This checklist was established to be a portrait of what the world looked like right before the stock market crashed during the first months of COVID-19. The purpose is partly to give a semi-algorithmic way to ask how much the word looks like that again. At the time it had scored a 13⁄14 on this checklist, COVID-19 was not designated a pandemic and it was still controversial whether or not it was even ok to suggest that was on the horizon.
I originally wrote this checklist to be “prediction on easy mode.” Then I realized it was also valuable as a way to gather information and give a realistic assessment of where the latest new and scary disease is at right now.
During early COVID, we had a meme here that people have trouble “seeing the smoke,” just acknowledging that there were serious obvious problem signs, until an authority figure gave them permission to do so. This checklist was really designed as a way to avoid that problem. I fill it out when a disease makes front page news, I score by the system, I publish, I update, it’s as simple as that. I don’t have to ask if I should, and readers have transparency about my motives for publishing and how I scored it.
So there are a lot of considerations that have gone into turning this into what it is. Think of it as a checklist to facilitate predictions, a sort of jumping off point, not as the checklist itself being a prediction of what will happen.
5% of world pop or GDP means China, India, and the US are the only countries used for the calculation in 12. Which seems questionable.
Also, 11-13 and maybe even 6 and 14 are lagging indicators that seem quite unhelpful in making before-the-fact predictions
This checklist was established to be a portrait of what the world looked like right before the stock market crashed during the first months of COVID-19. The purpose is partly to give a semi-algorithmic way to ask how much the word looks like that again. At the time it had scored a 13⁄14 on this checklist, COVID-19 was not designated a pandemic and it was still controversial whether or not it was even ok to suggest that was on the horizon.
I originally wrote this checklist to be “prediction on easy mode.” Then I realized it was also valuable as a way to gather information and give a realistic assessment of where the latest new and scary disease is at right now.
During early COVID, we had a meme here that people have trouble “seeing the smoke,” just acknowledging that there were serious obvious problem signs, until an authority figure gave them permission to do so. This checklist was really designed as a way to avoid that problem. I fill it out when a disease makes front page news, I score by the system, I publish, I update, it’s as simple as that. I don’t have to ask if I should, and readers have transparency about my motives for publishing and how I scored it.
So there are a lot of considerations that have gone into turning this into what it is. Think of it as a checklist to facilitate predictions, a sort of jumping off point, not as the checklist itself being a prediction of what will happen.
Yeah, the checklist seems great for what it’s meant for. Thanks for taking the time to post it.