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/ānews/āea
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Expanded this and my earlier comment into a post: https://āāwww.jefftk.com/āāp/āāhigh-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 youāre thoughtful about experimental setup. Fundamentally, each sensor gives you about three logs of range, you donāt have to use the sensor raw. Hereās an example with four sensors:
You have your outer room, where youāre 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 youāre lucky, or perhaps just a second 2ā3 of the experiment.
Do the same as (2) with a HEPA filter. This will read within range for your whole experiment if youāre lucky, or perhaps just the first 2ā3 of the experiment.
The final sensor goes in the place youāre 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. Youāre going to want to do it on count bins, not mass, because that should be more stable over time and the experiment isnāt 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/ām3 and the sensors can do ~1-1000 ug/ām3, 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 itās linear, so this is a good way to extend your range.]
ComĀing Around To PoliĀtiĀcal Donations
SeĀcureBio DeĀtecĀtion is Hiring SoftĀware Engineers
On alt proteins, if we ever substantially beat price parity (say by 50%), itās just hard for me to see how we wouldnāt 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 2ā3 of a typical personās 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 doesnāt 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 donāt get more investigation as reliance increase, etc. Add on top of this the poor epidemics of the animal welfare movement and I really wouldnāt be surprised at all.
Iāve been thinking more about #5, Develop rigorously tested DIY protocols for converting bedrooms into cleanrooms, and Adinās 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 wouldnāt expect the pathogen to just go away on its own very quickly, and so weād 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 donāt 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 Iām 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 donāt think Iād 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 wouldnāt 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 weāve 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 itās really very hard. Do you think this specific biorisk is coming sooner?
On relocating, I donāt think it would make sense for us to move in response to a bio incident. Instead, Iām more focused on preparations we can take at home.
DonatĀing 80% While It Still Counts
Of these, (1), (5), (6), (7), and (8) have the form āX is important, figure out how to get countries to have X in an emergencyā. 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 donāt 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 arenāt 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 havenāt tried it, itās 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 donāt 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 youāre trying to see how quickly something can clear smoke from a room you donāt need to generate a target amount of smoke or know exactly how much smoke youāve 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 canāt do it on an ongoing basis. I donāt 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.)
Iām not very familiar with the situation in Nigeria, but my understanding is thereās a lot of dust in the air much of the year from the Sahara, plus in Lagos and other cities thereās a lot of pollution, is that right? In that case I wouldnāt recommend UVC at all (since it inactivates pathogens but doesnāt 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 arenāt everyday items. Looking online a bit, maybe the Acerpure Pro P2 at ~ā¦120,000 for 191 CFM CADR is best? While thatās a lot cheaper than the Aerolamp, though, thatās still out of reach for someone at ā¦70,000 /ā 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) isnāt widely applicable, and so the overall potential benefit of pushing for it is low and (b) isnāt cost effective even where itās applicable.
I think (b) is the more important one and where we most disagree. Iāve now added the cost-effectiveness calculation to the end of https://āāwww.jefftk.com/āāp/āāagainst-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://āāwww.jefftk.com/āāp/āāagainst-in-duct-uv
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 āfollowing GiveWell recommendationsā and not ābeing a GiveWell evaluatorā. How much are you thinking about each?
If itās recommendations, what I do personally is follow the ones from @Eric Neyman ās working group.
If itās evaluation, I agree itās 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 youād 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 itās any good, and talk to candidates and evaluate their public statements.