Good question! Reworded a bit:

Far-UVC's strongest effect on viruses and bacteria is to damage their proteins, so they can't infect us. This same protein absorption is what makes far-UVC safe for humans: unlike the UVA and UVB in sunlight that penetrate deep enough to cause sunburns and skin damage, far-UVC is so strongly absorbed by proteins in the dead outer layers of our skin and eyes that it doesn't reach the living cells beneath. Because of this shallow absorption, far-UVC has minimal effects on the human body, and is safe to install in our homes, schools, and workplaces

I thought a lot about frugality when I was getting involved in EA (ex: Living Frugally So We Can Give Away More, from 2010), but I think we (and some other early EAs) could be shortsighted here. For example, in retrospect I think it would have been really valuable for @Julia_Wise🔸  and me to meet other EAs in person in the UK, but we didn't go there until 2014. And only then because we could tack it it onto travel for my sister's wedding.

A focus on minimizing spending can also be a distraction from other ways of increasing your impact. For example, when I wrote that post I was earning (all numbers in 2025 dollars) $106k in a research group. Two years later when I realized I should be trying harder to earn money and Carl Schulman suggested I join Google, my starting salary was $149k and in my first full calendar year I earned $301k. Very quickly I was able to donate more than I had been earning before. A focus on increasing earnings would have resulted in more donations.

On the other hand, I do think some frugality is really valuable. If we had let our expenses grow proportionately during the period when I was earning $700k+ I could easily have become trapped earning to give, but frugality ("a low personal burn rate" if you want to appeal to startup folks) allowed me to leave Google to join an early-stage biosecurity project that spun out into a non-profit that still can't afford to pay super well. And it has allowed me to take a voluntary salary reduction, allowing the non-profit to get more done with the same funding.

Overall, I think it would probably be good for EA to be moderately more frugal, but to be very aware of the downsides in burnout and turning people away.

You might also be interested in the top comments on Free-spending EA might be a big problem for optics and epistemics (posted at the height of the FTX-funding era) for some discussion on the pros and cons of EA's more frugal past.

Aww, thanks!

Better yet, donate.

This takes you to a GWWC page that says:

You can donate to several promising programs working in this area via our donation platform. For our charity and fund recommendations, see our best charities page.

But if you click through those links you can see there isn't a biosecurity fund, and the list of biosecurity-related programs you can donate on GWWC are just NTI and CHS. Which are not bad options, but as someone in the field they're not where I think funding would go farthest.  It would be really great if there were a bio fund, or a bio evaluator!

(Disclosure: I run a project that would plausibly be funded by such a thing)

@fezzy🔸 one important difference (especially important to me!) since we last talked is that the NAO just opened a position for a software engineer; consider applying? https://securebio.org/careers/bioinformatics-engineer-2025/

I wouldn't recommend getting into cybersecurity as a path to biosecurity.  From the outside, the main thing that transfers in the actual work is the mindset, but a very large majority of skills in both areas are domain specific.  On the other hand, I do think there are valuable things that need doing in cybersecurity, and biosecurity efforts nearly always also have cybersecurity needs.

I'm guessing support for upper room UV would be even higher than far UVC because there is very little exposure of people for upper room?

Maybe? Or maybe people would be worried about whether we'd deploy it properly.

And in-room filtration would be high support as long as it's not loud?

I don't think anyone has an objection to in-room filtration, and this is something I'd be happy rolling out without polling the community. But the real problem isn't the noise (though that is significant, and I'm excited about the Big Quiet Fan project), it's the sheer number of purifiers we'd need around the room to handle ~200 people.

The smallest one I know of is the kids' Flo Mask.

Thanks! I'll pass this along to Simon who leads our swab sampling work.

On reusable respirators, they're worse to significantly worse for intelligibility than disposables. If you're only talking about what to wear when not talking (ex: listening to talks) then this doesn't matter, but if you're considering masking for 1:1s or group discussions it becomes pretty important.

This is probably a regional thing: I don't see the 3M 4251 or other disposable respirators for sale in the US. My guess is the cost difference you're seeing is due to comparing a US-market (6200) vs UK-market (4251) masks on UK Amazon?