It seems like the main thrust of this is to compute individual average risk and construct policy recommendations from there. I have two main objections to this approach.
My utility might be closer to log in quality-adjusted life-days. For example, I think I would much prefer to lose 1/100th of my remaining life rather than take a 1⁄100 chance of immediate death. Similarly, it’s not clear to me that a 100% chance of a 50% loss of productivity is like a 50% chance of a 100% loss. This makes your averages seem to gloss over important distinctions.
I’m not sure the individualistic approach to policy recommendation makes sense. For example, suppose vaccines are exactly 90% effective. This isn’t enough for me to make big policy changes (EG, if going to a party felt unsafe before, it still feels unsafe after). However, me and my entire extended group of friends getting vaccinated makes a huge difference (the hypothetical party could now feel safe).
So I don’t feel like your average-case cost is that relevant to whether the rationalist community should take specific precautions. The cost of a specific precaution scales linearly with the number of people taking that precaution, but the benefit scales much faster, for a community of interacting people.
I’m left feeling like you probably ended up underestimating the level of caution we should have.
Since almost all of these costs are from Long COVID, I think these are actually more like a constant 1/100th of remaining life than 1/100th chance of immediate death. However, since 5% of the cost is from death and another decent chunk is from possibility of CFS, I would understand if you made a small adjustment here. Personally, I don’t think I’m going to increase the estimate of my own risk, though part of that is because I think I was conservative enough that I’d be skewing things if I made even more implicit adjustments toward higher risk.
Yeah, sorry about the confusion about community policy vs individual. I originally tried to give community advice but it got too complicated too quickly, so I just shipped with the individual policy estimate. My ideal way for people to interpret this is something like the precursors for a dividing line between the attractor states of “just act like normal and stay away from your cautious friends” and “just keep being cautious and stay away from all the risky people”. E.g. I think there should be bubbles of people who try not to get COVID and collectively take on less risk than individually optimal, but other people like myself should just take individually-relevant levels of risk and live the next few months in contact with others like ourselves. Ideally I will have a less-simplified version of this written up soon, but that’s definitely questionable.
Thanks for writing this!
It seems like the main thrust of this is to compute individual average risk and construct policy recommendations from there. I have two main objections to this approach.
My utility might be closer to log in quality-adjusted life-days. For example, I think I would much prefer to lose 1/100th of my remaining life rather than take a 1⁄100 chance of immediate death. Similarly, it’s not clear to me that a 100% chance of a 50% loss of productivity is like a 50% chance of a 100% loss. This makes your averages seem to gloss over important distinctions.
I’m not sure the individualistic approach to policy recommendation makes sense. For example, suppose vaccines are exactly 90% effective. This isn’t enough for me to make big policy changes (EG, if going to a party felt unsafe before, it still feels unsafe after). However, me and my entire extended group of friends getting vaccinated makes a huge difference (the hypothetical party could now feel safe).
So I don’t feel like your average-case cost is that relevant to whether the rationalist community should take specific precautions. The cost of a specific precaution scales linearly with the number of people taking that precaution, but the benefit scales much faster, for a community of interacting people.
I’m left feeling like you probably ended up underestimating the level of caution we should have.
Since almost all of these costs are from Long COVID, I think these are actually more like a constant 1/100th of remaining life than 1/100th chance of immediate death. However, since 5% of the cost is from death and another decent chunk is from possibility of CFS, I would understand if you made a small adjustment here. Personally, I don’t think I’m going to increase the estimate of my own risk, though part of that is because I think I was conservative enough that I’d be skewing things if I made even more implicit adjustments toward higher risk.
Yeah, sorry about the confusion about community policy vs individual. I originally tried to give community advice but it got too complicated too quickly, so I just shipped with the individual policy estimate. My ideal way for people to interpret this is something like the precursors for a dividing line between the attractor states of “just act like normal and stay away from your cautious friends” and “just keep being cautious and stay away from all the risky people”. E.g. I think there should be bubbles of people who try not to get COVID and collectively take on less risk than individually optimal, but other people like myself should just take individually-relevant levels of risk and live the next few months in contact with others like ourselves. Ideally I will have a less-simplified version of this written up soon, but that’s definitely questionable.