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Thanks a lot for the hard work! This will certainly be useful to people interested in biosecurity careers in our group!

Thanks a lot to you (and to Claude) for this!
I hadn't realized that context windows are now big enough to feed entire chapters.

GV
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Thank you very much for taking the time to write this, Alix!

Extremely interesting article -and I'd love to see other posts exploring your assumptions!

I had a chance to meet a private foundation's leader in Europe recently (raising and donating several millions / year). Interestingly, they also mentioned TBP and I'm now wondering whether it was to somehow position themselves as opposed to some sort of highly demanding grantmaking.

I do think TBP and EA are compatible, to some degree. We should not confuse (1) "having a very high bar for anticipated effectiveness" and (2) "having a very high bar for evidence of impact". It is quite simple to apply for a grant from most EA grantmakers. In my (certainly limited) experience, if you want your grant to be renewed (and, supposedly, increased), you'll probably have to provide significant evidence, and I think it's fair enough.

I suppose non-EA funders might:
- Have actually little knowledge of EA or the EA funding landscape
- Be discouraged by the depth of analysis that they can see from GiveWell
- Be annoyed or discouraged by EA's frequent, strong claim of "making decisions based on evidence" (btw, this claim is so often advertized that I'd assume that it can be conflated with a reliance on frequent reports from and control over grantees).

Also, maybe it's be worth distinguishing different cases, in particular:

  • Funders of "traditional" animal welfare or GHD charities;
  • Funders of more "exotic" projects (global catastrophic risks, community-building, forecasting...), which usually cannot rely as much on historical data for evaluation.

In the meantime: good spot. I assume they assumed that an experienced "finance" person could probably take on this part-time role pro bono.

GV
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I see on the website (https://www.non-trivial.org/program) that the short course is no longer presented. Now it is all about the fellowship. Is there a reason?

GV
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Very happy to see this! But for information, the Slack link is expired (if you update it, be careful because it's in multiple places in the article) @SofiaBalderson  @Cameron.K 

GV
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In a scenario where this tech works as well as we are dreaming of and has generalized in hundreds of millions of buildings: isn't there a risk of a general weakening of our immunity systems, making us more vulnerable over the medium-long run? 

Basic logic behind this question: certain/many classes of virus eradicated from many modern buildings => our bodies are generally less prepared to encounter it in other settings.

(epistemic status: I'm very ignorant in these fields)

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