There is a large set of people who went around, and are still are going around, telling people that “The coronavirus is nothing to worry about” despite the fact that robust evidence has existed for about a month that this virus could result in a global disaster. (Don’t believe me? I wrote a post a month ago about it).
So many people have bought into the “Don’t worry about it” syndrome as a case of pretending to be wise, that I have become more pessimistic about humanity correctly responding to global catastrophic risks in the future. I too used to be one of those people who assumed that the default mode of thinking for an event like this was panic, but I’m starting to think that the real default mode is actually high status people going around saying, “Let’s not be like that ambiguous group over there panicking.”
Now that the stock market has plummeted, from what my perspective appeared entirely predictable given my inside view information, I am also starting to doubt the efficiency of the stock market in response to historically unprecedented events. And this outbreak could be even worse than even some of the most doomy media headlines are saying. If epidemiologists like the one in this article are right, and the death rate ends up being 2-3% (which seems plausible, especially if world infrastructure is strained), then we are looking at a mainline death count of between 60-160 million people dead within about a year. That could mark the first time that world population dropped in over350 years.
This is not just a normal flu. It’s not just a “thing that takes out old people who are going to die anyway.” This could be like economic depression-level stuff, and is a big deal!
Just this Monday evening, a professor at the local medical school emailed someone I know, “I’m sorry you’re so worried about the coronavirus. It seems much less worrying than the flu to me.” (He specializes in rehabilitation medicine, but still!) Pretending to be wise seems right to me, or another way to look at it is through the lens of signaling and counter-signaling:
The truly ignorant don’t panic because they don’t even know about the virus.
People who learn about the virus raise the alarm in part to signal their intelligence and knowledge.
“Experts” counter-signal to separate themselves from the masses by saying “no need to panic”.
People like us counter-counter-signal the “experts” to show we’re even smarter / more rational / more aware of social dynamics.
Here’s another example, which has actually happened 3 times to me already:
The truly ignorant don’t wear masks.
Many people wear masks or encourage others to wear masks in part to signal their knowledge and conscientiousness.
“Experts” counter-signal with “masks don’t do much”, “we should be evidence-based” and “WHO says ‘If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection.’”
I respond by citing actual evidence in the form of a meta-analysis: medical procedure masks combined with hand hygiene achieved RR of .73 while hand hygiene alone had a (not statistically significant) RR of .86.
that I have become more pessimistic about humanity correctly responding to global catastrophic risks in the future
Maybe correctly understanding the underlying social dynamics can help us figure out how to solve or ameliorate the problem, for example by deliberately pushing more people toward the higher part of the counter-signaling ladder (but hopefully not so much that another group forms to counter-signal us).
Now that the stock market has plummeted, from what my perspective appeared entirely predictable given my inside view information, I am also starting to doubt the efficiency of the stock market in response to historically unprecedented events.
I used to be a big believer in stock market efficiency, but I guess Bitcoin taught me that sometimes there just are $20 bills lying on the street. So I actually made a sizable bet against the market two weeks ago.
“Experts” counter-signal to separate themselves from the masses by saying “no need to panic”.
I think the main reason is that the social dynamic is probably favorable to them in the longrun. I worry that there is a higher social risk to being alarmist than being calm. Let me try to illustrate one scenario:
My current estimate is that there is only 15 − 20% probability of a global disaster (>50 million deaths within 1 year) mostly because the case fatality rate could be much lower than the currently reported rate, and previous illnesses like the swine flu became looking much less serious after more data came out. [ETA: I did a lot more research. I think it’s now like 5% risk of this.]
Let’s say that the case fatality rate turns out to be 0.3% or something, and the illness does start looking like an abnormally bad flu, and people stop caring within months. “Experts” face no sort of criticism since they remained calm and were vindicated. People like us sigh in relief, and are perhaps reminded by the “experts” that there was nothing to worry about.
But let’s say that the case fatality rate actually turns out to be 3%, and 50% of the global population is infected. Then it’s a huge deal, global recession looks inevitable. “Experts” say that the disease is worse than anyone could have possibly seen coming, and most people believe them. People like us aren’t really vindicated, because everyone knows that the alarmists who predict doom every year will get it right occasionally.
