I think you and I have a very different impression of the pandemic then. No pandemic in history was more closely monitored. We did more to try to control this pandemic than any health event ever. Also, humanity didn’t literally go extinct, as is claimed for alignment.
Here is a quick drawing I did to communicate my point, and in particular to show the chasm between “best pandemic-response so far” and “doing everything we can”.
I believe with quite high confidence that with a bit of test&trace and some challenge trials, this pandemic could’ve been over in 3-5 months, instead of over 2 years. Every part of this seems simple to me (the mRNA vaccines were invented in <48 hours in January, challenge trials require only like 100s of people for ~2 weeks to get confident results, I think a company with the logistical competence of Amazon could’ve gotten a country vaccinated in just a couple of months, etc). So it looks to me like we’re very very far from “Doing Everything We Can”, so even if as you say we did better than ever before, we still didn’t get a passing grade according to me.
Recap: I’m making this point because you said you’re expecting a world where we’re doing everything we can, I gave the counterexample of Covid for our collective competence, and you said you thought we did better than any other pandemic. This isn’t a crux for me because there were lots of major easy wins we could’ve had which we did not. Our response looks to me like “not getting a passing grade” with the resources we had, and not really using most of the resources we had, while scoring lots of own-goals in the process.
I think you and I have a very different impression of the pandemic then. No pandemic in history was more closely monitored. We did more to try to control this pandemic than any health event ever. Also, humanity didn’t literally go extinct, as is claimed for alignment.
Here is a quick drawing I did to communicate my point, and in particular to show the chasm between “best pandemic-response so far” and “doing everything we can”.
I believe with quite high confidence that with a bit of test&trace and some challenge trials, this pandemic could’ve been over in 3-5 months, instead of over 2 years. Every part of this seems simple to me (the mRNA vaccines were invented in <48 hours in January, challenge trials require only like 100s of people for ~2 weeks to get confident results, I think a company with the logistical competence of Amazon could’ve gotten a country vaccinated in just a couple of months, etc). So it looks to me like we’re very very far from “Doing Everything We Can”, so even if as you say we did better than ever before, we still didn’t get a passing grade according to me.
Recap: I’m making this point because you said you’re expecting a world where we’re doing everything we can, I gave the counterexample of Covid for our collective competence, and you said you thought we did better than any other pandemic. This isn’t a crux for me because there were lots of major easy wins we could’ve had which we did not. Our response looks to me like “not getting a passing grade” with the resources we had, and not really using most of the resources we had, while scoring lots of own-goals in the process.