This is, of course, very tempting, and sounds very exciting. It would be a glorious coincidence if, of all possible things I could be doing, the thing that is most intellectually interesting and fun and increases my status the most also happens to be the most impactful thing I could do with my life. Similarly, why is it that taking a high-paying, high-power job where the promise of impact is a vague sense of “influence” at the cost of progress on a difficult, high-risk, and concrete intervention is so appealing?

Reminds me of this classic: Beware surprising and suspicious convergence.

Meta comment: It's fantastic to see some technical biosecurity discussion on the forum - I feel like that's been relatively rare the last 1-2 years. 

I disagree with the EA Forum's approach to life

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

Thanks for referring to these blog posts!

Very useful comment, thanks! 

hedging against uncertainty: we're just very uncertain about what a future pandemic might look like and where it will come from

I fully agree with this; I think this was an implicit premise of mine that I failed to point out explicitly. 

... though I think for it to work you have to also add a premise about the relative risk of substitution, right?

Great point that I actually haven't considered so far. I would need to think about this more before giving my opinion. It seems really context-dependent, though, and hard to determine with any confidence.

Also, the Maginot line analogy is cool; I hadn't seen that before. (I guess I really should read more of your report 🙂)

That sounds reasonable! Thanks for adding your impression.

Very cool thanks for pointing that out! I think I might have seen it before but had forgotten about it—will check it out again.

Xander, lmk if you have thought about this, and we can chat.