Like with cryonics, the relatively low but still significant chance of a huge outcome makes people systematically refuse to calculate expected value. It’s not a good feature of human psychology.
When I observe that there’s no fire alarm for AGI, I’m not saying that there’s no possible equivalent of smoke appearing from under a door.
What I’m saying rather is that the smoke under the door is always going to be arguable; it is not going to be a clear and undeniable and absolute sign of fire; and so there is never going to be a fire alarm producing common knowledge that action is now due and socially acceptable.
I think what we’re seeing now is the smoke coming out from under the door and people don’t want to be the first one to cause a scene.
So many people have bought into the “Don’t worry about it” syndrome as a case of pretending to be wise, that I have become more pessimistic about humanity correctly responding to global catastrophic risks in the future.
See also this story which gives another view of what happened:
Most importantly, Italy looked at the example of China, Ms. Zampa said, not as a practical warning, but as a “science fiction movie that had nothing to do with us.” And when the virus exploded, Europe, she said, “looked at us the same way we looked at China.”
BTW can you say something about why you were optimistic before? There are others in this space who are relatively optimistic, like Paul Christiano and Rohin Shah (or at least they were—they haven’t said whether the pandemic has caused an update), and I’d really like to understand their psychology better.
I’ll take the under for any line you sound like you’re going to set. “plummeted”? S&P 500 is down half a percent for the last 30 days and up 12% for the last 6 months. Death rate so far seems well under that for auto collisions. Also, I don’t have to pay if I’m dead and you do have to pay if nothing horrible happens.
I don’t think I’d say “don’t worry about it”, though. Nor would I say that for climate change, government spending, or runaway AI. There are significant unknowns and it could be Very Bad(tm). But I do think it matters _HOW_ you worry about it. Avoid “something must be done and this is something” propositions. Think through actual scenarios and how your behaviors might actually influence them, rather than just making you feel somewhat less guilty about it.
Most of things I can do on the margin won’t mitigate the severity or reduce the probability of a true disaster (enough destruction that global supply chains fully collapse and everyone who can’t move into and defend their farming village dies). Some of them DO make it somewhat more comfortable in temporary or isolated problems.
“plummeted”? S&P 500 is down half a percent for the last 30 days and up 12% for the last 6 months.
The last few days have been much more rapid.
Here’s the chart I have for the last 1 year, and you can definitely spot the recent trend.
Death rate so far seems well under that for auto collisions.
According to this source, “Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year.” That comes out to approximately 0.017% of the global population per year. By contrast, unless I the sources I provided are seriously incorrect, the coronavirus could kill between 0.78% to 2.0% of the global population. That’s nearly two orders of magnitude of a difference.
Think through actual scenarios and how your behaviors might actually influence them, rather than just making you feel somewhat less guilty about it.
The point of my shortform wasn’t that we can do something right now to reduce the risk massively. It was that people seem irrationally poised to dismiss a potential disaster. This is plausibly bad if this behavior shows up in future catastrophes that kill eg. billions of people.
This is plausibly bad if this behavior shows up in future catastrophes that kill eg. billions of people.
It’s bad if this behavior shows up in future catastrophes IFF different behavior was available (knowable and achievable in terms of coordination) that would have reduced or mitigated the disaster. I argue that the world is fragile enough today that different behavior is not achievable far enough in advance of the currently-believable catastrophes to make much of a difference.
If you can’t do anything effective, you may well be better off optimizing happiness experienced both before the disaster occurs and in the potential universes where the disaster doesn’t occur.
It’s bad if this behavior shows up in future catastrophes IFF different behavior was available (knowable and achievable in terms of coordination) that would have reduced or mitigated the disaster.
Are things only bad if we can do things to prevent them? Let’s imagine the following hypothetical situation:
One month ago I identify a meteor on collision course towards Earth and I point out to people that if it hit us (which is not clear, but there is some pretty good evidence) then over a hundred million people will die. People don’t react. Most tell me that it’s nothing to worry about since it hasn’t hit Earth yet and the therefore the deathrate is 0.0%. Today, however, the stock market fell over 3%, following a day in which it fell 3%, and most media outlets are attributing this decline to the fact that the meteor has gotten closer. I go on Lesswrong shortform and say, “Hey guys, this is not good news. I have just learned that the world is so fragile that it looks highly likely we can’t get our shit together to plan for a meteor even we can see it coming more than a month in advance.” Someone tells me that this is only bad IFF different behavior was available that would have reduced or mitigated the disaster. But information was available! I put it in a post and told people about it. And furthermore, I’m just saying that our world is fragile. Things can still be bad even if I don’t point to a specific policy proposal that could have prevented it.
