otoh I also don't think cutting off contact with anyone "impure", or refusing to read stuff you disapprove of, is either practical or necessary. we can engage with people and things without being mechanically "nudged" by them.

I think the reason not to do this is because of peer pressure. Ideally you should have the bad pressures from your peers cancel out, and in order to accomplish this you need your peers to be somewhat decorrelated from each other, and you can't really do this if all your peers and everyone you listen to is in the same social group.

there is no neurotype or culture that is immune to peer pressure

Seems like the sort of thing that would correlate pretty robustly to big-5 agreeableness, and in that sense there are neurotypes immune to peer pressure.

Edit: One may also suspect a combination of agreeableness and non-openness

Some assorted polymarket and metaculus forecasts on the subject:

• Bird flu pandemic before August 2025?

• Will there be any reported human-to-human transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 globally before 2026?

• Will an avian influenza virus in humans be declared a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” by the World Health Organization before 2030?

• Will the WHO declare an H5N1 pandemic before 2030?

• Will there be another pandemic in the USA that results in mask mandates on public transit by the end of 2030?

They are not exactly low.

Those invited to the foresight workshop (also the 2023 one) are probably a good start, as well as foresight’s 2023 and 2024 lectures on the subject.

I will take Zvi's takeaways from his experience in this round of SFF grants as significant outside-view evidence for my inside view of the field.

I think you are possibly better/optimizing more than most others at selecting conferences & events you actually want to do. Even with work, I think many get value out of having those spontaneous conversations because it often shifts what they're going to do--the number one spontaneous conversation is "what are you working on" or "what have you done so far", which forces you to re-explain what you're doing & the reasons for doing it to a skeptical & ignorant audience. My understanding is you and David already do this very often with each other.

I think its reasonable for the conversion to be at the original author's discretion rather than an automatic process.

Back in May, when the Crowdstrike bug happened, people were posting wild takes on Twitter and in my signal groupchats about how Crowdstrike is only used everywhere because the government regulators subject you to copious extra red tape if you try to switch to something else.

Here’s the original claim:

Microsoft blamed a 2009 antitrust agreement with the European Union that they said forced them to sustain low-level kernel access to third-party developers.[286][287][288] The document does not explicitly state that Microsoft has to provide kernel-level access, but says Microsoft must provide access to the same APIs used by its own security products.[287]

This seems consistent with your understanding of regulatory practices (“they do not give a rats ass what particular software vendor you use for anything”), and is consistent with the EU’s antitrust regulations being at fault—or at least Microsoft’s cautious interpretation of the regulations, which indeed is the approach you want to take here.

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