Knee-jerk reaction: WTF?? Was this common? How much of the Berkeley hub has been locking down this hard for this long? I had a general impression that the degree of paranoia among the Berkeley crowd was somewhat higher than seemed reasonable to me, but this seems way more over-the-top than I imagined.
There was also an enormous amount of social pressure to be extremely covid cautious. It was really over the top given the community demographics (very young!). This is part of the reason I recently left the Bay community.
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.
We were like this for about a month, then my sanity dropped to critical levels, forcing us to have a conversation about what we were ok with in terms of like, going outside. This resulted in me going on bike rides very frequently all summer, which helped A LOT.
Then in late summer, we had another “figure out what probabilities we are OK with” session and decided that we were going to categorically allow hanging out masked and outside, because the sanity/risk tradeoff seemed very good.
(Then we moved to DC and a whole lot of things happened that we would otherwise not have been OK with risk-wise, but were necessary for moving, which we felt was very beneficial overall.)
At this point we’re still at “don’t go indoors at a place with other people” (we grocery shop only via delivery/pickup), “categorically allow masked outdoor hangouts.” Also, we will go indoors with a P100/N95/KN95 if it’s a rare and necessary event such as medical treatment.
Feels to me from reading the post that A) Having these conversations was MUCH more difficult for OP, because she lives in a house with many other people, whereas Roger and I mostly had these conversations with just the two of us and to a lesser extent our two roommates who mostly just cooperated, B) We actually had much fewer of these conversations early on? We tried to keep it to just what we needed to make a couple very specific decisions (“is it OK for me to go on bike rides”), which I guess was also easier because there were fewer people and so fewer variables that needed to be tracked.
I guess a takeaway I have here is that it seems like 2020 was a good year to live with exactly one partner who you are very close with. Enough other-human for sanity, not so much other-human to increase the negotiation burden drastically. Seems like the difficulty of allowing people to do more things increases exponentially the more people you live with, which makes it hard for things not to lapse into “by default no one does anything even slightly risky despite the massive sanity damage.”
Very fair reaction. I should note that among the people in my house, I have done the fewest things by a fair margin, so this is not exactly representative – although I am also not the most locked-down person I know, by a long shot. Of the people in my house, most have traveled in the past year, including internationally, but day to day we mostly just… see each other, work (with people in our bubble) and sometimes walk around. Our bubble expanded at one point, though it’s still only ~12 people, since we lost a lot of housemates over the course of the year.
My mom and sister have been under a similar level of lockdown this whole time, though that makes more sense since my mom is in her 60s and also they had no friends in the first place and are really happy just chilling together with their bird.
(Honestly many of us have a not-that-mentally-okay year, but I wanted to steer away from that topic in this post because it’s A Lot.)
One person moved to a cabin (pretty far from things but close enough for grocery delivery) and had no interaction whatsoever except with their partner, who until recently had no interaction with anyone at all either. Another person wears a positive-pressure suit for every interaction, including in some parts of their house.
I should note that among the people in my house, I have done the fewest things by a fair margin, so this is not exactly representative – although I am also not the most locked-down person I know, by a long shot.
Do you have a quantitative sense of this? My rough guess (tho I’ve chatted with people a lot less because of the pandemic, so my sense might be quite off here) is that out of “200” bay area rationalists, you were in the bottom 10-20 in terms of microCOVID spend, but probably not bottom 2 or only bottom 40.
[Tho thinking about this more, I think my metric isn’t great. What a mistake looks like here is “not spending 1 microCOVID to do something worth more than one microCOVID’s worth of fun”, which is different from total integrated spend.]
I think the level of lockdown described here was very common “around here” in spring 2020 but at least in my corner of the community I think it was pretty uncommon to stick to that level of lockdown all year.
In the summer we learned that outdoors is pretty safe, and outdoor masked hangouts became common.
