While I agree with the specific claims this post is making (i.e. “Less Wrong provided information about coronavirus risk similar to or just-lagging the stock market”), I think it misses the thing that matters. We’re a rationality forum, not a superintelligent stock-market-beating cohort[1]! Compared to the typical human’s response to coronavirus, we’ve done pretty well at recognizing the dangers posed by the exponential spread of pandemics and acting accordingly. Compared to the very smart people who make money by predicting the economic effects of a virus, we’ve done expectedly mediocre—after all none of us (including the stock market) really had any special information about the virus’s trajectory.
Maybe it is disappointing if we lagged the stock market instead of being perfectly on pace with it but a week of lag is a pretty small amount of time in the grand scheme of things. And I’d expect different auditing methodologies/interpretations to have about that amount in variance. In any case, I don’t really think that it’s a big deal.
[1]That is, unless you count Bitcoin, which Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t.
While I agree with the specific claims this post is making (i.e. “Less Wrong provided information about coronavirus risk similar to or just-lagging the stock market”), I think it misses the thing that matters. We’re a rationality forum, not a superintelligent stock-market-beating cohort[1]! Compared to the typical human’s response to coronavirus, we’ve done pretty well at recognizing the dangers posed by the exponential spread of pandemics and acting accordingly. Compared to the very smart people who make money by predicting the economic effects of a virus, we’ve done expectedly mediocre—after all none of us (including the stock market) really had any special information about the virus’s trajectory.
Maybe it is disappointing if we lagged the stock market instead of being perfectly on pace with it but a week of lag is a pretty small amount of time in the grand scheme of things. And I’d expect different auditing methodologies/interpretations to have about that amount in variance. In any case, I don’t really think that it’s a big deal.
[1]That is, unless you count Bitcoin, which Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t.