I’d like to spend a little time acknowledging good projects executed and work done by rationalists in response to Covid. Here are some that come to mind, but it’s definitely not all of them, can people help me add to the list?
Epidemic Forecasting, a project that amongst other things took superforecasters and used them to answer decision-relevant questions for various governments and vaccine trials. This was led by many LessWrongers including Jacob Lagerros, Josh Jacobson, Jan Kulveit, Connor Flexman, and more. My sense is that this project was unsuccessful in causing major change (e.g. preventing 10k deaths), but was nonetheless a strongly worthwhile effort, and the relevant people learned a lot about the world and its inadequacies.
MicroCovid.org, a project lead by LessWronger Catherio that built the best microcovid calculator I know and has been used by many rationalists in their group coordination and personal assessment. (She wrote about it on LW here.)
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.
I’d like to spend a little time acknowledging good projects executed and work done by rationalists in response to Covid. Here are some that come to mind, but it’s definitely not all of them, can people help me add to the list?
Epidemic Forecasting, a project that amongst other things took superforecasters and used them to answer decision-relevant questions for various governments and vaccine trials. This was led by many LessWrongers including Jacob Lagerros, Josh Jacobson, Jan Kulveit, Connor Flexman, and more. My sense is that this project was unsuccessful in causing major change (e.g. preventing 10k deaths), but was nonetheless a strongly worthwhile effort, and the relevant people learned a lot about the world and its inadequacies.
MicroCovid.org, a project lead by LessWronger Catherio that built the best microcovid calculator I know and has been used by many rationalists in their group coordination and personal assessment. (She wrote about it on LW here.)
LessWrong Coronavirus Links Database (announcement) and LessWrong Coronavirus Research Agenda, where the LW team built a useful links database and also paid Elizabeth Van Nostrand to do+lead some research on LessWrong. (Got a bunch of traffic during the start of the virus, and was linked in places like stripe.com/covid-19.) LW also had a justified practical advice thread in February that was widely read and I think helped people get serious about Covid.
Zvi Mowshowitz’s weekly Covid updates (e.g. most recent one here) have been an invaluable source of information for many.
Sarah Constantin posted much analysis of covid and it (especially this) was very valuable early on, I know I leaned on it for figuring out my risks.
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 :)
Also several other LW posts I found personally useful, including:
Bucky on the growth rate
Jacobian giving people permission to prepare
Discussion of masks on LW and SSC
Jim and Elizabeth’s analysis of the CDC gave me a bunch of data about how the CDC operated and how much to rely on them
There’s more at the Coronavirus tag page.