4 ms·

My engineering org practices blameless postmortems too, and I am an extremely strong advocate of them, but a blameless postmortem is not the same thing as a pos

by Lazare 5y ago

My engineering org practices blameless postmortems too, and I am an extremely strong advocate of them, but a blameless postmortem is not the same thing as a postmortem that refuses to identify or address root causes. And here, there is some possibility that the current pandemic was the result of specific risks that we, collectively, took. Earlier in the pandemic I saw a focus on the risks of "wet markets" for zoonotic transmission; although that hasn't panned out so far as a theory for COVID-19, if wet markets present a significant risk of creating pandemics (note: if! I don't know they do), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them. More recently I've seen discussions of "gain of function" research on bat coronaviruses, and allegations that some dangerous research on coronaviruses was being carried out in BSL-2 laboratories. Regardless of whether COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak (or whether we ever prove it was), if some specific of research presents a significant risk of creating pandemics (again, if!), we should evaluate possible restrictions and regulations on them too. Pandemics are, I think, inevitable; it would be foolish to ignore trying to prepare for the next one. But the chance of a pandemic is very possibly not set in stone; it would be equally foolish to ignore trying to bring that risk down. And I categorically reject the argument we need to pick one or the other to focus on; I think we can focus on every step of the chain.

AstralStorm 5y ago
Funny thing, no matter what you do, there will be a pandemic similar to this one or worse. What you're doing is prolonging the time until regulations and checks failure. Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties. Instead, we would do much better to improve our tools for handling these issues by looking at successful and unsuccessful containment protocols, failed attempts to distribute a vaccine quickly enough etc.
- Lazare 5y ago
  Look, there's a pretty plausible story (see, eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...) right now that we, as a society, have spent a significant amount of effort performing research that had a relatively high risk of accidentally creating and releasing a pandemic virus into the wild, and then it may well have done exactly that. It's not a wild idea that we should 1) figure out if this story is true and 2) if it is, stop doing it. > Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties. I don't mean this as negatively as it sounds, but I literally don't understand the argument you're making here. It feels like it's of the form: "Because <bad actor> might do <bad thing>, there's no point trying to encourage anyone from not doing <bad thing>." Is that...right? Because if so, do you also feel like police forces and laws against murder and assault are a distraction from medical research devoted to savings the lives of people wounded in violent crimes? I think it's reasonable to suggest that "setting houses on fire less often" or "banning setting other people's houses on fire" or "mandating more fire safe construction" are all complementary strategies to "getting better at extinguishing house fire".

by Lazare 5y ago

AstralStorm 5y ago

Funny thing, no matter what you do, there will be a pandemic similar to this one or worse. What you're doing is prolonging the time until regulations and checks failure. Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties. Instead, we would do much better to improve our tools for handling these issues by looking at successful and unsuccessful containment protocols, failed attempts to distribute a vaccine quickly enough etc.

Lazare 5y ago
Look, there's a pretty plausible story (see, eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...) right now that we, as a society, have spent a significant amount of effort performing research that had a relatively high risk of accidentally creating and releasing a pandemic virus into the wild, and then it may well have done exactly that. It's not a wild idea that we should 1) figure out if this story is true and 2) if it is, stop doing it. > Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties. I don't mean this as negatively as it sounds, but I literally don't understand the argument you're making here. It feels like it's of the form: "Because <bad actor> might do <bad thing>, there's no point trying to encourage anyone from not doing <bad thing>." Is that...right? Because if so, do you also feel like police forces and laws against murder and assault are a distraction from medical research devoted to savings the lives of people wounded in violent crimes? I think it's reasonable to suggest that "setting houses on fire less often" or "banning setting other people's houses on fire" or "mandating more fire safe construction" are all complementary strategies to "getting better at extinguishing house fire".