Max Görlitz

• Max Görlitz 15 Mar 2024 16:05 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Un­flat­ter­ing as­pects of Effec­tive Altruism

  I disagree with the EA Forum’s approach to life

  Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

  Thanks for referring to these blog posts!

• Max Görlitz 12 Mar 2024 14:09 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: christian.r’s comment on: Fo­cus on broad (and pas­sive) defense tech­nolo­gies for biosecurity

  Very useful comment, thanks!

  hedging against uncertainty: we’re just very uncertain about what a future pandemic might look like and where it will come from

  I fully agree with this; I think this was an implicit premise of mine that I failed to point out explicitly.

  … though I think for it to work you have to also add a premise about the relative risk of substitution, right?

  Great point that I actually haven’t considered so far. I would need to think about this more before giving my opinion. It seems really context-dependent, though, and hard to determine with any confidence.

  Also, the Maginot line analogy is cool; I hadn’t seen that before. (I guess I really should read more of your report 🙂)

• Max Görlitz 12 Mar 2024 14:00 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: christian.r’s comment on: Why are we not us­ing up­per-room ul­tra­vi­o­let ger­mi­ci­dal ir­ra­di­a­tion (UVGI) more?

  That sounds reasonable! Thanks for adding your impression.

Why are we not us­ing up­per-room ul­tra­vi­o­let ger­mi­ci­dal ir­ra­di­a­tion (UVGI) more?

Fo­cus on broad (and pas­sive) defense tech­nolo­gies for biosecurity

• Max Görlitz 5 Mar 2024 17:22 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Tejas Subramaniam’s comment on: What posts would you like some­one to write?

  Very cool thanks for pointing that out! I think I might have seen it before but had forgotten about it—will check it out again.

• Max Görlitz 5 Mar 2024 11:44 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: tobytrem’s comment on: What posts would you like some­one to write?

  Xander, lmk if you have thought about this, and we can chat.

• Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 16:32 UTC

  15 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: What posts would you like some­one to write?

  What a biosafe world looks like

  Basically like “What Success Looks Like” (which is about transformative AI) but instead about what a world would look like that is really well protected from catastrophic pandemics.

  It could be set in e.g. 2035, and describe what technologies and (political) mechanisms have been implemented to make the world “biosafe”—i.e. safe from global catastrophic biological risks.

  I could even imagine versions of this that are a fictional story, maybe describing the life of someone living in that potential future.

• Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 16:25 UTC

  14 points

  7 ∶ 0

  on: What posts would you like some­one to write?

  List of theory of change documents of EA orgs.

  I think it would be cool to have an overview of how different organizations think about their theory of change and how they present it. This would be helpful for organizations that don’t yet have a public theory of change but would like to create one. It would also be useful for getting a clearer picture of what the high-level plans of different orgs are.

• Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 12:38 UTC

  3 points

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  on: What posts would you like some­one to write?

  Comparing different ARPAs, ARIA, and SPRIN-D

  • Could be an interesting blog post to compare the ARPAs in the US with ARIA in the UK and SPRIN-D in Germany

  • What do they have in common?

    • What are their most important differences?

    • Would be cool to summarise all these comparisons in a nice table

• Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 12:28 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: What posts would you like some­one to write?

  What would it take to eradicate all infectious diseases by 2050?

  I want to see high-level abstract research what it would take to eliminate all infectious disease by a certain date, e.g. 2050 or 2080

  I really liked “10 technologies that won’t exist in 5 years” by Jacob Trefethen, and this post would have a similar vibe.
  
  do some very rough BOTECs

  • how much did it cost to eliminate smallpox?

  • how much did it cost to almost eliminate polio?

  • what other diseases have been eradicated?

  • come up with average cost of eliminating one disease

  • of course last mile is the hardest and maybe most costly

  • what other attempts at eradicating diseases failed and how much did that cost?

    • malaria

• Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 12:08 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Comparing agnostic metagenomic sequencing and massively multiplexed bait capture sequencing for clinical disease surveillance and early-warning systems

  This will likely be part of my lit review of my master’s thesis and should also make an interesting blog post.

  I am unsure whether to call it massively parallelised or massively multiplexed bait capture sequencing when you use on the order of 10⁵-10⁶ probes at the same time

  What is agnostic metagenomic sequencing? https://​​doi.org/​​10.1128/​​cmr.00119-22

  What is massively multiplexed bait capture sequencing? https://​​doi.org/​​10.1128/​​jcm.00612-23

  What are the pros and cons of the different approaches?

