Hey Seth, thanks for the comment. Very reasonable point on the importance of considering insider legibility/local context. I think far-UV doesn't fit the pattern you're describing, though, because the people writing about it are "insiders" and it's a very small field where everyone is talking and sharing information--there isn't an equivalent to local context that someone working in the field wouldn't quickly discover. Richard Williamson (who wrote the article you linked) works for Blueprint Biosecurity and is a leading expert in this field.
In the case of far-UV, I don't think there's a super deep reason for the lack of scale, and field insiders still debate the best path forward to scale up. I think what's going on is that it's at the "early adopter" tech stage and in the case of any early-commercial-stage tech, it's hard to say exactly what would speed up adoption and exactly why people aren't buying it faster. The most basic principle at play is inertia: it's always easier to not buy expensive, relatively unproven new tech than to buy it. Probably RCTs/a NIST standard/lower cost would help, but these things still wouldn't guarantee adoption.
I think they should, and have spoken directly to Constellation about this, but it would probably help if people who actually use the space also express enthusiasm about the idea. My suggestion is to install far-UV in rooms that host gatherings where lots of people are regularly talking in relatively close quarters, like communal dining areas and rooms used for talks/presentations.
(I think it's a good idea not only because of direct disease reduction, but also to increase social proof/normalcy.)
I do! (Not in the financial sense, tbc.) But just want to flag that my endorsement is confounded. Basically, Aerolamp uses the design of the nonprofit referenced in my post, OSLUV, and most of my technical info about far-UV comes from a) Aerolamp cofounder Viv Belenky and b) OSLUV. I've been working with Viv and OSLUV for a couple of years, long before the founding of Aerolamp, and trust their information, but you should know that my professional opinion is highly correlated with theirs—1Day Sooner doesn't have the equipment to do independent testing.
I think it's the ideal outcome that a bunch of excellent researchers took a look at the state of the field and made their own product. So I'm not too worried about relying on this team's info, but you should just have that context.
Fwiw, Mox (moxsf.com), run by Austin Chen, has installed a couple of Aerolamps and they were easy to set up and are running smoothly.
Hi Matthew, thanks for the clear and thoughtful response. I just want to emphasize first that my team really hoped this bill would pass, with our amendment, but the political process didn't allow for that. Regardless of our intentions, it's reasonable for you to still identify harm in the outcome.
All my arguments were laid out in the post--I'd guess we just have different grounding assumptions about, among other things: the importance of preparing to fight future airborne superspreading-driven pathogens, the potential for far-UV to become a cheaper and more accessible consumer product than longer wavelengths, the potential relative impact of far-UV vs alternatives like filtration, the impact that far-UV could have on pathogens in an already reasonably-ventilated room, and the value of investing in far-UV equipped with scrubbers.
Of course, I just said "potential" and "could" a lot above. You're right that the benefit was uncertain. As I wrote, I had serious concerns during this effort, but we couldn't avoid acting under uncertainty.
I also want to emphasize that far-UV is in a particularly vulnerable development stage relative to its potential value, but we're fighting to improve indoor air quality broadly, not just focusing on far-UV. 1Day Sooner's current IAQ project is more focused on filter implementation.
Sure, we're just not hiring for the same role repeatedly or on a predictable schedule, especially not entry-level roles. Like other orgs, we do work tests and trial periods, which are the fit-testing part of the hiring procedure. We often hire for pretty specialized roles, usually not entry-level, and right now we don't necessarily know the next role we're going to hire for, so we don't know what we'd want to look for in an intern. Those trial periods are useful lead-ins for the specialized jobs we've recently filled, they're just not what I would call an internship. When I think of internships-as-work-training, I think of the model at consultant, financial, or engineering firms, which know they're going to bring in new staff each year to fill entry-level roles that are very similar to each other, because they have a steady stream of work that fits a pattern into which they can predictably slot new people over the course of a year.
As David mentions below, 1Day also does periodically employ students or very early-career people for specific projects, which can look pretty similar to a paid internship in practice. But we can't know that we'll have a suitable full-time role available by the time those contracts are up. Basically, we sometimes do things that look like internships (and sometimes we even call them internships) and we also have a trial period for jobs, but there's not good overlap between what we have interns/student contractors do and what we've hired for lately.
