I was wondering, how useful would a short write up of 'Could far UVC have averted histories deadliest pandemics' be? I expect it would take me about 2-3 hours for a rough write up, rising to about 5 hours to include some meaningful graphics. I've done research into the types of pathogens and which ones are likely to be effected by far UVC, and also which have more or less chance of resistance/adulteration. E.g. if 90% of the most deadliest pandemics (e.g. top 10) in the last few centuries could have been avoided, it would signal for example some level of confidence natural pandemics would be reduced from X/S-risk if we had it, vs if only say 10% of pandemic candidate pathogens are meaningfully affected by far UVC, it points to is more as a business/sick leave cost reduction rather than meaningful government/organisational broad scope pandemic protection? I'd analyse trends in also future pathogen candidates e.g. H5, H1 (swine, avian) plus whether malicious threat actors are likely to utilise heavier/lower weight pathogens e.g. fungi/bacteria vs viruses/spores etc (but unsure if that part I will publicly post)

This is a small appreciation post for the deep and prompt community engagement from the 80k team after their announcement of their new strategic direction. No organization is under any obligation to respond to comments and criticisms about their strategy, and I've been impressed by the willingness of so many 80k staff members to engage in both debate and reassurance - at least 5 people from the organization have weighed in.  It has both helped me understand their decision better and made the organization feel more caring and kind then if they had just dropped the announcement without follow up. Although engaging to this degree has costs, I think this shows that if this kind of engagement is done well it might help both the reputation of the org and smooth over misunderstandings as well.

I've been doing some data crunching, and I know mortality records are flawed, but can anyone give feedback on this claim: Nearly 5% of all deaths (1 in 20) in the entire world occur from direct primary causation recorded due to just 2 bacterial species, S. Aureus and S. Pneumoniae.   I'm doing a far UVC write up on whether it could have averted history's deadliest pandemics. Below is a snippet of my reasoning when defining 'CURRENT' trends in s-risk bio. ---------------------------------------- Analysis of pathogen differentials: 2021-2024 data: Sources Our World in Data, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CDC, FluStats, WHO, 80 000 hours   Figure 8: Comparison of number of identified and cultured strains of pathogen types Figure 9: Comparison of number of strains pathogenic to humans by pathogen types   From the data, despite a considerable amount of identified strains of fungi and protists, the percentage of the strains of those pathogen types that can pose a threat to humans is low (0.2% and 0.057%) so the absolute amount of strains pathogenic to humans from different pathogen types remains similar to viruses, and becomes outweighed by pathogenic bacteria.   Archaea have yet to be identified as posing any pathogenic potential for humans, however, a limitation is that identification is sparse and candidates of extremophile domains tend to be less suitable for laboratory culture conditions.   The burden of human pathogenic disease appears clustered from a small minority of strains of bacterial, viral, fungal and Protoctista origin.   Furthermore, interventions can be asymmetrical in efficacy. Viral particles tend to be much smaller than bacterial or droplet based aerosols, so airborne viral infections such as measles would spread much quicker in indoor spaces and would not be meaningfully prevented by typical surgical mask filters. Whilst heavy droplet particles or bodily fluid transmission such as of colds or HIV can be more effectively prev

Over the years I've written some posts that are relevant to this week's debate topic. I collected and summarized some of them below: "Disappointing Futures" Might Be As Important As Existential Risks The best possible future is much better than a "normal" future. Even if we avert extinction, we might still miss out on >99% of the potential of the future. Is Preventing Human Extinction Good? A list of reasons why a human-controlled future might be net positive or negative. Overall I expect it to be net positive. On Values Spreading Hard to summarize but this post basically talks about spreading good values as a way of positively influencing the far future, some reasons why it might be a top intervention, and some problems with it.

It seems like "what can we actually do to make the future better (if we have a future)?" is a question that keeps on coming up for people in the debate week. I've thought about some things related to this, and thought it might be worth pulling some of those threads together (with apologies for leaving it kind of abstract). Roughly speaking, I think that: * ~Optimal futures flow from having a good reflective process steering things * It's sort of a race to have a good process steering before a bad process * Averting AI takeover and averting human takeover are both ways to avoid the bad process thing (although of course it's possible to have a takeover still lead to a good process) * We're going to need higher powered epistemic+coordination tech to build the good process * But note that these tools are also very useful for avoiding falling into extinction or other bad trajectories, so this activity doesn't cleanly fall out on either side of the "make the future better" vs "make there be a future" debate   There are some other activities which might help make the future better without doing so much to increase the chance of having a future, e.g.: * Try to propagate "good" values (I first wrote "enlightenment" instead of "good", since I think the truth-seeking element is especially important for ending up somewhere good; but others may differ), to make it more likely that they're well-represented in whatever entities end up steering * Work to anticipate and reduce the risk of worst-case futures (e.g. by cutting off the types of process that might lead there) However, these activities don't (to me) seem as high leverage for improving the future as the more mixed-purpose activities.