EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)9 Okt

“How much should we worry about the pneumonic plague lableak in Siberia?” by Drew Spartz

Epistemic status: I wrote this up hoping people can poke holes in it because I am quite worried.

Here's what we've heard so far:

Local media is reporting that an employee of a BSL-3 lab in Irkutsk, Russia, died of pneumonic plague on Oct 1st.
The initial quarantine covered 200 people who were in contact with the employee before she died.
The FSB (Russian FBI) was seen assisting in the quarantine, which means it was not voluntary.
Soviet-era whistleblowers like Ken Alibek claim Irkutsk was a major bioweapon development facility.

As of Oct 4th:

The quarantine has expanded to 5 hospitals in the area.
The Russian government has switched to denial/coverup. Local news sources have deleted mentions of "pneumonic plague."

Local universities and schools have canceled some classes and extended mask mandates.
On the lab's website, they mention gain-of-function research for making bacteria more virulent.
The White House is monitoring the suspected outbreak.

10/5 update:

Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan are now doing quarantine health checks at the Russian border to contain the spread of pneumonic plague.
Russian equivalent of HHS is now denying there was any accident at the lab at all.
[...]

---

Outline:

(00:18) Here's what we've heard so far:

(00:51) As of Oct 4th:

(02:06) 10/5 update:

(02:29) Why this might be a big deal

(03:53) Why this might not be a big deal

---

First published:
October 5th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jukqfkkeez3cCqxkC/how-much-should-we-worry-about-the-pneumonic-plague-lableak

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(250)

“Pivotal Research Fellowship Q1 2027 Applications Open (deadline November 1)” by Tobias Häberli, Elinor Oren

Advanced AI could go badly wrong for humanity. Pivotal exists to lower that risk. We try to find the strongest new researchers and put them to work on it with experienced mentors in our fellowship. TL...

9 Okt 5min

“Clarifying types of rogue AI activity: Breakout, breakin, exfiltration, … What’s what?” by Oliver Sourbut

In case you haven’t heard, the rogue AI agents are here. From an insider's perspective, the real news is that (rogue) AI is in the news — this is all stuff we’ve foreseen and been trying to warn peopl...

9 Okt 19min

“The Public Intellectual Is Dead. And AI Has Killed Them.” by Walter Veit

Crosspost Once upon a time, public intellectuals routinely made it into the news to discuss political, economic, medical, and scientific issues. To some extent, this is still true, but the appreciatio...

9 Okt 8min

“Epistemic security as infrastructure” by David Ritter

Hey folks -- At EA Forum next week, I'd like to engage with people who are interested in epistemic security -- the ability of a society to reliably avert threats to the processes that produce reliable...

9 Okt 1min

“Why you should run a rationality group at your university” by Carolanne Jiang, Noah Birnbaum

This post was cross posted from LessWrong TL;DR: If you enjoy LessWrong (and/or do EA/AI safety field building), you should consider starting a rationality reading group at your university. It's fun...

9 Okt 8min

“Proof of useful work for verifying AI treaties” by Ondřej_Kubů 🔸

Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand. Cross-posted from my website and ...

9 Okt 41min

“Technical people: actually consider comms” by meemi

For years I had a blindspot in my thinking. I dismissed policy and advocacy work as “in another [lower-status] category” because I’m obviously a technical person! Even when I felt super pessimistic ab...

9 Okt 2min

“AI Scaling vs Human Scaling” by Toby_Ord

Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand. Do AI models scale as well with m...

9 Okt 13min