One major concern I have with the tail of long COVID is its severity even if/when it does get better after a few years. If I have debilitating long COVID for 3 years and then I recover fully, how will my career be affected, and what kind of person will I be after that? I think it’s reasonably likely that it would cause value drift away from effective altruism (in part because being connected to EA while feeling hopeless about my own future productivity seems psychologically painful, and if I become primarily preoccupied with my own recovery and wellbeing), so under my current values, a 3-year case of debilitating long COVID could cost me about half of my expected future altruistic value, which would be like a ~50% chance of my own death. My inside view, just considering my own psychology and ignoring external evidence of value drift, is that I would very likely get back to EA.
Getting COVID once seems like an around 0.2%-2% chance of something at least this bad for me (based primarily on Matt Bell’s analysis for the high end, with downward adjustments for my good health, Omicron being less severe, and concerns about study bias for severity for the lower end). This is bad enough to me to worry about, but also not so bad that I’m not willing to make tradeoffs for exercise, mental health and productivity generally, based on gathering size, vaccine effectiveness and local case counts, etc.. It’s mild enough that new information seems reasonably likely to update me towards no longer worrying about long COVID, and most of the considerations I’ve come across not accounted for in Matt Bell’s analysis seem to point towards less severe. However, it’s also not clear to me that each time you get COVID is less bad in expectation than earlier times, since immunity wanes, and you will be older and potentially accumulate more harms from COVID, increasing its severity when it does reinfect you.
For those working on short timeline-focused AI safety, long COVID could cost you most of your chance to contribute.
I think I would very likely get back to EA with only about 1 year of long COVID or less. I also think there’s substantial probability that I’d get back to EA no matter how long before I’m mostly recovered, as long as I do recover, at least 20%.
As an aside, naively, psychedelics seem promising as a treatment for brain fog and chronic fatigue from long COVID (whether or not it’s psychosomatic).
One major concern I have with the tail of long COVID is its severity even if/when it does get better after a few years. If I have debilitating long COVID for 3 years and then I recover fully, how will my career be affected, and what kind of person will I be after that? I think it’s reasonably likely that it would cause value drift away from effective altruism (in part because being connected to EA while feeling hopeless about my own future productivity seems psychologically painful, and if I become primarily preoccupied with my own recovery and wellbeing), so under my current values, a 3-year case of debilitating long COVID could cost me about half of my expected future altruistic value, which would be like a ~50% chance of my own death. My inside view, just considering my own psychology and ignoring external evidence of value drift, is that I would very likely get back to EA.
Getting COVID once seems like an around 0.2%-2% chance of something at least this bad for me (based primarily on Matt Bell’s analysis for the high end, with downward adjustments for my good health, Omicron being less severe, and concerns about study bias for severity for the lower end). This is bad enough to me to worry about, but also not so bad that I’m not willing to make tradeoffs for exercise, mental health and productivity generally, based on gathering size, vaccine effectiveness and local case counts, etc.. It’s mild enough that new information seems reasonably likely to update me towards no longer worrying about long COVID, and most of the considerations I’ve come across not accounted for in Matt Bell’s analysis seem to point towards less severe. However, it’s also not clear to me that each time you get COVID is less bad in expectation than earlier times, since immunity wanes, and you will be older and potentially accumulate more harms from COVID, increasing its severity when it does reinfect you.
For those working on short timeline-focused AI safety, long COVID could cost you most of your chance to contribute.
I think I would very likely get back to EA with only about 1 year of long COVID or less. I also think there’s substantial probability that I’d get back to EA no matter how long before I’m mostly recovered, as long as I do recover, at least 20%.
As an aside, naively, psychedelics seem promising as a treatment for brain fog and chronic fatigue from long COVID (whether or not it’s psychosomatic).