Thanks for the post! I wanted to add a clarification regarding the discussion of metagenomic sequencing,

The first is metagenomic sequencing. This is technology that can take a sample from a patient or the environment and sequence all DNA and RNA in it, matching them against databases of known organisms. An example of a practical deployment would be to use it for diagnostic conundrums — if a doctor can’t work out why a patient is so sick, they can take a sample and send it to a central lab for metagenomic sequencing. If China had had this technology, they would have known in 2019 that there was a novel pathogen whose closest match was SARS, but which had substantial changes. Given China’s history with SARS they would likely have acted quickly to stop it. There are also potential use-cases where a sample is taken from the environment, such as waste water or an airport air conditioner. Novel pandemics could potentially be detected even before symptoms manifest by the signature of exponential growth over time of a novel sequence.

China does have metagenomic sequencing. In fact, metagenomic sequencing was used in China to help identify the presence of a new coronavirus in the early Covid patient samples (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2008-3),

Here we study a single patient who was a worker at the market and who was admitted to the Central Hospital of Wuhan on 26 December 2019 while experiencing a severe respiratory syndrome that included fever, dizziness and a cough. Metagenomic RNA sequencing4 of a sample of bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from the patient identified a new RNA virus strain from the family Coronaviridae, which is designated here ‘WH-Human 1’ coronavirus (and has also been referred to as ‘2019-nCoV’)

Excellent post; I did not read it carefully enough to evaluate much of the details, but these are all things we are concerned with at the Nucleic Acid Observatory and I think your three "Reasons" is a great breakdown of the core issues.

In his recent interview on the 80000 Hours Podcast, Toby Ord discussed how nonstandard analysis and its notion of hyperreals may help resolve some apparent issues arising from infinite ethics (link to transcript). For those interested in learning more about nonstandard analysis, there are various books and online resources. Many involve fairly high-level math as they are aimed at putting what was originally an intuitive but imprecise idea onto rigorous footing. Instead of those, you might want to check out a book like that of H. Jerome Keisler's Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach, which is freely available online. This book aims to be an introductory calculus textbook for college students, which uses hyperreals instead of limits and delta-epsilon proofs to teach the essential ideas of calculus such as derivatives and integrals. I haven't actually read this book but believe it is the best known book of this sort. Here's another similar-seeming book by Dan Sloughter.

Great!

Potentially - this is something myself and others working on metagenomic monitoring have discussed and would like to investigate the practicalities of. If anyone has connections to international airlines or knows about the legalities/ownership of airline waste, I'd be interested in chatting.

It seems that Sandberg is discussing something like this typology in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn2vgQGNI_c

Edit: Sandberg starts talking about three categories of hazards at ~12:00

I see, thank you!

Hi Ajeya, thanks for doing this and for your recent 80K interview! I'm trying to understand what assumptions are needed for the argument you raise in the podcast discussion on fairness agreements that a longtermist worldview should have been willing to trade up all its influence for ever-larger potential universe. There are two points I was wondering if you could comment on if/how these align with your argument.

1. My intuition says that the argument requires a prior probability distribution on universe size that has an infinite expectation, rather than just a prior with non-zero probability on all possible universe sizes with a finite expectation (like a power-law distribution with k > 2).

2. But then I figured that even in a universe that was literally infinite but had a non-zero density of value-maximizing civilizations, the amount of influence over that infinite value that any one civilization or organization has might still be finite. So I'm wondering if what is needed to be willing to trade up for influence over ever larger universes is actually something like the expectation E[V/n] being infinite, where V = total potential value in universe and n = number of value-maximizing civilizations.

I have very little skin in the game here, as I don't personally have a strong desire for an acronym...but my 2 cents are that "Reasoning carefully" can be shortened to "Reasoning" (or "Reason") for this purpose with no loss - the "careful" part is implied. And I think I identify more with the idea of using careful reasoning than rationality. "Reason(ing)" also matches an existing short definition of EA as "Using reason and evidence to do the most good" (currently the page title for effectivealtruism.org)

Thanks for the post! This is just the type of thinking I wanted to do this morning, and I'm finding it and the spreadsheet template a useful motivator.