1) Yes, this discussion is important, but it should have taken place before a post like this was posted.
2) The standard for something that is admittedly an infohazard can’t be ” the authors themselves think the thing they are doing is a good idea.” And knowing most of the people in this space, I strongly suspect that if anyone in biosecurity in EA had read this, they would have said that it needs at least further consideration and a rewrite. Perhaps I wrong, but I think it is reasonable to ask someone in the relevant area, rather than simply having authors discuss it.
People have many avenues of vetting things before making a public post—it’s not like the set of people in EA who work on biosecurity is a secret, and they have publicly offered to vet potential infohazards in other places.
3) I disagree with you that most of the criticism in other places was of the form exhibited here. Claiming we shouldn’t trust the CDC seems dangerous to me. And this post isn’t simply repeating what others have said. Liberal news sources often note that the Trump administration isn’t trustworthy, or say that the CDC has screwed up, but as far as I have seen, they *don’t* claim that the organization is fundamentally untrustworthy, as this post does. In my view, the central framing changes the tone of the rest of the points from “the CDC doesn’t get everything right, and we should be cautious about blindly accepting their claims” to “the CDC is fundamentally so broken that it should be actively ignored.” While I’m sure that some lesswrong readers are going to marginally and responsibly update their beliefs in light of the new information presented here based on their well-reasoned understanding of the US government and its limitations, many readers will not.
Would your opinion change significantly if we changed the wording to highlight that this is an opinion on the trustworthiness of the CDC in this moment, with these constraints, rather than a fundamental property of the CDC?
I think these are all good points.
1) Yes, this discussion is important, but it should have taken place before a post like this was posted.
2) The standard for something that is admittedly an infohazard can’t be ” the authors themselves think the thing they are doing is a good idea.” And knowing most of the people in this space, I strongly suspect that if anyone in biosecurity in EA had read this, they would have said that it needs at least further consideration and a rewrite. Perhaps I wrong, but I think it is reasonable to ask someone in the relevant area, rather than simply having authors discuss it.
People have many avenues of vetting things before making a public post—it’s not like the set of people in EA who work on biosecurity is a secret, and they have publicly offered to vet potential infohazards in other places.
3) I disagree with you that most of the criticism in other places was of the form exhibited here. Claiming we shouldn’t trust the CDC seems dangerous to me. And this post isn’t simply repeating what others have said. Liberal news sources often note that the Trump administration isn’t trustworthy, or say that the CDC has screwed up, but as far as I have seen, they *don’t* claim that the organization is fundamentally untrustworthy, as this post does. In my view, the central framing changes the tone of the rest of the points from “the CDC doesn’t get everything right, and we should be cautious about blindly accepting their claims” to “the CDC is fundamentally so broken that it should be actively ignored.” While I’m sure that some lesswrong readers are going to marginally and responsibly update their beliefs in light of the new information presented here based on their well-reasoned understanding of the US government and its limitations, many readers will not.
Would your opinion change significantly if we changed the wording to highlight that this is an opinion on the trustworthiness of the CDC in this moment, with these constraints, rather than a fundamental property of the CDC?