For people who doubt this, I’d point to variance in initial governmental-level response to COVID19, which ranged from “highly incompetent” (eg. early US) to “quite competent” (eg Taiwan).
Seems worth noting that Taiwan is an outlier in terms of average IQ of its population. Given this, I find it pretty unlikely that typical governmental response to AI would be more akin to Taiwan than the US.
I doubt that’s the primary component that makes the difference. Other countries which did mostly sensible things early are eg Australia, Czechia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Iceland.
My main claim isn’t about what a median response would be, but something like “difference between median early covid governmental response and actually good early covid response was something between 1 and 2 sigma; this suggests bad response isn’t over-determined, and sensibe responses are within human reach”. Even if Taiwan was an outlier, it’s not like it’s inhabited by aliens or run by a friendly superintelligence.
Empirically, median governmental response to a novel crisis is copycat policymaking from some other governments
I doubt that’s the primary component that makes the difference. Other countries which did mostly sensible things early are eg Australia, Czechia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Iceland.
What do you think is the primary component? I seem to recall reading somewhere that previous experience with SARS makes a big difference. I guess my more general point is that if the good COVID responses can mostly be explained by factors that predictably won’t be available to the median AI risk response, then the variance in COVID response doesn’t help to give much hope for a good AI risk response.
My main claim isn’t about what a median response would be, but something like “difference between median early covid governmental response and actually good early covid response was something between 1 and 2 sigma; this suggests bad response isn’t over-determined, and sensibe responses are within human reach”.
This seems to depend on response to AI risk being of similar difficulty as response to COVID. I think people who updated towards “bad response to AI risk is overdetermined” did so partly on the basis that the former is much harder. (In other words, if the median government has done this badly against COVID, what chance does it have against something much harder?) I wrote down a list of things that make COVID an easier challenge, which I now realize may be a bit of a tangent if that’s not the main thing you want to argue about, but I’ll put down here anyway so as to not waste it.
it’s relatively intuitive for humans to think about the mechanics of the danger and possible countermeasures
previous human experiences with pandemics, including very similar ones like SARS
there are very effective countermeasures that are much easier / less costly than comparable countermeasures for AI risk, such as distributing high quality masks to everyone and sealing one’s borders
COVID isn’t agenty and can’t fight back intelligently
potentially divisive issues in AI risk response seem to be a strict superset of politically divisive issues in COVID response (additional issues include: how to weigh very long term benefits against short term costs, the sentience, moral worth, and rights of AIs, what kind of values do we want AIs to have, and/or who should have control/access to AI)
I asked myself for an example of a country whose initial pandemic response was unusually poor, settled on Brazil, and found that Brazil’s IQ was lower than I expected at 87. So that’s one data point that supports your hypothesis.
I suspect that cultural homogeneity is at least as important.
What do you think is the primary component? I seem to recall reading somewhere that previous experience with SARS makes a big difference. I guess my more general point is that if the good COVID responses can mostly be explained by factors that predictably won’t be available to the median AI risk response, then the variance in COVID response doesn’t help to give much hope for a good AI risk response.
What seemed to make a difference
someone with a good models what to do getting to advisory position when the politicians freak out
previous experience with SARS
ratio of “trust in institutions” vs. “trust in your neighbors wisdom”
raw technological capacity
ability of the government to govern (ie execute many things at short time)
In my view, 1. and 4. could go better than in covid, 2. is irrelevant, 3. and 5. seem broad parameters which can develop in different directions. Image you somehow become the main advisor to US president when the situation becomes really weird, and she follows your advice closely—my rough impression is in most situations you would be able to move the response to be moderately sane.
