You are not directly vouching for anyone here, but as a general point I'd like to argue that friendship is a poor predictor of ethical behavior.
It may be tempting to consider positive social experiences and friendship as evidence that someone behaves generally ethically and with high standards, but when dealing with more capable people, it's not. Maintaining ethical behavior and building trust in low-stakes settings like friendship with few temptations to try and exploit for profit is trivially easy. Especially if you are socially skilled and capable of higher level power games and manipulation. The cutthroat moves are saved exclusively for situations where the profits are large enough.
(And a skilled manipulator will rarely engage in obviously cutthroat moves anyways, because the cost of being outed as an unethical cutthroat is high enough to outweight the potential profit of most situations..)
Because you're someone with influence in the community, anyone with a manipulative bent and any smarts will absolutely give you their best impression. You have more value as an ally, and probably provide few opportunities for direct profit otherwise.
Instead of creating new ingroups and outgroups and tribal signifiers for enforcing such, we should focus on careful truth-seeking. Some mythologies and terms that engage our more primal instincts can be useful, like when Scott introduced "Moloch", but others are much more likely harmful. "Orthodox vs Reform" seems like a purely harmful one, that is only useful for enforcing further division and tribal warfare.
To summarize, in this post Aaronson,
This seems like a powerful approach for waging ideological warfare. It is not constructive for truth-seeking.
Historically it seems likely that there will be several weeks or even months of warning where a reasonably prepared person can react. What sort of crisis would immediately or surprisingly close all borders? Coronavirus closed many borders, but we had many weeks to react before that. A significant challenge might not be leaving, but being accepted to another country.
Some practical and mostly cost-effective ideas that should increase the speed and odds of escape:
In the end, the two most important things are probably 1) having plans and 2) being ready to act on them. All of the others are nice but optional. Ultimately all that matters is that you exit.
inoculating via the GI tract, which may lead to weaker symptoms than the same load in the respiratory system.
A critical care doctor speculated in the This Week in Virology -podcast that getting the virus gastrointestinally might result in worse outcomes. They had observed that in hospitalized patients, those with GI symptoms tended to have worse outcomes, and one theory for why was that the GI system has the widest surface area for the virus to multiply in before spreading to the rest of the body. I don't have the expertise to judge how plausible this is.
Regarding point 2, how sure are you? Why are we even trying to disinfect N95 masks if that's true? I think your point is plausible but the filter technology in these masks isn't entirely trivial. Most filter materials actually depend on a static electric charge in the polypropylene to filter properly. Does the charge actually release the active virus particles after some time, and then you breathe them in? I have no idea. I was already surprised to find out that masks simply aren't just a dense material that filters particles, but a bit more complicated.
I bought a half-mask and several filters almost two months ago, and it's definitely easier and safer for my once-per-week shopping trip than a single use mask. I don't think that it's a particularly effective general solution though, for the following reasons:
1. All of these are sold out. To make more, you need to manufacture both masks and filters.
2. All the replaceable filters are sold out. The filters need to be sequentially rotated or otherwise disinfected.
3. Wearing one for anything more than 30 minutes is still quite awful.
4. Most of them have exhaust valves which still spread the virus to others.
I think one of the key lessons from the OpenAI board fiasco is the value of pausing, and how critically our rationality can suffer under (false) urgency.
My rationality failed in a similar situation as well. Last year was the best of my life. This year has been the worst. It's almost entirely because I didn't pause.
I didn't pause to think, consult, and reorient before critical action.
I was not under any real time pressure, only false and self-imposed pressure.
If only I had paused.
The lesson applies broadly. The more time you have to think and reorient before action, the better your actions are.
The times when you least feel like pausing, might be the exact situations where pausing holds the most value. When the stakes are high you may feel like you can not pause, but consider if this is actually true. Pause at least to think if you can pause more. If you notice that you actually could pause more, consider also that you probably should pause for a lot longer than you initially feel like. Pausing is a rationality superpower.