My current sense is yes, though I really don’t think it’s obvious and think that this is a pretty high-stakes call.
My sense is that work in a crisis generally has really high-leverage, and I think there are reasonable arguments that this is the biggest global crisis since World War 2, at least in terms of how the world will be shaped by it, and how much is at stake (you don’t see a 30% drop in the stock market that often, and the number of people who will die is quite plausibly more than WW1). I do indeed think that during World War 2 it would have been reasonable for many people on LessWrong to participate in the war effort, and think the same is true in this case. I do think that on an all-things-considered view this is likely going to be much less big of a deal than World War 2, but I think the basic argument is plausible enough that it seems worth betting quite a bit on.
I also think this topic is a much better fit than usual political and news-related topics for LessWrong, because we are ultimately dealing with a “Player vs. Environment” type of threat, and not a “Player vs. Player” type of threat. I think in cases like this, our tools for epistemic rationality and general scientific inquiry are in a good place to shine, and there is less risk of us getting sucked into an adversarial epistemic environment, because the questions to be asked and answered are primarily about pretty stable ground-truths.
The second argument is tractability. I think it’s pretty key that people on LessWrong noticed that this was important much earlier than the vast majority of the world, and even the vast majority of the world’s intellectual elite. I think this made LessWrong a natural Schelling point of attention, and I don’t think it’s obvious that a separate Schelling point would emerge if we were to deemphasize coronavirus related topics on LessWrong. This makes me think that LessWrong has at least some responsibility in not damaging the communication around this topic by suddenly deemphasizing the topic, at least not without creating a separate hub where discussion can coalesce instead.
The third argument is that taking a global perspective, I think there is a good argument that you should help out in crises like this, even if working on them is not directly related to your goals, because many other players in the world care a lot about it, and will be deeply grateful for your assistance. I think from a perspective of cooperating with other powers in the world, it’s good form to help out with this as much as possible, given the overwhelming importance other people put on this.
The fourth argument is just relevance to all of our wellbeing. I don’t think we are at the stage where we can just rely on local governments or standard expert hierarchies to give us advice and tell us what to do. Most governments and municipalities have not yet announced safety measures that seem sufficient to me, and so it’s still up to the individual and small communities like LessWrong to figure out what the appropriate level of safety is, and I sadly expect this to be the case for a while.
Traffic is up 30% from last month (which is very significant given that usually most of LessWrong’s traffic is driven by the large number of distributed links strewn all around the internet, and so is very stable and already quite high).
We also are being linked from a lot of places. A lot of Facebook links and a lot of Twitter links. I am not sure how to translate Google Sheets visitor numbers into traffic, but we’ve had pretty consistently 70+ people concurrently on the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, which is more than I’ve seen on basically any other Google Doc linked, and LessWrong, which usually has around 120k unique users a month usually gets around 40 concurrent users. So the additional traffic here seems pretty significant.
I have also heard of at least one higher up place in the UK government which said that they were actively following LessWrong to keep track of the Coronavirus stuff, though this is now a second-degree rumor, so treat this with some salt.
My sense is also that there is a broader ecosystem of people around LessWrong and the rationality community (which includes the EA and SSC communities), which ended up putting a lot of their coronavirus related thoughts here, and who are referring a lot to our content.
I don’t think any of this indicates overwhelming amounts of attention on us (which I am mostly glad for), but I do think it indicates attention from a significant subset of smart and informed people that I care a lot about.
I do indeed think that during World War 2 it would have been reasonable for many people on LessWrong to participate in the war effort, and think the same is true in this case.
It feels to me like there are three reasons this could be the case:
Counterfactual impact on the war; if the LWers of the time chose to act instead of not act, they shift the probabilities of who ends up winning / what collateral damage happens over the course of the resolution.
Social obligation; if LW conscientiously objected from doing its part, or thought other things were more important, this would be terrible PR / weaken LW’s position after the fact. (Or maybe the reason to be an EA and the reason to sign up to fight in the war have a common cause that’s hard to turn off.)
Ability to impact other things that happen as a result of war participation; sign up, be excellent, get promoted, and then set up good systems that last after the crisis. (This looks like the standard argument for being in public service, except argues it’s an unusually good time to enter it.)
Is this basically what you had in mind, or is there something else I’m missing?
Yep, I think these three perspectives roughly cover why I think it might have been a good idea. I also think that a good number of people we now think of as having had a large impact on x-risk and who were kind of similar to rationalists (e.g. some of the Manhattan Project scientists) had that impact because they participated in that effort (and the followup cold-war period) for roughly the three reasons you cite.
It seems important to note that, from my reading of the Making of the Atomic Bomb, the biggest motivator for most of the physicists was the fear that the Nazis would get to the bomb first. This is technically under Vaniver’s first point above, but it has a different tenor: it wasn’t a dispassionate assessment of counterfactual impact, it was visceral fear.
