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Apparently, a lab in china has created a virus with a 100% kill rate in humanized mice. Combined with the fact that there's a decent chance that COVID was a lab leak, this sort of thing is extremely dangerous to be doing.
I'm not sure how best to make it so that people are not incentivized to do things like this, but ceasing to fund this variety of research (it looks like the US ended one program that was pushing this sort of thing last year), and instating some sort of legal liability on those who do this, and especially if they dispose of it badly, probably seem like good decisions.
Extremely dangerous diseases are among the top few things in being both disastrous to humanity (unlike climate change) and also relatively likely (unlike a massive asteroid hitting earth). Development of them is also something that is not excessively difficult to do. This is probably the closest thing we have so far to Bostrom's black ball metaphor. People joke about Yudkowskian airstrikes on data centers; would airstrikes on labs be similarly warranted? More seriously, though, there should be far more effort put into preventing this sort of thing than there currently is.
Bostrom's concerns should probably be something more important to be aware of. The ideal is just to not develop technology in specific fields to the point that killing millions is a cheap and easy thing to do. Of course, the tradeoff is totalitarianism, a terror of its own.
EDIT: Some of the comments have argued, relatively convincingly, that this particular news story was overblown and misleading.
This is perfectly timed with a recent scottpost on almost the exact same topic which got me to think about it before I saw this post.
As an aside, hopefully this isn't too inflammatory a claim but I've always balked at the "approach" of assigning arbitrary probabilities and using Bayesian fake-math to imbue said arbitrary numbers with some semblance of meaning. I get the impetus but there's already a wonderful thing called a "gut feeling" for that, you can just, like, state what you feel outright, trying to lend more credence to it with (literally!) arbitrary numbers and math comes off as almost comically missing the point. Maybe I don't have the INT required to pick this node in the rationalist skill tree, I admit my level isn't very high, but I completely fail to see how pulling a number out of your ass and using it to have an opinion is in any way better than pulling a ready-made opinion out of your ass, the guiding principle is exactly the same in both cases sans the obfuscation layers.
Anyway I digress, disregard the numbers and probability stuff, the core claim (against learning from "dramatic events", emphasis mine) is concrete enough to be taken on its own merits, definition of "dramatic events" aside. How much should we update, actually? Is this a severe enough breach of Masquerade to demand a hardline unilateral response (like with the Ukraine war, for instance), and if not, a breach of what severity would it take for the US public to broadly update and for the US gov't to actually try taking action? Although I suspect those are two separate questions with different answers.
In my opinion "gain-of-function delenda est" was already solidly established with COVID, but this if proven seems to go a step beyond even that. Given the, uh, issues around the handling of COVID, I've "updated" quite significantly downward in regards to our ability to keep viruses like this in check. Which makes some of Scott's arguments even more perplexing to me:
As if every instance is somehow made less harmful purely by virtue of the long lineage behind it? The context here is mass shootings (and even then I'm not sure I'm ready to take "mass shootings are normal actually" at face value) but it applies to virus outbreaks just the same, just because COVID happened and I managed to survive it doesn't mean I'm very thrilled for a rerun. Scott hedges by "if it happens twice in a row, yeah, that’s weird, I would update some stuff", but in my opinion this is plainly bad rhetoric and dangerously close to a slippery slope, with the subtle downplaying reminiscent of the political pipeline of "nobody is saying this, you're paranoid" -> "it's just a few [bad actors] on [irrelevant platforms], no big deal" -> "well there are supporters but nobody is saying [thing] exactly" -> etc. (At this point there really should be a name for this trick, I'm not aware if there is one)
If each new instance is treated as demanding a massive update, then chances are it's a psyop, sure, the 20s saw plenty of those, but regardless of politicking you still have to deal with the consequences of the act itself. Which, in this case here, look to be mildly alarming given how much impact the "previous instance" (e.g COVID) already had. Man, I wish people could care to drum up at least half the hysteria around biotech that currently surrounds AI, at least the former has very direct and obvious risks in the here and now.