it’s relatively intuitive for humans to think about the mechanics of the danger and possible countermeasures
Empirically, this often wasn’t true. Humans had mildly confused ideas about the micro-level, but often highly confused ideas about the exponential macro-dynamics. (We created a whole educational game on that, and have some feedback that for some policymakers it was the thing that helped them understand… after a year in the pandemic)
previous human experiences with pandemics, including very similar ones like SARS
there are very effective countermeasures that are much easier / less costly than comparable countermeasures for AI risk, such as distributing high quality masks to everyone and sealing one’s borders
COVID isn’t agenty and can’t fight back intelligently
potentially divisive issues in AI risk response seem to be a strict superset of politically divisive issues in COVID response (additional issues include: how to weigh very long term benefits against short term costs, the sentience, moral worth, and rights of AIs, what kind of values do we want AIs to have, and/or who should have control/access to AI)
One factor which may make governments more responsive to AI risk is covid wasn’t exactly threatening to states. Covid was pretty bad for individual people, and some businesses, but in some cases, the relative power of states even grew during covid. In contrast, in some scenarios it may be clear that AI is existential risk for states as well.
Australia seems to have suffered a lot more from the pandemic than the U.S., paying much more in the cost of lockdown than even a relatively conservative worst-case estimate would have been for the costs of an uncontrolled COVID pandemic. I don’t know about the others, but given that you put Australia on this list, I don’t currently trust the others to have acted sensibly.
I’m not sure if you actually read carefully what you are commenting on. I emphasized early response, or initial governmental-level response in both comments in this thread.
Sure, multiple countries on the list made mistakes later, some countries sort of become insane, and so on. Later, almost everyone made mistakes with vaccines, rapid tests, investments in contact tracing, etc.
Arguing that the early lockdown was more costly than “an uncontrolled pandemic” would be pretty insane position (cf GDP costs, Italy had the closest thing to an uncontrolled pandemic). (Btw the whole notion of “an uncontrolled pandemic” is deeply confused—unless you are a totalitarian dictatorship, you cannot just order people “live as normally” during a pandemic when enough other people are dying; you get spontaneous “anarchic lockdowns” anyway, just later and in a more costly way)
If Australia was pursuing a strategy of “lock down irrespective of cost”, then I don’t think it makes sense to describe the initial response as competent. It just happened to be right in this case, but in order for the overall response to helpful, it has to be adaptive to the actual costs. I agree that the early response on its own would have indicated a potentially competent decision-making algorithm, but the later followup showed that the algorithm seems to have mostly been correct on accident, and not on-purpose.
I do appreciate the link to the GDP cost article. I would have to look into the methodology more to comment on that, but it certainly seems like an interest analysis and suggestive result.
I absolutely agree. Australia has done substantially better than most other nations regarding COVID from all of economic, health, and lifestyle points of view. The two largest cities did somewhat worse in lifestyle for some periods, but most other places had far fewer and less onerous restrictions than most other countries for nearly 2 years. I personally was very happy to have lived with essentially zero risk of COVID and essentially zero restrictions both personal or economic for more than a year and a half.
A conservative worst-case estimate for costs of an uncontrolled COVID outbreak in Australia was on the order of 300,000 deaths and about $600 billion direct economic loss over 2 years, along with even larger economic impacts from higher-order effects.
We did very much better than that, especially in health outcomes. We had 2,000 deaths up until giving up on elimination in December last year, which was about 0.08 deaths per thousand. Even after giving up on local elimination, we still only have 0.37 per thousand compared with United States at 3.0 per thousand.
Economic losses are also substantially less than US in terms of comparison with the pre-pandemic economy, but the attribution of causes there is much more contentious as with everything to do with economics.
I know of a good number of friends who were unable to continue their jobs that requires substantial in-person abroad coordination since Australia prevented nationals from leaving their own country. I also talked to 2-3 Australians who thought that Australia had messed up pretty badly here.
Sure. I also talked to tens of Australians who thought that they did a great job. In Spain, the country where I am from, I know personally many people who were also unable to continue their jobs, and not because the country forbade their nationals to leave. There is going to be a lot of variance in the individual opinions. The amount of dead people is on the other hand a more objective measure on how successful were countries at dealing with the pandemic
Taking the # of dead people as an objective is biasing the question.
Fundamentally, there is a question of whether the benefits of lockdowns were worth the costs.
Measuring that only by # of dead people is ignoring the fundamental problems with the lockdowns.
