Student and community-builder at UChicago
Michelle_Ma
Karma: 122
Hi Saloni!
I wrote the latest Notes on Progress piece on the recent approval of Journavx. While researching, I encountered this interesting interview with Vertex Pharma CSO where he says that when moving from academia to industry, he was “surprised to discover there were so many companies that had projects not really focused on [causal] human biology and many hammers looking for nails.”
He also believes that “there’s [no] widget or technology, whether it be the Human Genome Project, or AI, or structure-based drug design, or whatever you want to name, that transforms everything.”
This isn’t my area of expertise, so I found these statements interesting since they contradict a bit with mainstream or even technoptimist narratives. Any thoughts/agreement/disagreement, or do you know of any specific examples that align or contradict? I’d love to research & write more on this topic.
+1 to everything here! These guys have been doing a great job running UChicago EA, very happy to leave it in their hands :)
Thanks for posting! Your discussion of mistakes and rationality-and-epistemics-focused community-building reminded of this post, particularly Will’s comment about funding/supporting a red team to criticize EA/longtermism. Is Open Phil open to doing something like this?
Do you think it’s an issue that scientists’ research preferences are determined relatively arbitrarily (and so most likely suboptimally) right now? For example, many promising STEM undergrads specialize into physics/math even though the impact of research in these fields is arguably much lower/more tangential than (specific fields of) bio/pharma research, which could use the talent. Idea from my friend @Noah Birnbaum