The question in this post is “was Less Wrong a good alarm bell” and in my opinion only one of those links constitute alarm bells—the one on EAForums. Acknowledging/discussing the existence of the coronavirus is vastly different from acknowledging/discussing the risk of the coronavirus.
“Will ncov survivors suffer lasting disability at a high rate?” is a medical question that makes no implication about broader covid risk.
“Some quick notes on hand-hygene” does not mention the coronavirus in the main post (but to be fair does have a coronavirus tag). It does make an offhand reference implying the coronavirus could be a “maybe pandemic” but this isn’t a concrete estimation of actual risk
“Concerning the recent 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak” is a fantastic post that makes concrete claims like it now seems reasonable to assign a non-negligible probability (>2%) to the proposition that the current outbreak will result in a global disaster (>50 million deaths resulting from the pathogen within 1 year). Per one of the comments, this was consistent with Metaculus.
Overall, I’d say that LessWrong was about on par with “having lunch conversations with Chinese-American coworkers” in terms of serving as an actual alarm bell. Moreover, in the case that we admit a weaker standard for what an alarm bell is, it’s worth noting that we still don’t really beat the stock market—because it didrespond to the coronavirus back in January. It just didn’t respond strongly enough to convey an actual broad concrete risk.
I also would be somewhat hesitant about saying that the markets crashed on February 20th. The market continued crashing for quite a while, and this is when Wei Dai wrote some comments about his investment strategy, which, if you had followed it at that point would have still made you a good amount of money.
As someone who pretty regularly follows Less Wrong, I missed Wei Dai’s investment strategy which makes me lean in the direction that most casual readers wouldn’t have benefitted from it. The linked comment itself also doesn’t have very strong valence, stating ” The upshot is that maybe it’s not too late to short the markets.” Low valence open-thread comments don’t really sound like alarm bells to me. Wei Dai has also acknowledged that this was a missed opportunity on EAforums.
Moreover, there was also an extremely short actionable window. On February 28th, the stock market saw a swift >5% bear market rally before the second leg of the crash which temporarily undid half the losses. Unless your confidence in “maybe its not too late to short the markets” was strong enough to weather through this, you would’ve probably lost money. This almost happened to me—I sold the Thursday morning after Wei Dai’s comment and bought back in Monday, netting a very meek ~3% gain.
“Will ncov survivors suffer lasting disability at a high rate?” is a medical question that makes no implication about broader covid risk.
This seems wrong to me, in part because the hypothesis that there could be widespread negative effects even for survivors was a compelling reason for 1) me to take it seriously (at the time, I estimated my disability risk was something like 5x the importance of my mortality risk) and 2) people to expect spread to be bad in a way that shows up in many indicators (like GDP).
Fair enough. When I was thinking about “broad covid risk”, I was referring more to geographical breadth—something more along the lines of “is this gonna be a big uncontained pandemic” than “is coronavirus a bad thing to get.” I grant that the latter could have been a valid consideration (after all, it was with H1N1) and that claiming that it makes “no implication” about broader covid risk was a mis-statement on my part.
That being said, I wouldn’t really consider it an alarm bell (and when I read it, it wasn’t one for me). The top answer, Connor Flexman, states:
Tl;dr long-term fatigue and mortality from other pneumonias make this look very roughly 2x as bad to me as the mortality-alone estimates.
It’s less precise than looking at CoVs specifically, but we can look at long-term effects just from pneumonia.
For me personally:
A 2x increase in how bad Covid19 was in February was not cause for much alarm in general. I just wasn’t that worried worried about a pandemic
The answer is based long-term effects of pneumonia, not covid itself (which isn’t measurable). If I read something that said “hey you have a surprisingly high likelihood of getting pneumonia this year”, I would be alarmed. This wasn’t really that post
I was already kind of expecting that Covid could cause pneumonia based on typical coverage of the virus—I wasn’t surprised by the post in the way I’d expect to be if it was an alarm bell
I’ll give the post some points for pointing out a useful, valuable and often-neglected consideration but I dunno. At that time I saw “you are in danger of getting coronavirus” posts as different from “coronavirus can cause bad things to happen” posts. And the former would’ve been alarm bells and the latter wouldn’t’ve been.
