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There's no way to protect oneself from any of this. One just has to accept that the biomedicine people can kill everybody and it's going to be easy for them to

by bbor 3y ago

There's no way to protect oneself from any of this. One just has to accept that the biomedicine people can kill everybody and it's going to be easy for them to do this, and that it's going to be easy for them to do this forever. With absolutely no offense intended: this reads like dialogue from the well-meaning second-act villain in a comic book movie. You’re obviously knowledgeable about the specifics, so I’m not saying you’re wrong. I for one am optimistic we can keep biomedical safety at or near current levels

impossiblefork 3y ago
Maybe I'm knowledgeable, but I obviously haven't tried these things that I'm fairly sure are relatively easy, but I can't absolutely say that it's as easy as I have said. It can be fiddly to figure out experimental procedures, and debugging is hard, so it's possible that this really only is something that PhD students and above can do, but I think it's accessible to skilled to hobbyists. But I should say my biomedicine knowledge consists of a special highschool biotechnology program, nothing more. Basically we put plasmids into bacteria and grew them, maybe we did something with yeast, we did DNA amplification and other easy experiments of that sort. This is the extent of my biomedicine knowledge. I think biomedicine people just don't want to kill everybody. The idea of biomedical safety at our current levels, that's what I object to: there isn't any. The safety consists entirely in the biomedicine people being decent. They are self-interested and intelligent, so a society genuinely shits on them, then the risk increases. After all, this stuff is really very easy. But as long as one has democracy, reasonable order, etc., then the fact that they're decent means that there is very little risk. It's the same thing with political assassinations. The politicians aren't alive because of clever guards and security arrangements, they are quite vulnerable in fact, but most people want democracy, civilisation, etc. are willing to accept even bad politicians that they oppose if that's what everybody else wants. But if you think that you're safe because of your guards and security arrangements, then you get the wrong attitude.

by bbor 3y ago

impossiblefork 3y ago

Maybe I'm knowledgeable, but I obviously haven't tried these things that I'm fairly sure are relatively easy, but I can't absolutely say that it's as easy as I have said. It can be fiddly to figure out experimental procedures, and debugging is hard, so it's possible that this really only is something that PhD students and above can do, but I think it's accessible to skilled to hobbyists. But I should say my biomedicine knowledge consists of a special highschool biotechnology program, nothing more. Basically we put plasmids into bacteria and grew them, maybe we did something with yeast, we did DNA amplification and other easy experiments of that sort. This is the extent of my biomedicine knowledge. I think biomedicine people just don't want to kill everybody. The idea of biomedical safety at our current levels, that's what I object to: there isn't any. The safety consists entirely in the biomedicine people being decent. They are self-interested and intelligent, so a society genuinely shits on them, then the risk increases. After all, this stuff is really very easy. But as long as one has democracy, reasonable order, etc., then the fact that they're decent means that there is very little risk. It's the same thing with political assassinations. The politicians aren't alive because of clever guards and security arrangements, they are quite vulnerable in fact, but most people want democracy, civilisation, etc. are willing to accept even bad politicians that they oppose if that's what everybody else wants. But if you think that you're safe because of your guards and security arrangements, then you get the wrong attitude.