Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Sama Says the Age of Giant AI Models is Already Over, published by Algon on April 17, 2023 on LessWrong.

There wasn't much content to this article, except for the below quotes.

Sam Altman says

further progress will not come from making models bigger. “I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models,” he told an audience at an event held at MIT late last week. “We'll make them better in other ways.” [...] Altman said there are also physical limits to how many data centers the company can build and how quickly it can build them. [...] At MIT last week, Altman confirmed that his company is not currently developing GPT-5. “An earlier version of the letter claimed OpenAI is training GPT-5 right now,” he said. “We are not, and won't for some time.”

Nick Frosst, a cofounder at Cohere, says

“There are lots of ways of making transformers way, way better and more useful, and lots of them don’t involve adding parameters to the model,” he says. Frosst says that new AI model designs, or architectures, and further tuning based on human feedback are promising directions that many researchers are already exploring.

In the Lex Fridman interview with Sam Altman, Sam said that they had to do "hundreds of complicated things". Does this, together with the above quote, suggest Sam thinks transformers are running out of oomph? Is he, perhaps, pausing progress whilst we await the next breakthrough in deep learning?

Edit: Added in a relevant question. Give your probability for the first option.

Elicit Prediction (forecast.elicit.org/binary/questions/VuF0joaV6)

Or vote at this tweet, if you like:

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Possibilizing vs. actualizing, published by TsviBT on April 16, 2023 on LessWrong.

[Metadata: crossposted from. First completed December 31, 2022. This essay is more like research notes than exposition, so context may be missing, the use of terms may change across essays, and the text might be revised later; only the versions at tsvibt.blogspot.com are definitely up to date.]

Some behavior seems like it's just making things possible, without actually doing much of anything, while other behavior seems to actually do something. Is there a principled, or a useful, distinction between possibilizing and actualizing? Is it possible to possibilize a large effect on the world without actualizing large effects on the world?

It's not clear whether this is a real distinction, but to me it's a very intuitive and intuitively salient idea (because possibilizing seems safer than actualizing), so I'd like to have a better analysis or dissolution of it.

Terms

Possibilizing is making something possible for an agent to do. That is, it's setting the stage, preparing, unlocking, satisfying the preconditions, gathering the needed resources and tools, gaining the necessary understanding and skill and components and information, getting agents on board, making the plans, opening the way. "Possible" is cognate with "potent", "power", and "hospital". Other possible words: enabling, feasibilizing, empowering.

Actualizing is (an agent) actually doing something, making something happen, achieving a goal, affecting something, having impact, delivering a payload. Other possible words: realizing, implementing, exerting.

Examples

Taking a step forward along a path possibilizes the next step, and contributes to possibilizing further steps; and it actualizes itself, a forward movement of the walker. In this example, it does seem like there's much distinction between possibilizing and actualizing: what's being possibilized (subsequent steps) is the same sort of thing as the possibilizing (the current step), and they interact in a straightforward way. Intuitively, this is mere progress, not possibilizing, so the above definition of possibilizing is incomplete.

Speed cubers first look at the Rubik's cube, then put it down, and then pick it up and turn its faces. Before they pick it up the second time, in their head they're possibilizing solving the cube by figuring out the sequence of moves. Before that, they had to understand how to solve the cube and train that skill, which was also possibilizing solving the cube. The order can't be switched: you can't turn the faces so the cube is in a solved state, and then, after that, figure out for the first time what sequence of turns would solve the cube. But you can "think with the cube", trying out moves to see what happens, sometimes backtracking, which blurs the distinction.

To build a complicated house, you look at the site where you'll build it, then you leave and elsewhere you think and draw pictures, and then later you come back and build the house.

A lot of engineering tasks are solved straightforwardly. But engineering tasks that push the envelope require the engineers to recurse up to more abstract thinking (e.g. "first-principles thinking"), removing all but the most necessary assumptions/constraints, finding an abstract design that satisfies the abstract constraints, and then constructing a new concrete, detailed design in a way that's beholden to the abstract design.

Coming up with a word possibilizes the expression of some thoughts.