I work at 1Day Sooner, a small global health/biosecurity org. I'm answering based on my own observations, not in an official capacity.
We've had a couple of internships before as one-offs, but no continuous internship program. The biggest issues with running a standing internship program would be:
Carving out a suitable internship project is hard: Most of our work is pretty high-context, so projects need to be staffed by people who are continuously engaged (including both full-time staff and long-term contractors). Internship projects should be interesting and educational to the intern, but also should be a reasonable use of a mentor's time (or at least not actively detracting from the mentor's normal work). Those conditions mean that an internship project needs to be relatively compact and low-context so the intern is able to actually do stuff pretty independently within their internship time frame.
Hiring and training takes a lot of time: We, like a lot of small orgs, are constantly operating at the edge of our capacity, so staff mostly don't have time for "extras". If you're going to expend a lot of time on hiring and training, and you're already bandwidth-constrained, you'd rather look for people who are able to make a longer commitment. (In some orgs, internships are sort of a training/test period or lead-in to a full-time role, but my understanding is that's mostly a thing for bigger organizations that hire for the same roles every year, and definitely not realistic for us.)
Speaking for myself, I actually would like to have more interns. I think good internships can be a great way to "pay it forward" in terms of all the educational experiences I've had that have gotten me here. I also just enjoy the opportunity to be a mentor! However, I mostly can't, in good conscience, argue that creating and running internships is a great use of my time or our grant money, and I don't think that we have enough internship-suitable projects that would make for a valuable and interesting internship experience. (I have offered to supervise/advise on independent projects before, which would be on my own time and wouldn't take up 1Day resources, although have yet to be taken up on that.)
I have colleagues in other organizations who are involved in ASHRAE; one contributed to the development of 241! 241 is great, and to be very clear, my job is not to promote far-UV, it is to promote indoor air cleaning. Far-UV gets a lot of attention in my social circles because it is exciting and new, and people have a lot of questions about that specifically--this post is meant for the very narrow case of answering questions I've directly gotten about far-UV.
Great to see your thinking laid out this way, and of course thank you for your interest in our (1Day Sooner/Rethink Priorities) report!
It was useful to see the discussion of possible overhype from the funding side of the field, since I don't have insight into funding decisions. On the other hand, there are reasons funders might want to focus attention on far-UV, without disregarding the usefulness of conventional-wavelength GUV: since far-UV requires more research than conventional-wavelength systems at this time, but might ultimately be easier to install, the far-UV research payoff could be very large for increasing adoption of GUV in general. I expect that conventional-wavelength systems would benefit from investment into R&D for easier installation, but that's not obviously a place for philanthropic funding. The safety studies necessary for far-UV are too expensive for the current market size, so if far-UV research does not get more philanthropic funding than conventional-wavelength GUV, far-UV safety studies might not be performed in a rigorous way. However, I would agree that funders should be wavelength-agnostic if they are directly funding installations.
Because of the challenges facing comprehensive far-UV analysis, I was surprised that you didn't think it would be very impactful for philanthropists to fund studies--broadly speaking, I agree about the lack of expertise, but this is a small enough field that the informed voices are fairly well-known within the field and I think interested philanthropic bodies would be able to consult those informed opinions. Again, I don't have insight into the funding side of the process, so that may be optimistic. I am certainly biased, since 1Day Sooner does regularly apply/advocate for philanthropic funding for technical research! On the reverse side, personal experience has left me pessimistic about policy advocacy for GUV research, but your report has swayed me somewhat to at least consider the fact that there is not a concerted, heavyweight policy advocacy effort in this area.
I appreciated the argument on capturing the bulk of the risk by later deployment; it was a very helpful presentation of the case. I do think that there is a learning-by-doing element to GUV rollout (for either type of GUV), where rollout and analysis in select environments is necessary for better understanding broader GUV use cases. Identifying those environments is an element of the current 1Day Sooner IAQ project. I also would love to see the cost of GUV installation fall sooner rather than later in order to address endemic disease burden worldwide, e.g. via widespread installation in TB clinics. (I'm fully aware that this use case might remain impractical, but it's nice to consider the potential to address global health! Of course if a funder is specifically trying to fight TB, I’d still recommend sinking their money into vaccine research or treatment.)
