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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Disease won’t wipe us out. Even the Black Death only killed, what, 30% of the population? And we have much better medical technology.

And we have much better medical technology.

When the next oops comes, at least half of the population will refuse to follow the expert's orders and use the newly advanced technology (which half will depend whether the new treaments are coded blue or red this time).

This effect will be canceled by the experts' orders being anywhere from useless to counterproductive. (As it was with COVID and the Black Death)

You grossly underestimate the risk of intentional or accidental development of bio-weapons, of which I consider GOF research to be the latter.

We have diseases with properties, which, if combined, would likely be beyond our ability to handle even with concomitant advances in biotech.

Offense outpaces defense very hard here, and the main reason we're not dead is because nobody is trying particularly hard for it to be so. You can GOF an extremely virulent organism to be much more lethal, a lethal organism to be much more virulent, potentially with the ability to lie dormant like HIV for ages till it erupts a few months later after infecting a majority of humanity. Even if it doesn't kill literally everyone, it has the potential to throw a very real wrench in the works, look at what Baby's First Pandemic, Covid, with a CFR of 0.1% before vaccines, managed to cause.

We didn’t have to notice Covid happened, let alone react the way we did, it was a media panic. The Black Death is probably an upper limit as far as plague; myxomatosis in rabbits maxed out at around that threshold IIRC.

Covid certainly was an over-reaction, but trust me doctors would have noticed an OOM or two surge in hospitalizations for respiratory issues regardless of public awareness. A more deadly by an OOM or two disease would cause far more economic damage.

Death usually occurs between days 10 and 12. Highly virulent strains, such as those present in North and South America, have essentially 100% case fatality rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomatosis

You're relying on the observed lethality of natural epidemics to decide on the risks of engineered ones, which is a very bad idea for something that is presumably being aggressively optimized to kill you. Look at the number of eggs laid by a wild junglefowl versus a breed optimized to churn them out for an illustration of what selective pressures can achieve.

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