Could you link to the essay on “why covid doesn’t matter any more for one’s personal life and personal risk taking choices”?
I don’t think covid stopped being important, I just think it just stopped being the #1 thing that people were officially freaking out about as part of The Zeitgeist (because Ukraine took its place as something even worse, like with nuclear fallout possibilities, and a more vivid Villain for a new style of Three Minute Hate).
For my money, the key times it was important to have covid info was:
When we didn’t know how it spread or how to compare different precautions
When new variants were being a big deal (delta a little, omicron a lot)
At this point I think everyone is very well oriented to the first one. I think if a new variant came out we’d frontpage all posts sharing data and orienting to it.
Perhaps I’m missing some important other category because I’ve not been thinking about Covid recently, but I don’t personally follow Zvi’s Covid posts so much any more, and I have all personal practical considerations down pat.
(Actually, there’s a post I might want to write about how awful antigen and NAAT testing, is after my experience running multiple 40+ people events and office spaces during Omicron and seeing how spotty and unreliable they were. This would mostly be useful for people if there’s another variant.)
Thank you for the response. Maybe we have different definitions of “everyone” and maybe also different definitions of “new variant”?
(Perhaps the difference just loads on the indexical phrase “my money”? <3)
It seems like BA.2 is the new variant, but it hasn’t been conveniently named yet because… maybe because the rein holders are trying to calm the horses right now?
(I’ve heard from my people who watch TV that in TV land people think the SCOTUS nomination is important, and this reminds me about how in Feb 2020 people in TV land thought that Trump’s impeachment was important, even though it seemed to me like it was not at all where a sane person would keep their eyes.)
And in the last ~2 months I’ve had more “people I trade text with regularly” test positive than in the entire previous 2 years.
It seems like the smart people who test positive dither on whether to take Paxlovid or not. I think I would try to, in their situation, and even in my situation, but I haven’t done a thorough review.
As several more people tested positive, wanting to know the actual truth about what might help them, I just now searched for [site:lesswrong.com zvi paxlovid]…
...and ended up back here, writing this comment in defense of “maybe covid isn’t over and cogent thinking about it is still quite valuable?”
IF Paxlovid (or other anti-virals) are a net positive for <categories of people NOT chosen to get it by default for reasons related to triaging and/or politics, and rather than single-patient-centric net benefit calculations>...
...THEN it might be hard for such people to get personal-health-advancing behavioral compliance from a doctor who might grant them access to such anti-virals.
I think the antecedent is basically true, but I might be wrong.
Thus I think the consequent is also likely to be true… but again I might be wrong.
If I’m right, it means that techniques for making doctors behave like “actual good drug vendors who give the drugs they have a legal monopoly on giving” might be useful know.
Also, inventory of anti-virals can complicate matters, but I think it might regionally vary?
I guess another possibility is that everyone smart is just routing around the broken medical system, and getting real medicine from Mexico and/or Canada and/or the Internet?
Also, all this stuff tends to arise as the person is… well… “feeling sick” and might have “fewer spoons”.
If there is a way to buy “the best actually helpful anti-viral” pre-emptively (in violation of evil US laws), then I’d personally and selfishly like to do this, I think? Then if I catch this new variant or the next, when I’m low on spoons and need some medicine in order to minimize my symptoms and scarring, I can just take it, without having to fight bureaucracies? Perhaps such honesty is not permitted in a top level post though?
The only sane public benefit I can see to not letting people buy anti-bacterials and anti-virals over the counter is to manage the evolution of the parasite ecosystem, but like: maybe people didn’t notice that that cat is entirely out of the bag now? Like… the same logic says that you have to close the borders and gate entry based on communicable disease status, right?
So maybe the US should use diplomacy and violence to impose our anti-germicidal-drug-freedom policies globally? Or make anti-germicidals OTC? Or make the borders medically functional?
Basically: the laws here are either incoherent by accident, or incoherent on purpose because the legal system de facto hates humans and is de facto as happy for us to die as live, so long as rich people stay rich, and powerful people stay powerful, right? So good smart people should probably be writing up posts on how to break the law or else be in favor of rewriting the law, right?
(Or not? The CCP’s “slicing and gridding” approach sounds remarkably similar to the only thing I can visualize as “actually working” to eradicate covid using reasonably small amounts of physical resources, but which I have tended to call “the green zone approach” in conversations with people, because I’m in favor of it, and “green zones” sound nice. So maybe China will keep its overall green zone status by “slicing and gridding” its little orange zones, and then making them turn locally green again? And maybe the Chinese Communist Party is telling the truth about how small and insignificant its orange zones are? But it seems like a parameter someone who cared about the world economy would focus on? Then again, maybe “caring about global prosperity is not about caring about global prosperity”</hanson>?)
