On 1: How much time do people need to spend reading & arguing about coronavirus before they hit dramatically diminishing marginal returns? How many LW-ers have already reached that point?
On 3a: I’m pretty skeptical about marginal thought from people who aren’t specialists actually doing anything—unless you’re planning to organise tests or similar. What reason do you have to think LW posts will be useful?
On 3b: It feels like you could cross-apply this logic pretty straightforwardly to argue that LW should have a lot of political discussion; it has many of the same upsides, and also many of the same downsides. The very fact that LW has so much coronavirus coverage already demonstrates that the addictiveness of discussing this topic is comparable to that of politics.
Overall: my current estimate is that there’s about one more month of useful high-focus COVID work to do. Meanwhile, we’ll be shipping the “block covid content from frontpage” option within 24 hours, so the people sick of COVID content can easily tune it out (assuming they’re using LessWrong. Hmm, this is a good reminder that we should probably check in with GreaterWrong peeps about implementing the new tagging features)
Also, if you’re using LessWrong and you haven’t yet turned off the “Coronavirus” section at the top of the page, you already have the option in your recommendation settings to turn that off.
...
Answering other comments in more detail:
I do think #1 probably has the least remaining value for people who for whom it’s a live option to “get supplies and hole-up somewhere for months.”
The two reasons that I think at least some more thought is worthwhile here are:
Some people can’t actually hole up forever, and I think those people benefit from having good, up-to-date models that inform them of how risky things actually are
Some people may be worried about economic/political turmoil. I am more worried about those discussions turning Mindkiller-y, and not quite sure what to do about it. But, I think they are worth figuring-out-how-to-figure-out-without-turning-Mindkillery.
3a: I think there’s plenty of data-aggregation efforts that can be directed by high-context people, that mid-level-researchers can help.
I also think… the counterfactual posts that mid-level generalist researchers are going to do that aren’t about COVID probably also aren’t
3b: Politics isn’t bad because it’s addictive, it’s bad because it’s damaging to epistemics. (I do agree addictiveness means it should be “quarantined” somewhere [har har], but that part’s pretty easy)
On 1: How much time do people need to spend reading & arguing about coronavirus before they hit dramatically diminishing marginal returns? How many LW-ers have already reached that point?
On 3a: I’m pretty skeptical about marginal thought from people who aren’t specialists actually doing anything—unless you’re planning to organise tests or similar. What reason do you have to think LW posts will be useful?
On 3b: It feels like you could cross-apply this logic pretty straightforwardly to argue that LW should have a lot of political discussion; it has many of the same upsides, and also many of the same downsides. The very fact that LW has so much coronavirus coverage already demonstrates that the addictiveness of discussing this topic is comparable to that of politics.
Overall: my current estimate is that there’s about one more month of useful high-focus COVID work to do. Meanwhile, we’ll be shipping the “block covid content from frontpage” option within 24 hours, so the people sick of COVID content can easily tune it out (assuming they’re using LessWrong. Hmm, this is a good reminder that we should probably check in with GreaterWrong peeps about implementing the new tagging features)
Also, if you’re using LessWrong and you haven’t yet turned off the “Coronavirus” section at the top of the page, you already have the option in your recommendation settings to turn that off.
...
Answering other comments in more detail:
I do think #1 probably has the least remaining value for people who for whom it’s a live option to “get supplies and hole-up somewhere for months.”
The two reasons that I think at least some more thought is worthwhile here are:
Some people can’t actually hole up forever, and I think those people benefit from having good, up-to-date models that inform them of how risky things actually are
Some people may be worried about economic/political turmoil. I am more worried about those discussions turning Mindkiller-y, and not quite sure what to do about it. But, I think they are worth figuring-out-how-to-figure-out-without-turning-Mindkillery.
3a: I think there’s plenty of data-aggregation efforts that can be directed by high-context people, that mid-level-researchers can help.
I also think… the counterfactual posts that mid-level generalist researchers are going to do that aren’t about COVID probably also aren’t
3b: Politics isn’t bad because it’s addictive, it’s bad because it’s damaging to epistemics. (I do agree addictiveness means it should be “quarantined” somewhere [har har], but that part’s pretty easy)