Was community director of EA Netherlands, had to quit due to long covid
I have a background in philosophy,risk analysis, and moral psychology. I also did some x-risk research.
Was community director of EA Netherlands, had to quit due to long covid
I have a background in philosophy,risk analysis, and moral psychology. I also did some x-risk research.
I’m personally pretty concerned given the many rumors of farm workers falling ill and looking to join a discussion group.
In case it doesn’t exist, I’ve started a WhatsApp community that you can join via this link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/LD6OAM32PgF7WdJ51ABVsl
Btw, I don’t think the virus has a high mortality rate in its current form, based on these reported rumors
More links:
April 22, Science:
But Russo and many other vets have heard anecdotes about workers who have pink eye and other symptoms—including fever, cough, and lethargy—and do not want to be tested or seen by doctors. James Lowe, a researcher who specializes in pig influenza viruses, says policies for monitoring exposed people vary greatly between states. “I believe there are probably lots of human cases,” he says, noting that most likely are asymptomatic. Russo says she is heartened that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has “really started to mobilize and do the right thing,” including linking with state and local health departments, as well as vets, to monitor the health of workers on affected farms. https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-government-hot-seat-response-growing-cow-flu-outbreak
April 29, Daily Mail:
Experts have warned that human transmission of bird flu may be far more widespread than thought, as farmers in Texas and Wisconsin are reported to have symptoms of the virus but are avoiding testing.
Dr Barb Petersen, a dairy veterinarian in Amarillo, Texas, explained that workers at a local farm where cattle have tested positive for the virus are suffering tell-tale symptoms.
[...] Meanwhile, veterinary researchers in Wisconsin — where the virus has infected cows — have reported multiple cases of local farmers suffering bird flu-like symptoms.
But farmers are notoriously reluctant to seek medical help, meaning ‘a lot of cases are not documented’, according to Dr Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.
in This Week in Virology, Vincent Racaniello says that he had visited Ohio farmers, and said that farm workers were getting specifically conjunctivitis rather than respiratory infections. He mentioned this really casually.
This Week in Virology TWiV 1108: Clinical update with Dr. Daniel Griffin
Also this:
“every dairy that I’ve worked with has – with the exception of one – had sick human beings at the same time they had sick cows.” https://www.bovinevetonline.com/news/industry/message-ag-industry-about-h5n1
From this opinion piece by Zeynep Tüfekçi in the NY Times: It’s not like there’s any at-scale human testing
the agency told me, it is aware of only 23 people who have been tested.
However, I don’t think these cases are likely to lead to sustained human-to-human transmission, of it’s true that most have only conjunctivitis.
It’s in line with the one confirmed case, which only had conjunctivitis and no other symptoms: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/p0401-avian-flu.html
It’s also in line with Fouchier et al., 2004
The same virus was detected subsequently in 86 humans who handled affected poultry and in three of their family members. Of these 89 patients, 78 presented with conjunctivitis, 5 presented with conjunctivitis and influenza-like illness, 2 presented with influenza-like illness, and 4 did not fit the case definitions. Influenza-like illnesses were generally mild, but a fatal case of pneumonia in combination with acute respiratory distress syndrome occurred also.
It spreading to pigs farms seems the biggest risk at the moment, and not unlikely.
Given how bird flu is progressing (spread in many cows, virologists believing rumors that humans are getting infected but no human-to-human spread yet), this would be a good time to start a protest movement for biosafety/against factory farming in the US.
Thanks
Maybe quite some people don’t like random ideas being shared on the Forum?
Ah, I wasn’t aware that that wasn’t the conventional definition. Thanks for the correction.
Still, I think it’s important to somehow manage both sets of people and we can probably do better, though my idea is quite random.
Well, yes, but I was thinking about what to do with sociopaths that are already in the community. If your policy is “we kick out every sociopath we identify”, no sociopath is going to identify themselves to you. I’m not advocating for attracting new sociopaths.
Mind you, I’m assuming here that there are plenty of sociopaths that aren’t that bad, and want to do good, but suffer from the disability of not being able to care emotionally for others. I think it would be good if we could at least keep them out of powerful positions.
This was a pretty uninformed thought of how to deal with sociopaths, but it does feel like a problem worth someone thinking more deeply about.
Here’s another question I have:
is SBF a sociopath, and should the community have a specific strategy for dealing with sociopaths?
(I think yes. Something like 1% of the population of sociopathic, and I think EA’s utilitarianism attracts sociopaths at a higher level than population baseline. Many sociopaths don’t inherently want to do evil, especially not those attracted to EA. If sociopaths could somehow receive integrity guidance and be excluded from powerful positions, this would limit risk from other sociopaths.)
Random idea:
Maybe we should—after this question of investigation or not has been discussed in more detail—organize community-wide vote on whether there should be an investigation or not?
Thanks Rob! Fixed it.
I have not been very closely connected to the EA community the last couple of years, but based on communications, I was expecting:
an independent and broad investigation
reflections by key players that “approved” and collaborated with SBF on EA endeavors, such as Will MacAskill, Nick Beckstead, and 80K.
For example, Will posted in his Quick Takes 9 months ago:
I had originally planned to get out a backwards-looking post early in the year, and I had been holding off on talking about other things until that was published. That post has been repeatedly delayed, and I’m not sure when it’ll be able to come out. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TeBBvwQH7KFwLT7w5/william_macaskill-s-shortform?commentId=yxK8NCxrZQBjAxpCL
It now turns out that this has changed into podcasts, which is better than nothing, but doesn’t give room to conversation or accountability.
I think 80K has been most open in reflecting on their mistakes and taking responsibility.
I was also implicitly expecting:
a broader conversation in the community (on the Forum and/or at conferences) where everyone could ask questions and some kind of plan of improvement would be made
It is disappointing that too little had happened, and it feels kind of like a relationship where a bad thing happened, where the immediate fallout was addressed, but then never quite aired out. I think it would be very healthy for the community to take these steps and reflect on & learn from the SBF affair as well as the mismanaged aftermath, and then hopefully we can all move forward.
I would like to know what the disagree votes* mean here.
*At the time of this comment, it’s 7 Agree − 7 Disagree
I hope you are correct! As an outsider, I find it very hard to judge without standardized non-gameable benchmarks for agents.
I hope you are correct. I find it very hard to judge without standardized, non-gameable benchmarks for agents.
I hope you are correct. As an outsider, I find it very hard to judge without standardized, non-gameable benchmarks for agents.
Thanks, will do!
I really like this post, but I think the concept of buckets is a mistake. It implies that a cause has a discrete impact and “scores zero” on the other 2 dimensions, while in reality some causes might do well on 2 dimensions (or at least non-zero).
I also think over time, the community has moved more towards doing vs. donating, which has brought in a lot of practical constraints. For individuals this could be:
“what am I good at?”
“what motivates me?”
“what will my family think of me?”
And also for the community:
“which causes can we convince outsiders to go into?”
“which spread in causes do we need to not look too weird and demonstrate that our principles work?”
It can be difficult to separate these from the more universal moral and epistemic considerations, once someone is in a committed career path.
If anyone has good suggestions of what I could email to relevant MEPs (just Zvi’s post?) that would be net-positive (e.g. low risk of bad regulation), I’d be happy to hear them.
Here’s Carnegie’s publications on AI: https://carnegieendowment.org/programs/technology/ai/