I often missing things.
However, my current model is that people want it to be the case that “covid is over” and so that’s how they are acting and talking.
In this model: precisely such aggregate opinions predict that we’re going to have another wave… because the mass adoption of this opinion will cause a widespread decrease in all the little personal safety copes that people have been doing in their own life as a response to the general lack of a functioning public health system during this plague which will cause an increase in spread. This is consistent with so many people I personally know becoming covid positive lately.
However, I’m modeling people here as “making the kind of stupid mistake that humans make”, not modeling people as “knowing something important that I don’t know”.
In my experience it is productive to try to find out what they someone else might have seen (as if they were smart and informed) if they are observed acting in ways that don’t make sense to me.
Maybe “most people” are not engaged in some kind of motivated cognition about covid this February and March?
Maybe there are facts that are commonly known that I’m ignorant about?
If so,”for my money” I’d love to hear about these facts because I think it will help me plan in useful ways :-)
Not just for investing… also I think it is nice to help people by knowing and saying what is true, so they can also plan in useful ways, and in this regard I find myself mostly interested in understanding anti-virals, and when and how people should get them during the current(?) “covid is over” covid wave.
FWIW since writing your comment I found out about the UK Covid Case spike, and had the call with my mother where I recommended she move back to wearing her P3 in crowded spaces, like we did during Omicron. So I think I was a bit out of the loop about the new variant thing.
Regarding drugs, my model has been that if you’re experiencing severe symptoms you want to take paxlovid and fluvoxamine and also a steroid like inhaled budesonide if you’re having respiratory symptoms. (I took budesonide when I thought I had Covid during the omicron spike, and had the other two on-hand.)
I am in a spate of avoiding news on current events, and I just (internally) reminded the LW team that I’m not really tracking this stuff right now, so I am not fully connected to current decisions.
So good smart people should probably be writing up posts on how to break the law
I encourage pseudonymous accounts to write things they think will help others, and this idea sounds pretty good to me :)
It sounds like you’re set with good medicine, at hand. just in case. Well played!
(Thinking about the side audience… Not that I actually know those 3 drugs are the best stack (with low side effects etc). Yet if you’re informedly confident, Ben, then I take it as useful indirect evidence of things for me to research maybe, and I appreciate the info.)
Could you link to the essay on “why covid doesn’t matter any more for one’s personal life and personal risk taking choices”?
I don’t think covid stopped being important, I just think it just stopped being the #1 thing that people were officially freaking out about as part of The Zeitgeist (because Ukraine took its place as something even worse, like with nuclear fallout possibilities, and a more vivid Villain for a new style of Three Minute Hate).
For my money, the key times it was important to have covid info was:
When we didn’t know how it spread or how to compare different precautions
When new variants were being a big deal (delta a little, omicron a lot)
At this point I think everyone is very well oriented to the first one. I think if a new variant came out we’d frontpage all posts sharing data and orienting to it.
Perhaps I’m missing some important other category because I’ve not been thinking about Covid recently, but I don’t personally follow Zvi’s Covid posts so much any more, and I have all personal practical considerations down pat.
(Actually, there’s a post I might want to write about how awful antigen and NAAT testing, is after my experience running multiple 40+ people events and office spaces during Omicron and seeing how spotty and unreliable they were. This would mostly be useful for people if there’s another variant.)
Thank you for the response. Maybe we have different definitions of “everyone” and maybe also different definitions of “new variant”?
(Perhaps the difference just loads on the indexical phrase “my money”? <3)
It seems like BA.2 is the new variant, but it hasn’t been conveniently named yet because… maybe because the rein holders are trying to calm the horses right now?
(I’ve heard from my people who watch TV that in TV land people think the SCOTUS nomination is important, and this reminds me about how in Feb 2020 people in TV land thought that Trump’s impeachment was important, even though it seemed to me like it was not at all where a sane person would keep their eyes.)
And in the last ~2 months I’ve had more “people I trade text with regularly” test positive than in the entire previous 2 years.
It seems like the smart people who test positive dither on whether to take Paxlovid or not. I think I would try to, in their situation, and even in my situation, but I haven’t done a thorough review.
As several more people tested positive, wanting to know the actual truth about what might help them, I just now searched for [site:lesswrong.com zvi paxlovid]…
...and ended up back here, writing this comment in defense of “maybe covid isn’t over and cogent thinking about it is still quite valuable?”
(The other big hit was Paxlovid Remains Illegal: 11⁄24 Update.)
Some Questions:
IF Paxlovid (or other anti-virals) are a net positive for <categories of people NOT chosen to get it by default for reasons related to triaging and/or politics, and rather than single-patient-centric net benefit calculations>...
...THEN it might be hard for such people to get personal-health-advancing behavioral compliance from a doctor who might grant them access to such anti-virals.
