Note that a) some group houses just did this, b) a major answer for why people didn’t do particularly novel things with microcovid was “by the time it came out, people were pretty exhausted out from covid negotiation, and doing whatever default thing was suggested was easier.”
a) Do you have a sense for the proportion of group houses that did it? And the proportion of group houses that seriously considered it? (My guess would be that 10-20% did it, and an additional 10% considered it.)
Re: b) That does seem like a good chunk of the explanation, thanks. I do expect the Pigouvian tax would have been a better policy even prior to microcovid.org existing, given how much knowledge about COVID people had, so I’m still wondering why it wasn’t considered even before microcovid.org existed.
(I remember doing explicit risk calculations back in April / May 2020, and I think there’s a good chance we would have implemented a similar Pigouvian tax system even without microcovid existing, with worse risk estimates.)
I actually guess even fewer houses than you’re thinking did it (I think I only know if like 1-3).
In my own house, where I think we could have come up with the Pigouvian tax, I think when we did all our initial negotiations in April, I think the thinking was “hunker down for a month while we wait to see how bad Covid actually is, to avoid tail risks of badness, and then re-evaluate” but then it turned out by the time we got to the “re-evaluate” step, people were burned out on negotiation.
Note that a) some group houses just did this, b) a major answer for why people didn’t do particularly novel things with microcovid was “by the time it came out, people were pretty exhausted out from covid negotiation, and doing whatever default thing was suggested was easier.”
a) Do you have a sense for the proportion of group houses that did it? And the proportion of group houses that seriously considered it? (My guess would be that 10-20% did it, and an additional 10% considered it.)
Re: b) That does seem like a good chunk of the explanation, thanks. I do expect the Pigouvian tax would have been a better policy even prior to microcovid.org existing, given how much knowledge about COVID people had, so I’m still wondering why it wasn’t considered even before microcovid.org existed.
(I remember doing explicit risk calculations back in April / May 2020, and I think there’s a good chance we would have implemented a similar Pigouvian tax system even without microcovid existing, with worse risk estimates.)
I actually guess even fewer houses than you’re thinking did it (I think I only know if like 1-3).
In my own house, where I think we could have come up with the Pigouvian tax, I think when we did all our initial negotiations in April, I think the thinking was “hunker down for a month while we wait to see how bad Covid actually is, to avoid tail risks of badness, and then re-evaluate” but then it turned out by the time we got to the “re-evaluate” step, people were burned out on negotiation.
(So far we have 3 -- my house, Event Horizon, and Mark Xu’s house, assuming that’s not also Event Horizon.)
Mark Xu’s house is not EH.