Coming up with a concept possibilizes making good predictions and finding good designs. If you don't know about chromatic dispersion, you'll be confused about why your lenses produce images with weird color-dependent blurring, and you'll have trouble knowing, without physically testing, how much chromatic dispersion a ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: But why would the AI kill us?, published by So8res on April 17, 2023 on LessWrong.

Status: Partially in response to We Don't Trade With Ants, partly in response to watching others try to make versions of this point that I didn't like. None of this is particularly new; it feels to me like repeating obvious claims that have regularly been made in comments elsewhere, and are probably found in multiple parts of the LessWrong sequences. But I've been repeating them aloud a bunch recently, and so might as well collect the points into a single post.

Might the AGI let us live, not because it cares but because it has no particular reason to go out of its way to kill us?

As Eliezer Yudkowsky once said:

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else.

There's lots of energy in the biosphere! (That's why animals eat plants and animals for fuel.) By consuming it, you can do whatever else you were going to do better or faster.

(Last I checked, you can get about 10x as much energy from burning a square meter of biosphere as you can get by collecting a square meter of sunlight for a day. But I haven't done the calculation for years and years and am pulling that straight out of a cold cache. That energy boost could yield a speedup (in your thinking, or in your technological design, or in your intergalactic probes themselves), which translates into extra galaxies you manage to catch before they cross the cosmic event horizon!)

But there's so little energy here, compared to the rest of the universe. Why wouldn't it just leave us be, and go mine asteroids or something?

Well, for starters, there's quite a lot of energy in the sun, and if the biosphere isn't burned for fuel then it will freeze over when the AI wraps the sun in a dyson sphere or otherwise rips it apart. It doesn't need to consume your personal biomass to kill you; consuming the sun works just fine.

And separately, note that if the AI is actually completely indifferent to humanity, the question is not "is there more energy in the biosphere or in the sun?", but rather "is there more energy available in the biosphere than it takes to access that energy?". The AI doesn't have to choose between harvesting the sun and harvesting the biosphere, it can just harvest both, and there's a lot of calories in the biosphere.

I still just think that it might decide to leave us be for some reason.

That answers above are sufficient to argue that the AI kills us (if the AI's goals are orthogonal to ours, and can be better achieved with more resources). But the answer is in fact overdetermined, because there's also the following reason.

A humanity that just finished coughing up a superintelligence has the potential to cough up another superintelligence, if left unchecked. Humanity alone might not stand a chance against a superintelligence, but the next superintelligence humanity builds could in principle be a problem. Disassembling us for parts seems likely to be easier than building all your infrastructure in a manner that's robust to whatever superintelligence humanity coughs up next. Better to nip that problem in the bud.[1]

But we don't kill all the cows.

Sure, but the horse population fell dramatically with the invention of the automobile.

One of the big reasons that humans haven't disassembled cows for spare parts is that we aren't yet skilled enough to reassemble those spare parts into something that is more useful to us than cows. We are trying to culture meat in labs, and when we do, the cow population might also fall off a cliff.

A sufficiently capable AI takes you apart instead of trading with you at the point that it can rearrange your atoms into an even better trading partner.[2] And humans are probably not the optimal trading partners.

But there's still a bunch of hor...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: We're losing creators due to our nitpicking culture, published by TheAthenians on April 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This is a cross-post from LessWrong, originally titled "Killing Socrates" by Duncan Sabien. Cross-posted with his permission.

This is posted from an anonymous account of somebody who has been on the Forum for over 7 years and has over 2500 karma who's more or less stopped posting on the EA Forum and LessWrong for exactly the reasons he describes.

This is not an isolated case. Here are a couple examples to illustrate this, and some memes that have been floating around EA Twitter that seem to be resonating. The first two examples are for LessWrong but just as easily could have been for the EA Forum, which has a similar culture.

^Source

^Source

Funnily enough, one of the top comments on the post at the time of publishing was somebody debating the correct pluralisation of "Socrates".

And remember that for every one famous case of somebody leaving because of it, there will probably be tens to >100 people who leave without saying anything.

This is an important problem, and I don't know the solution, but I hope it is discussed and addressed.

