I didn’t really see much public discussion early outside of epidemiology Twitter. I’m married to an epidemiologist who stocked our flat with masks in December when there were 59 confirmed cases in Wuhan, and we bought enough tins of food to eat for a few weeks in January, as well as upgrading our work-from-home set up before things sold out. Although I completely failed to make the connection and move my pension out of equities, that doesn’t actually seem to have cost me very much in the long run (for those keeping count, S&P 500 is up 17% year-on-year).
(The biggest very early warning sign, apparently, was that when there were 59 cases China was still claiming there was no person-to-person transmission, which seemed implausible).
I actually am impressed by how well the Lesswrong-sphere did epistemically. People here seem to have been taking COVID seriously before most other people were, but as I’ve tried to explain a bit more above, I’m not sure how much this good this did anyone personally. If the argument is ‘listen to rationalists when they say weird things because they’re more often right when they say weird things that most other people’, then I think I’m on board. If the argument is ‘try explicit rationality, it will make your life noticeably better in measurable ways’, then I’m less convinced, and I think these really are distinct claims.
PS—your links seem to be broken, it’s easy enough to follow them, as you gave full URL’s, just thought I’d let you know.
(Also, I don’t get the S&P being up so much, am generally pretty confused by that, and updated further that I don’t know how to get information out of the stock market.)
I think epistemics is indeed the first metric I care about for LessWrongers. If we had ignored covid or been confident it was not a big deal, I would now feel pretty doomy about us, but I do think we did indeed do quite well on it. I could talk about how we discussed masks, precautions, microcovids, long-lasting respiratory issues, and so on, but I don’t feel like going on at length about it right now. Thanks for saying what you said there.
Now, I don’t think you/others should update on this a ton, and perhaps we can do a survey to check, but my suspicion is that LWers and Rationalists have gotten covid way, way less than the baseline. Like, maybe an order of magnitude less. I know family who got it, I know whole other communities who got it, but I know hundreds of rationalists and I know so few cases among them.
Of my extended circle of rationalist friends, I know of one person who got it, and this was due to them living in a different community with different epistemic standards, and I think my friend fairly viscerally lost some trust in that community for not taking the issue seriously early on. But otherwise, I just know somewhere between 100-200 people who didn’t get it (a bunch of people who were in NY like Jacob, Zvi, etc), people who did basic microcovid calculations, started working from home as soon as the first case of community-transmission was reported in their area, had stockpiled food in February, updated later on that surface-transmission was not a big deal so stopped washing their deliveries, etcetera and so forth.
I also knew a number of people who in February were doing fairly serious research trying to figure out the risk factors for their family, putting out bounties for others to help read the research, and so on, and who made a serious effort to get their family safe.
There have been some private threads in my rationalist social circles where we’ve said “Have people personally caught the virus in this social circle despite taking serious quarantine precautions?” and there’ve been several reports of “I know a friend from school who got it” or “I know a family member who got it”, and there’s been one or two “I got a virus in February before quarantining but the symptoms don’t match”, but overall I just know almost no people who got it, and a lot of people taking quarantine precautions before it was cool. I also know several people who managed to get tests and took them (#SecurityMindset), and who came up negative, as expected.
One of the main reasons I’m not very confident is that I think it’s somewhat badly incentivized for people to report that they personally got it. While it’s positive for the common good, and it lets us know about community rates and so on, I think people expect they will be judged a non-zero amount for getting it, and can also trick themselves with plausible deniability because testing is bad (“Probably it was just some other virus, I don’t know”). So there’s likely some amount of underreporting, correlated with the people who didn’t take it seriously in the first place. (If this weren’t an issue, I would had said more like 500-1500 of my extended friends and acquaintances.)
And, even if it’s true, I have concerns that we acted with appropriate caution in the first few months, but then when more evidence came in and certain things turned out to be unnecessary (e.g. cleaning deliveries, reheating delivery food, etc) I think people stuck those out much too long and some maybe still are.
Nonetheless, my current belief is that rationality did help me and a lot of my 100s of rationalist friends and acquaintances straightforwardly avoid several weeks and months of life lost in expectation, just by doing some basic fermi estimates about the trajectory and consequences of the coronavirus, and reading/writing their info on LessWrong. If you want you and your family to be safe from weird things like this in the future, I think that practicing rationality (and being on LessWrong) is a pretty good way to do this.
(Naturally, being married to an epidemiologist is another good way, but I can only have one spouse, and there are lots of weird problems heading our way from other areas too. Oh for the world where the only problem facing us was pandemics.)
(Also thx, I think I have fixed the links.)
Added: I didn’t see your reply to Jacobian before writing this. Feel free to refer me to parts of that.
Hey Ben, given that you are able to keep track of 100s of friends and acquaintances, and assuming that you also have lots of other friends and acquaintances who are not rationalists but similar in other respects (probably: young; high income and education; jobs that can be transformed to remote jobs if they aren’t already; not too uncomfortable with staying at home because they do not spend every weekend in a soccer stadium or dancing all night?):
How large do you estimate the differential impact of “being rationalist” to be?