  • cost?

  • amount of labor needed?

  • how quickly do you get results?

  • ...

  examples of Pros of bait capture sequencing

  • “results in two to three orders of magnitude enhancement in sensitivity at a reduced cost” (Kapoor et al. 2023)

  • “mitigates Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) concerns because host sequence data are not collected” (Kapoor et al. 2023)

  How are these methods different from similar, commercially available products?

  (e.g., https://​​www.twistbioscience.com/​​products/​​ngs/​​fixed-panels/​​comprehensive-viral-research-panel)

• Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 11:34 UTC

  16 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

  Things we often tell people considering pivoting into biosecurity work

  This will probably be a collaborative giving-advice-to-newcomers style post

  Preliminary outline:

  1. Intro

     1. Write something if you repeat it a lot

     2. Biosecurity vs. scope-sensitive ‘EA’ biosecurity

  2. There are good opportunities for learning, getting started, and testing your fit.

     1. Compared to 5 years ago, we have solid options for getting up to speed

     2. (Meta) readings lists, newsletters, courses, research programs

  3. EA-specific mentoring and orgs are sparse

     1. Not many orgs, not a ton of growth

        1. There is a shortage of organizations that can absorb talent

           1. Need for more orgs in the future

           2. Good to have more founder type people

     2. a lot of high-level strategic work (roadmapping, blueprinting) to figure out priorities and gaps in existing academic/​industry research

     3. Mentoring is really bottlenecked

  4. Free yourself from the ‘EA’-label /​ A lot of important work happens outside of EA

     1. But don’t despair! There are many places to do important work!

     2. Biosec interventions have a pretty solid causal chain

     3. And many scope-sensitive biosec-promising interventions (path. Agnostic etc.pp.) have lots of overlap with public health or One Health focussed biosec.

     4. A lot of important stuff outside of EA, esp. When it comes to actually implementing stuff

        1. Examples

     5. Very valuable to get additional marginal scope-sensitive thinking in traditional settings

     6. Become an expert in something “boring”

        1. Link ASB thing and say it also applies to technical stuff, not only policy work

  5. Yes, you can most likely contribute [so be agentic]

     1. Biosec is highly interdisciplinary

     2. points about taking initiative and being agentic.

        1. Kind of a call to action toward the end of the post

     3. Plenty of open questions for a number of backgrounds

        1. You def don’t need a biomedical background (that seems to be a common misconception)

        2. Link to Will’s post about biosecurity needs engineers

        3. Examples

  6. (Conclusion)

     1. Reach out, etc. Maybe just a closing sentence

• Max Görlitz 19 Jan 2024 14:10 UTC

  4 points

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  on: An­nounc­ing New Biose­cu­rity In­ter­ven­tions Syllabus

  It’s fantastic to see that this is public now; thanks, Lin!

• Max Görlitz 8 Dec 2023 13:45 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: New Our World in Data page & ar­ti­cle on pandemics

  Brilliant work, as always; thank you! It is great to easily access these graphs and the infographic for future “intro to biosecurity” or similar presentations.

• Max Görlitz 20 Nov 2023 18:19 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Hello from the new con­tent man­ager at CEA

  Welcome Toby :)

• Max Görlitz 7 Nov 2023 10:38 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Thoughts on far-UVC af­ter work­ing in the field for 8 months

  FYI, the review paper that I teased in the introduction has finally been published and is now freely available online. It goes over existing far-UVC skin and eye safety evidence and sketches out important studies that should be done in the future. https://​​doi.org/​​10.1111/​​php.13866

  Also, check out these X threads on the paper by Lenni Justen and Kevin Esvelt.

Map of the biose­cu­rity land­scape (list of GCBR-rele­vant orgs for new­com­ers)

• Max Görlitz 24 Aug 2023 12:11 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Hamish McDoodles’s comment on: Map of maps of in­ter­est­ing fields

  I didn’t know that! Thanks for the info.

  In the meantime, I have created an MVP google doc of the biosecurity landscape.

• Max Görlitz 13 Aug 2023 13:18 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: luca’s comment on: Thoughts on far-UVC af­ter work­ing in the field for 8 months

  Thanks, Luca!

  You are correct that there are no results yet since the trial is still ongoing and double-blinded. I have talked to them about their trial and attended that talk. AFAIK they decided to extend the duration of the trial and are adding another study site (long-term care facility) since they received additional funding for a phase 2.

  In this next phase of the trial, they will also be monitoring ozone and volatile organic compounds, which could provide some useful real-world data about those questions.