This is a type of post that should have been vetted with someone for infohazards and harms before being posted, and pending that, I think it should be deleted by moderators or removed by the authors.
As a response to this, the moderator team did indeed reach out (CC’ing David) to one of the people I think David and I both consider to be among the best informed decision-makers in biorisk. With their permission, here is the key excerpt from their response:
> [Me summarizing David:] David is under the impression that people like Elizabeth and Jim are under an obligation to show posts like this to people in biorisk like yourself and definitely not publish if you had any objections (and that posts that don’t do so should be immediately deleted). Do you think they are under that obligation and that we should delete posts of this type?
I do not think they are under an obligation to do this. If the post contained object-level nonobvious content related to generating or exacerbating biorisks, I would consider them under a moral obligation to do so, the strength of which would depend on the particulars of the situation.
If the post overemphasizes the degree to which it’s handled the outbreak badly only mildly-moderately, or based on reasonable-seeming lines of argumentation in my view, I’d likely consider that within the reasonable range of opinions/perspectives to hold and share on forums like LW. If the post was highly misleading, such that I thought it communicated the wrong picture of the CDC, then I’d think it was epistemically virtuous to make top-level updates, and if the authors refused to do that, writing a counter-post explaining why their post was misleading would seem like a good thing to do to me, though not something I’d want to demand, if I were in position to demand such a thing, which I don’t consider myself to be.
Overall, my sense is that you made a prediction that people in biorisk would consider this post an infohazard that had to be prevented from spreading (you also reported this post to the admins, saying that we should “talk to someone who works in biorisk at at FHI, Openphil, etc. to confirm that this is a really bad idea”).
We have now done so, and in this case others did not share your assessment (and I expect most other experts would give broadly the same response). I think the authors were correct in predicting a response like this if they had ran it by anyone else, and I also don’t think they were under any obligation to run the post by anyone else. This is not in any way a post that is particularly likely to contain infohazards, and I feel very comfortable with people posting posts in this general reference class without running them by anyone else first.
Of course, please continue to point out any errors and ask for factual corrections to the post. And downvote the post if you think it is overall more misleading than helpful. A really big reason for posting things like this publicly is so that we can correct any errors and collectively promote the most important information to our attention. But it seems clear to me that this post does not constitute any significant infohazard that the LessWrong team should prevent from spreading.
I do also think that it is important for LessWrong to have a good infohazard policy, in particular for more object-level ideas, both in biorisk and artificial intelligence. In those domains, I would have probably followed your recommended policy of drafting the post until we had run the post by some more people. I am also happy to chat more with you about what our policies in these more object-level domains should be.
It does seem to me that your comments on this post (and your private messages, and postings to other online groups warning of infohazards in this space) have overall been quite damaging to good discourse norms, and I would strongly request that you stop asking people to take posts down, in particular in the way you have here. Our ability to analyze ideas on the basis of their truth-value, and not the basis of their political competitiveness and implications is one of our core strengths on LessWrong, and it appears to me that in this thread you’ve at least once argued for conclusions you think are prosocial, but not actually true, which I think is highly damaging.
You’ve also claimed that hard to access expert-consensus was on your side, when it evidently is not, which I think is also really damaging, since I do think our ability to coordinate around actually dangerous infohazards requires accurate information about the beliefs of our experts, and it seems to me that overall people will walk away with a worse model of that expert consensus after reading your comments.
Most of the consensus that has been built around infohazards in the bio-x-risk community is about the handling of potentially dangerous technological inventions, and major security vulnerabilities. You claimed here (and other places) that this consensus also applied to criticizing government institutions during times of crisis, which I think is wrong, and also has very little chance of actually ever reaching consensus (at least in crises of this type).
The effects of your comments have also been quite significant. The authors of this post have expressed large amounts of stress to me and others. I (and others on the mod team like Ben) have spent multiple hours dealing with this, and overall I expect authority-based criticism like this to have very large negative chilling effects that I think will make our overall ability to deal with this crisis (and others like it) quite a bit worse. You have also continued writing comments like this in private messages and other forums adjacent to LessWrong, with similar negative effects. While I don’t have jurisdiction over those places, I can only implore you strongly to cease writing comments of this type, and if you think something is spreading misinformation, to instead just criticize it on the object-level. Here, on LessWrong, where I do have jurisdiction, I still don’t think I am likely to invoke my moderator powers, but I am going to strong-downvote any future comments like this (and have already done so for this one).