Finally, this report was extremely helpful for a current 1Day Sooner project! We're working on a report to assess the potential for market shaping techniques to accelerate the adoption of indoor air cleaning technology. This post, and writing up this comment, really helped clarify some of my thinking about the possible directions we'd been tossing around, so a huge thank you for that!
Hey Seth, thanks for the comment. Very reasonable point on the importance of considering insider legibility/local context. I think far-UV doesn't fit the pattern you're describing, though, because the people writing about it are "insiders" and it's a very small field where everyone is talking and sharing information--there isn't an equivalent to local context that someone working in the field wouldn't quickly discover. Richard Williamson (who wrote the article you linked) works for Blueprint Biosecurity and is a leading expert in this field.
In the case of far-UV, I don't think there's a super deep reason for the lack of scale, and field insiders still debate the best path forward to scale up. I think what's going on is that it's at the "early adopter" tech stage and in the case of any early-commercial-stage tech, it's hard to say exactly what would speed up adoption and exactly why people aren't buying it faster. The most basic principle at play is inertia: it's always easier to not buy expensive, relatively unproven new tech than to buy it. Probably RCTs/a NIST standard/lower cost would help, but these things still wouldn't guarantee adoption.
I think they should, and have spoken directly to Constellation about this, but it would probably help if people who actually use the space also express enthusiasm about the idea. My suggestion is to install far-UV in rooms that host gatherings where lots of people are regularly talking in relatively close quarters, like communal dining areas and rooms used for talks/presentations.
(I think it's a good idea not only because of direct disease reduction, but also to increase social proof/normalcy.)
Thanks so much for flagging this update!
I do! (Not in the financial sense, tbc.) But just want to flag that my endorsement is confounded. Basically, Aerolamp uses the design of the nonprofit referenced in my post, OSLUV, and most of my technical info about far-UV comes from a) Aerolamp cofounder Viv Belenky and b) OSLUV. I've been working with Viv and OSLUV for a couple of years, long before the founding of Aerolamp, and trust their information, but you should know that my professional opinion is highly correlated with theirs—1Day Sooner doesn't have the equipment to do independent testing.
I think it's the ideal outcome that a bunch of excellent researchers took a look at the state of the field and made their own product. So I'm not too worried about relying on this team's info, but you should just have that context.
Fwiw, Mox (moxsf.com), run by Austin Chen, has installed a couple of Aerolamps and they were easy to set up and are running smoothly.
Hi Matthew, thanks for the clear and thoughtful response. I just want to emphasize first that my team really hoped this bill would pass, with our amendment, but the political process didn't allow for that. Regardless of our intentions, it's reasonable for you to still identify harm in the outcome.
All my arguments were laid out in the post--I'd guess we just have different grounding assumptions about, among other things: the importance of preparing to fight future airborne superspreading-driven pathogens, the potential for far-UV to become a cheaper and more accessible consumer product than longer wavelengths, the potential relative impact of far-UV vs alternatives like filtration, the impact that far-UV could have on pathogens in an already reasonably-ventilated room, and the value of investing in far-UV equipped with scrubbers.
Of course, I just said "potential" and "could" a lot above. You're right that the benefit was uncertain. As I wrote, I had serious concerns during this effort, but we couldn't avoid acting under uncertainty.
I also want to emphasize that far-UV is in a particularly vulnerable development stage relative to its potential value, but we're fighting to improve indoor air quality broadly, not just focusing on far-UV. 1Day Sooner's current IAQ project is more focused on filter implementation.
Hell yeah! I love visiting DC, and seeing the EA DC crowd is a high point of each trip.
Sure, we're just not hiring for the same role repeatedly or on a predictable schedule, especially not entry-level roles. Like other orgs, we do work tests and trial periods, which are the fit-testing part of the hiring procedure. We often hire for pretty specialized roles, usually not entry-level, and right now we don't necessarily know the next role we're going to hire for, so we don't know what we'd want to look for in an intern. Those trial periods are useful lead-ins for the specialized jobs we've recently filled, they're just not what I would call an internship. When I think of internships-as-work-training, I think of the model at consultant, financial, or engineering firms, which know they're going to bring in new staff each year to fill entry-level roles that are very similar to each other, because they have a steady stream of work that fits a pattern into which they can predictably slot new people over the course of a year.
