Thanks for finding these! Even with them included, though, there’s an obvious sharp discontinuity in volume of posting starting on Feb. 27th. There was early information was available in this community. Some people were thinking hard about it. But I think based on this, the majority of us were still waiting for other people to tell us there was a catastrophe at hand. And we kept waiting and waiting until the stock market let us know.
Based on that, I’d say that we have not yet achieved any kind of substantial collective coordination or debiasing. By and large, we’re still passively waiting for the consensus to come to us and shake us out of complacency. I think we should feel especially chagrined given the constant conversation around black swans, catastrophic risk (specifically around pandemics), and the high level of mathematical competence in this community.
Even with them included, though, there’s an obvious sharp discontinuity in volume of posting starting on Feb. 27th.
Is this the right comparison? It seems to me that the interesting question is “what was the balance of information available on LW before the 20th?” and “how much information was there on LW before the 20th?”, not “did the amount of discussion on LW increase over time?”. In worlds where we had posted the perfect pandemic survival guide on Feb 11th, and then as more and more people realized the crisis was real and posted questions here, the posts graph would look a lot like the one you posted.
To the best of my knowledge, LW had very little minimization or pushback against preparation (and what pushback I recall was generally of precautions that probably were too extreme or could have been accomplished more cheaply).
Based on that, I’d say that we have not yet achieved any kind of substantial collective coordination or debiasing. By and large, we’re still passively waiting for the consensus to come to us and shake us out of complacency.
I mean, this seems true in the sense that most online communities are 90% lurkers.
I think my main regret was something like “assuming more people were on top of this,” explicitly or implicitly; I was spooked and preparing early enough that when I went on one of my last outings to get something with Duncan, our conversation spooked him and he started preparing, and then he was on top of it in time to help other people prepare. But you won’t see any warnings from me on LessWrong or Facebook, because my reaction was closer to “ah now I have a bunch of chores to get ready myself, and I’m not making inferences on any private data, so others can come to the same conclusion if they want to” than “oh jeez I need to make sure everyone is aware of this / I need to publicly vouch for my inference to best shift the group epistemology.”
But also most of the conversations that I was having about this were private, in one way or another; what should this group house do? What do I think of this draft doc my boyfriend’s group house is working on? Some of this eventually made its way to LW, mostly through the actions of a few heroes, but also often after days of private discussion and fact-checking.
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.
It seems like the relevant metric here is “when did people start preparing in some way?” not “when did posts increase.” (This is a bit harder to check. I do naively expect that the turning point here would be Seeing the Smoke, which was indeed on February 28th which is inline with your analysis. I do think that this is still prior to most other people, or at least most Americans – not sure about other countries)
I do think a lot of the mechanisms by which rationalists I know did prepare was social – some rationalists were paying heavy attention to it, and they got their friends to be aware of it. This is less useful for people who aren’t as socially entwined.
Thanks for finding these! Even with them included, though, there’s an obvious sharp discontinuity in volume of posting starting on Feb. 27th. There was early information was available in this community. Some people were thinking hard about it. But I think based on this, the majority of us were still waiting for other people to tell us there was a catastrophe at hand. And we kept waiting and waiting until the stock market let us know.
Based on that, I’d say that we have not yet achieved any kind of substantial collective coordination or debiasing. By and large, we’re still passively waiting for the consensus to come to us and shake us out of complacency. I think we should feel especially chagrined given the constant conversation around black swans, catastrophic risk (specifically around pandemics), and the high level of mathematical competence in this community.
Is this the right comparison? It seems to me that the interesting question is “what was the balance of information available on LW before the 20th?” and “how much information was there on LW before the 20th?”, not “did the amount of discussion on LW increase over time?”. In worlds where we had posted the perfect pandemic survival guide on Feb 11th, and then as more and more people realized the crisis was real and posted questions here, the posts graph would look a lot like the one you posted.
To the best of my knowledge, LW had very little minimization or pushback against preparation (and what pushback I recall was generally of precautions that probably were too extreme or could have been accomplished more cheaply).
I mean, this seems true in the sense that most online communities are 90% lurkers.
I think my main regret was something like “assuming more people were on top of this,” explicitly or implicitly; I was spooked and preparing early enough that when I went on one of my last outings to get something with Duncan, our conversation spooked him and he started preparing, and then he was on top of it in time to help other people prepare. But you won’t see any warnings from me on LessWrong or Facebook, because my reaction was closer to “ah now I have a bunch of chores to get ready myself, and I’m not making inferences on any private data, so others can come to the same conclusion if they want to” than “oh jeez I need to make sure everyone is aware of this / I need to publicly vouch for my inference to best shift the group epistemology.”
But also most of the conversations that I was having about this were private, in one way or another; what should this group house do? What do I think of this draft doc my boyfriend’s group house is working on? Some of this eventually made its way to LW, mostly through the actions of a few heroes, but also often after days of private discussion and fact-checking.
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.
It seems like the relevant metric here is “when did people start preparing in some way?” not “when did posts increase.” (This is a bit harder to check. I do naively expect that the turning point here would be Seeing the Smoke, which was indeed on February 28th which is inline with your analysis. I do think that this is still prior to most other people, or at least most Americans – not sure about other countries)
I do think a lot of the mechanisms by which rationalists I know did prepare was social – some rationalists were paying heavy attention to it, and they got their friends to be aware of it. This is less useful for people who aren’t as socially entwined.