When the microcovid site was launched, lots of people soon started using it to plan human contact that was important to them. (People were sometimes doing that before too, but with much more difficulty and often much more cautiously.)
My own lockdown has been quite cautious but less severe than described here but I still would not say my mental health is any good, though.
Berkeley people have it good. At least they are doing this together. Imagine being a Berkeley person at heart and being in a completely anti-Berkeley environment.
I mean, the result I would hope for in such a situation is that social pressure would accelerate the probably-true realization that this level of paranoia simply does not make sense.
A thing that I think this isn’t modeling is exhaustion, negotiation/modeling fatigue, and in some cases trauma from earlier negotiations (I don’t know if that was relevant to mingyuan but I know it was relevant in my grouphouse situations). By the time you get to the point where maybe you should take stock and re-evaluate everything, it’s not really about “does the paranoia make sense?” it’s “do you have the spare energy and emotional skills to change your S1 attitudes to a lot of things, while the crisis is still kinda ongoing.”
I’m not sure exactly how it played out for most people, my guess is more common is “bring it up, but the output is ‘man I am too exhausted to negotiate this’, and then there’s nowhere for the conversation to go.”
Things that strike me, as I try to think about “okay what coordination lessons do we learn from this?”
1. Maybe, the thing we Got Wrong was not refactoring more into smaller houses (I think lots of people did do this, but some didn’t. My guess is people who refactored into smaller houses had a healthier time)
2. Maybe the thing we Got Wrong was not figuring out how to effectively respond to lots of fear/exhaustion/trauma while also leveling up at other coordination skills, such that we could continue to coordinate large groups. (I am mostly skeptical about this, I think we probably just didn’t have the skills to do it and it would have made things worse. But, it’s an option on the table)
3. Maybe it was overdetermined that things go pretty much how they went. BUT, now the situation is “Okay, we all just went through a big trial together. Maybe it turns out the only way to be able to withstand a huge trial in a psychologically healthy way is to already have undergone one.
And now the situation is ’there’s a way to process everything that happened that makes mental issues calcify, and a way to process them that makes you stronger for next time.” And a good goal is to try to figure out the ways to process things such that the next time shit hits the fan, we’re older/stronger/wiser people (and maybe can help newcomers who are less older/wiser/stronger to orient better? This is what tribal elders are for – they’re old enough to know how to handle rarer emergencies)
Unfortunately it’s totally possible to accidentally pressure people into responding “healthily” in a way that makes things worse instead of better, and I’m not sure how to think about that.
4. When I look back and think “what did we get wrong that we realistically could have done better?” I think the thing is having a clearer model that negotiations would calcify and people would get exhausted, and also that people wouldn’t primarily be “applying agency and rationality” the whole way through, they would be settling into patterns, and choosing “the amount of relaxed/paranoid to be” rather than choosing “the right actions based on their goals and values.” It’s easier to dial-up and dial-down paranoia, than it is to change complex strategy. And we weren’t factoring that in, but when I’m judging our rationality, that’s what I think we could have credibly figured out in advance.
my guess is more common is “bring it up, but the output is ‘man I am too exhausted to negotiate this’, and then there’s nowhere for the conversation to go.”
This is a problem I’ve run into in other areas before. Some parts of my thoughts around it:
Some people cannot handle stress, have little mental resilience, etc. In situations like this, their inability to cope will by-default impose costs on those around them.
It is often worth simply avoiding people-who-cannot-handle-stress for exactly this reason, unless they’re bringing some large counterbalancing value to the table.
In an emergency, definitely try to keep such people out of the loop if possible. They will make things strictly worse.
If you are that sort of person, then you should be aware that you are probably doing this sometimes, and getting better at handling stressful things will make more people more willing to be around you. At the very least, learn to recognize the feelings and stay out of the way.
Dealing with lots of fear/exhaustion/trauma: best-case, you’ve figured out ahead of time which people respond badly to mental stress. Those people have developed at least some ability to recognize the warning signs in themselves, and know that they should usually defer to others and try to stay out of the way.
