Let’s make nice things with biology. Working on biosecurity at iGEM. Also into lab automation, event production, donating to global health. From Toronto, lived in Paris, currently in the SF Bay. Website: tessa.fyi
Tessa
Karma: 2,763
Yes, I have updated towards the view that a single funder can strongly influence the direction and focus of a research field.
I notice I feel reluctant to give any detailed description of what I learned in those conversations in this entirely public forum; I’d like people to feel as if they can share their opinions with me without those later being broadcast.
My broad, stitched-together impression (which could be as much my interpretation as the opinion of those I spoke to) is that people are excited about the emergence of a major new funder, but leery of the sudden change in what research is most easily able to get funded. In addition to bringing new people into the field, Open Phil granting has redirected some established researchers to focus on GCBRs, and I think there is a view that GCBRs are a valid concern, but not so singularly important that they should overwhelm other research agendas.
It seems they are worried they might learn more and decide they were wrong and now want something different… If you truly, deeply care about altruism, you’ll keep picking it in every moment, up until the world changes enough that you don’t.
I don’t object to learning more and realizing that I value different things, but there are a lot of other reasons I might end up with different priorities or values. Some of those are not exactly epistemically virtuous.
As a concrete example, I worry that living in the SF bay area is making me care less about extreme wealth disparities. I witness them so regularly that it’s hard for me to feel the same flare of frustration that I once did. This change has felt like a gradual hedonic adaptation, rather than a thoughtful shifting of my beliefs; the phrase “value drift” fits that experience well.
One solution here is, of course, not to use my emotional responses as a guide for my values (cf. Against Moral Intuitions) but emotions are a very useful decision-making shortcut and I’d prefer not to take on the cognitive overhead of suppressing them.
My values being differently expressed seems very important, though. If I feel as if I value the welfare of distant people, but I stop taking actions in line with that (e.g. making donations to global poverty charities), do I still value it to the same extent?
That said, my example wasn’t about external behaviour changes, so you probably weren’t responding with that in mind.
I’ve inarguably experienced drift in the legibility of my values to myself, since I no longer have the same emotional signal for them. I find the the term “Value Drift” a useful shorthand for that, but it sounds like you find it makes things unclear?
Myself and Zachary Jacobi did some research for a post that we were going to call “Second-Order Effects Make Climate Change an Existential Threat” back in April 2019. At this point, it’s unlikely that our notes will be converted into a post, so I’m going to link a document of our rough notes.
The tl;dr of the doc:
Epistemic status: conjecture stated strongly to open debate.
It seems like there is a robust link between heat and crime (at least 1%/ºC). We should be concerned that increased temperatures due to climate change will lead to increases in conflict that represent an existential threat.
We assumed that:
Climate change is real and happening (Claim 0).
Conflict between humans is a major source of existential risk (Claim 1).
Tessa researched whether increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations would make people worse at thinking (Claim 2).
She concluded that there is only mixed evidence that CO2 concentrations affect cognition, and only at very high (i.e. indoor) concentrations.
If you are concerned about the CO2 → poor cognition → impulsivity/conflict link, worry about funding HVAC systems, not climate change.
Zach researched whether heat makes people more violent (Claim 3).
They concluded that “This seems to be solidly borne out by a variety of research and relatively uncontroversial, although there is quibbling about which confounders (alcohol, nicer weather) play a role. On the whole, we’re looking at at least 1%/ºC increase in crime. The exact mechanism remains unknown and everything I’ve read seems to have at least one counter-argument against it.”
The quality of the studies supporting this claim surprised both of us.
We did not get around to researching the intersection of food scarcity, climate change, and conflict .
This has been discussed in another comment thread on this post.
The rough notes represent maybe 4 person-hours of research and discussion; it’s a shallow investigation.
That’s great!
I’ve been working on a biosecurity event (Catalyst) that’s happening later this month in SF. It’s going to be a larger and less purely EA audience (and thus I expect it to have less of a working-group atmosphere) but I’d be happy to connect afterwards and share any takeaways on biorisk event organization.
Yeah, most people (including me) don’t apply multiple mL of hand sanitizer over every surface of their hands, then rub the hands together until it dries completely (which takes around 20 seconds).
Happy to be corrected here, but I think hand sanitizer is recommended by the WHO for healthcare workers because of its strong antibacterial properties, and if you’re concerned specifically about viruses you will usually be better off with hand washing.
If children washing their hand in Spanish daycares looks like “regular person use”, then this study found hand sanitizer to be more effective.
(Though I can’t tell how much more carefully supervised the children using hand sanitizer were; there’s a paragraph that sort of suggests this-”The HSG children were supervised by DCC staff and parents when using the hand sanitizer, and in the case of young children, it was administered by DCC staff and parents. The CG followed usual hand-washing procedures.”- and that might explain the whole difference, since it’s not that dramatic.)