As David mentions below, 1Day also does periodically employ students or very early-career people for specific projects, which can look pretty similar to a paid internship in practice. But we can't know that we'll have a suitable full-time role available by the time those contracts are up. Basically, we sometimes do things that look like internships (and sometimes we even call them internships) and we also have a trial period for jobs, but there's not good overlap between what we have interns/student contractors do and what we've hired for lately.
I work at 1Day Sooner, a small global health/biosecurity org. I'm answering based on my own observations, not in an official capacity.
We've had a couple of internships before as one-offs, but no continuous internship program. The biggest issues with running a standing internship program would be:
Speaking for myself, I actually would like to have more interns. I think good internships can be a great way to "pay it forward" in terms of all the educational experiences I've had that have gotten me here. I also just enjoy the opportunity to be a mentor! However, I mostly can't, in good conscience, argue that creating and running internships is a great use of my time or our grant money, and I don't think that we have enough internship-suitable projects that would make for a valuable and interesting internship experience. (I have offered to supervise/advise on independent projects before, which would be on my own time and wouldn't take up 1Day resources, although have yet to be taken up on that.)
I have colleagues in other organizations who are involved in ASHRAE; one contributed to the development of 241! 241 is great, and to be very clear, my job is not to promote far-UV, it is to promote indoor air cleaning. Far-UV gets a lot of attention in my social circles because it is exciting and new, and people have a lot of questions about that specifically--this post is meant for the very narrow case of answering questions I've directly gotten about far-UV.
Great to see your thinking laid out this way, and of course thank you for your interest in our (1Day Sooner/Rethink Priorities) report!
It was useful to see the discussion of possible overhype from the funding side of the field, since I don't have insight into funding decisions. On the other hand, there are reasons funders might want to focus attention on far-UV, without disregarding the usefulness of conventional-wavelength GUV: since far-UV requires more research than conventional-wavelength systems at this time, but might ultimately be easier to install, the far-UV research payoff could be very large for increasing adoption of GUV in general. I expect that conventional-wavelength systems would benefit from investment into R&D for easier installation, but that's not obviously a place for philanthropic funding. The safety studies necessary for far-UV are too expensive for the current market size, so if far-UV research does not get more philanthropic funding than conventional-wavelength GUV, far-UV safety studies might not be performed in a rigorous way. However, I would agree that funders should be wavelength-agnostic if they are directly funding installations.
Because of the challenges facing comprehensive far-UV analysis, I was surprised that you didn't think it would be very impactful for philanthropists to fund studies--broadly speaking, I agree about the lack of expertise, but this is a small enough field that the informed voices are fairly well-known within the field and I think interested philanthropic bodies would be able to consult those informed opinions. Again, I don't have insight into the funding side of the process, so that may be optimistic. I am certainly biased, since 1Day Sooner does regularly apply/advocate for philanthropic funding for technical research! On the reverse side, personal experience has left me pessimistic about policy advocacy for GUV research, but your report has swayed me somewhat to at least consider the fact that there is not a concerted, heavyweight policy advocacy effort in this area.
I appreciated the argument on capturing the bulk of the risk by later deployment; it was a very helpful presentation of the case. I do think that there is a learning-by-doing element to GUV rollout (for either type of GUV), where rollout and analysis in select environments is necessary for better understanding broader GUV use cases. Identifying those environments is an element of the current 1Day Sooner IAQ project. I also would love to see the cost of GUV installation fall sooner rather than later in order to address endemic disease burden worldwide, e.g. via widespread installation in TB clinics. (I'm fully aware that this use case might remain impractical, but it's nice to consider the potential to address global health! Of course if a funder is specifically trying to fight TB, I’d still recommend sinking their money into vaccine research or treatment.)
Finally, this report was extremely helpful for a current 1Day Sooner project! We're working on a report to assess the potential for market shaping techniques to accelerate the adoption of indoor air cleaning technology. This post, and writing up this comment, really helped clarify some of my thinking about the possible directions we'd been tossing around, so a huge thank you for that!