Saying “I am too exhausted to deal with this” is fine, once or twice. If you are too exhausted to deal with important things most of the time, then that is a rather big problem. At the bare minimum, defer/get out of the way so people who are not too exhausted can make progress.
Obviously this is… not a very kind way of framing things. But it is both true and important.
I think that’s a totally valid way of framing things for an org. I think it’s valid as part-of-the-frame for group houses. But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live. “Alice gets out of the way so that Bob and Cameron can make progress” isn’t really workable when “progress” is built out of “Alice and Bob and Cameron having a healthy life together.”
My frame on this is option #1 above, where “refactor into smaller houses so you can have fewer stakeholders”, which goes along with “and people self-sort into groups of houses where people with similar preferences can have more agency over their lives.”
There was some intrinsic shittiness to the situation where a major thing early on is “well, we have a bunch of people living together, who weren’t really filtered for ‘How Well Do They Cope With Crisis Together?’, and it’s probably better if some of them leave, but being forced to leave your home suddenly is among the more stressful things that can happen to a person. So I see the key question as “how do negotiate who leaves, or, how people decide to stay together and what new norms they create, in a way that is fair.”
But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live.
I think the problem is a bit harder than this. Even if you get a bunch of “can’t deal with it” people together in one house, that house still ends up in a not-great place. They maybe don’t block other people, so that’s a plus, but it still sucks for them.
The bottom line here is, if someone does not have the mental capacity to deal with a problem themselves, then the only way to get a good solution is to outsource the thinking/deciding to someone else.
This feels like it’s missing something important to me. I can say the object level things that feel off, but suspect this is more of a frame disagreement situation (which I expect to be hard).
On the straightforward, factual level:
I think how well people can deal things is very contingent on their environment. In a world where they are constantly under pressure from a bunch of people with varying degrees of distrust, I think it can be really hard to deal with things. If they’re in an environment where they more or less get to directly control their life, I expect them to fare much better. Both because they object-level get to live in ways that are good for them, and also because having self-directed-efficacy is good for people even if they don’t get to use it to live exactly how they want.
When I imagine people splitting into sub-houses, I’m not imagining everyone splitting up based purely on how well they handle stress. I’m also imagining them splitting up based on what other things they actually want, and what style of stress management they prefer. i.e.
...do they prefer staying in their original home?
...do they prefer long walks in nature?
...do they prefer easy access to outdoor walks, or indoor hangouts, without other in person friends? Or are videocalls a good enough way to be social? Do they even care about being social?
...do they really want to remain in a city where they have lots of social or professional connections?
People vary on a lot of axes, and they form subgroups that enable each subgroup to thrive without as many competing access needs.
And then there’s the fact that smaller groups just requires less negotiation, period.
I agree that this a dimension along which things can improve orthogonal to stress-capacity, and if improvement along this dimension reduces stress-level enough, the original problem can go away to a large extent.
Also… just because you’re dealing with a lot of fear, exhaustion, and trauma, and someone else isn’t, doesn’t mean you can trust them enough to outsource your decision-making process to them.
Also… it seems really unreasonable to say “if you can’t handle 10 hours of grueling negotiations about what COVID precautions to take, you’re weak and I need to cut you out of my life and/or take away decisionmaking power from you during times of stress.” I would guess that, uhh, most people are weak by that definition.
That link offers a good analogy for some situations which are not this situation. There are parts of society whose primary role is to help people through tough times, just as an umbrella’s primary role is to keep one dry in the rain. It is entirely unfair to call people “a burden” for using mechanisms which are there for that purpose.
By default, most relationships are not like this. People have their own lives to live. Imposing a year of strict lockdown on my roommates because I cannot handle a day of negotiations would not be fair to my roommates. They are not an umbrella whose purpose is to keep me dry of rain.
