It sounds like you were relying pretty heavily on the amount of alarm in the media as one of your main indicators of how much to worry (while using an interpretive filter). What you took from the swine flu example is that the media tends to be too alarmist, but you also/instead could’ve concluded that the media is not very good at risk assessment (and maybe isn’t even trying that hard to do good risk assessments). The line of reasoning that this new virus is probably less dangerous than swine flu because it’s less media hype depends on the assumption that the level of alarm in the media is strongly correlated with the level of danger (with a systematic bias towards exaggerated alarm); I think the correlation between media alarm and danger is not that strong in which case this argument doesn’t go through. So, the media isn’t that functional as an alarm, and you need some other approach for figuring out if there’s a big problem. Really bad pandemics are possible, and the amount of alarm in the media isn’t that strong an indicator of whether a new virus is likely to turn into a bad pandemic, so how could I tell if one is coming? You maybe could still use the media as an initial alert: the media is alarmed about this thing, and it is the sort of thing that has the potential to be really bad, so I’ll take that as my cue to put effort into understanding what’s going on (via some other approach that doesn’t rely on the media). Or, you could try to be plugged into other information environments which are more reliable, such that you’d trust them more if they raised an alarm. I benefited from hearing things like this and this, and similar things by word-of-mouth & ephemeral Facebook posts.
It helps to think in terms of probabilities & expected values. Scott wrote about this in some depth in A Failure, But Not of Prediction. For example: If swine flu turned out to be unimportant after the media hyped it up, that gives reason to think that the probability that the next media-hyped virus will be really bad is more like 25% than 75%. But it doesn’t give much reason to think that the probability is more like 1% than 25% - not enough data for that. And if you see the probability that a novel coronavirus will turn into a really bad pandemic as being as high as 25%, then it’s worth investigating & preparing for.
It sounds like a big part of your lack of concern is that you thought the illness wasn’t that serious, so that even if the virus became widespread it wouldn’t affect you much. My memory is that this is different from the reasoning of most people who weren’t very concerned, as it was more common to think that the virus wouldn’t become widespread. So (a) this mismatch seems like a clue that something might be up, and worth looking into. And (b) I think there were reasons to think that the virus would be a big deal if it became widespread, e.g. the lives of people in Wuhan had changed in pretty drastic ways as a result of the virus.
It sounds like you were relying pretty heavily on the amount of alarm in the media as one of your main indicators of how much to worry (while using an interpretive filter). What you took from the swine flu example is that the media tends to be too alarmist, but you also/instead could’ve concluded that the media is not very good at risk assessment (and maybe isn’t even trying that hard to do good risk assessments). The line of reasoning that this new virus is probably less dangerous than swine flu because it’s less media hype depends on the assumption that the level of alarm in the media is strongly correlated with the level of danger (with a systematic bias towards exaggerated alarm); I think the correlation between media alarm and danger is not that strong in which case this argument doesn’t go through. So, the media isn’t that functional as an alarm, and you need some other approach for figuring out if there’s a big problem. Really bad pandemics are possible, and the amount of alarm in the media isn’t that strong an indicator of whether a new virus is likely to turn into a bad pandemic, so how could I tell if one is coming? You maybe could still use the media as an initial alert: the media is alarmed about this thing, and it is the sort of thing that has the potential to be really bad, so I’ll take that as my cue to put effort into understanding what’s going on (via some other approach that doesn’t rely on the media). Or, you could try to be plugged into other information environments which are more reliable, such that you’d trust them more if they raised an alarm. I benefited from hearing things like this and this, and similar things by word-of-mouth & ephemeral Facebook posts.
It helps to think in terms of probabilities & expected values. Scott wrote about this in some depth in A Failure, But Not of Prediction. For example: If swine flu turned out to be unimportant after the media hyped it up, that gives reason to think that the probability that the next media-hyped virus will be really bad is more like 25% than 75%. But it doesn’t give much reason to think that the probability is more like 1% than 25% - not enough data for that. And if you see the probability that a novel coronavirus will turn into a really bad pandemic as being as high as 25%, then it’s worth investigating & preparing for.
It sounds like a big part of your lack of concern is that you thought the illness wasn’t that serious, so that even if the virus became widespread it wouldn’t affect you much. My memory is that this is different from the reasoning of most people who weren’t very concerned, as it was more common to think that the virus wouldn’t become widespread. So (a) this mismatch seems like a clue that something might be up, and worth looking into. And (b) I think there were reasons to think that the virus would be a big deal if it became widespread, e.g. the lives of people in Wuhan had changed in pretty drastic ways as a result of the virus.