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Last Wednesday, I joined a panel at the 2024 iGEM Grand Jamboree on "Youth & Education for Biosecurity, Biosafety, and Global Policy" within the Responsibility Conference. It took me some time to reflect on what message I wanted to pass on to the diverse audience (team members, sponsors, governments, academia and industry people, etc.).
Here is what I said:
So here we are, at the Responsibility Conference: let’s talk about responsibility. I believe each and everyone of you, whatever your age, origin, background, skin color, gender… can embody this responsibility, first not to do harm, but also to proactively contribute to this world that we’re building together, and make it better.
From there, there are many possible paths ahead, especially when one thinks about what it means for their career, and I think there are two structuring questions one can use to explore them.
First: how can I contribute? What are am I good at? What do I enjoy doing on a day-to-day basis?
And second: what am I driven by? What will bring me longterm motivation? What will bring me a feeling of fulfillment?
If I take my own story as an example, I have a scientific background, but I regularly found myself asking this question: will I find longterm motivation in researching e.g. some specific bacterial pathogen? People around me empowered me to think I could contribute more. And because contributing more, having more impact, is a driver for me, it was essential that I surround myself with aligned people and understand, with their help, how I could do that.
I realized that I believe that biotechnologies come with real, concrete, potentially large scale risks, and enabling the extraordinary benefits of biology while preventing those risks was a strong motivator for me. I hope I can contribute to a future in which the world is safe from biological threats.
However, when we are students or even young professionals, we tend to follow the path that have been laid down before us by others. Usually it means keeping the steering wheel straight, and go deeper in one domain of expertise. I get it, I started doing a Ph.D. because science is fascinating and that’s the natural next step, right? But is the mission driving me? It’s a tough question, it’s uncomfortable and at times overwhelming, but one day maybe Future You might thank you for doing the work.
Another point I would like to get across is: there are options beyond the duality of academia and industry for scientists. I’ve been there, when I was in uni it’s the choice I was told I had. But scientists can contribute in other ways, as some of my fellow panelists are also examples of, where the core of the job is not technical, but understanding the technicalities is still very important.
Let’s talk about one of those options: policy. There aren’t that many obvious ways to transition from science to policy, and I wanted to talk about my own bumpy road to here.
When I was asking myself hard what I was driven by, I realized two things: research is fascinating, but I want collaboration and building strong connections to be a big part of my job, rather than pushing the intellectual frontier. Second, I’m less excited about being at the forefront of innovation, and more about optimizing how our discoveries can be applied to improve lives at scale and have real-world impact.
At some point and after dozens of conversations with friends or strangers whose jobs I was inspired by, I really felt drawn to the policy world. It seemed like a way to follow the motivation I mentioned earlier: enabling the extraordinary benefits of biotech while preventing potential risks.
I’m not gonna say it was easy, and it required me to build resistance to rejection, but at some point stars will align. I found the Talos Fellowship, which trains young professionals to contribute to emerging tech policy through a reading group and then a 6-month placement in a think tank. While mostly focused on advanced AI, you probably know that AI has a huge potential in enabling biotechnologies, and there is a lot to work on at the interface of the two. I’m grateful for the opportunity I got at Talos to skill up, and now be placed at the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance, a think tank working on international and multilateral AI governance. My goal is to leverage the skills I’m building in bio, AI, and policy, to contribute to make the future safer for everyone.
What I want you to takeaway from here is the following:
- Two questions: how can you contribute, and what is driving you
Also, there is more to what you can see for yourself. It takes exploring and considering unusual ideas seriously. Be bold, reach out, talk to people you’re inspired by, seek the difficult feedback that will allow you to make better decisions:
- Dare to diverge from the path, the only thing you need is to step away and make a turn. Find the people that will empower you to do that.
By doing this, you also unlock the potential of doing more and better, which you might feel a responsibility for:
- Scientists can, and should, contribute beyond science.
Why does nobody use the term "eutopia"? From Greek etymology, dystopia means "bad place", and utopia means... "non-place" - like an unachievable place, while eutopia means "lucky place". Shouldn't we use a word pointing toward something that we can hope for?
Wikipedia mentions that the fact that both utopia and eutopia are pronounced identically might have given rise to a change of meaning. But I think the difference in meaning is important - should we deliberately use - and thus mispronounce - eutopia /ɘːˈtoʊpiə/?
Actually, In Chapter 1 of What We Owe The Future, reintroducing this distinction is something that MacAskill does!
In practice, people mean "eutopia" when they say "utopia", and in a Wittgensteinian sense 'meaning is use', so changing language won't actually result in much.
Curated and popular this week
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[Cross-posted from my Substack here]
If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right?
The answer is all of them and none of them.
This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say:
* Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement.
* Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick.
* Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement.
* Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964.
* Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly.
* And so on…
To paint this picture, we can see this in action below:
Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption
Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising
What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things:
1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing
2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
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I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons.
1. Scalability
2. Capital counterfactuals
3. Standards
4. Learning potential
5. Earning to give potential
These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1]
Scalability
There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations.
Capital Counterfactuals
I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue.
Standards
Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want.
Learning Potential
Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
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James Özden and Sam Glover at Social Change Lab wrote a literature review on protest outcomes[1] as part of a broader investigation[2] on protest effectiveness. The report covers multiple lines of evidence and addresses many relevant questions, but does not say much about the methodological quality of the research. So that's what I'm going to do today.
I reviewed the evidence on protest outcomes, focusing only on the highest-quality research, to answer two questions:
1. Do protests work?
2. Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence?
Here's what I found:
Do protests work? Highly likely (credence: 90%) in certain contexts, although it's unclear how well the results generalize. [More]
Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence? Yes—the report's core claims are well-supported, although it overstates the strength of some of the evidence. [More]
Cross-posted from my website.
Introduction
This article serves two purposes: First, it analyzes the evidence on protest outcomes. Second, it critically reviews the Social Change Lab literature review.
Social Change Lab is not the only group that has reviewed protest effectiveness. I was able to find four literature reviews:
1. Animal Charity Evaluators (2018), Protest Intervention Report.
2. Orazani et al. (2021), Social movement strategy (nonviolent vs. violent) and the garnering of third-party support: A meta-analysis.
3. Social Change Lab – Ozden & Glover (2022), Literature Review: Protest Outcomes.
4. Shuman et al. (2024), When Are Social Protests Effective?
The Animal Charity Evaluators review did not include many studies, and did not cite any natural experiments (only one had been published as of 2018).
Orazani et al. (2021)[3] is a nice meta-analysis—it finds that when you show people news articles about nonviolent protests, they are more likely to express support for the protesters' cause. But what people say in a lab setting mig
Why does nobody use the term "eutopia"? From Greek etymology, dystopia means "bad place", and utopia means... "non-place" - like an unachievable place, while eutopia means "lucky place". Shouldn't we use a word pointing toward something that we can hope for?
Wikipedia mentions that the fact that both utopia and eutopia are pronounced identically might have given rise to a change of meaning. But I think the difference in meaning is important - should we deliberately use - and thus mispronounce - eutopia /ɘːˈtoʊpiə/?
You're probably right. It still feels like many other languages are using this word in its original meaning, so even if the English language has a different definition, bringing some "utopian" concepts to a global community might be misunderstood.