The only way it makes sense for the LW community to have been on top of this, yet for nCov posting on LW to explode only after Feb 27th, is if most of us were focused on practical prep for nCov and didn’t have time to post about it extensively until that date.
It’s hard for me to see a reason why we’d have such a sharp discontinuity in posting activity if that were the case.
It makes much more sense to say that we as a community just fundamentally didn’t see what a huge deal this was going to be, and start getting obsessed by the implications, until that time.
I’m making two key claims about the state of this community regarding “effective rationality.”
1) Those who did understand the seriousness of this epidemic early were too quiet online to act as leaders for the digital readership. Next time, they should be louder, post more, and drive the message home.
2) Most of the online community, including myself, is not yet able to put two and two together and depends on blaring social norms to decide what to care about. Yet we had all the information and skills we needed to come to the right conclusion earlier than the stock market. We need to ask how we could do better next time.
The only way it makes sense for the LW community to have been on top of this, yet for nCov posting on LW to explode only after Feb 27th, is if most of us were focused on practical prep for nCov and didn’t have time to post about it extensively until that date.
It’s hard for me to see a reason why we’d have such a sharp discontinuity in posting activity if that were the case.
It makes much more sense to say that we as a community just fundamentally didn’t see what a huge deal this was going to be, and start getting obsessed by the implications, until that time.
I’m making two key claims about the state of this community regarding “effective rationality.”
1) Those who did understand the seriousness of this epidemic early were too quiet online to act as leaders for the digital readership. Next time, they should be louder, post more, and drive the message home.
2) Most of the online community, including myself, is not yet able to put two and two together and depends on blaring social norms to decide what to care about. Yet we had all the information and skills we needed to come to the right conclusion earlier than the stock market. We need to ask how we could do better next time.