Let me explicate.
I think I am in the minority position on this board (and Habryka might be too) in that I feel it is obvious that the relatively small number of elderly people saved counterfactually by lockdowns is not comparable to the enormous mental, economic loss, the dangerous precedent for civil liberties set by lockdowns etc. It is clear to me that a “correct” utilitarian calculation will conclude that the QALYs lost by dead elderly people in the first world is absolutely swamped by the QALYs lost by mental health of young people and the millions of global poor thrown back into poverty.
(Moreover, this ignores the personal liberty aspect that people are free to make their own safety/lifestyle tradeoffs and it should require a superabundance of QALYs saved to impinge on this freedom)
Bolstered by the apparent succes of Taiwan I supported a short lockdown followed by track & trace—but mid summer 2020 it was clear that this was never going to work. Actually, Taiwan had to revert to lockdowns later during the pandemic anyway. It was clear to me that further lockdowns were no longer worth it.
Even if you think the lockdowns were justified, one should note that Australia has gone much farther; it has continued severe COVID restrictions even after vaccination & absence of a long-term plan. It has made it almost completely impossible to go in or out of the country (even if one is an Australian citizen willing to undergo extensive testing) . In my humble opinion this is completely crazy territory.
Speaking about completely crazy territory… If you measure a country’s COVID response by # of deaths by COVID then the “bestest most responsible government” would be the Chinese government.
I hope you will agree with me that this would be a mistake.
My assessment is also that the health costs of the pandemic were small in comparison to the secondary effects of lockdown (which were mostly negative). Any analysis that primarily measures deaths seems to me to ignore the vast majority of the impact (which is primarily economic and social).
I know this is a sensitive topic and I probably won’t change your mind but hear me out for a second. Re. China, I do agree with you that the response of the CCP (now) is not really a model of what an exemplar government should do. I also agree that up to a certain point you shouldn’t measure exclusively the number of dead people to judge how well a country fared. But it certainly is an important variable that we shouldn’t discount either. The number of dead people is closely correlated to other important factors such as the number of people suffering long covid or even the human suffering in general. I do agree with you that lockdowns in many places have caused potentially more harm than they should. The problem is that not all lockdowns are the same, and people keep them treating as equivalent. Another problem is that I see that many people are rationalizing that things couldn’t have been different, which is super convenient especially for those in power.
So let me talk a bit about Australia (I was living there during the whole pandemic period).
USA sits right now at 3015 dead people per 1M. Australia’s casualties are 364.
I can guarantee you, that to everyone I spoke with who was living at the time in other places (I have many friends in different European countries, Spain, Italy, France, England, etc) would have swtiched places with me without thinking about it for a second.
I follow very closely the news in the USA and I know how extremely biased the coverage was (including some famous podcasters, I am looking at you, Joe Rogan). They focused a lot on the Australian border restrictions / lockdown in Melbourne and very little on the fact that for almost two years, most Australians enjoyed a mostly normal life when people abroad were facing repeatedly absurd government interventions/restrictions. It is not totally true that the borders were completly close either: I have a friend who was allowed to leave the country to visit her dying father in Italy. She came back to Australia and she had to do a quarantine, true, but she was allowed to be back.
The lockdowns in Australia (at least in Queensland where I lived) served a purpose: buy time for the contact tracers so that COVID cases can really be taken down to zero. In Queensland we have a long one at the beginning (2 months maybe?) but then we have a few more (don’t rememeber how many, maybe 3?) that lasted only a few days. They understood very well that dealing with COVID should be a binary thing: Either you have no cases, or you are facing repeated waves of covid. This must continue until everyone has an opportunity to have two shots of the vaccine. Once that everyone had a chance, the borders were opened again and most restrictions were lifted. So in this regard, I do think that the harsh Chinese government measures AT THE BEGINNING (i.e. closing the national borders, PCRs, selective lockdowns, contact tracing, etc), made much more sense that everything that was happening in most of the Western world. Talking to a few Chinese friends, they considered utterly outrageous the fact that we were justifying the death of people saying that they were old anyway or that we shouldn’t stop the economy.
