I found a bunch of this really interesting, thanks for sharing this! I'd be pretty curious whether this resonates with anyone who now thinks of themselves as "EA adjacent" in part because of FTX fallout :) (although maybe those folks aren't, y'know, on the EA Forum 🤷🏻‍♀️)

FWIW, I appreciated reading this :) Thank you for sharing it!

We had a bit of a tragedy of the commons problem because a lot of people are risk-averse and don't want to be associated with EA in case something bad happens to them but this causes the brand to lose a lot of good people you'd be happy to be associated with.

I so agree! I think there is something virtuous and collaborative for those of us who have benefited from EA and its ideas / community to just... being willing to stand up and say simply that. I think these ideas are worth fighting for.

I'm a proud EA.

<3

Nice. You're such a fast writer! Very helpful, thank you!

From this post:

They’re now sequencing wastewater from eight sewersheds across four metropolitan areas, with the addition of Riverside CA (in collaboration with Jason Rothman) in December.

In Fall 2023 we partnered with CDC’s Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program and Ginkgo Biosecurity to collect and sequence both pooled airplane lavatory waste and municipal wastewater influent and sludge. We’ve submitted a full set of aliquots to MIT’s BioMicroCenter for high-throughput library preparation, and will be sending the libraries to Broad Clinical Labs for sequencing later this quarter.

I see, that answered some of my questions. I still feel confused how big a sewershed is relative to a city, and how much that matters from the perspective of early detection. But no pressure to engage, was just curious. Exciting!

Wow, this is so exciting!! Thanks for sharing, and congratulations team!

To this end, we're pleased to share that Open Philanthropy has granted $3M to the NAO over one year to fund a significant scale-up of our wastewater sequencing, targeting three NovaSeq X 25B runs weekly.

Wow 😍. That's great. And if I read footnote 2 right, the implication is that by end of 2025, you'd aim to be able to detect a pathogen that sheds like Influenza A in cities you monitor before 2% of the population is infected? Or is that not quite right because you're targeting 3 such runs weekly across all cities (maybe I should say "sewersheds"?) so you wouldn't quite be able to hit that point yet?

I had some other basic / not-an-expert questions but no pressure to engage :)

• Which cities are you monitoring again?
• It sounds like from this notebook you're still trying to figure out how valuable monitoring one city is from the perspective of catching any global pandemic, so I assume one weakness of this approach is in the geographic restrictions. Although I've vaguely heard of wastewater monitoring in a network of airports / aircrafts as a way to get around this (I can't tell if that's just an idea right now or if it's already being implemented, though.)
• Was the 2% threshold chosen for a particular reason?

Thanks Neel! (I work closely with Jessica on the growth pillar.)

To me Growth feels like a somewhat unhelpful handle here that pushes me in the mind frame of what leads to short-term growth rather than a sustainable healthy community. But if it feels useful to you, fair enough

Thanks for your takes on the framing, that's helpful. The one line description of our 2025-6 strategy is "building sustainable momentum for EA" (as in the body of the post). I do personally find that the best meme to capture the spirit of the strategy. Curious if it resonates!

I feel extremely unsure about this one. I'm voting slightly against purely from the perspective of, "wow, there are projects in that direction that feel super neglected".

Given that this comment has gained some traction, consider making a top level post with more instructions to get people to do this?

I'd also be interested in a bit more exposition on the theory of change re: writing the AG — I get why writing to your representative is probably useful, but do AGs typically take letters from the public into account when deciding whether to make an objection?! (I'd bid for you to make the top level post even if you don't address this question though, just for visibility reasons.)

Nice, sounds like a fun event! Thanks for pointing to the initial list of concrete projects, I found them interesting, especially:

• Pedantry metrics — I found that an interesting way to think about degrees of falsehoods / how misleading statements can be. Maybe there's some sort of evals flavored project there?
• Argument parser — I like the idea of creating some sort of LLM tool to "neutralize persuasion / rhetoric".

I'd be kind of interested to see someone try those ideas out if you re-run this hackathon. And wow, I found the demo on detecting fraudulent research super cool. Agreed that it'd be exciting to see this go viral.

Nice! By the way, I really appreciate how consistently your team helps ground discussions like this in data. I opened this post and as I was scrolling through, I thought, "oh I bet David has already responded with something helpful." It's a great public service!