This raises a good point, especially with ethics and blame/credit. Before the Rootclaim debate, I gave a lab leak at about 65% confidence. After the debate and some thought, I put it much lower, <10% with a lot of my uncertainty based on my relatively low biology knowledge. If someone asks, I may say ~about 10% but I’m not enough of an expert. (I also expect if I was more of an expert or spent a lot more time, my 10% would go down, in tension to rationality)
HOWEVER that does not mean I can ethically judge the GoF researchers as if they had taken a 10% chance at killing >20 million people or about equal to killing 2 million for certain. (I do think they were reckless, biased, unethical, generally bad etc but just not capable enough to cause such harm).
There seems to be a bit of a Pascal mugging like thing going on here—if you are not an expert I can convince you that x has a ~1% chance of ending the world, therefore anyone involved is the worst person in history.
This is the same problem you get with insect welfare calculations. Insects suffer X% as much as humans, and whatever X actual humans pick, you conclude that insect suffering is a horrible moral catastrophe.
This raises a good point, especially with ethics and blame/credit. Before the Rootclaim debate, I gave a lab leak at about 65% confidence. After the debate and some thought, I put it much lower, <10% with a lot of my uncertainty based on my relatively low biology knowledge. If someone asks, I may say ~about 10% but I’m not enough of an expert. (I also expect if I was more of an expert or spent a lot more time, my 10% would go down, in tension to rationality)
HOWEVER that does not mean I can ethically judge the GoF researchers as if they had taken a 10% chance at killing >20 million people or about equal to killing 2 million for certain. (I do think they were reckless, biased, unethical, generally bad etc but just not capable enough to cause such harm).
There seems to be a bit of a Pascal mugging like thing going on here—if you are not an expert I can convince you that x has a ~1% chance of ending the world, therefore anyone involved is the worst person in history.
This is the same problem you get with insect welfare calculations. Insects suffer X% as much as humans, and whatever X actual humans pick, you conclude that insect suffering is a horrible moral catastrophe.