I still remember that at the very beginning of the pandemic, the POTUS was given a press conference and he showed a hesitancy rarely seen on him: he swallowed and took a few seconds to say, stuttering a little bit, that he hadn’t taken measures, there could be a hundred thousand American dying. Today the tally sits at more than 1M. Things could have been different.
Fair enough. Thank you for explaining where you are coming from.
I do agree that if an island is able to close the borders and thereby avoid severe domestic lockdowns this can be justified.
Seems worth noting that Taiwan is an outlier in terms of average IQ of its population. Given this, I find it pretty unlikely that typical governmental response to AI would be more akin to Taiwan than the US.
I doubt that’s the primary component that makes the difference. Other countries which did mostly sensible things early are eg Australia, Czechia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Iceland.
My main claim isn’t about what a median response would be, but something like “difference between median early covid governmental response and actually good early covid response was something between 1 and 2 sigma; this suggests bad response isn’t over-determined, and sensibe responses are within human reach”. Even if Taiwan was an outlier, it’s not like it’s inhabited by aliens or run by a friendly superintelligence.
Empirically, median governmental response to a novel crisis is copycat policymaking from some other governments
What do you think is the primary component? I seem to recall reading somewhere that previous experience with SARS makes a big difference. I guess my more general point is that if the good COVID responses can mostly be explained by factors that predictably won’t be available to the median AI risk response, then the variance in COVID response doesn’t help to give much hope for a good AI risk response.
This seems to depend on response to AI risk being of similar difficulty as response to COVID. I think people who updated towards “bad response to AI risk is overdetermined” did so partly on the basis that the former is much harder. (In other words, if the median government has done this badly against COVID, what chance does it have against something much harder?) I wrote down a list of things that make COVID an easier challenge, which I now realize may be a bit of a tangent if that’s not the main thing you want to argue about, but I’ll put down here anyway so as to not waste it.
it’s relatively intuitive for humans to think about the mechanics of the danger and possible countermeasures
previous human experiences with pandemics, including very similar ones like SARS
there are very effective countermeasures that are much easier / less costly than comparable countermeasures for AI risk, such as distributing high quality masks to everyone and sealing one’s borders
COVID isn’t agenty and can’t fight back intelligently
potentially divisive issues in AI risk response seem to be a strict superset of politically divisive issues in COVID response (additional issues include: how to weigh very long term benefits against short term costs, the sentience, moral worth, and rights of AIs, what kind of values do we want AIs to have, and/or who should have control/access to AI)
I asked myself for an example of a country whose initial pandemic response was unusually poor, settled on Brazil, and found that Brazil’s IQ was lower than I expected at 87. So that’s one data point that supports your hypothesis.
I suspect that cultural homogeneity is at least as important.
What seemed to make a difference
someone with a good models what to do getting to advisory position when the politicians freak out
previous experience with SARS
ratio of “trust in institutions” vs. “trust in your neighbors wisdom”
raw technological capacity
ability of the government to govern (ie execute many things at short time)
In my view, 1. and 4. could go better than in covid, 2. is irrelevant, 3. and 5. seem broad parameters which can develop in different directions. Image you somehow become the main advisor to US president when the situation becomes really weird, and she follows your advice closely—my rough impression is in most situations you would be able to move the response to be moderately sane.
Empirically, this often wasn’t true. Humans had mildly confused ideas about the micro-level, but often highly confused ideas about the exponential macro-dynamics. (We created a whole educational game on that, and have some feedback that for some policymakers it was the thing that helped them understand… after a year in the pandemic)
One factor which may make governments more responsive to AI risk is covid wasn’t exactly threatening to states. Covid was pretty bad for individual people, and some businesses, but in some cases, the relative power of states even grew during covid. In contrast, in some scenarios it may be clear that AI is existential risk for states as well.