Or, On The Willful Destruction Of Gardens Of Collaborative Inquiry

One of the more interesting dynamics of the past eight-or-so years has been watching a bunch of the people who [taught me my values] and [served as my early role models] and [were presented to me as paragons of cultural virtue] going off the deep end.

Those people believed a bunch of stuff, and they injected a bunch of that stuff into me, in the early days of my life when I absorbed it uncritically, and as they've turned out to be wrong and misguided and confused in two or three dozen ways, I've found myself wondering what else they were wrong about.

One of the things that I absorbed via osmosis and never questioned (until recently) was the Hero Myth of Socrates, who boldly stood up against the tyrannical, dogmatic power structure and was unjustly murdered for it. I've spent most of my life knowing that Socrates obviously got a raw deal, just like I spent most of my life knowing that

It now seems quite plausible to me that Socrates was, in fact, correctly responded-to by the Athenians of his time, and that the mythologized version of his story I grew up with belongs in the same category as Washington's cherry tree or Pocahontas's enthusiastic embrace of the white settlers of Virginia.

The following borrows generously from, and is essentially an embellishment of, this comment by @Vaniver.

Imagine that you are an ancient Athenian, responsible for some important institution, and that you have a strong belief that the overall survival of your society is contingent on a reliable, common-knowledge buy-in of Athenian institutions generally, i.e. that your society cannot function unless its members believe that it does function.

This would not be a ridiculous belief! We have seen, in the modern era, how quickly things go south when faith in a bank (or in the financial system as a whole) evaporates. We know what happens when people stop believing that the police or the courts are on their side. Regimes (or entire nations) fall when their constituents stop propping up the myth of those regimes. Much of civilization is shared participation in self-fulfilling prophecies like "this little scrap of green paper holds value."

And if you buy

"My society's survival depends upon people's faith in its institutions."

...then it's only a small step from there to something like:

"My society's survival depends upon a status-allocation structure whereby [the people who pour their time and effort into building things larger than themselves] receive lots of credit and reward, and [the people who contribute little, and sit back idly criticizing] receive correspondingly l...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Free one-to-one behavioral addiction support for EAs, published by John Salter on April 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Free coaching via Zoom. Treats addictions that aren't acutely life-threatening, but that drain your time & money e.g.

social media

gaming

smoking

Benefits

Save money & time

Achieve more

Feel better about yourself and more in control of your life

How it works

Six thirty-minute sessions, for free.

Continuation thereafter is optional

Arranged via Calendly, or for a recurring slot once or twice a week (up to you)

The Coaches

Era's got a BSc in Psychology, and an MSc in Addiction, from King's College London. Lizzy's got a master's in psychology and a certificate in psychotherapy. Both have done ~160 hours of addiction coaching training, passed their final assessment, and are now ready to see real clients. So far, we've had unanimously positive feedback and ~70% retention from the 100+ clients our coaches have seen so far.

What happens in sessions

Session One

Tell your coach about you and your situation

They'll help you draft a minimum viable plan

You attempt to execute it between now and next week

Sessions Two til Five

Share your progress or lack thereof

Tell them what worked and what didn't

Update the plan accordingly

Repeat

Session Six

Talk about your progress

We'll likely give you the option to continue on a paid basis

In either case, we'll help you draft a plan to help recover from relapses, and prevent them from happening in the first place

Disclaimers

Potential downside - they aren't EAs

Potential upside - they aren't EAs

We don't have magical solutions

At least 20% of sign-ups will give up

Of those that stay, at least 20% will fail

Many of those who succeed will relapse within one year

Promises we make

To maintain complete confidentiality

To use proven techniques exclusively

To be supportive & non-judgemental

Sign up

Free to any Effective Altruist. 7 EA-exclusive places are available immediately. If the results are good, we'll do a monthly cohort of ~20 EAs. You can opt-out at any time, no hard feels. Click here to apply.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Funding Opportunity for New Fish Welfare Charity, published by MathiasKB on April 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Hi everyone, unsure what the norms here are about sharing funding opportunities, but since its time-sensitive I'll opt to ask for forgiveness over permission!

A new fish-welfare charity with an excellent founder behind it, is fundraising a seed-round to get the project off the ground.

