Focusing on the Alpha (here ‘English Strain’) parts only and looking back, I’m happy with my reasoning and conclusions here. While the 70% prediction did not come to pass and in hindsight my estimate of 70% was overconfident, the reasons it didn’t happen were that some of the inputs in my projection were wrong, in ways I reasoned out at the time would (if they were wrong in these ways) prevent the projection from becoming true. And at the time, people weren’t making the leap to ‘Alpha will take over, and might be a huge issue in some worlds depending on its edge spreading and how fast we vaccinate’ at all.
We also saw with Omicron how, when the variables turn out differently, we do see the thing I was pointing towards, and how people are slow to recognize that it might happen or is going to happen. I do think this had the virtue of advancing the understanding of what was plausibly going to happen. If it overshot a bit in terms of how likely it had its core predictions coming true, that’s something to improve going forward, but very much a ‘man in the arena’ situation, and much better than my ‘not be confident so say little or nothing’ approach that I shared with most others in Jan/Feb 2020.
To what extent this justifies inclusion in a timeless list is up for grabs, but I think it’s important that the next time we notice something like this, we speak up fast and loud (while also striving for good calibration on the chance it happens, and its magnitude)
Focusing on the Alpha (here ‘English Strain’) parts only and looking back, I’m happy with my reasoning and conclusions here. While the 70% prediction did not come to pass and in hindsight my estimate of 70% was overconfident, the reasons it didn’t happen were that some of the inputs in my projection were wrong, in ways I reasoned out at the time would (if they were wrong in these ways) prevent the projection from becoming true. And at the time, people weren’t making the leap to ‘Alpha will take over, and might be a huge issue in some worlds depending on its edge spreading and how fast we vaccinate’ at all.
We also saw with Omicron how, when the variables turn out differently, we do see the thing I was pointing towards, and how people are slow to recognize that it might happen or is going to happen. I do think this had the virtue of advancing the understanding of what was plausibly going to happen. If it overshot a bit in terms of how likely it had its core predictions coming true, that’s something to improve going forward, but very much a ‘man in the arena’ situation, and much better than my ‘not be confident so say little or nothing’ approach that I shared with most others in Jan/Feb 2020.
To what extent this justifies inclusion in a timeless list is up for grabs, but I think it’s important that the next time we notice something like this, we speak up fast and loud (while also striving for good calibration on the chance it happens, and its magnitude)