I don't think I'm claiming primarily/solely manual dexterity, so I may have communicated this not super well.

The barrier I'm describing is that protocols are underspecified in ways that can't be fixed by writing more words: "gently" has no operationalization that transfers across materials. The optimal "gentleness" often depends on what the specimen is doing that day too. There's some level of knowledge that is very hard to write ahead of time, also because each specimen is different. This is harder to fix.

Are you familiar with the term "lab hands"? This is the term used in biology lab circles to call what I'm trying to convey. Do you contest that there's some people who have more success in lab work because of something people just simplify by saying this term?

Roughly 10, ~8 of which I interviewed at one point at the same time so to red team each other. At least 4 were in AIxbio. More than one were x-risk/ea-prioritization-focused.

Pipetting is hard based on the type of task you need to do. Obviously, pipetting is super easy when the thing itself is basic. The difficult is a function of the braoder task you're doing. Fragile materials, concentrations, contamination: all this is to illustrate what "lab hands" mean to non-bio people people, as well as why some things in textbooks are much harder in real life.

None of this is to say that making a basic bioweapon is impossible for people who have an institution, basic skills, the ability to order controlled things, and the desire. The people who have a list of all of those things, plus the skills for very specific types of virus sets, are a smaller crowd, in general, which people seem to not be understanding. Hence, see my BOTEC of those people in Article 1.

I'd love to know what "bizarre" claims you mean. A good number of the biologists were actively doing wet lab work. It's been publicly commended predominantly biologists and domain experts.

Thanks Jacob! I appreciate your comment.

I think we agree on a lot of the things. I think the crux is diverging beliefs in how much economic growth has solved absolute poverty in the global north. I was basing that on the Center for Global Development's work, as well as the work on a lot of evidence-focused global poverty focused orgs. Economic growth / avoiding stagnation is what Our World in Data noted as the main factor for whether a country is on track to raise GDP + incomes. https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-has-made-huge-progress-in-reducing-extreme-poverty-could-this-be-coming-to-an-end

Abundance as I am referencing it is not what circles like the Abundance Institute is doing, where their metric isn't social good as much as free markets. I think the fact that Klein/Thompson's approach is often misunderstood as associated with just pro-business circles is proof that it's neglected. I think if it was extremely popular within Democrats then it wouldn't be something only 1% of people have heard of, according to recent surveys.

As for environmental regulations, the fact that some environmental regulations don't protect people from bad outcomes is not proof that some environmental regulations don't provide environmental protection as intended. NEPA for example is often used by a small handful of environmental orgs to stop the building of clean energy plans, environmentally beneficial projects, apartments, and bike lanes. Within the environmental movement, there's ire about this kind of thing because it's gotten in the way of better climate-friendly infrastructure.

Lower housing prices might harm homeowners but it benefits everyone, including homeowners, in so many ways that people don't often realize: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/

Thanks Adrian! Yes totally agree, I think abundance can and does mean a lot of things. I probably should have specified that I really like the Klein/Thompson take on abundance because it prioritizes social good as a way to prioritize amongst existing supply-side/regulation-focused reforms. For example, I don't think abundance's focus on trains would count as EA (maaaybee if other problems were solved first, since it can help with road fatalities?). I don't encounter much the birth rates focus in the abundance circles I run in. I don't think birth rates would qualify for abundance in the way that I think of it (I don't see how many well-intentioned government action impacted birth rates).

On examples of abolishing regulations: abundance asks that people review whether the tradeoffs of whatever regulation are still worth the cost. There's a lot of inertia that leads to no one doing a review of regulations for unintended consequences. For context, I am pushing to get the Save Our Bacon Act removed from the farm bill; those regulations are clearly worth their cost.

Also, abundance is not just deregulation. It's also covering things like advanced market commitments or other ways to incentivize good social outcomes. For context, the delay with the malaria vaccine wasn't solely regulation. The main pursuers of the vaccine saw it as mostly an academic pursuit. The lack of urgency was a big problem.

Thanks so much for your note! :)

EDIT: I think the economic-growth argument and acceleration-technologies-that-other-countries-use (like the East Asian tigers and chips) is a huge deal for EAs focusing on global health and poverty. Our World in Data noted econ growth/avoiding stagnation as main factor for whether a country is on track to raise GDP + incomes. (A big part of the equation though is also whether the country is able to adopt these e.g. state capacity, aligning incentives, also abundance issues.) https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-has-made-huge-progress-in-reducing-extreme-poverty-could-this-be-coming-to-an-end

Apologies for the delay, I didn't see this. Yes, that's fine. Go ahead, thanks for linking it back.

I'm curious why mass media campaigns would be the recommended action given that meta-analysis of mass media campaigns don't seem indicate a reduction in sedentary behavior nor achievement of recommended physical activity levels, (though they do promote some increase in walking.)  Lobbying to invest in the built environment seems cheaper and also more effective in the long run. Organizations like Strong Towns, Bloomberg City Labs, various walking and biking safety groups advocate/lobby for walkable neighborhood changes that are very affordable, if not free, like loosening zoning to allow for mixed-use buildings, multiple homes/businesses in one lot, reduced parking minimums. Many of the changes only require legislative change, since businesses or developers take on cost of new construction. Urban3 consultancy group has considerable research into the significantly higher tax revenues cities get from new residential and commercial developments, replacing underutilized spaces like parking lots. I would guess that influencing national health organizations (like national cancer or diabetes associations) to see walkable neighborhoods as possible could increase the pace of change. Other ways to get other groups to join the lobbying effort might be to clarify via mass media campaigns the link between car-centric infrastructure to the high rates of road fatalities (the main way to make roads safer is to build pedestrian/biking infrastructure (build buffers to remove "stroads", bike lanes = narrow roads, sidewalk bump-outs = increase visibility, both of these decrease speeding). Or clarify the health impacts of children (developmental delays and asthma) for those who live on car-centric streets. I would guess these mass media campaigns would have a counterfactual difference (though indirectly to your goal) since road fatalitiy preventability and children health outcomes from even just proximity to cars are things people are not aware of, whereas almost everyone is aware that physical activity is good.

Why the recommendation against having an organization email address? There seem to be some strong downsides to board members using personal email addresses for board matters: member's entire personal inboxes are  vulnerable to search if any litigation against org happens; when members depart, it's difficult to ensure org-related emails are archived for record-keeping, particularly relating to org decisions; similarly, it's difficult to ensure org-related emails are deleted, to lessen the risk of leaks in the event of an email hack (since the email address won't be deactivated like a org-email would).

There already seems to be a strong publicly available database: GCR’s. We actually synced our publicly-available AI policies ideas to their database while working on this, strengthening GCR’s public database even more. This specific database allows for sharing of ideas that aren’t ready for prime-time, and that wouldn’t have been shared had they been meant for public dissemination. For example, this might be ideas that people are investigating or would like for folks to investigate, but no public report exists. I reviewed a lot of Google Docs that were previously not shared with a large groups of people. This expands access to that niche.