It’s very strange to me that a group of people who are, on average, very well informed about COVID, and who are probably aware that the risk of death for healthy non-elderly people is incredibly low, would so often go completely overboard on precautions. Is it hyper-altruism?
I’ve talked to some people who locked down pretty hard pretty early; I’m not confident in my understanding but this is what I currently believe.
I think characterizing the initial response as over-the-top, as opposed to sensible in the face of uncertainty, is somewhat the product of hindsight bias. In the early days of the pandemic, nobody knew how bad it was going to be. It was not implausible that the official case fatality rate for healthy young people was a massive underestimate.
I don’t think our community is “hyper-altruistic” in the Strangers Drowning sense, but we do put a lot of emphasis on being the kinds of people who are smart enough not to pick up pennies in front of steamrollers, and on not trusting the pronouncements of officials who aren’t incentivized to do sane cost-benefit analyses. And we apply that to altruism as much as anything else. So when a few people started coordinating an organized response, and used a mixture of self-preservation-y and moralize-y language to try to motivate people out of their secure-civilization-induced complacency, the community listened.
This doesn’t explain why not everyone eased up on restrictions once the epistemic Wild West of February and March gave way to the new normal later in the year. That seems more like a genuine failure on our part. I think I prefer Raemon’s explanation from this subthread: the concentrated attention that was required to make the initial response work turned out to be a limited resource, and it had been exhausted. By the time it replenished, there was no longer a Schelling event to coordinate around, and the problems no longer seemed so urgent to the people doing the coordinating.
While risk of death is clearly relatively low (especially when it gets people to consume medical services that might also reduce risk of death), the risk of long COVID isn’t clearly very low.
I mean, this question is why I wrote the post in the first place. It’s not hyper-altruism. I think it’s an inadequate equilibrium, although I don’t know that calling it that actually explains anything. There was a lot of stuff at play here that is hard to write about because it’s sort of nebulous and social and I don’t remember all the details that well. Perhaps someone else in my bubble could take a stab at it?
To add more color to the inadequate equilibrium: I didn’t want to hang out with people with a lot of risk, not because of how bad COVID would be for me, but because of how it would limit which community members would interact with me. But this also meant I was a community member who was causing other people to take less risk.
The theory I heard postulated (by the guy that used to record the ssc podcast) is that once people start thinking “better” in reductionist frameworks they fail to account non quantifiable metrics (e.g. death is quantifiable in qaly, being more isolated isn’t)
Sure it is. This is what I did when deciding that I would go to a concert I’d been waiting for since January that was then cancelled a couple of days later in the middle of March 2020. Guesstimate at the odds of getting it in a giant crowded outdoors venue given the background number of cases I was hearing about in Budapest. Guesstimate at the odds of dying if I got it, with another adjustment for the amount of time that I might lose from being very sick.
I then noted that the expected loss in minutes of life after doing this calculation was considerably less than the time I’d be spending at this concert, and so if I cared enough about the concert to go in the first place I should go anyways. Remembering back I think I didn’t properly quantify the risks to my wife, her other partner, and his other partner, and people outside of the group who we might have given it to, but I’m not at all sure that that would have mathematically changed the decision, and it simply points to additional factors that need to be included in the calculations, and that even taking the well being of people in your bubble as exactly as valuable as your own well being does not automatically imply that you should sit at home and never do anything.
It’s very strange to me that a group of people who are, on average, very well informed about COVID, and who are probably aware that the risk of death for healthy non-elderly people is incredibly low, would so often go completely overboard on precautions. Is it hyper-altruism?
I’ve talked to some people who locked down pretty hard pretty early; I’m not confident in my understanding but this is what I currently believe.
I think characterizing the initial response as over-the-top, as opposed to sensible in the face of uncertainty, is somewhat the product of hindsight bias. In the early days of the pandemic, nobody knew how bad it was going to be. It was not implausible that the official case fatality rate for healthy young people was a massive underestimate.
I don’t think our community is “hyper-altruistic” in the Strangers Drowning sense, but we do put a lot of emphasis on being the kinds of people who are smart enough not to pick up pennies in front of steamrollers, and on not trusting the pronouncements of officials who aren’t incentivized to do sane cost-benefit analyses. And we apply that to altruism as much as anything else. So when a few people started coordinating an organized response, and used a mixture of self-preservation-y and moralize-y language to try to motivate people out of their secure-civilization-induced complacency, the community listened.
This doesn’t explain why not everyone eased up on restrictions once the epistemic Wild West of February and March gave way to the new normal later in the year. That seems more like a genuine failure on our part. I think I prefer Raemon’s explanation from this subthread: the concentrated attention that was required to make the initial response work turned out to be a limited resource, and it had been exhausted. By the time it replenished, there was no longer a Schelling event to coordinate around, and the problems no longer seemed so urgent to the people doing the coordinating.
This is my favorite take/summary. Author endorses.
While risk of death is clearly relatively low (especially when it gets people to consume medical services that might also reduce risk of death), the risk of long COVID isn’t clearly very low.
I mean, this question is why I wrote the post in the first place. It’s not hyper-altruism. I think it’s an inadequate equilibrium, although I don’t know that calling it that actually explains anything. There was a lot of stuff at play here that is hard to write about because it’s sort of nebulous and social and I don’t remember all the details that well. Perhaps someone else in my bubble could take a stab at it?
To add more color to the inadequate equilibrium: I didn’t want to hang out with people with a lot of risk, not because of how bad COVID would be for me, but because of how it would limit which community members would interact with me. But this also meant I was a community member who was causing other people to take less risk.
Do people in your bubble generally find it difficult to make decisions that might seem “selfish,” or might be disapproved of by their peers?
The theory I heard postulated (by the guy that used to record the ssc podcast) is that once people start thinking “better” in reductionist frameworks they fail to account non quantifiable metrics (e.g. death is quantifiable in qaly, being more isolated isn’t)
Sure it is. This is what I did when deciding that I would go to a concert I’d been waiting for since January that was then cancelled a couple of days later in the middle of March 2020. Guesstimate at the odds of getting it in a giant crowded outdoors venue given the background number of cases I was hearing about in Budapest. Guesstimate at the odds of dying if I got it, with another adjustment for the amount of time that I might lose from being very sick.
I then noted that the expected loss in minutes of life after doing this calculation was considerably less than the time I’d be spending at this concert, and so if I cared enough about the concert to go in the first place I should go anyways. Remembering back I think I didn’t properly quantify the risks to my wife, her other partner, and his other partner, and people outside of the group who we might have given it to, but I’m not at all sure that that would have mathematically changed the decision, and it simply points to additional factors that need to be included in the calculations, and that even taking the well being of people in your bubble as exactly as valuable as your own well being does not automatically imply that you should sit at home and never do anything.