Are things only bad if we can do things to prevent them?
Nope. But we should do things to prevent them only if we can do things to prevent them. That seems tautologically obvious to me.
If you can suggest things that actually will deflect the meteor (or even secure your mine shaft to further your own chances), that don’t require historically-unprecedented authority or coordination, definitely do so!
If the stock market indeed fell due to the coronavirus, and traders at the time misunderstood the severity, I say that I could have given actionable information in the form of “Sell your stock now” or something similar
[ETA: I’m writing this now to cover myself in case people confuse my short form post as financial advice or something.] To be clear, and for the record, I am not saying that I had exceptional foresight, or that I am confident this outbreak will cause a global depression, or that I knew for sure that selling stock was the right thing to do a month ago. All I’m doing is pointing out that if you put together basic facts, then the evidence points to a very serious potential outcome, and I think it would be irrational at this point to place very low probabilities on doomy outcomes like the global population declining this year for the first time in centuries. People seem to be having weird biases that cause them to underestimate the risk. This is worth pointing out, and I pointed it out before.
And how much did you short the market, or otherwise make use of this better-than-median prediction? My whole point is that the prediction isn’t the hard part. The hard part is knowing what actions to take, and to have any confidence that the actions will help.
Is it really necessary that I personally used my knowledge to sell stock? Why is it that important that I actually made money from what I’m saying? I’m simply pointing to a reasonable position given the evidence: you could have seen a potential pandemic coming, and anticipated the stock market falling. Wei Dai says above that he did it. Do I have to be the one who did it?
In any case, I used my foresight to predict that Metaculus’ median estimate would rise, and that seems to have borne out so far.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m saying about how and whether you used knowledge personally. You’re free to value and do what you want. I’m mostly disagreeing with your thesis that “don’t worry about it” is a syndrome or a serious problem to fix. For people that won’t or can’t act on the concern in a way that actually improves the situation, there’s not much value in worrying about it.
Quite. Those with capability to actually prepare or change outcomes definitely SHOULD do so. But not by worrying—by analyzing and acting. Whether bureaucrats and politicians can or will do this is up for debate.
I wish I could believe that politicians and bureaucrats were clever enough to be acting strongly behind the scenes while trying to avoid panic by loudly saying “don’t worry” to the people likely to do more harm than good if they worry. But I suspect not.
There is a large set of people who went around, and are still are going around, telling people that “The coronavirus is nothing to worry about” despite the fact that robust evidence has existed for about a month that this virus could result in a global disaster. (Don’t believe me? I wrote a post a month ago about it).
So many people have bought into the “Don’t worry about it” syndrome as a case of pretending to be wise, that I have become more pessimistic about humanity correctly responding to global catastrophic risks in the future. I too used to be one of those people who assumed that the default mode of thinking for an event like this was panic, but I’m starting to think that the real default mode is actually high status people going around saying, “Let’s not be like that ambiguous group over there panicking.”
Now that the stock market has plummeted, from what my perspective appeared entirely predictable given my inside view information, I am also starting to doubt the efficiency of the stock market in response to historically unprecedented events. And this outbreak could be even worse than even some of the most doomy media headlines are saying. If epidemiologists like the one in this article are right, and the death rate ends up being 2-3% (which seems plausible, especially if world infrastructure is strained), then we are looking at a mainline death count of between 60-160 million people dead within about a year. That could mark the first time that world population dropped in over 350 years.
This is not just a normal flu. It’s not just a “thing that takes out old people who are going to die anyway.” This could be like economic depression-level stuff, and is a big deal!
Just this Monday evening, a professor at the local medical school emailed someone I know, “I’m sorry you’re so worried about the coronavirus. It seems much less worrying than the flu to me.” (He specializes in rehabilitation medicine, but still!) Pretending to be wise seems right to me, or another way to look at it is through the lens of signaling and counter-signaling:
The truly ignorant don’t panic because they don’t even know about the virus.
