This is a personal anecdote, so I’m not sure how to assess it as an intellectual contribution. That said, global developments like the Covid pandemic sure have made me more cynical towards our individual as well as societal ability to notice and react to warning signs. In that respect, this story is a useful complement to posts like There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence, Seeing the Smoke, and the 2021 Taliban offensive in Afghanistan (which even Metaculus was pretty blindsided by).
This is a personal anecdote, so I’m not sure how to assess it as an intellectual contribution. That said, global developments like the Covid pandemic sure have made me more cynical towards our individual as well as societal ability to notice and react to warning signs. In that respect, this story is a useful complement to posts like There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence, Seeing the Smoke, and the 2021 Taliban offensive in Afghanistan (which even Metaculus was pretty blindsided by).
And separately, the post resulted in some great discussion, e.g. a comment by Vaniver on the difficulty of timing markets, which someone suggested could be turned into a post of its own; or this story by Viliam of growing up in communist Czechoslovakia.