EA - Map of Biosecurity Interventions by James Lin

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Map of Biosecurity Interventions, published by James Lin on October 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryI recently created a visual map of biosecurity. It covers my interpretation of foundational biosecurity interventions. The map is designed to broadly answer “what are people working on in biosecurity?”(Link to a larger, higher resolution image)‘Low-downside Interventions’ are interventions that are on the lower-risk side. These might be good discussion topics or companies to work on. Promising GCBR Interventions are interventions with general consensus among biosecurity experts for being effective at preventing catastrophic pandemics.Not all interventions are made equal. Some are much more effective than others, but I’ve included the ‘less-promising’ interventions all the same. I didn’t want my biases (or the biosecurity community’s biases, for that matter) about what is and isn’t promising to obscure solutions from a first-principles breakdown.Though I consulted experts and peers, all final decisions were ultimately mine and may differ from the biosecurity community. The rest of the post will go over my rationale for certain decisions.GCBR vs. Covid-scale pandemicsThis map covers preventing pandemics, not just the catastrophic ones, but also the Covid-scale ones which might occur more frequently.EA focuses a lot on global catastrophic biological risk (GCBR) pandemics. This seems pretty important given its neglectedness and potentially catastrophic impact. I’ve outlined the interventions that I think would be promising for GCBRs.At the same time, many in biosecurity consider the effects of AI to outweigh those from biorisks (the magnitude is usually 10-100x). Progress in alignment is influenced by factors like international cooperation, institutional distrust, and nuclear conflict. All of these factors are affected by Covid-scale pandemics, whether through decreases in trust, sudden scarcity of resources, or armed international conflict. Considering the possible detrimental effect of even small-scale but more frequent pandemics, it seems worth exploring interventions focused on this scale. There may be more low-hanging fruit than we imagine.Mitigate-Prevent breakdownThere are other excellent frameworks for pandemic prevention. Kevin Esvelt’s Delay-Detect-Defend is one such example. I decided on a two-factor framework of Mitigate-Prevent because I think it covers the space of interventions well and because it resulted in a nice visual. Part of this framework is Survive which involves bunkers and food resilience. I didn’t include it because I wanted more emphasis on preventing diseases from becoming pandemics in the first place, which is much more important than escaping to a bunker. If we’re escaping to bunkers, then it’s likely that we’ve lost. That said, I could imagine creating another map that covers this axis of resilience.Thoughts on some specific interventionsAgricultural disease monitoring and farm-animal testingFactory farms practically incubate viruses due to the high concentration of animals. Because diseases can pass from animals to humans, more vigilance here could be an effective preventative measure. Wet markets experienced pushback for being viral breeding grounds, and it’s about time that factory farms undergo the same scrutiny.In addition to worrying about human and animal infection, crops are also vulnerable. Agricultural practices are monoculture in nature, meaning there is a lack of genetic diversity in the crops grown. Blights exist, and countries are surprisingly dependent on a few sources of food. Monitoring agricultural diseases through runoff water or random sampling seems worth consideration.BioenhancementBy bioenhancement, I mean health and performance-boosting drugs. Most people have a negative connotation w...