Australia seems to have suffered a lot more from the pandemic than the U.S., paying much more in the cost of lockdown than even a relatively conservative worst-case estimate would have been for the costs of an uncontrolled COVID pandemic. I don’t know about the others, but given that you put Australia on this list, I don’t currently trust the others to have acted sensibly.
I’m not sure if you actually read carefully what you are commenting on. I emphasized early response, or initial governmental-level response in both comments in this thread.
Sure, multiple countries on the list made mistakes later, some countries sort of become insane, and so on. Later, almost everyone made mistakes with vaccines, rapid tests, investments in contact tracing, etc.
Arguing that the early lockdown was more costly than “an uncontrolled pandemic” would be pretty insane position (cf GDP costs, Italy had the closest thing to an uncontrolled pandemic). (Btw the whole notion of “an uncontrolled pandemic” is deeply confused—unless you are a totalitarian dictatorship, you cannot just order people “live as normally” during a pandemic when enough other people are dying; you get spontaneous “anarchic lockdowns” anyway, just later and in a more costly way)
If Australia was pursuing a strategy of “lock down irrespective of cost”, then I don’t think it makes sense to describe the initial response as competent. It just happened to be right in this case, but in order for the overall response to helpful, it has to be adaptive to the actual costs. I agree that the early response on its own would have indicated a potentially competent decision-making algorithm, but the later followup showed that the algorithm seems to have mostly been correct on accident, and not on-purpose.
I do appreciate the link to the GDP cost article. I would have to look into the methodology more to comment on that, but it certainly seems like an interest analysis and suggestive result.
I don’t think this is true at all. See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r9gfbq26qvrjjA7JA/thank-you-queensland
I absolutely agree. Australia has done substantially better than most other nations regarding COVID from all of economic, health, and lifestyle points of view. The two largest cities did somewhat worse in lifestyle for some periods, but most other places had far fewer and less onerous restrictions than most other countries for nearly 2 years. I personally was very happy to have lived with essentially zero risk of COVID and essentially zero restrictions both personal or economic for more than a year and a half.
A conservative worst-case estimate for costs of an uncontrolled COVID outbreak in Australia was on the order of 300,000 deaths and about $600 billion direct economic loss over 2 years, along with even larger economic impacts from higher-order effects.
We did very much better than that, especially in health outcomes. We had 2,000 deaths up until giving up on elimination in December last year, which was about 0.08 deaths per thousand. Even after giving up on local elimination, we still only have 0.37 per thousand compared with United States at 3.0 per thousand.
Economic losses are also substantially less than US in terms of comparison with the pre-pandemic economy, but the attribution of causes there is much more contentious as with everything to do with economics.
I know of a good number of friends who were unable to continue their jobs that requires substantial in-person abroad coordination since Australia prevented nationals from leaving their own country. I also talked to 2-3 Australians who thought that Australia had messed up pretty badly here.
Sure. I also talked to tens of Australians who thought that they did a great job. In Spain, the country where I am from, I know personally many people who were also unable to continue their jobs, and not because the country forbade their nationals to leave. There is going to be a lot of variance in the individual opinions. The amount of dead people is on the other hand a more objective measure on how successful were countries at dealing with the pandemic
Taking the # of dead people as an objective is biasing the question.
Fundamentally, there is a question of whether the benefits of lockdowns were worth the costs. Measuring that only by # of dead people is ignoring the fundamental problems with the lockdowns.
Let me explicate.
I think I am in the minority position on this board (and Habryka might be too) in that I feel it is obvious that the relatively small number of elderly people saved counterfactually by lockdowns is not comparable to the enormous mental, economic loss, the dangerous precedent for civil liberties set by lockdowns etc. It is clear to me that a “correct” utilitarian calculation will conclude that the QALYs lost by dead elderly people in the first world is absolutely swamped by the QALYs lost by mental health of young people and the millions of global poor thrown back into poverty. (Moreover, this ignores the personal liberty aspect that people are free to make their own safety/lifestyle tradeoffs and it should require a superabundance of QALYs saved to impinge on this freedom)
Bolstered by the apparent succes of Taiwan I supported a short lockdown followed by track & trace—but mid summer 2020 it was clear that this was never going to work. Actually, Taiwan had to revert to lockdowns later during the pandemic anyway. It was clear to me that further lockdowns were no longer worth it.
