Thanks for researching and writing this!

Thanks for doing this survey and sharing the results, super interesting!

Regarding

maybe partly because people who have inside views were incentivised to respond, because it’s cool to say you have inside views or something

Yes, I definitely think that there's a lot of potential for social desirability bias here! And I think this can happen even if the responses are anonymous, as people might avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes with admitting to "not having an inside view." One might even go as far as framing the results as  "Who do people claim to defer to?"

Hi Elika, 

Thanks for writing this, great stuff!  

I would probably frame some things a bit differently (more below), but I think you raise some solid points, and I definitely support the general call for nuanced discussion.

I have a personal anecdote that really speaks to your "do your homework point." When doing research for our 2021 article on dual-use risks (thanks for referencing it!) , I was really excited about our argument for implementing "dual-use evaluation throughout the research life cycle, including the conception, funding, conduct, and dissemination of research." The idea that effective dual-use oversight requires intervention at multiple points felt solid, and some feedback we'd gotten on presentations of our work gave me the impression that this was a fairly novel framing. 

It totally wasn't! NSABB called for this kind of oversight throughout the research cycle (at least) as early as 2007, ^[1] and, in hindsight, it was pretty naïve of me to think that this simple idea was new. In general, it's been a pretty humbling experience to read more of the literature and realise just how many of the arguments that I thought were novel based on their appearance in recent op-eds and tweets can be found in discussions from 10, 20, or even 50 years ago.

Alright, one element of your post that I would've framed differently: You put a lot of emphasis on the instrumental benefits of nuanced discussion in the form of building trust and credibility, but I hope readers of your post also realise the intrinsic value of being more nuanced.

E.g., from the summary 

"[what you say] does impact how much you are trusted, whether or not you are invited back to the conversation, and thus the potential to make an impact"

And the very last sentence:

 "Always make sure ‘you’re invited back to the table’." 

This is a great point, and I really do think it's possible to burn bridges and lose respect by coming across as ignorant or inflammatory. But getting the nuanced details wrong is also a recipe for getting solutions wrong! As you say, proper risk-benefit analysis for concrete dual-use research is almost always difficult, given that the research in question very often has some plausible upside for pandemic preparedness or health more generally.

And even if you know what specific research to draw red lines around, implementation is riddled with challenges: How do you design rules that won't be obsolete with scientific advances?  How do you make criteria that won't restrict research that you didn't intend to restrict? How do you avoid inadvertent attention hazards from highlighting the exact kinds of research that seem the most risky? Let's say you've defined the perfect rules. Who should be empowered to make the tough judgment calls on what to prohibit? If you're limiting access to certain knowledge, who gets to have that access? And so on, and so on.

I do think there's value in strongly advocating for more robust dual-use oversight or lab biosafety, and (barring infohazard concerns), I think op-eds aimed at both policymakers and the general public can be helpful. It's just that I think such advocacy should be more in the tone of "Biosecurity is important, and more work on it is urgently needed" and less "Biosecurity Is Simple, I Would Just Ban All GOF." 

Bottom line, I especially like the parts of your post that encourage people to be more nuanced, not just sound more nuanced.

1. ^{^}

   From Casadevall 2015: "In addition to defining the type of research that should elicit heightened concern, the NSABB recommended that research be examined for DURC potential throughout its life span, from experimental conception to final dissemination of the results."

Thank you for writing this.

“Open Phil posts all of its grants with some explanation.”

I do not think that this is accurate, I believe that some of their grants are not posted to their website.

Thank you for writing this, I think it's very important.