I wish I could look up the source for that 90% quote, but it’s from a book from the 1990s. Quoting a press release from ASM about that same 2019 result:
The influenza A virus (IAV) remains infectious in wet mucus from infected patients, even after being exposed to an ethanol-based disinfectant (EBD) for two full minutes… Most studies on EBDs test the disinfectants on mucus that has already dried. When he and his colleagues repeated their experiments using fully dried mucus, they found that hand rubbing inactivated the virus within 30 seconds… Washing hands with an antiseptic soap, they found, deactivated the virus within 30 seconds, regardless of whether the mucus remained wet or had dried.
More alcohol isn’t necessarily better- this 2002 CDC Review on Handwashing notes that:
Alcohol solutions containing 60%–95% alcohol are most effective, and higher concentrations are less potent because proteins are not denatured easily in the absence of water.
The tests summarized in that report suggest high efficacy at the 70% concentration for a lot of viruses, included some non-enveloped ones:
Other nonenveloped viruses such as hepatitis A and enteroviruses (e.g., poliovirus) may require 70%–80% alcohol to be reliably inactivated. However, both 70% ethanol and a 62% ethanol foam product with emollients reduced hepatitis A virus titers on whole hands or fingertips more than nonmedicated soap.
[edited to clarify] So maybe the reason that the CDC recommends handwashing is that healthcare workers are likely to have soiled [ETA:
or dampor mucus-covered] hands?
Yeah, edited to clarify a bit. At this point I’m just a bit confused about the CDC recommendation to favour handwashing:
Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after going to the bathroom; before eating; and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.
If soap and water are not readily available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol. Always wash hands with soap and water if hands are visibly dirty.
This now has a website: https://www.covid19risk.com/.
The (all-volunteer) team could use more help! You can ask for an invite to the Slack, or send tips about other related efforts, using contact@covid19risk.com.
Other prior work: Would activism to ensure local hospitals and health departments are adequately preparing for COVID-19 be high-leverage?
I’d really appreciate ideas for how to try to confer some of what it was like to people who couldn’t make it. We recorded some of the talks and intend to edit + upload them, we’re writing a “how to organize a conference” postmortem / report, and one attendee is planning to write a magazine article, but I’m not sure what else would be useful. Would another post like this be helpful?
You might be interested in the Just One Giant Lab OpenCovid19 project. They just had their first conference call and their goal is to “develop an open source methodology to safely test for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 using tools as common as possible”.
I’ve seen claims before that the CDC’s response to the 1976 H1N1 epidemic had long-term negative public health consequences, but after a few minutes of looking for evidence of this, I’m not sure it’s true.
In the fall of 1976, based on fears that a January outbreak of swine flu was going to become a 1918-scale pandemic in the coming season, the CDC vaccinated around 25% of the American populace. However, new cases of H1N1 weren’t appearing, people were developing Guillain–Barré syndrome after being vaccinated, Ford lost the election, and the whole program was abandoned. The received wisdom (e.g. this Discover article) seems to be that this was viewed as a disaster and increased distrust of government vaccination campaigns.
From what I can tell from this article on Influenza Pandemics of the 20th Century and the the CDC’s 2006 reflections on the vaccination program, though, the public health officials involved in the campaign feel like they reacted reasonably given the information they had? (Most of the world did not mount mass vaccination campaigns, and it was not an unusually bad flu season.)
Anyway, leaving this as a comment rather than an answer, since this was an overreaction to the H1N1 strain that existed, but I don’t know if it was an overreaction to the information accessible in February 1976, and it’s not clear that it had terrible consequences.
Are there theory-of-change-level misconceptions that you commonly find yourself correcting for your clients? What are some of the strategic mistakes you frequently see made by institutions on the scale you advise?
These are great ideas! I love all of the practical zoom-call-management suggestions. Splitting into breakout rooms based on upvoted questions in a Google doc sounds quite fun, I may have to try that.
I really liked the encouraging tone of this― “from one little fish in the sEA to another” was so sweet― and like the suggestion to instigate small / temporary / obvious projects. Reminds me a bit of the advice in Dive In which I totally failed to integrate when I first read it, but now feels very spot on; I spent ages agnoising over whether my project ideas were Effective Enough and lost
monthsyears that could have been spent building imperfect things and nurturing competence and understanding.
How has OpenPhil’s Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness strategy changed in light of how the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded so far? What biosecurity interventions, technologies or research directions seem more (or less) valuable now than they did a year ago?
How much collaboration exists between research analysts (or operations associates, for that matter)?
I decided against working in academic research because I do much better in a team environment (short feedback loops, bouncing ideas off peers, sense that my work contributes to shared purpose and projects) than I do working independently. I prefer the industry side of basically all of Philip Guo’s industry vs. academia comparisons. Would it still make sense for me to apply for an OpenPhil job? I think I have relevant skills, but I’m worried that I wouldn’t be effective in a research environment, even if it is non-academic.