(And it’s not just imposing a burden on the roommates! Subjecting oneself to a year of strict lockdown, to avoid a day or even a week of hard/stressful thinking and negotiating, is not a good tradeoff. It’s a tradeoff which clearly reflects stress-impaired judgement. If I can’t handle the problem, outsourcing decision-making isn’t just good for those around me, it’s good for me too.)
Also… just because you’re dealing with a lot of fear, exhaustion, and trauma, and someone else isn’t, doesn’t mean you can trust them enough to outsource your decision-making process to them.
This I definitely agree with, and I definitely am not saying that someone who cannot deal with the stress of thinking through a group problem should just defer to whoever’s most insistent. There are degrees of freedom in who to defer to. Deferring to norms of some broader group (e.g. general social norms) is one option, for instance. When one’s thinking/judgement is sufficiently impaired that better-than-typical results are unlikely, deferring to what everyone else does is a decent way to at least get typical results.
By default, most relationships are not like this. People have their own lives to live. Imposing a year of strict lockdown on my roommates because I cannot handle a day of negotiations would not be fair to my roommates. They are not an umbrella whose purpose is to keep me dry of rain.
I think a major disconnect between your outlook here, and me (and I assume maia’s) outlook is… while it’s true that most relationships are not about being umbrellas to keep you dry, friendships are to some degree that, and housemates are disproportionately friendships.
They don’t have to be, and some people have different ways of conceptualizing friendship. But… basically insofar as I have roommates I’m not friends with, I think I’m making a mistake, or doing a temporary thing I hope will change. (Because: why would you want to live with people who you aren’t also cultivating some longterm relationship with? It’s a huge lost opportunity)
I think friendship is complicated. And, it’s certainly the case that I don’t want to subject my friends to a year of unnecessary precautions. (It’s my responsibility as a friend to try not to do that, and if I can’t not do that, get help minimizing the damage). But, yes, my friendships also explicitly come with my responsibility to help make sure they are okay when they are dealing with tough times, and to not drop people when they become inconvenient.
(If I was housemates with a friend who it turned out I was incompatible with during a crisis, I’d consider my goal to be to somehow refactor our living arrangement such that we were not imposing those costs on each other, so that I could continue to help them and be their friend from a position of slack and security. This might include helping them process their feelings and getting intellectually oriented, or renting temporary airBnBs while we sort things out, or each moving out)
(And it’s not just imposing a burden on the roommates! Subjecting oneself to a year of strict lockdown, to avoid a day or even a week of hard/stressful thinking and negotiating, is not a good tradeoff. It’s a tradeoff which clearly reflects stress-impaired judgement. If I can’t handle the problem, outsourcing decision-making isn’t just good for those around me, it’s good for me too.)
This seems to be assuming “it’s possible to make outsource decisions in this way”, which just seems mostly false to me. You can outsource these decisions by giving up on your agency, but I think that’s a really big deal that would probably mostly make things worse.
I think people essentially have a responsibility to make sure they have enough slack, so that they don’t burden each other unnecessarily. i.e don’t pursue strategies that’ll reliably make you constantly need help from people around you, if other strategies are available. This includes noting how easily stressed out you are, and accounting for it. But, the thing is that covid was just a huge slack cost that was overdetermined to overwhelm many people’s usual slack buffer.
I think it’d probably have been a mistake to be maintaining enough slack for covid not to fuck you* up (that’d mean you’re just leaving value on the table most of the time. You can’t be prepared for every single type of emergency that might come up. I think people should maintain enough slack to weather, like, 3 minor emergencies coming up in a given week without having to dip into reserves, and covid just continuously soaked up more than that allocation each week, for months on end)
*for many values of ‘you’. Obviously some people vary here.
You can outsource these decisions by giving up on your agency, but I think that’s a really big deal that would probably mostly make things worse.
