by Anemone Franz and Tessa Alexanian 80,000 Hours ranks preventing catastrophic pandemics as one of the most pressing problems in the world, and we have advised many of our readers to work in biosecurity to have high-impact careers. But biosecurity is a complex field, and while the threat is undoubtedly large, there's a lot of disagreement about how best to conceptualise and mitigate the risks. We wanted to get a better sense of how the people thinking about these threats every day perceive the risks. So we decided to talk to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to better understand their views. To make them feel comfortable speaking candidly, we granted the experts we spoke to anonymity. Sometimes disagreements in this space can get contentious, and certainly many of the experts we spoke to disagree with one another. We don’t endorse every position they’ve articulated below. We think, though [...] ---Outline:(02:47) Expert 1: Failures of imagination and appeals to authority(04:54) Expert 2: Exaggerating small-scale risks and Western chauvinism(06:32) Expert 3: Useless reports and the world beyond effective altruism(07:09) Expert 4: Overconfidence in threat models(08:05) Expert 5: Interventions that don’t address the largest threats(09:01) Expert 6: Over-reliance on past experience and overconfidence about the future(10:59) Expert 7: Resistance from governments and antagonising expert communities(13:50) Expert 8: Preparing for the “Big One” looks like preparing for the smaller ones(14:31) Expert 9: ChatGPT is not dangerous(16:52) Expert 10: The barriers to bioweapons are not that high(18:24) Expert 11: We don’t need silver bullets(18:57) Expert 12: Three failure modes(19:32) Expert 13: Groupthink and failing to be scope sensitive(20:47) Expert 14: COVID-19 does not equal biological weapons---
First published:
February 29th, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NGFkW4Qxww9jGESrk/what-are-the-biggest-misconceptions-about-biosecurity-and

Linkpost URL:https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-misconceptions-about-biosecurity/
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.