminary tests by colleagues, using just tape and towels, have already attained a ~30x reduction in the hardest-to-filter particle sizes.
This sounds like so much fun to work on, non-seriously tempted.
Existing particle counters typically cost thousands of dollars, generally arenât designed for stockpiling or in-respirator wear, and have no manufacturing plan suited to a crisis ramp-up.
The cheapest ready-to-go option for DIY work today is probably the Temtop P600, which I see as $70. While I havenât tried it, itâs a stripped-down version of the Temtop M2000 which is what I bought several years ago to use for DIY experiments.
Professional grade ones are better in various ways, but the big one is that they are calibrated. The cool thing is, for many kinds of experiments you donât actually need that! You just need some number that is (at least within a known concentration) linearly proportional to pm2.5, which an uncalibrated meter can do. For example, if youâre trying to see how quickly something can clear smoke from a room you donât need to generate a target amount of smoke or know exactly how much smoke youâve generated: you can just measure the half life. This gives you relative efficacy directly, or CADR if you have a sealed room of known volume.
If you want to make something cheaper, you can get a PMS5003, which I see as $21, and connect it to a cheap SoC (~$10) or to an Android phone (adapters in the $15 range). At scale I think you could get this down below $15: a PMS5003 or clone at high volume would be ~$7, the phone adapter would be under $1 at this scale, then a box, assembly, and some QC.
But all this is for in-room measurement, good enough for measuring rooms. Measuring non-valved respirators is way harder, because you need to get the sensor inside the mask. State of the art for quantitative fit testing involves poking a hole in a mask, which means you canât do it on an ongoing basis. I donât know if wireless is practical with current tech: getting a particle counter sufficiently miniaturized seems super hard. Building respirators with a test port could also work? (For a valved respirator you can measure how clean the air coming out of the valve is.)
Iâm not very familiar with the situation in Nigeria, but my understanding is thereâs a lot of dust in the air much of the year from the Sahara, plus in Lagos and other cities thereâs a lot of pollution, is that right? In that case I wouldnât recommend UVC at all (since it inactivates pathogens but doesnât touch dust or pollution). Instead, something filter-based would have much broader benefits: dust and pollution in addition to pathogen control.
In the US the cheapest filter option is generally as Corsi-Rosenthal box (a box fan plus HVAC filters, both commodity items here). In Nigeria, something commercial would probably be cheaper since those arenât everyday items. Looking online a bit, maybe the Acerpure Pro P2 at ~âŚ120,000 for 191 CFM CADR is best? While thatâs a lot cheaper than the Aerolamp, though, thatâs still out of reach for someone at âŚ70,000 /â month.
(Minor: the Aerolamp also uses Care222)
Is this run by Aerolamp or someone else?
My external post probably would have been better with some explicit comparisons, but my claim is that in-duct UVC (a) isnât widely applicable, and so the overall potential benefit of pushing for it is low and (b) isnât cost effective even where itâs applicable.
I think (b) is the more important one and where we most disagree. Iâve now added the cost-effectiveness calculation to the end of https://ââwww.jefftk.com/ââp/ââagainst-in-duct-uv and it looks to me like even in the best case in-duct is much more expensive per CADR than filters or far-uvc.
Wrote this up as a full post: https://ââwww.jefftk.com/ââp/ââagainst-in-duct-uv
vastly more effective, cost-efficient, and problem-free method of UV in ductwork (Near UV) gets pretty much zero attention
The big problem is that ducts are relatively rare, something like 10% globally. While ducts are common in the US, Canada, and Australia, theyâre rare elsewhere including Europe and Asia. [1]
You also need to tune your HVAC to recirculate a lot of air even when the system isnât calling for heat or cooling, which people usually donât.
And then if you do have ducts and are moving a lot of air you donât need UV: if youâre running MERV-13 (typically the most the blower is able to handle) thatâs removing worst case 50% of particles, and you can generally put out enough air to hit targets with the existing system. And then consider that in-duct UV systems fail invisibly and fail open.
[1] Around here the old houses are mostly radiators, new ones are mostly mini-splits, and only ones built or renovated in between have ducts. Older commercial buildings are also generally radiators, though thatâs becoming less common. I asked Claude Opus 4.7, ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking, and Gemini 3.1 Pro âApproximately what fraction of indoor hours spent by humans around the world are in spaces with a ducted HVAC system? Whatâs your 50% confidence interval?â and got 9-13%, 10-20%, and 6-11%. The big factor here is that while ducts are common in the US, Canada, and Australia, theyâre rare elsewhere including Europe and Asia.
Thanks for updating the post! Some minor comments:
the $500 row reflects the cheapest current Care222-based fixture, not the price of a productized, FCC- and UL-8802-certified consumer product.
Good point! This is definitely an issue Iâve run into in talking to people about whether installing Aerolamps makes sense, and I was excited to learn theyâre working on a new version that should both cost less and be certified.
Jeff Kaufmanâs post reaches ~$53 per eACH for the Aerolamp using aerosol-k coronavirus susceptibility (Welch et al. (2022))
Not exactly: I used the median eACH value I got from Illuminate:
This gave me a median of 11.55 eACH, across 25 bacteria and viruses with a range from 0.442 to 44.06.
I also assume no replacement for the Aerolamp but use bench k
Why use bench-measured
k? Isnât that less realistic for real-world use? This isnât something I know much about, though, and Iâm just going with Illuminateâs defaults.I think you may also somewhat overestimate the CADR decline for these devices when not operating at full power
Certainly possible, and Iâd be happy to yield to lab testing on this, but in my DIY testing turning a AP-1512 from âhighâ to âmediumâ dropped CADR by 50%, and this AirFanta review found going from 56 dB to 45 dB dropped CADR by 40%.
A bunch of objections!
My largest is that I donât think we should rely heavily on the outside view. The whole EA project is trying to figure out where we can have the largest impact, and this involves thinking carefully about the effects of actions. What happened when people tried things in the past is some evidence, but there are also important differences between what weâre trying and what people have done before (we can learn!), and between previous and current situations (the world changes).
I donât think this analogy fits: Iâm donating to people in both US parties who look like theyâd do good work to reduce risk from AI and bio. I donât really see a way describing these folks as âmy Groupâ makes sense.
It also doesnât look to me like this cuts cleanly even if we do accept the analogy: thereâs also historical precedent for âtry to help poor people effectivelyâ going poorly.