The question in this post is “was Less Wrong a good alarm bell” and in my opinion only one of those links constitute alarm bells—the one on EAForums. Acknowledging/discussing the existence of the coronavirus is vastly different from acknowledging/discussing the risk of the coronavirus.
“Will ncov survivors suffer lasting disability at a high rate?” is a medical question that makes no implication about broader covid risk.
“Some quick notes on hand-hygene” does not mention the coronavirus in the main post (but to be fair does have a coronavirus tag). It does make an offhand reference implying the coronavirus could be a “maybe pandemic” but this isn’t a concrete estimation of actual risk
“Concerning the recent 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak” is a fantastic post that makes concrete claims like it now seems reasonable to assign a non-negligible probability (>2%) to the proposition that the current outbreak will result in a global disaster (>50 million deaths resulting from the pathogen within 1 year). Per one of the comments, this was consistent with Metaculus.
Overall, I’d say that LessWrong was about on par with “having lunch conversations with Chinese-American coworkers” in terms of serving as an actual alarm bell. Moreover, in the case that we admit a weaker standard for what an alarm bell is, it’s worth noting that we still don’t really beat the stock market—because it did respond to the coronavirus back in January. It just didn’t respond strongly enough to convey an actual broad concrete risk.
As someone who pretty regularly follows Less Wrong, I missed Wei Dai’s investment strategy which makes me lean in the direction that most casual readers wouldn’t have benefitted from it. The linked comment itself also doesn’t have very strong valence, stating ” The upshot is that maybe it’s not too late to short the markets.” Low valence open-thread comments don’t really sound like alarm bells to me. Wei Dai has also acknowledged that this was a missed opportunity on EAforums.
Moreover, there was also an extremely short actionable window. On February 28th, the stock market saw a swift >5% bear market rally before the second leg of the crash which temporarily undid half the losses. Unless your confidence in “maybe its not too late to short the markets” was strong enough to weather through this, you would’ve probably lost money. This almost happened to me—I sold the Thursday morning after Wei Dai’s comment and bought back in Monday, netting a very meek ~3% gain.
This seems wrong to me, in part because the hypothesis that there could be widespread negative effects even for survivors was a compelling reason for 1) me to take it seriously (at the time, I estimated my disability risk was something like 5x the importance of my mortality risk) and 2) people to expect spread to be bad in a way that shows up in many indicators (like GDP).
Fair enough. When I was thinking about “broad covid risk”, I was referring more to geographical breadth—something more along the lines of “is this gonna be a big uncontained pandemic” than “is coronavirus a bad thing to get.” I grant that the latter could have been a valid consideration (after all, it was with H1N1) and that claiming that it makes “no implication” about broader covid risk was a mis-statement on my part.
That being said, I wouldn’t really consider it an alarm bell (and when I read it, it wasn’t one for me). The top answer, Connor Flexman, states:
For me personally:
A 2x increase in how bad Covid19 was in February was not cause for much alarm in general. I just wasn’t that worried worried about a pandemic
The answer is based long-term effects of pneumonia, not covid itself (which isn’t measurable). If I read something that said “hey you have a surprisingly high likelihood of getting pneumonia this year”, I would be alarmed. This wasn’t really that post
I was already kind of expecting that Covid could cause pneumonia based on typical coverage of the virus—I wasn’t surprised by the post in the way I’d expect to be if it was an alarm bell
I’ll give the post some points for pointing out a useful, valuable and often-neglected consideration but I dunno. At that time I saw “you are in danger of getting coronavirus” posts as different from “coronavirus can cause bad things to happen” posts. And the former would’ve been alarm bells and the latter wouldn’t’ve been.