Even if you think the lockdowns were justified, one should note that Australia has gone much farther; it has continued severe COVID restrictions even after vaccination & absence of a long-term plan. It has made it almost completely impossible to go in or out of the country (even if one is an Australian citizen willing to undergo extensive testing) . In my humble opinion this is completely crazy territory.
Speaking about completely crazy territory… If you measure a country’s COVID response by # of deaths by COVID then the “bestest most responsible government” would be the Chinese government. I hope you will agree with me that this would be a mistake.
My assessment is also that the health costs of the pandemic were small in comparison to the secondary effects of lockdown (which were mostly negative). Any analysis that primarily measures deaths seems to me to ignore the vast majority of the impact (which is primarily economic and social).
I know this is a sensitive topic and I probably won’t change your mind but hear me out for a second. Re. China, I do agree with you that the response of the CCP (now) is not really a model of what an exemplar government should do. I also agree that up to a certain point you shouldn’t measure exclusively the number of dead people to judge how well a country fared. But it certainly is an important variable that we shouldn’t discount either. The number of dead people is closely correlated to other important factors such as the number of people suffering long covid or even the human suffering in general. I do agree with you that lockdowns in many places have caused potentially more harm than they should. The problem is that not all lockdowns are the same, and people keep them treating as equivalent. Another problem is that I see that many people are rationalizing that things couldn’t have been different, which is super convenient especially for those in power.
So let me talk a bit about Australia (I was living there during the whole pandemic period).
USA sits right now at 3015 dead people per 1M. Australia’s casualties are 364.
I can guarantee you, that to everyone I spoke with who was living at the time in other places (I have many friends in different European countries, Spain, Italy, France, England, etc) would have swtiched places with me without thinking about it for a second.
I follow very closely the news in the USA and I know how extremely biased the coverage was (including some famous podcasters, I am looking at you, Joe Rogan). They focused a lot on the Australian border restrictions / lockdown in Melbourne and very little on the fact that for almost two years, most Australians enjoyed a mostly normal life when people abroad were facing repeatedly absurd government interventions/restrictions. It is not totally true that the borders were completly close either: I have a friend who was allowed to leave the country to visit her dying father in Italy. She came back to Australia and she had to do a quarantine, true, but she was allowed to be back.
The lockdowns in Australia (at least in Queensland where I lived) served a purpose: buy time for the contact tracers so that COVID cases can really be taken down to zero. In Queensland we have a long one at the beginning (2 months maybe?) but then we have a few more (don’t rememeber how many, maybe 3?) that lasted only a few days. They understood very well that dealing with COVID should be a binary thing: Either you have no cases, or you are facing repeated waves of covid. This must continue until everyone has an opportunity to have two shots of the vaccine. Once that everyone had a chance, the borders were opened again and most restrictions were lifted. So in this regard, I do think that the harsh Chinese government measures AT THE BEGINNING (i.e. closing the national borders, PCRs, selective lockdowns, contact tracing, etc), made much more sense that everything that was happening in most of the Western world. Talking to a few Chinese friends, they considered utterly outrageous the fact that we were justifying the death of people saying that they were old anyway or that we shouldn’t stop the economy.
I still remember that at the very beginning of the pandemic, the POTUS was given a press conference and he showed a hesitancy rarely seen on him: he swallowed and took a few seconds to say, stuttering a little bit, that he hadn’t taken measures, there could be a hundred thousand American dying. Today the tally sits at more than 1M. Things could have been different.
Fair enough. Thank you for explaining where you are coming from. I do agree that if an island is able to close the borders and thereby avoid severe domestic lockdowns this can be justified.
(364 Vs 3015 is two orders of magnitude?)
Oooops! Corrected, thanks
Well, Australia did orders of magnitude better than USA and in IQ they seem to be pretty close. I’m not sure that IQ is the right variable to look at