A pretty key piece of my thinking here is: if I emotionally cannot handle a decision, then “don’t give up my agency” is not an option. My agency is already basically gone at that point. If I am not emotionally capable of choosing between at least two different decisions (e.g. engage in a long negotiation to change circumstances or keep going with status quo), then for agency-analysis purposes, I am a rock with my already-chosen decision written on it.
This is why we have things like power of attorney and living wills. At some point, there is no meaningful agency left to retain. The first-best option (i.e. retaining agency) is already gone, and it’s time to move on to next-best.
(John and I just chatted offline, and a point of confusion we resolved was that I thought John was saying something like “the majority people in the house who are able to do thinking better should take over the thinking for the people who are too overwhelmed to think”, but the thing he meant was more like* “the people who are having trouble thinking should proactively find a person to be their lawyer, and/or help them think. Their “lawyer” should be whoever they trust most to help them.” Which is a pretty different frame.
I happen to not think this would have worked very well – I think a key problem was that everyone was overwhelmed at once, so there was nobody you trusted to be your lawyer who actually had bandwidth to do so. But, this is more of a straightforward factual constraint than a deep disagreement. I agree that looking for people to help you think, and/or represent you at house meetings, is a useful approach in some cases)
*I’m not 100% sure I represented his viewpoint well here.
Also… it seems really unreasonable to say “if you can’t handle 10 hours of grueling negotiations about what COVID precautions to take, you’re weak and I need to cut you out of my life and/or take away decisionmaking power from you during times of stress.” I would guess that, uhh, most people are weak by that definition.
To be clear, I do indeed think we have the luxury to exclude most people from our lives. Indeed any rule that doesn’t exclude 90%+ of people from your life to a very large degree seems far too lax to me.
Also, 10 hours really doesn’t seem that much over the course of a pandemic, so I do think the above holds for me. It just seems really really crucial to maintain coordination ability in crises, and this will require some harsh decisions.
4. When I look back and think “what did we get wrong that we realistically could have done better?” I think the thing is having a clearer model that negotiations would calcify and people would get exhausted, and also that people wouldn’t primarily be “applying agency and rationality” the whole way through, they would be settling into patterns, and choosing “the amount of relaxed/paranoid to be” rather than choosing “the right actions based on their goals and values.” It’s easier to dial-up and dial-down paranoia, than it is to change complex strategy. And we weren’t factoring that in, but when I’m judging our rationality, that’s what I think we could have credibly figured out in advance.
This does seem like a super-important lesson to me.
It also feels like it gives me some insight into the gears of why the world is mad.
If you have a small number of people who are totally on the same page and feel chill, those people can actually go out and interact with other people without “I want to give my friend a hug” being a 10-person-negotiation.
Normally I like living with lots of people, but during covid my life got way less stressful when I slimmed down to just living with 1 person.
[Oh, mingyuan already said this in way more detail. Coolio]
No, Ray is almost certainly right. Everyone I talked to who lived with one exactly one other person (my sister and my mom, and lots of people with their romantic partners) had a way better time than everyone I know who lived in a group house, N=50+. (I can think of maybe one exception?) This is partly about it being easier to negotiate with just one other person, as mentioned in the post, but also just everything being less difficult with just one other person. It’s easier to avoid them if you’re feeling anti-social; it’s easier to build routines alongside just one other person than with a bunch of unreliable housemates; it’s easier to notice which of your social needs are not being met and seek out alternative ways to meet them, rather than feeling socially burned out by being around other people 24⁄7 and yet also not having your needs met.
Obviously I’m primarily talking about pairs of people who like and care about each other, like family members or romantic partners. However, I think some of the benefits would still apply even if it was a randomly assigned roommate. And maybe even still if it was someone you hated, because I think I’d rather live with one person I hated than with multiple people I hated. Not sure though.