I think the antecedent is basically true, but I might be wrong.
Thus I think the consequent is also likely to be true… but again I might be wrong.
If I’m right, it means that techniques for making doctors behave like “actual good drug vendors who give the drugs they have a legal monopoly on giving” might be useful know.
Also, inventory of anti-virals can complicate matters, but I think it might regionally vary?
I guess another possibility is that everyone smart is just routing around the broken medical system, and getting real medicine from Mexico and/or Canada and/or the Internet?
Also, all this stuff tends to arise as the person is… well… “feeling sick” and might have “fewer spoons”.
If there is a way to buy “the best actually helpful anti-viral” pre-emptively (in violation of evil US laws), then I’d personally and selfishly like to do this, I think? Then if I catch this new variant or the next, when I’m low on spoons and need some medicine in order to minimize my symptoms and scarring, I can just take it, without having to fight bureaucracies? Perhaps such honesty is not permitted in a top level post though?
The only sane public benefit I can see to not letting people buy anti-bacterials and anti-virals over the counter is to manage the evolution of the parasite ecosystem, but like: maybe people didn’t notice that that cat is entirely out of the bag now? Like… the same logic says that you have to close the borders and gate entry based on communicable disease status, right?
So maybe the US should use diplomacy and violence to impose our anti-germicidal-drug-freedom policies globally? Or make anti-germicidals OTC? Or make the borders medically functional?
Basically: the laws here are either incoherent by accident, or incoherent on purpose because the legal system de facto hates humans and is de facto as happy for us to die as live, so long as rich people stay rich, and powerful people stay powerful, right? So good smart people should probably be writing up posts on how to break the law or else be in favor of rewriting the law, right?
On the bigger picture: China might be losing its de facto covid zero status, and so the global supply chain disruptions I feared greatly in Feb 2020 might now finally be “in the mail”?
(Or not? The CCP’s “slicing and gridding” approach sounds remarkably similar to the only thing I can visualize as “actually working” to eradicate covid using reasonably small amounts of physical resources, but which I have tended to call “the green zone approach” in conversations with people, because I’m in favor of it, and “green zones” sound nice. So maybe China will keep its overall green zone status by “slicing and gridding” its little orange zones, and then making them turn locally green again? And maybe the Chinese Communist Party is telling the truth about how small and insignificant its orange zones are? But it seems like a parameter someone who cared about the world economy would focus on? Then again, maybe “caring about global prosperity is not about caring about global prosperity”</hanson>?)
I often missing things.
However, my current model is that people want it to be the case that “covid is over” and so that’s how they are acting and talking.
In this model: precisely such aggregate opinions predict that we’re going to have another wave… because the mass adoption of this opinion will cause a widespread decrease in all the little personal safety copes that people have been doing in their own life as a response to the general lack of a functioning public health system during this plague which will cause an increase in spread. This is consistent with so many people I personally know becoming covid positive lately.
However, I’m modeling people here as “making the kind of stupid mistake that humans make”, not modeling people as “knowing something important that I don’t know”.
In my experience it is productive to try to find out what they someone else might have seen (as if they were smart and informed) if they are observed acting in ways that don’t make sense to me.
Maybe “most people” are not engaged in some kind of motivated cognition about covid this February and March?
Maybe there are facts that are commonly known that I’m ignorant about?
If so,”for my money” I’d love to hear about these facts because I think it will help me plan in useful ways :-)
Not just for investing… also I think it is nice to help people by knowing and saying what is true, so they can also plan in useful ways, and in this regard I find myself mostly interested in understanding anti-virals, and when and how people should get them during the current(?) “covid is over” covid wave.
FWIW since writing your comment I found out about the UK Covid Case spike, and had the call with my mother where I recommended she move back to wearing her P3 in crowded spaces, like we did during Omicron. So I think I was a bit out of the loop about the new variant thing.
Regarding drugs, my model has been that if you’re experiencing severe symptoms you want to take paxlovid and fluvoxamine and also a steroid like inhaled budesonide if you’re having respiratory symptoms. (I took budesonide when I thought I had Covid during the omicron spike, and had the other two on-hand.)
I am in a spate of avoiding news on current events, and I just (internally) reminded the LW team that I’m not really tracking this stuff right now, so I am not fully connected to current decisions.
I encourage pseudonymous accounts to write things they think will help others, and this idea sounds pretty good to me :)
Valid. I hope your mom is safe <3
It sounds like you’re set with good medicine, at hand. just in case. Well played!
(Thinking about the side audience… Not that I actually know those 3 drugs are the best stack (with low side effects etc). Yet if you’re informedly confident, Ben, then I take it as useful indirect evidence of things for me to research maybe, and I appreciate the info.)
Thx :)