Relevant quote:
Patriotism contributed to many decisions, but a deeper motive among the physicists, by the measure of their statements, was fear—fear of German triumph, fear of a thousand-year Reich made invulnerable with atomic bombs. And deeper even than fear was fatalism. The bomb was latent in nature as a genome is latent in flesh. Any nation might learn to command its expression. The race was therefore not merely against Germany. As Roosevelt apparently sensed, the race was against time. (Rhodes, Chapter 12)
I’m not sure what the relevance to the current corona situation is.
The fourth argument is just relevance to all of our wellbeing.
My intuition is that from here on out it’s going to be hard to find steps we can take that will have even a moderate impact on our wellbeing.
1) We know that we need to avoid contact with others, so I assume we’ll all being staying home. Given that we’re at home isolated from others, is there much left to do? Things that go beyond common sense and standard advice, like opening packages outside and disinfecting them?
2) Eventually we’ll face the question of when it is safe to end the quarantine. A conservative answer to that question is probably going to be “a few months after everyone else does”. Maybe by studying it we’ll learn that it’s safe to end quarantine after two months instead of three, but that doesn’t seem like it’s a particularly impactful use of time.
3) Sadly, we can probably expect some members of our community to be infected. Or at least the loved ones of some members of our community. So then, the question of how to deal with infection is inevitably going to present itself.
I feel torn about whether that will be the most important thing to focus on when it does. On the one hand, when you shut up and multiply, I’m pretty sure that xrisk is many, many times more important. On the other, I really care about people in this community. I’ve always felt torn about this question of how much extra moral weight to give to those who I care about.
Regardless, I feel pessimistic that there will be much room for us to offer useful advice here. The big question is probably going to be whether you’ll be able to navigate through the swarms in the hospitals to get access to treatment, and it seems unlikely that we’ll be able assist with that.
Fortunately our community tends to be on the young side, and we are probably all quarantined by now, so we’ll at least be good in a relative sense.
I feel torn about whether that will be the most important thing to focus on when it does. On the one hand, when you shut up and multiply, I’m pretty sure that xrisk is many, many times more important. On the other, I really care about people in this community. I’ve always felt torn about this question of how much extra moral weight to give to those who I care about.
The value of people working on x-risk, from an x-risk perspective, is quite high. So while I sympathize with the conflict in broader terms, in this case, it just seems pretty obvious to me that I care quite a lot about protecting the people in this community, from both a personal and an altruistic perspective.
My intuition is that from here on out it’s going to be hard to find steps we can take that will have even a moderate impact on our wellbeing.
It’s going to be hard now but it was easy before now?
I think the site regulars have a comparative advantage in thinking (and writing about those thoughts) and that we’ll make (relatively) good judgements about how much attention we should be paying to the pandemic.
I think it’s just as likely that we will continue to help as much as we have already, which I think has been an effective impact. A lot of this ‘work’ seems broadly useful too, beyond just this current crisis.
My current sense is yes, though I really don’t think it’s obvious and think that this is a pretty high-stakes call.
My sense is that work in a crisis generally has really high-leverage, and I think there are reasonable arguments that this is the biggest global crisis since World War 2, at least in terms of how the world will be shaped by it, and how much is at stake (you don’t see a 30% drop in the stock market that often, and the number of people who will die is quite plausibly more than WW1). I do indeed think that during World War 2 it would have been reasonable for many people on LessWrong to participate in the war effort, and think the same is true in this case. I do think that on an all-things-considered view this is likely going to be much less big of a deal than World War 2, but I think the basic argument is plausible enough that it seems worth betting quite a bit on.
I also think this topic is a much better fit than usual political and news-related topics for LessWrong, because we are ultimately dealing with a “Player vs. Environment” type of threat, and not a “Player vs. Player” type of threat. I think in cases like this, our tools for epistemic rationality and general scientific inquiry are in a good place to shine, and there is less risk of us getting sucked into an adversarial epistemic environment, because the questions to be asked and answered are primarily about pretty stable ground-truths.
The second argument is tractability. I think it’s pretty key that people on LessWrong noticed that this was important much earlier than the vast majority of the world, and even the vast majority of the world’s intellectual elite. I think this made LessWrong a natural Schelling point of attention, and I don’t think it’s obvious that a separate Schelling point would emerge if we were to deemphasize coronavirus related topics on LessWrong. This makes me think that LessWrong has at least some responsibility in not damaging the communication around this topic by suddenly deemphasizing the topic, at least not without creating a separate hub where discussion can coalesce instead.
The third argument is that taking a global perspective, I think there is a good argument that you should help out in crises like this, even if working on them is not directly related to your goals, because many other players in the world care a lot about it, and will be deeply grateful for your assistance. I think from a perspective of cooperating with other powers in the world, it’s good form to help out with this as much as possible, given the overwhelming importance other people put on this.
