I'm not familiar with Ryan Holiday, but a quick skim suggests he's a stoic philosopher of some kind? Stoicism does seem like one of the attitudes that can make it easier to stare at very dark things.

I guess I maybe don't think of "EA" as a coherent enough identity to think of it as an actor that can "do the minimum", but I think it's sometimes helpful for community members to see messages like the one in this post, or some of the recent pieces from Ajeya Cotra, saying that they believe one doesn't always have to be staring to the abyss and working to the bone.

Quoting those pieces, which you might enjoy:

• The Gorgon: "You used to make a point of watching an undercover factory farm video every few months. You would rehearse the horror of it, indulge in it. This did not seem to bring you any closer to slaying the Gorgon, so the habit shriveled like a vestigial organ. And it was never much fun either."
• Tempering Hardcoreness: "if you ever run out of steam being a monastic vegan who works 80 hours a week, you can pretty seamlessly transition into a reducetarian dad who works 40 hours a week. You don’t have to lose your friends or professional community, you’ll probably still have more impact year on year as your experience grows, you’ll look back with pride on how much you accomplished in a more intense season of your life"

yeah, we assume this kind of tool would be used as one part of a second-stage follow-up screen when an order has been flagged and can't be approved by default. I agree that ordering genes from a wide variety of organisms isn't an anomalous or suspicious signal on its own. Right now, questions like "does this person have research history with this organism?", which some of signals of legitimacy assembled to decide whether to fulfill a flagged order, are answered by ad-hoc googling by customer service reps; tools like Cliver can automated and accelerate that process (see their recent preprint on Evaluating AI-Assisted Customer Verification for Synthetic Nucleic Acid Screening).

A small update on each of these project ideas, for the end of 2025:

• ORCID-TAXID mapping tool: Alejandro Acelas and Hanna Pálya have created Cliver, which ended up supported by an Astral Codex Ten grant. I believe they are validating with synthesis providers right now; unclear where the project goes long-term, but they've made a lot of progress.
• Customer Screening Training Dataset: It looks pretty likely that IBBIS and EBRC will work on this project in 2026, building off IBBIS's work on customer screening and EBRC's work on end-to-end stress testing
• Biosecurity Statements Repository: Shiying and PT Nhean developed one, as announced in this October 2025 EA forum post
• Vulnerability Disclosure Framework: Looks like IBBIS will work on this in 2026.
• International Suspicious Activity Reporting Analysis: Sentinel Bio funded MITRE in August 2025 to "propose mechanisms for aggregating data across the nucleic acid synthesis industry", which feels at least related to this work.

Overall, I must say I'm pretty happy that several of these project ideas ended up getting picked up by volunteers based on the forum post! I should yeet ideas that I don't have time to work on onto the internet more often.

Thanks for the post! On faruvc.org, you say:

Far-UVC is most valuable in crowded indoor spaces where people spend extended time together. Because it is based on light, it also has the strongest advantages over alternative methods like air purifiers in larger rooms, where beams of light can travel further.

The two lamps you recommend on that site are Aerolamp (500 USD for one lampp) and Nukit Torch (345 USD for 4 smaller lamps). Do you have any sense of:

1. What kinds of rooms would be better cleaned by the 4 smaller lamps vs. the 1 larger lamp (and whether that's the most salient difference between Aerolamp and Nukit)?
2. When it would be better to invest in a Far-UVC lamp vs. a high-CADR air purifier? I think HouseFresh is fairly trusted as a review site ― to be more concrete, who would you recommend buy a CleanAirKits Luggable over a UVC lamp?

I really liked the Rockefeller Gather Guide; the updated Rockefeller Foundation Convening Design Guide version has more on virtual events and is shorter (24 pages), so it's a fine place to start, but the older Gather: The Art and Science of Effective Convening is longer (85 pages) and as a result has more worksheets and activity ideas. I can't easily find a PDF online for the older version but happy to share over DM.

+1 that the EA Global Bay Area sweatshirt with the bridge is the only EA Global merch I wear with any regularity; it's simply a really nice looking shirt! I wear it more than any other conference / company swag, I think.

I've seen something similar done with conference badge ribbons, including at fairly stodgy trade shows. The main conference can provide a set of basic ribbons for people to choose from (e.g. roles such as "First Time Attendees", discussion topics such as "AI governance", useful information such as personal pronouns) and then attendees can print and add their own.

I can't speak for the author, and while I'd classify these as examples of suspicion and/or criticism of EA biosecurity rather than a "backlash against EA", here are some links:

• Will splashy philanthropy cause the biosecurity field to focus on the wrong risks?, Filippa Lentzos, 2019 (also linked and discussed on the forum)
• Exaggerating the risks post series, Reflective Altruism, 2022-2024
• Recent criticism specifically of AI-Bio risks, such as Propaganda or Science: Open Source AI and Bioterrorism Risk

I'll also say I've heard criticism of "securitising health" which is much less about EAs in biosecurity and more clashing concerns between groups that prioritise global health and national security, where EA biosecurity folks often end up seen as more aligned with the national security concerns due to prioritising risks from deliberate misuse of biology.

A new biosecurity-relevant newsletter (which me and Anemone put together) is GCBR Organization Updates. Every few months, we’ll ask organizations who are doing impactful work to reduce GCBRs to share their current projects, recent publications, and any opportunities for collaboration.

I was part of a youth delegation to the BWC in 2017, and I think the greatest benefit I got was that it raised my aspirations. I'm not sure I'd previously conceived of myself as the sort of person who could speak at the UN. I also heard an expert bowing out of dinner early because they had to go finish their slides for the next day, and realized there isn't some upper echelon of governance and society where everyone is hypercompetent and on top of things; even at the friggin' United Nations people are making their slides the night before.

I don't know how much of an effect this had on my decision to start a biosecurity meetup the next year and eventually transition to full-time biosecurity work, but I think it played a role. There are other benefits too; Schelling-point NGO networking, collecting lived-experience stories that make your understanding of diplomacy more vivid, and creating a pressure of prior consistency that increases the chance of that a delegate will continue to work on biosecurity (YMMV on whether the last item is a benefit).