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Short summary (a scientist erred/falsified results in heart disease treatments, up to 800,000 died):
Full Vox link
I find the Vox article somewhat disturbing. They spend most of the article talking about whether criminalization is the answer. 800,000 dead, or some number in the high thousands and they feel it's necessary to spend so much time justifying and proposing? Why should they be carefully peeping their heads over the parapet, wary of sniper fire? If ever there was someone to cancel and demonize, it's this guy.
I have an internal feeling of justice that calls for extremely severe penalties for these people. I guess I'm in the minority, since it doesn't happen. The EcoHealth gang, Daszak and the Bat Lady of Wuhan are still living the high life. Meanwhile, scientists who dare to have sex with coworkers get their lives derailed.
I suppose that most people have their feelings of justice heavily weighted towards direct things like killing with knives, selling faulty goods or being mean. That makes sense, we didn't evolve to care about the probabilistic harms caused by institutional malpractice over many years. This is why I think we should have extra-strong prohibitions on this kind of non-obvious harm. Even a hardened EcoHealth researcher might have qualms about massacring 10-20 million people with guns and blades. It's a lot easier to do exciting, fun research and be a little slack on all those tedious safety checks. It doesn't feel so wrong, which is why they need to feel fear to counter it.
In the past I've made this sort of argument and been rebuffed by some people on the grounds that if we imposed very severe punishments then people would just double down on lying and blaming others to escape liability. Plus it would disincentivize people from taking up important roles.
However, when it comes to mechanical engineering, we've learned to build bridges that stay up. We appreciate that some kind of consequence should fall upon you if you adulterate food with plastic or replace the concrete with cardboard (or cardboard derivatives). Back in the early Industrial Revolution nobody particularly cared about safety, there were plenty of bridge failures. We slowly had to evolve systems that corrected these problems but we got there in the end.
Indeed, negligence is a big part of law. Mostly it works on the assumption that the harm-causing party is a big corporation or someone with lots of money. From a broad evolutionary point of view, that makes a lot of sense. Proving guilt and getting to the bottom of things takes a lot of effort, you want to be sure that there will be a pay-off. It's like how creatures might evolve fangs to pierce flesh and get at that juicy meat. Entities that can cause lots of harm tend to have lots of resources.
However, academia gives us cases where there are no clear, direct, short-term links between the cause of harm and the victims. The cause of harm might be a few moderately well off scientists. The harm itself might be hazy, there might be no ironclad proof of the magnitude and exact nature. Think how long it took to prove that cigarettes caused cancer. We had the statistical proof long before the exact causal mechanism was ironed out and the costs of delay were phenomenal. Biology is the most obvious case where this happens. There was another case where Alzheimer's research was thought to be fraudulent, wasting many years and billions of dollars. I say slash and burn, take their money away, give them humiliating tattoos and make them work at McDonalds somewhere far away from all their friends, or worse. Normal criminals couldn't do that much harm in a lifetime.
AI likely falls into the same category, though it can probably be dealt with via more traditional negligence systems since it's mostly advanced by big companies. I am worried that it will take far too long for people to realize the danger posed by AI or those who wield them, there isn't enough time to develop seriousness.
Anyway, I think it would be wise to develop ways to target and severely punish biologists who fraudulently or negligently allow harm (perhaps also praising and granting boons to those who uncover their fraud). This would be a positive incentive for singularitarian scenarios and virtuous in itself. We need to get out of the mindset of waiting for our market-Darwinist-legal system to fix things and attack problems pre-emptively. Or at least with a minimum of megadeaths.
The problem with any proposal to punish large-scale indirect and negligent harms that arise from engaging in some otherwise permitted activity carelessly is that people only get excited about the prospect of doing it to people and professions in their outgroup. It's easy to believe that academics or COVID policymakers should be forced work under the looming threat of punishment for any consequences that can be traced to their research or policy when the personal suffering of scientists and COVID policymakers leaves you cold and you suspect that either activity has no or negative value anyway. However, if you are not willing to accept that the same principle apply to people and professions in your coalition, you will never be able to gather the requisite support from the other side. Would you be happy to bite the bullet and also develop ways to target and severely punish company executives for the same thing - say, holding everyone near the top of the tobacco industry responsible for lung cancer cases, or oil executives for deaths that were statistically traced to global warming? What about holding every media personality who signal-boosted dubious COVID treatments ranging from Ivermectin to antibiotics accountable for projected delta-deaths that resulted from people following their advice? If not, the other side of the culture war will rightly suspect that you actually just want to make life hard for their champions while ensuring that yours can continue operating unencumbered.
They’re not analogous. People consume oil and tobacco willingly. They don’t, or wouldn’t, aquiesce to GoF research or a cardboard bridge. If we’re trading horses, you could have oil spill C-suits. Of course we can’t draconically punish a low-level technician for releasing a virus if he was not adequately compensated for that responsibility.
I know this secretary in a big company, she would produce and present documents for the (somewhat dumb) CEO to sign and she was revolted that he wouldn’t understand, or even read, most of what he was signing. One day she was in a hurry to get some papers through, and instead of waiting for the CEO, another executive suggested that she sign them herself. “I’m not paid to sign!” she replied. And that’s true. The signature has to mean something. Some skin in the game, buck stopping power. In theory, they’re compensated for it, but they’re not really accountable for it. That's the way the managerial class wants it. But the rest of us don't have to take it.
A cardboard bridge would probably get glowing reviews. Wait, no, it already has. They’d never sign off on one for actual traffic…until they do, because it’s cheaper, greener, or just novel. If it could possibly make someone money, they’ll try it.
Same for Gain-of-Function. People want new technology. People also don’t think very hard about externalities. So they vote for people who run programs that do GoF, and they go into biotech programs in college, and they do GoF research to fund a PhD.
The most obviously terrible ideas are the most likely to become a contrarian marketing gimmick. Business as usual.
The material is immaterial – what’s punishable is the broken promise (signature) that the bridge would stand.
I fear that in your attempts to shield some people from accountability you have descended into total nihilism. “No one will ever be held accountable, even if they build a literal doomsday device.” “Okay! That’s bad!”
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If I got frustrated in a position like that and my concerns got knocked back, the next documents the CEO would be presented to sign would be requests for an increase in how much I was being paid.
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