People who learn about the virus raise the alarm in part to signal their intelligence and knowledge.
“Experts” counter-signal to separate themselves from the masses by saying “no need to panic”.
People like us counter-counter-signal the “experts” to show we’re even smarter / more rational / more aware of social dynamics.
Here’s another example, which has actually happened 3 times to me already:
The truly ignorant don’t wear masks.
Many people wear masks or encourage others to wear masks in part to signal their knowledge and conscientiousness.
“Experts” counter-signal with “masks don’t do much”, “we should be evidence-based” and “WHO says ‘If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection.’”
I respond by citing actual evidence in the form of a meta-analysis: medical procedure masks combined with hand hygiene achieved RR of .73 while hand hygiene alone had a (not statistically significant) RR of .86.
Maybe correctly understanding the underlying social dynamics can help us figure out how to solve or ameliorate the problem, for example by deliberately pushing more people toward the higher part of the counter-signaling ladder (but hopefully not so much that another group forms to counter-signal us).
I used to be a big believer in stock market efficiency, but I guess Bitcoin taught me that sometimes there just are $20 bills lying on the street. So I actually made a sizable bet against the market two weeks ago.
I think the main reason is that the social dynamic is probably favorable to them in the longrun. I worry that there is a higher social risk to being alarmist than being calm. Let me try to illustrate one scenario:
My current estimate is that there is only 15 − 20% probability of a global disaster (>50 million deaths within 1 year) mostly because the case fatality rate could be much lower than the currently reported rate, and previous illnesses like the swine flu became looking much less serious after more data came out. [ETA: I did a lot more research. I think it’s now like 5% risk of this.]
Let’s say that the case fatality rate turns out to be 0.3% or something, and the illness does start looking like an abnormally bad flu, and people stop caring within months. “Experts” face no sort of criticism since they remained calm and were vindicated. People like us sigh in relief, and are perhaps reminded by the “experts” that there was nothing to worry about.
But let’s say that the case fatality rate actually turns out to be 3%, and 50% of the global population is infected. Then it’s a huge deal, global recession looks inevitable. “Experts” say that the disease is worse than anyone could have possibly seen coming, and most people believe them. People like us aren’t really vindicated, because everyone knows that the alarmists who predict doom every year will get it right occasionally.
Like with cryonics, the relatively low but still significant chance of a huge outcome makes people systematically refuse to calculate expected value. It’s not a good feature of human psychology.
I’m reminded of the fire alarm essay
I think what we’re seeing now is the smoke coming out from under the door and people don’t want to be the first one to cause a scene.
I’ve moved in the opposite direction. Please share your research?
See also this story which gives another view of what happened:
BTW can you say something about why you were optimistic before? There are others in this space who are relatively optimistic, like Paul Christiano and Rohin Shah (or at least they were—they haven’t said whether the pandemic has caused an update), and I’d really like to understand their psychology better.
I’ll take the under for any line you sound like you’re going to set. “plummeted”? S&P 500 is down half a percent for the last 30 days and up 12% for the last 6 months. Death rate so far seems well under that for auto collisions. Also, I don’t have to pay if I’m dead and you do have to pay if nothing horrible happens.
I don’t think I’d say “don’t worry about it”, though. Nor would I say that for climate change, government spending, or runaway AI. There are significant unknowns and it could be Very Bad(tm). But I do think it matters _HOW_ you worry about it. Avoid “something must be done and this is something” propositions. Think through actual scenarios and how your behaviors might actually influence them, rather than just making you feel somewhat less guilty about it.
Most of things I can do on the margin won’t mitigate the severity or reduce the probability of a true disaster (enough destruction that global supply chains fully collapse and everyone who can’t move into and defend their farming village dies). Some of them DO make it somewhat more comfortable in temporary or isolated problems.
The last few days have been much more rapid.
Here’s the chart I have for the last 1 year, and you can definitely spot the recent trend.
According to this source, “Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year.” That comes out to approximately 0.017% of the global population per year. By contrast, unless I the sources I provided are seriously incorrect, the coronavirus could kill between 0.78% to 2.0% of the global population. That’s nearly two orders of magnitude of a difference.