The fourth argument is just relevance to all of our wellbeing. I don’t think we are at the stage where we can just rely on local governments or standard expert hierarchies to give us advice and tell us what to do. Most governments and municipalities have not yet announced safety measures that seem sufficient to me, and so it’s still up to the individual and small communities like LessWrong to figure out what the appropriate level of safety is, and I sadly expect this to be the case for a while.
Outsiders are paying attention to our coverage of the coronavirus? To a significant degree?
Traffic is up 30% from last month (which is very significant given that usually most of LessWrong’s traffic is driven by the large number of distributed links strewn all around the internet, and so is very stable and already quite high).
We also are being linked from a lot of places. A lot of Facebook links and a lot of Twitter links. I am not sure how to translate Google Sheets visitor numbers into traffic, but we’ve had pretty consistently 70+ people concurrently on the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, which is more than I’ve seen on basically any other Google Doc linked, and LessWrong, which usually has around 120k unique users a month usually gets around 40 concurrent users. So the additional traffic here seems pretty significant.
I have also heard of at least one higher up place in the UK government which said that they were actively following LessWrong to keep track of the Coronavirus stuff, though this is now a second-degree rumor, so treat this with some salt.
My sense is also that there is a broader ecosystem of people around LessWrong and the rationality community (which includes the EA and SSC communities), which ended up putting a lot of their coronavirus related thoughts here, and who are referring a lot to our content.
I don’t think any of this indicates overwhelming amounts of attention on us (which I am mostly glad for), but I do think it indicates attention from a significant subset of smart and informed people that I care a lot about.
It feels to me like there are three reasons this could be the case:
Counterfactual impact on the war; if the LWers of the time chose to act instead of not act, they shift the probabilities of who ends up winning / what collateral damage happens over the course of the resolution.
Social obligation; if LW conscientiously objected from doing its part, or thought other things were more important, this would be terrible PR / weaken LW’s position after the fact. (Or maybe the reason to be an EA and the reason to sign up to fight in the war have a common cause that’s hard to turn off.)
Ability to impact other things that happen as a result of war participation; sign up, be excellent, get promoted, and then set up good systems that last after the crisis. (This looks like the standard argument for being in public service, except argues it’s an unusually good time to enter it.)
Is this basically what you had in mind, or is there something else I’m missing?
Yep, I think these three perspectives roughly cover why I think it might have been a good idea. I also think that a good number of people we now think of as having had a large impact on x-risk and who were kind of similar to rationalists (e.g. some of the Manhattan Project scientists) had that impact because they participated in that effort (and the followup cold-war period) for roughly the three reasons you cite.
It seems important to note that, from my reading of the Making of the Atomic Bomb, the biggest motivator for most of the physicists was the fear that the Nazis would get to the bomb first. This is technically under Vaniver’s first point above, but it has a different tenor: it wasn’t a dispassionate assessment of counterfactual impact, it was visceral fear.
Relevant quote:
I’m not sure what the relevance to the current corona situation is.
I’m curious about the 3rd argument. I’m curious about why you think it is likely that significant players will notice the contribution of Less Wrong?
My intuition is that from here on out it’s going to be hard to find steps we can take that will have even a moderate impact on our wellbeing.
1) We know that we need to avoid contact with others, so I assume we’ll all being staying home. Given that we’re at home isolated from others, is there much left to do? Things that go beyond common sense and standard advice, like opening packages outside and disinfecting them?
2) Eventually we’ll face the question of when it is safe to end the quarantine. A conservative answer to that question is probably going to be “a few months after everyone else does”. Maybe by studying it we’ll learn that it’s safe to end quarantine after two months instead of three, but that doesn’t seem like it’s a particularly impactful use of time.
3) Sadly, we can probably expect some members of our community to be infected. Or at least the loved ones of some members of our community. So then, the question of how to deal with infection is inevitably going to present itself.
I feel torn about whether that will be the most important thing to focus on when it does. On the one hand, when you shut up and multiply, I’m pretty sure that xrisk is many, many times more important. On the other, I really care about people in this community. I’ve always felt torn about this question of how much extra moral weight to give to those who I care about.
Regardless, I feel pessimistic that there will be much room for us to offer useful advice here. The big question is probably going to be whether you’ll be able to navigate through the swarms in the hospitals to get access to treatment, and it seems unlikely that we’ll be able assist with that.
Fortunately our community tends to be on the young side, and we are probably all quarantined by now, so we’ll at least be good in a relative sense.
The value of people working on x-risk, from an x-risk perspective, is quite high. So while I sympathize with the conflict in broader terms, in this case, it just seems pretty obvious to me that I care quite a lot about protecting the people in this community, from both a personal and an altruistic perspective.
It’s going to be hard now but it was easy before now?
I think the site regulars have a comparative advantage in thinking (and writing about those thoughts) and that we’ll make (relatively) good judgements about how much attention we should be paying to the pandemic.
I think it’s just as likely that we will continue to help as much as we have already, which I think has been an effective impact. A lot of this ‘work’ seems broadly useful too, beyond just this current crisis.
This is a good answer.