If you do believe that we should change our infohazard policies to include cases like this, then you are welcome to argue for that by making a new top-level post. But please don’t claim that we already have norms, policies and broad buy-in, and that a post like this should have already been taken down, which is just evidently wrong.
As a response to this, the moderator team did indeed reach out (CC’ing David) to one of the people I think David and I both consider to be among the best informed decision-makers in biorisk. With their permission, here is the key excerpt from their response:
Overall, my sense is that you made a prediction that people in biorisk would consider this post an infohazard that had to be prevented from spreading (you also reported this post to the admins, saying that we should “talk to someone who works in biorisk at at FHI, Openphil, etc. to confirm that this is a really bad idea”).
We have now done so, and in this case others did not share your assessment (and I expect most other experts would give broadly the same response). I think the authors were correct in predicting a response like this if they had ran it by anyone else, and I also don’t think they were under any obligation to run the post by anyone else. This is not in any way a post that is particularly likely to contain infohazards, and I feel very comfortable with people posting posts in this general reference class without running them by anyone else first.
Of course, please continue to point out any errors and ask for factual corrections to the post. And downvote the post if you think it is overall more misleading than helpful. A really big reason for posting things like this publicly is so that we can correct any errors and collectively promote the most important information to our attention. But it seems clear to me that this post does not constitute any significant infohazard that the LessWrong team should prevent from spreading.
I do also think that it is important for LessWrong to have a good infohazard policy, in particular for more object-level ideas, both in biorisk and artificial intelligence. In those domains, I would have probably followed your recommended policy of drafting the post until we had run the post by some more people. I am also happy to chat more with you about what our policies in these more object-level domains should be.
It does seem to me that your comments on this post (and your private messages, and postings to other online groups warning of infohazards in this space) have overall been quite damaging to good discourse norms, and I would strongly request that you stop asking people to take posts down, in particular in the way you have here. Our ability to analyze ideas on the basis of their truth-value, and not the basis of their political competitiveness and implications is one of our core strengths on LessWrong, and it appears to me that in this thread you’ve at least once argued for conclusions you think are prosocial, but not actually true, which I think is highly damaging.
You’ve also claimed that hard to access expert-consensus was on your side, when it evidently is not, which I think is also really damaging, since I do think our ability to coordinate around actually dangerous infohazards requires accurate information about the beliefs of our experts, and it seems to me that overall people will walk away with a worse model of that expert consensus after reading your comments.
Most of the consensus that has been built around infohazards in the bio-x-risk community is about the handling of potentially dangerous technological inventions, and major security vulnerabilities. You claimed here (and other places) that this consensus also applied to criticizing government institutions during times of crisis, which I think is wrong, and also has very little chance of actually ever reaching consensus (at least in crises of this type).
The effects of your comments have also been quite significant. The authors of this post have expressed large amounts of stress to me and others. I (and others on the mod team like Ben) have spent multiple hours dealing with this, and overall I expect authority-based criticism like this to have very large negative chilling effects that I think will make our overall ability to deal with this crisis (and others like it) quite a bit worse. You have also continued writing comments like this in private messages and other forums adjacent to LessWrong, with similar negative effects. While I don’t have jurisdiction over those places, I can only implore you strongly to cease writing comments of this type, and if you think something is spreading misinformation, to instead just criticize it on the object-level. Here, on LessWrong, where I do have jurisdiction, I still don’t think I am likely to invoke my moderator powers, but I am going to strong-downvote any future comments like this (and have already done so for this one).
If you do believe that we should change our infohazard policies to include cases like this, then you are welcome to argue for that by making a new top-level post. But please don’t claim that we already have norms, policies and broad buy-in, and that a post like this should have already been taken down, which is just evidently wrong.