The point of my shortform wasn’t that we can do something right now to reduce the risk massively. It was that people seem irrationally poised to dismiss a potential disaster. This is plausibly bad if this behavior shows up in future catastrophes that kill eg. billions of people.
It’s bad if this behavior shows up in future catastrophes IFF different behavior was available (knowable and achievable in terms of coordination) that would have reduced or mitigated the disaster. I argue that the world is fragile enough today that different behavior is not achievable far enough in advance of the currently-believable catastrophes to make much of a difference.
If you can’t do anything effective, you may well be better off optimizing happiness experienced both before the disaster occurs and in the potential universes where the disaster doesn’t occur.
Are things only bad if we can do things to prevent them? Let’s imagine the following hypothetical situation:
One month ago I identify a meteor on collision course towards Earth and I point out to people that if it hit us (which is not clear, but there is some pretty good evidence) then over a hundred million people will die. People don’t react. Most tell me that it’s nothing to worry about since it hasn’t hit Earth yet and the therefore the deathrate is 0.0%. Today, however, the stock market fell over 3%, following a day in which it fell 3%, and most media outlets are attributing this decline to the fact that the meteor has gotten closer. I go on Lesswrong shortform and say, “Hey guys, this is not good news. I have just learned that the world is so fragile that it looks highly likely we can’t get our shit together to plan for a meteor even we can see it coming more than a month in advance.” Someone tells me that this is only bad IFF different behavior was available that would have reduced or mitigated the disaster. But information was available! I put it in a post and told people about it. And furthermore, I’m just saying that our world is fragile. Things can still be bad even if I don’t point to a specific policy proposal that could have prevented it.
Nope. But we should do things to prevent them only if we can do things to prevent them. That seems tautologically obvious to me.
If you can suggest things that actually will deflect the meteor (or even secure your mine shaft to further your own chances), that don’t require historically-unprecedented authority or coordination, definitely do so!
If the stock market indeed fell due to the coronavirus, and traders at the time misunderstood the severity, I say that I could have given actionable information in the form of “Sell your stock now” or something similar
If you knew that then, it was actionable. If you know it now, and other traders also do, it’s not.
[ETA: I’m writing this now to cover myself in case people confuse my short form post as financial advice or something.] To be clear, and for the record, I am not saying that I had exceptional foresight, or that I am confident this outbreak will cause a global depression, or that I knew for sure that selling stock was the right thing to do a month ago. All I’m doing is pointing out that if you put together basic facts, then the evidence points to a very serious potential outcome, and I think it would be irrational at this point to place very low probabilities on doomy outcomes like the global population declining this year for the first time in centuries. People seem to be having weird biases that cause them to underestimate the risk. This is worth pointing out, and I pointed it out before.
As I said, I wrote a post about the risk about a month ago...
And how much did you short the market, or otherwise make use of this better-than-median prediction? My whole point is that the prediction isn’t the hard part. The hard part is knowing what actions to take, and to have any confidence that the actions will help.
Is it really necessary that I personally used my knowledge to sell stock? Why is it that important that I actually made money from what I’m saying? I’m simply pointing to a reasonable position given the evidence: you could have seen a potential pandemic coming, and anticipated the stock market falling. Wei Dai says above that he did it. Do I have to be the one who did it?
In any case, I used my foresight to predict that Metaculus’ median estimate would rise, and that seems to have borne out so far.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m saying about how and whether you used knowledge personally. You’re free to value and do what you want. I’m mostly disagreeing with your thesis that “don’t worry about it” is a syndrome or a serious problem to fix. For people that won’t or can’t act on the concern in a way that actually improves the situation, there’s not much value in worrying about it.
That’s ok for most people. I can hope that bureaucrats, expert advisers, politicians and eg. Trump’s internal staff don’t share the same attitude.
Quite. Those with capability to actually prepare or change outcomes definitely SHOULD do so. But not by worrying—by analyzing and acting. Whether bureaucrats and politicians can or will do this is up for debate.
I wish I could believe that politicians and bureaucrats were clever enough to be acting strongly behind the scenes while trying to avoid panic by loudly saying “don’t worry” to the people likely to do more harm than good if they worry. But I suspect not.
I believe the relevant phrase is “aged like milk”.