I want to emphasize that this just sets a lower bound on the importance.

E.g. there's a theory that fungal infections are the primary cause of cancer.

How much of chronic fatigue is due to undiagnosed fungal infections? Nobody knows. I know someone with chronic fatigue who can't tell whether it's due in part to a fungal infection. He's got elevated mycotoxins in his urine, but that might be due to past exposure to a moldy environment. He's trying antifungals, but so far the side effects have prevented him from taking more than a few doses of the two that he has tried.

It feels like we need something more novel than slightly better versions of existing approaches to fungal infections. Maybe something as radical as nanomedicine, but that's not very tractable yet.

the typical time from vaccine development was decades and the fastest ever time was 10 years.

Huh? It was about 6 months for the 1957 pandemic.

We shouldn't be focused too heavily on what is politically feasible this year. A fair amount of our attention should be on what to prepare in order to handle a scenario in which there's more of an expert consensus a couple of years from now.

I participated in XPT, and have a post on LessWrong about it.

I have alexithymia.

Greater awareness seems desirable. But I doubt it "severely affects" 1 in 10 people. My impression is that when it's correlated with severe problems, the problems are mostly caused by something like trauma, and alexithymia is more a symptom than a cause of the severe problems.

It's not obvious that unions or workers will care as much about safety as management. See this post for some historical evidence.

6 months sounds like a guess as to how long the leading companies might be willing to comply.

The timing of the letter could be a function of when they were able to get a few big names to sign.

I don't think they got enough big names to have much effect. I hope to see a better version of this letter before too long.

Something important seems missing from this approach.

I see many hints that much of this loneliness results from trade-offs made by modern Western culture, neglecting (or repressing) tightly-knit local community ties to achieve other valuable goals.

My sources for these hints are these books:

• The Amish
• WEIRDest People
• The Explanation of Ideology
• The Geography of Thought

One point from WEIRDest People is summarized here:

Neolocal residence occurs when a newly married couple establishes their home independent of both sets of relatives. While only about 5% of the world's societies follow this pattern, it is popular and common in urban North America today largely because it suits the cultural emphasis on independence.

Can Western culture give lower priority to independence while retaining most of the benefits of WEIRD culture?

Should we expect to do much about loneliness without something along those lines?

AI seems likely to have some impact on loneliness. Can we predict and speed up the good impacts?

Most Westerners underestimate the importance of avoiding loneliness. But I'm confused as to how we should do something about that.

I doubt most claims about sodium causing health problems. High sodium consumption seems quite correlated with dietary choices that have other problems, which makes studying this hard.

See Robin Hanson's comments.