Putting a probability to your beliefs is just a health tool to get you out of the silly narrative mindset where you get committed to one narrow line of possible events. It gives you a bunch of other useful tools for thinking about uncertain events like making sure that compounding conditionals should lower your probability rather than raise it. It's not really a substitute for having gut feelings but it's a very useful set of tools for discussing and reasoning about these gut feelings.
But considering other conditions while weighing the "probability" implies that you're aware of those conditions (since if you aren't you obviously wouldn't think of them), and since you're already aware of them, they're highly likely to be already "baked in" in the gut feeling/opinion currently residing in your ass. Not to mention that it's eminently possible to pull the opinion out of said ass and then discuss and reason about it, I do this often myself.
I'm probably missing something but I still fail to see the utility of the numerical approach. What point in "calibrating" around some specific number if that number, by design, isn't grounded in reality? As per @philosoraptor below, "garbage in - garbage out", meticulous calibration doesn't negate the possibility of the "origin point" being wildly off the mark in the first place.
People naturally cluster their beliefs about things into this neat little narratives. They see John running and get attached to some particular theory about why he is running. They interpret his pace and the look on his face to mean he must be running from someone or something and then build out theories about what the pursuer could be. They think extensively about all the different types of pursuers and that occupies so much of their mind space that they end up way, hilariously, over estimating the likelihood of each of those theories. It's very easy to accidentally discount the possibility that he's just out for an exercise run and made a funny face way below where it belongs if you're not careful.
The practice reminds you to think critically about each additional compounding conditional in this way and prevents common failure modes. It fits nicely with the demand to measure both probability and confidence in things like bets. I've seen myself moderate my beliefs in real time when faced with the need to define odds and offer a bet, it's a humbling thing to have happen.
It also breaks you out of the "my team vs their team" mindset. When I assign a probability besides one or zero to something I've given myself a reasonable out to it not happening. I'm less emotionally invested in some outcome and can more easily resist each new piece of evidence to the contrary causing me to double down about how it really, if you squint, supports my original position. I think this is something a lot of people who end up sucked into ideological pipelines could avoid most of their bad ends if they adopted. "From the evidence before I think I was still right in favoring outcome X, but I see I now that I was too confident and maybe evidence Y and Z should be less compelling to me in the future" is a much superior mental state to "No, bullshit, I was always right and there must be some kind of conspiracy to hide the truth". And the latter appears to be a very common occurrence.
Can you make due without these tools? Absolutely. Some people are able to free solo crazy climbs. But I find it strange that you don't least recognize their value.
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I like that it gets people to plainly state their biases. Sure, they are pretending these are mathematical "priors" and then pretending to perform Bayesian reasoning with them and with new evidence. But merely explicitly stating their built-in biases and what impact they assign to evidence is great.
It's the rare confluence of jivey, fake and useful.
So it's basically just about what you mumble while pounding the nails with the Bayesian hammer? Pretty clever, I guess I can buy that, the extra steps still seem unnecessary to me but at least I can see the crumbs of utility now.
The common alternative is people not proactively stating their biases or an estimate of how much they think a particular unit of evidence counts.
Given the alternative, this is great. Jivey language. Fake numbers. Fake math. And also a great way for people to clearly state what is otherwise hidden in conversation.
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If nothing else it forces you to stay internally consistent, at least on the specific topics the numbers cover. That's more than a lot of people seem able to manage without such tools. Nevertheless, you're not wrong that there can be an element of "garbage in, garbage out".
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I'm with you on the "this is just gut feeling with extra steps" observation. I think people were just impressed by the thought that went into the Drake Equation & forgot to understand that it's still just a thought experiment. Unlike other equations with solutions, it has no predictive power.
It's the best tool they have, they don't appreciate the limits of it, and we all know what happens when all you have is a hammer.
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