I didn’t really see much public discussion early outside of epidemiology Twitter. I’m married to an epidemiologist who stocked our flat with masks in December when there were 59 confirmed cases in Wuhan, and we bought enough tins of food to eat for a few weeks in January, as well as upgrading our work-from-home set up before things sold out. Although I completely failed to make the connection and move my pension out of equities, that doesn’t actually seem to have cost me very much in the long run (for those keeping count, S&P 500 is up 17% year-on-year).
(The biggest very early warning sign, apparently, was that when there were 59 cases China was still claiming there was no person-to-person transmission, which seemed implausible).
I actually am impressed by how well the Lesswrong-sphere did epistemically. People here seem to have been taking COVID seriously before most other people were, but as I’ve tried to explain a bit more above, I’m not sure how much this good this did anyone personally. If the argument is ‘listen to rationalists when they say weird things because they’re more often right when they say weird things that most other people’, then I think I’m on board. If the argument is ‘try explicit rationality, it will make your life noticeably better in measurable ways’, then I’m less convinced, and I think these really are distinct claims.
PS—your links seem to be broken, it’s easy enough to follow them, as you gave full URL’s, just thought I’d let you know.
Good on your spouse! Very impressed.
(Also, I don’t get the S&P being up so much, am generally pretty confused by that, and updated further that I don’t know how to get information out of the stock market.)
I think epistemics is indeed the first metric I care about for LessWrongers. If we had ignored covid or been confident it was not a big deal, I would now feel pretty doomy about us, but I do think we did indeed do quite well on it. I could talk about how we discussed masks, precautions, microcovids, long-lasting respiratory issues, and so on, but I don’t feel like going on at length about it right now. Thanks for saying what you said there.
Now, I don’t think you/others should update on this a ton, and perhaps we can do a survey to check, but my suspicion is that LWers and Rationalists have gotten covid way, way less than the baseline. Like, maybe an order of magnitude less. I know family who got it, I know whole other communities who got it, but I know hundreds of rationalists and I know so few cases among them.
Of my extended circle of rationalist friends, I know of one person who got it, and this was due to them living in a different community with different epistemic standards, and I think my friend fairly viscerally lost some trust in that community for not taking the issue seriously early on. But otherwise, I just know somewhere between 100-200 people who didn’t get it (a bunch of people who were in NY like Jacob, Zvi, etc), people who did basic microcovid calculations, started working from home as soon as the first case of community-transmission was reported in their area, had stockpiled food in February, updated later on that surface-transmission was not a big deal so stopped washing their deliveries, etcetera and so forth.
I also knew a number of people who in February were doing fairly serious research trying to figure out the risk factors for their family, putting out bounties for others to help read the research, and so on, and who made a serious effort to get their family safe.
There have been some private threads in my rationalist social circles where we’ve said “Have people personally caught the virus in this social circle despite taking serious quarantine precautions?” and there’ve been several reports of “I know a friend from school who got it” or “I know a family member who got it”, and there’s been one or two “I got a virus in February before quarantining but the symptoms don’t match”, but overall I just know almost no people who got it, and a lot of people taking quarantine precautions before it was cool. I also know several people who managed to get tests and took them (#SecurityMindset), and who came up negative, as expected.
One of the main reasons I’m not very confident is that I think it’s somewhat badly incentivized for people to report that they personally got it. While it’s positive for the common good, and it lets us know about community rates and so on, I think people expect they will be judged a non-zero amount for getting it, and can also trick themselves with plausible deniability because testing is bad (“Probably it was just some other virus, I don’t know”). So there’s likely some amount of underreporting, correlated with the people who didn’t take it seriously in the first place. (If this weren’t an issue, I would had said more like 500-1500 of my extended friends and acquaintances.)
And, even if it’s true, I have concerns that we acted with appropriate caution in the first few months, but then when more evidence came in and certain things turned out to be unnecessary (e.g. cleaning deliveries, reheating delivery food, etc) I think people stuck those out much too long and some maybe still are.
Nonetheless, my current belief is that rationality did help me and a lot of my 100s of rationalist friends and acquaintances straightforwardly avoid several weeks and months of life lost in expectation, just by doing some basic fermi estimates about the trajectory and consequences of the coronavirus, and reading/writing their info on LessWrong. If you want you and your family to be safe from weird things like this in the future, I think that practicing rationality (and being on LessWrong) is a pretty good way to do this.
(Naturally, being married to an epidemiologist is another good way, but I can only have one spouse, and there are lots of weird problems heading our way from other areas too. Oh for the world where the only problem facing us was pandemics.)
(Also thx, I think I have fixed the links.)
Added: I didn’t see your reply to Jacobian before writing this. Feel free to refer me to parts of that.
Hey Ben, given that you are able to keep track of 100s of friends and acquaintances, and assuming that you also have lots of other friends and acquaintances who are not rationalists but similar in other respects (probably: young; high income and education; jobs that can be transformed to remote jobs if they aren’t already; not too uncomfortable with staying at home because they do not spend every weekend in a soccer stadium or dancing all night?):
How large do you estimate the differential impact of “being rationalist” to be?
It’s a good question. I’ll see if I can write a reply in the next few days...