EA - CE: Rigorously prioritizing the top health security (biosecurity) ideas by CE

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: CE: Rigorously prioritizing the top health security (biosecurity) ideas, published by CE on June 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Every year at Charity Entrepreneurship (CE), we try to find the best interventions for impact-focused charities to launch through our Incubation Program. Our research in 2022 focused on health security (which includes biosecurity) and on large-scale global health.This post outlines:An introduction to health security at CE. What CE means by health security exactly, some of CE’s views on preventing catastrophic and existential risks, and why we picked “health security” as a topic.Our prioritization of the top health security interventions. Why rigorous prioritization of ideas is needed to be effective in the world (especially for longtermist cause areas), and CE’s approach to this within health security.Our results. The long list of nearly 200 ideas, our top six shortlisted ideas, and our final recommendations.If you’d like to learn how to conduct similar prioritization research, and how to evaluate the results that come out of starting high-impact interventions, we have just launched our Research Training Program that you can apply to by July 17, 2023.Introduction to health security at CEWhat we mean by health securityWe took a fairly broad interpretation of health security. Our initial definition was: anything that minimizes the danger of acute public health events.This included several broad categories:Pandemic preventionPandemic preparednessGeneral risk preparedness for acute public health eventsAntimicrobial resistanceHealth system strengtheningOther / meta ideas (e.g., better biosecurity forecasting)This included looking at both natural pandemics and engineered pandemics (which could be due to accidental or deliberate misuse of biotech).How much does CE value preventing catastrophic/existential risks?This may seem like a bit of a cop-out answer, but there are a wide range of views on this topic among CE staff. There is no clear overarching organizational view or policy. This section gives a rough sense of how “CE staff” might tend to think about these topics, but probably doesn’t accurately reflect any individual staff member’s stance.In general, CE’s staff tend to apply a very high level of empirical rigor to decision making. Staff tend to trust empirical evidence (e.g., RCTs, M&E of existing charities, base-rate forecasting, etc.) above other kinds of evidence, particularly valuing such evidence above theoretical reasoned arguments. That said, staff tend to accept that making good decisions requires robust/cluster thinking and look for cases where many kinds of evidence align, including theoretical reasoning. Along the same lines, staff are likely to think that doing good is really difficult and having some ongoing measurable evidence of impact is probably required.In general, CE staff believe that preventing extinction is a worthwhile endeavor. However, given the above, staff are likely to be skeptical about:The ability to know what the biggest future risks are, especially where risk estimates rely on reasoned speculation about future technologies.The success of any organization that doesn’t have a clear path to measure the impact of its activities.We took all these views into consideration and chose to focus on health security, including biorisks. This focus allows us (and future CE charities) to explore risk areas that have at least some chance of being globally catastrophic, but also have clear historical precedents and evidence of less extreme catastrophes. Additionally, we expected to find a number of options within biorisk that could be impactful in addressing catastrophic biorisks while also demonstrating health impacts in the short run, meaning a new charity should be able to track and demonst...