Their mission is to influence US state policy of using live baitfish. Billions of fish are bred each year to be used as baitfish and live pretty terrible lives up until the point they are put on the hook of a fishing rod and used to fish with.

If you want to help see this charity started don't hesitate to contact me and I can put you in touch with the founder or share their pitch deck (its excellent).

I've personally pledged to cover a portion if they can meet their funding target, so I'll happily admit to being biased in wanting to see it succeed.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Goodhart's Law inside the human mind, published by Kaj Sotala on April 17, 2023 on LessWrong.

Some time back, I saw a tweet from somebody that read:

Much of social psychology seems to be premised on the bizarre assumption that what people really care about is not real-world outcomes but the state of their own mind: self-esteem, a positive self-image, dissonance reduction, feelings of control, reducing uncertainty, etc.

I've certainly seen versions of the same myself. Maybe the most poignant example comes from this book review, which suggested that gambling addicts get hooked on a sense of control - even though someone who's hooked on gambling to the point of ruining their life clearly isn't in much control of anything:

The primary objective that machine gambling addicts have is not to win, but to stay in the zone. The zone is a state that suspends real life, and reduces the world to the screen and the buttons of the machine. Entering the zone is easiest when gamblers can get into a rhythm. Anything that disrupts the rhythm becomes an annoyance. This is true even when the disruption is winning the game. Many gamblers talk about how winning the game brings them out of the zone, and they actually dislike winning for that reason. For some gamblers, the very act of pressing buttons to play the game disrupts the rhythm. These gamblers use autoplay modes on games that offer them, and jerryrig an autoplay mode on machines that don’t by jamming something into buttons to keep them pressed. They don’t want to chase a win or pick their lucky numbers, they want to disappear into the zone. [...]

The book is full of heartbreaking stories about what gamblers endure on their path to extinction. They sacrifice their bodies, their time, and their relationships. Sharon, for example, spent four days at a casino, trying to lose all her money to reach extinction. At the end of this ordeal, she came home to sleep, but she found three nickels in her bedroom. The thought of not having spent all her money bothered her so much that she drove back to a casino immediately to lose those last three nickels. [...]

I used to think that gambling addicts “lost control” when they gambled excessively. But the addicts in the book use machines as a way to gain control in their lives. In front of a machine, the world is simple: they place bets and lose a little bit of money on each turn. The gamblers are in control of this machine world. It is the world away from machines where the prospect of losing control in frightening ways looms. Away from the machines, life is long and full of terrors.

This certainly sounds odd and destructive—seeking control in a way that destroys one's life.

But it's also one that resonates with me - it feels like it describes the relationship I've often had with social media. Picking up my phone and checking Facebook can give me a sense of autonomy, like I'm choosing to leave the current situation and momentarily visit another world. This feels like it's the case even when the phone-checking becomes compulsive; a part of me craves that feeling of control so much that it gets out of control.

While I've never smoked, I understand that many smokers describe their relationship with cigarettes similarly. Smoking offers a socially acceptable reason to step away from a dull conversation or meeting for a moment. Briefly, you can tune out and regain a sense of control.

There's something peculiar about this. The initial tweet mentioned the "bizarre" assumption in social psychology that people prioritize internal mental states over actual control (or any other attribute the feelings seem to track). It's strange that a gambling addict would chase the feeling of control even when it leads their life to spiral out of control.

However, I believe it's relatively simple to explain. First, there's a...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Starting and running your own mini projects: What I've learnt running a newsletter for a year, published by SofiaBalderson on April 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Tl;dr:

There are many unmet needs in the movement that you can fill with a couple of hours a month (without anyone’s permission)

My project - the newsletter itself was relatively easy to put together (2-4h a month basic running) and now has 457 subscribers (and counting!)

The open rates are amazingly high: over 62% consistently

It’s really tempting to give up: please give new projects feedback and encouragement

My Story: how and why I started it

I like to be aware of opportunities in animal advocacy and when I see something interesting, I usually can think of a couple of friends who might find it useful. After a couple of years of sending links to a growing network of friends, I realised that I’m spending A LOT of time sharing resources. I thought to myself, why not start a newsletter where I’d put all these opportunities and then can invite my network to sign up. So at first it was a time-saving opportunity. But also I noticed that existing animal advocates are in closed spaces and groups and all the best opportunities are posted there, while there are lot of new and existing animal advocates who don’t have access to these groups. I thought it wasn’t very inclusive and decided to create something that’s open to everybody.