In general I think the ability to choose who you interact with is what matters. Feelings of isolation come because you don’t reach out to the people you’d like to interact with (maybe because of anxiety about reaching out, maybe because you don’t have anyone you’d like to reach out to), but that’s at least fixable. Whereas being in a situation where you’re forced to interact with a bunch of people all the time whether you want to or not is harder to escape just by application of your own agency. I’d rather live alone and have to put in the activation energy to reach out to people, than live with others and feel totally trapped. Maybe there’s such thing as an extrovert for whom having people around is just pretty much an unqualified good, but I don’t think I know anyone like that.
Finally, I’ll note that Ray’s comment is coming from a place of experience – his house noticed quite early on that spending the pandemic together would be a bad idea, and Ray and his partner (who moved somewhere on their own), as well as C (who went to live on his own) seem to have had a pretty good time by their self-reports that I’ve heard.
My risk should be from 19% to 82% probability in the next six months. This, if I always remain in the house. In order to avoid that, I should put my life on hold and get a full-time job I dislike. And people call me exaggerated and crazy both IRL and online. Long-term consequences of Covid are what worry me the most. Idk how to deal with this tbh. Genuinely asking.
Where do you live? At least in the US, I would find these numbers implausible. 19-82% is the background chance for a random person in the US, taking completely typical measures, to have had COVID. That definitely does not look like always remaining in the house.
Italy. House of 5 people. A city with around 1k cases per day for a few months. One person goes to school, sees friends, invites friends into the house. Another travels abroad or inside the country for a few days every 10 days or so and doesn’t always get tested when returning. When he is in the house he also invites his girlfriend, eats out, sees friends, etc. In the microcovid test site I put 5 ppl house with 10 close contacts for lack of better options. Sounds reasonable?
Edit: Italy’s vaccination rate sucks. Not gonna see a vaccine for me or anyone in the house with risky behavior till 2022
Ah… “always remain in the house” is not the right way to think about your options here. Your roommates are apparently acting about like the broader populace, and therefore have exposure rates about like the broader populace. If you want to have lower exposure rates than that, then the thing-you-need-to-do is not to always remain in the house, but rather to avoid significant exposure to your roommates.
Indeed, spending more time outside the house might be a good strategy.
Knee-jerk reaction: WTF?? Was this common? How much of the Berkeley hub has been locking down this hard for this long? I had a general impression that the degree of paranoia among the Berkeley crowd was somewhat higher than seemed reasonable to me, but this seems way more over-the-top than I imagined.
… are people mentally ok?
Multiple houses did this sort of thing.
There was also an enormous amount of social pressure to be extremely covid cautious. It was really over the top given the community demographics (very young!). This is part of the reason I recently left the Bay community.
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.
We were like this for about a month, then my sanity dropped to critical levels, forcing us to have a conversation about what we were ok with in terms of like, going outside. This resulted in me going on bike rides very frequently all summer, which helped A LOT.
Then in late summer, we had another “figure out what probabilities we are OK with” session and decided that we were going to categorically allow hanging out masked and outside, because the sanity/risk tradeoff seemed very good.
(Then we moved to DC and a whole lot of things happened that we would otherwise not have been OK with risk-wise, but were necessary for moving, which we felt was very beneficial overall.)
At this point we’re still at “don’t go indoors at a place with other people” (we grocery shop only via delivery/pickup), “categorically allow masked outdoor hangouts.” Also, we will go indoors with a P100/N95/KN95 if it’s a rare and necessary event such as medical treatment.
Feels to me from reading the post that A) Having these conversations was MUCH more difficult for OP, because she lives in a house with many other people, whereas Roger and I mostly had these conversations with just the two of us and to a lesser extent our two roommates who mostly just cooperated, B) We actually had much fewer of these conversations early on? We tried to keep it to just what we needed to make a couple very specific decisions (“is it OK for me to go on bike rides”), which I guess was also easier because there were fewer people and so fewer variables that needed to be tracked.
