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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.
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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