Want to just give credit to all the non-rationalist coauthors of microcovid.org! (7 non-rationalists and 2 “half-rationalists”?)
I’ve learned a LOT about the incredible power of trusted collaborations between “hardcore epistemics” folks and much more pragmatic folks with other skillsets (writing, UX design, medical expertise with ordinary people as patients, etc). By our powers combined we were able to build something usable by non-rationalist-but-still-kinda-quantitative folks, and are on our way to something usable by “normal people” 😲.
We’ve been able to get a lot more scale of distribution/usage/uptake with a webapp, than if we had just released a spreadsheet & blogpost. And coauthors put everything I wrote through MANY rounds of extensive writing/copy changes to be more readable by ordinary folks. We get feedback often that we’ve changed someone’s entire way of thinking about risks and probabilities. This has surprised and delighted me. And I think the explicit synthesis between rationalist and non-rationalist perspectives on the team has been directly helpful.
Want to just give credit to all the non-rationalist coauthors of microcovid.org! (7 non-rationalists and 2 “half-rationalists”?)
I’ve learned a LOT about the incredible power of trusted collaborations between “hardcore epistemics” folks and much more pragmatic folks with other skillsets (writing, UX design, medical expertise with ordinary people as patients, etc). By our powers combined we were able to build something usable by non-rationalist-but-still-kinda-quantitative folks, and are on our way to something usable by “normal people” 😲.
We’ve been able to get a lot more scale of distribution/usage/uptake with a webapp, than if we had just released a spreadsheet & blogpost. And coauthors put everything I wrote through MANY rounds of extensive writing/copy changes to be more readable by ordinary folks. We get feedback often that we’ve changed someone’s entire way of thinking about risks and probabilities. This has surprised and delighted me. And I think the explicit synthesis between rationalist and non-rationalist perspectives on the team has been directly helpful.
That’s all awesome to hear :)