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devi comments on Harper's Magazine article on LW/MIRI/CFAR and Ethereum - Less Wrong
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Perhaps this is silly of me, but the single word in the article that made me indignantly exclaim "What!?" was when he called CFAR "overhygienic."
I mean... you can call us nerdy, weird in some ways, obsessed with productivity, with some justification! But how can you take issue with our insistence [Edit: more like strong encouragement!] that people use hand sanitizer at a 4-day retreat with 40 people sharing food and close quarters?
[Edit: The author has clarified above that "overhygienic" was meant to refer to epistemic hygiene, not literal hygiene.]
This is not something that would cross my mind if I was organizing such a retreat. Making sure people who handled food washed their hands with soap, yes, but not hand sanitizer. Perhaps this is a cultural difference between (parts of) US and Europe.
I think hand sanitizer is more feasible for practical reasons? Generally in the sorts of spaces where people gather for things like this, there is not a sink near the food. So I'm used to there being hand sanitizer at the beginning of the food line, not because hand sanitizer is great, but because it's inconvenient and time consuming (and overbearing) to ask everyone to shuffle through the restroom to wash their hands before touching the food.
Not to mention that if people touch the bathroom door handle, sink handle, etc. after they washed their hands, they'll get many of the germs they just washed off back onto their hands, whereas with hand sanitizer, all you need do is touch the pump and you're good to go.
US Americans are overly obsessed with hygiene from the point of view of the average European.