I guess a takeaway I have here is that it seems like 2020 was a good year to live with exactly one partner who you are very close with. Enough other-human for sanity, not so much other-human to increase the negotiation burden drastically. Seems like the difficulty of allowing people to do more things increases exponentially the more people you live with, which makes it hard for things not to lapse into “by default no one does anything even slightly risky despite the massive sanity damage.”
Very fair reaction. I should note that among the people in my house, I have done the fewest things by a fair margin, so this is not exactly representative – although I am also not the most locked-down person I know, by a long shot. Of the people in my house, most have traveled in the past year, including internationally, but day to day we mostly just… see each other, work (with people in our bubble) and sometimes walk around. Our bubble expanded at one point, though it’s still only ~12 people, since we lost a lot of housemates over the course of the year.
My mom and sister have been under a similar level of lockdown this whole time, though that makes more sense since my mom is in her 60s and also they had no friends in the first place and are really happy just chilling together with their bird.
(Honestly many of us have a not-that-mentally-okay year, but I wanted to steer away from that topic in this post because it’s A Lot.)
Yeah IDEK man. Shit’s cray.
I’ve got to ask, what is the most locked-down person you know doing? It’s hard to imagine being more locked down than you are!
One person moved to a cabin (pretty far from things but close enough for grocery delivery) and had no interaction whatsoever except with their partner, who until recently had no interaction with anyone at all either. Another person wears a positive-pressure suit for every interaction, including in some parts of their house.
Do you have a quantitative sense of this? My rough guess (tho I’ve chatted with people a lot less because of the pandemic, so my sense might be quite off here) is that out of “200” bay area rationalists, you were in the bottom 10-20 in terms of microCOVID spend, but probably not bottom 2 or only bottom 40.
[Tho thinking about this more, I think my metric isn’t great. What a mistake looks like here is “not spending 1 microCOVID to do something worth more than one microCOVID’s worth of fun”, which is different from total integrated spend.]
I think the level of lockdown described here was very common “around here” in spring 2020 but at least in my corner of the community I think it was pretty uncommon to stick to that level of lockdown all year.
In the summer we learned that outdoors is pretty safe, and outdoor masked hangouts became common.
When the microcovid site was launched, lots of people soon started using it to plan human contact that was important to them. (People were sometimes doing that before too, but with much more difficulty and often much more cautiously.)
My own lockdown has been quite cautious but less severe than described here but I still would not say my mental health is any good, though.
Berkeley people have it good. At least they are doing this together. Imagine being a Berkeley person at heart and being in a completely anti-Berkeley environment.
I mean, the result I would hope for in such a situation is that social pressure would accelerate the probably-true realization that this level of paranoia simply does not make sense.
A thing that I think this isn’t modeling is exhaustion, negotiation/modeling fatigue, and in some cases trauma from earlier negotiations (I don’t know if that was relevant to mingyuan but I know it was relevant in my grouphouse situations). By the time you get to the point where maybe you should take stock and re-evaluate everything, it’s not really about “does the paranoia make sense?” it’s “do you have the spare energy and emotional skills to change your S1 attitudes to a lot of things, while the crisis is still kinda ongoing.”
Ah… and in a group house, if one out of N people lack the mental fortitude for this, the default action is for everyone to just not bring it up?
I’m not sure exactly how it played out for most people, my guess is more common is “bring it up, but the output is ‘man I am too exhausted to negotiate this’, and then there’s nowhere for the conversation to go.”
Things that strike me, as I try to think about “okay what coordination lessons do we learn from this?”
1. Maybe, the thing we Got Wrong was not refactoring more into smaller houses (I think lots of people did do this, but some didn’t. My guess is people who refactored into smaller houses had a healthier time)
2. Maybe the thing we Got Wrong was not figuring out how to effectively respond to lots of fear/exhaustion/trauma while also leveling up at other coordination skills, such that we could continue to coordinate large groups. (I am mostly skeptical about this, I think we probably just didn’t have the skills to do it and it would have made things worse. But, it’s an option on the table)
3. Maybe it was overdetermined that things go pretty much how they went. BUT, now the situation is “Okay, we all just went through a big trial together. Maybe it turns out the only way to be able to withstand a huge trial in a psychologically healthy way is to already have undergone one.