Some (very nice!) feedback I got:

Reader surveys

I ran a very easy, press of a button survey in autumn, and most people said they found the newsletter useful (albeit a very small sample size of 29 and a bias towards most active users, but that just shows how people don’t have time for surveys, as I sent a Google Form that didn't get many answers at all)

Individual positive feedback:

"I'm so grateful for the newsletter - I've been listening to the podcasts recommended in it during my work hours, and read posts with a cuppa in the mornings/evenings. Loving the resource as it covers so many different aspects and areas within EAA. It'll be heavily used by me as I want to learn as much as I can about the community as I figure out what career in EAA would be a good fit" - Shaileen McGovern, Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Ireland.

From Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla, CEO at the Shimp Welfare Project:

“For your poll [above], the only negative I have is that I open a dozen new tabs of things to read when I should be working! More seriously, this aggregation of news and events is at the very list inspiring to continue my own activism” - Josh Baldwin.

Some stats:

The newsletter consistently has on average 62.5% open rate. It started with 80% open rate on the second edition (the one that was the first edition for about half the subscribers to receive, then it gradually went down and it’s been consistent for about 6 months).

At the time of writing the newsletter has 457 subscribers. I had a big jump at the launch to just under 200 and then consistently arrived at over 400. I haven't done much promotion until about a week ago (hence the spike).

The country composition is very interesting, mainly US and UK, but also Germany, Spain and other countries.

What I’ve learnt:

If you have a good idea that is based on an actual problem/unmet need, just do it.

Don’t listen to your own voice that tells you “No one needs it” or others saying it’s already been done. Check if it has really been done, or if people just think it has. If it has been done, has it been done well enough?

If you need some help identifying a problem, listen to people's conversations online and see what people often complain about. Do they lack IT support? HR consultancy? No time to do ops?

Don’t spend too much time thinking about counterfactuals. I know that EAs love to discuss whether this is really the best use of your...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Predicting the cost-effectiveness of running a randomized controlled trial, published by Falk Lieder on April 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TLDR: Research is underrated. Running an RCT to evaluate a digital intervention for promoting altruism could be more than 10x as cost-effective as the best charities working on global health and wellbeing.

In the previous post, we found that – in expectation – Baumsteiger’s (2019) intervention for promoting altruism is about 4x as cost-effective as GiveDirectly but lower than the cost-effectiveness of the Against Malaria Foundation or StrongMinds. However, the uncertainty about the actual cost-effectiveness of this intervention is still extremely high.

The uncertainty is, in fact, so high that the 95% credible interval on the cost-effectiveness of the new intervention ranges from -0.5 WELLBYs/$1000 to 88 WELLBYs/$1000. The upper bound of this credible interval is close to the cost-effectiveness of the presumably most cost-effective mental health charity StrongMinds (90 WELLBYs/$1000; Plant, 2022), and more than twice the cost-effectiveness of the Against Malaria Foundation (39 WELLBYs/$1000; Plant, 2022). Based on these estimates, there is a 5% chance that the intervention might be harmful and a more than 5% chance that it might be at least as cost-effective as the charities recommended by GiveWell and the Happier Lives Institute.

Because of this high uncertainty, any decisions based on the current state of knowledge could be highly suboptimal compared to what we would do if we had additional information. However, information can be costly, especially when running a randomized controlled trial (RCT). And the more money we spend on information, the less we can spend on saving lives. This dilemma raises the question, “When is it worthwhile to run an RCT to gather more data, and when should we exploit what we already know?” To answer this question, we introduce a new method for predicting the cost-effectiveness of gaining new information through an RCT and comparing it to the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers and directly promoting global health and well-being. We illustrate this method using the intervention by Baumsteiger (2019) as an example.

However, the approach we are illustrating is more general and can also be applied to RCTs on established, emerging, and yet unknown EA interventions, including deworming, motivating parents to vaccinate their children, water purification, and interventions for improving mental health.

We develop our method in two steps. First, we apply the established Value of Information framework (Howard, 1966) to obtain an upper bound on the cost-effectiveness of running an RCT. Then, we replace this method’s unrealistic assumption of perfect information with more realistic assumptions about the imperfect information generated by an RCT. This yields a new method that can provide more accurate estimates of the cost-effectiveness of evaluation research. As a proof of concept, we apply this method to predict how cost-effective it would be to evaluate the altruism intervention based on Baumsteiger (2019) in RCTs with different numbers of participants. Our method predicts that running such an RCT with 1200 participants would be highly cost-effective. This post is a brief summary of the longer report presented in this interactive notebook.

How valuable would it be to know the true exact value of the cost-effectiveness of the intervention by Baumsteiger (2019)?

To obtain an upper bound on how valuable it might be to evaluate the intervention by Baumsteiger (2019), I first calculate the value of obtaining perfect information about its cost-effectiveness. The value of perfect information is an established mathematical concept introduced by Howard (1966). It has recently been applied to charity evalu...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: List of Short-Term (<15 hours) Biosecurity Projects to Test Your Fit, published by Sofya Lebedeva on April 17, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Thank you Elika Somani, Chris Bakerlee & Tessa Alexanian for the edits & suggestions.

I frequently get the following questions:

Am I a good fit for biosecurity?

How do I test my fit for biosecurity?

The general idea of working in biosecurity seems exciting but I am hesitant to apply to a full-time position or a 2-month summer program.

How do I get involved in a biosecurity project?

What if I am not interested in working in a lab, but think biosecurity is important? What should I do?

Having talked to a number of people about this I have composed a list of projects that can be completed without the need for a lab (a computer & internet access is required). These should take 10-15 hours total and will allow individuals to test their fit for biosecurity.

List of projects:

See the next section for details & specific examples of the projects

Conduct & write up a 2-page literature review on any of the following GCBR topics: Infectious Disease Surveillance, UVC, Indoor Air Quality, and PPE.

Conduct & write up a 2-page literature review of the existing biosecurity policy of any particular country. In particular, it would be helpful to do this with countries that have biosecurity programmes in their country.

Conduct & write up a 2-page survey of the biggest supply chain shocks in the last 100 years, and what can we learn from them for GCBR resilience?

Conduct a 2-page distillation of one of the biosecurity articles from this list.

Conduct a 2-page review of the labs in your university/local area that are working on biosecurity research.

Conduct a 2-page review of the history, current status, and potential future applications to global biological weapon nonproliferation/disarmament of one article on the biological weapons convention.

More in-depth information about each project:

Conduct & write up a 2-page literature review on any of the following topics:

Infectious Disease Surveillance

Far UVC & Indoor Air Quality

Next-generation vaccines & antivirals

PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). An example of a speedrun

Supply chains & global coordination of any of the above. Particularly focused on identifying issues with existing policy, suggestions, and details around implementing policy (ex. Not just what should a policy cover broadly, but how would you write a policy)

Conduct & write up a 2-page literature review of the existing biosecurity policy of any particular country.

Policy and governance over dual-use research of concern (DURC) or any element of biosafety and biosecurity (ex. DNA synthesis, enhanced potential pandemic pathogens)

DURC, ePPP, gain-of-function, and lab-based biosafety and biosecurity

Emerging Technologies and synthetic biology risks and Oversight

Import Control

Select Agents

Animal & Plant Risks

DNA synthesis and emerging technologies

Specific example: review DURC policy in India

Specific example: review strategic countermeasure stockpiling in Brazil

For more examples please look at Global Bio Labs.

For more information go to the country profiles from the GHSI

They are lengthy PDFs but contain a lot of information.

For example, to find the one for Canada, you would go here and then click "Country Score Justification Summary" and you will get this.

Conduct & write up a 2-page survey of the biggest supply chain shocks in the last 100 years, and what can we learn from them for GCBR resilience?

Picking one specific shock, examining its effects & evaluating why it was worse than others

Conduct a 2-page distillation of one of the biosecurity articles from this list.

Your 2-page article should be accessible to a wide audience and should be able to be understood by someone with little background knowledge about biology

...