And now the situation is ’there’s a way to process everything that happened that makes mental issues calcify, and a way to process them that makes you stronger for next time.” And a good goal is to try to figure out the ways to process things such that the next time shit hits the fan, we’re older/stronger/wiser people (and maybe can help newcomers who are less older/wiser/stronger to orient better? This is what tribal elders are for – they’re old enough to know how to handle rarer emergencies)
Unfortunately it’s totally possible to accidentally pressure people into responding “healthily” in a way that makes things worse instead of better, and I’m not sure how to think about that.
4. When I look back and think “what did we get wrong that we realistically could have done better?” I think the thing is having a clearer model that negotiations would calcify and people would get exhausted, and also that people wouldn’t primarily be “applying agency and rationality” the whole way through, they would be settling into patterns, and choosing “the amount of relaxed/paranoid to be” rather than choosing “the right actions based on their goals and values.” It’s easier to dial-up and dial-down paranoia, than it is to change complex strategy. And we weren’t factoring that in, but when I’m judging our rationality, that’s what I think we could have credibly figured out in advance.
This is a problem I’ve run into in other areas before. Some parts of my thoughts around it:
Some people cannot handle stress, have little mental resilience, etc. In situations like this, their inability to cope will by-default impose costs on those around them.
It is often worth simply avoiding people-who-cannot-handle-stress for exactly this reason, unless they’re bringing some large counterbalancing value to the table.
In an emergency, definitely try to keep such people out of the loop if possible. They will make things strictly worse.
If you are that sort of person, then you should be aware that you are probably doing this sometimes, and getting better at handling stressful things will make more people more willing to be around you. At the very least, learn to recognize the feelings and stay out of the way.
Dealing with lots of fear/exhaustion/trauma: best-case, you’ve figured out ahead of time which people respond badly to mental stress. Those people have developed at least some ability to recognize the warning signs in themselves, and know that they should usually defer to others and try to stay out of the way.
Saying “I am too exhausted to deal with this” is fine, once or twice. If you are too exhausted to deal with important things most of the time, then that is a rather big problem. At the bare minimum, defer/get out of the way so people who are not too exhausted can make progress.
Obviously this is… not a very kind way of framing things. But it is both true and important.
I think that’s a totally valid way of framing things for an org. I think it’s valid as part-of-the-frame for group houses. But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live. “Alice gets out of the way so that Bob and Cameron can make progress” isn’t really workable when “progress” is built out of “Alice and Bob and Cameron having a healthy life together.”
My frame on this is option #1 above, where “refactor into smaller houses so you can have fewer stakeholders”, which goes along with “and people self-sort into groups of houses where people with similar preferences can have more agency over their lives.”
There was some intrinsic shittiness to the situation where a major thing early on is “well, we have a bunch of people living together, who weren’t really filtered for ‘How Well Do They Cope With Crisis Together?’, and it’s probably better if some of them leave, but being forced to leave your home suddenly is among the more stressful things that can happen to a person. So I see the key question as “how do negotiate who leaves, or, how people decide to stay together and what new norms they create, in a way that is fair.”
I think the problem is a bit harder than this. Even if you get a bunch of “can’t deal with it” people together in one house, that house still ends up in a not-great place. They maybe don’t block other people, so that’s a plus, but it still sucks for them.
The bottom line here is, if someone does not have the mental capacity to deal with a problem themselves, then the only way to get a good solution is to outsource the thinking/deciding to someone else.
This feels like it’s missing something important to me. I can say the object level things that feel off, but suspect this is more of a frame disagreement situation (which I expect to be hard).
On the straightforward, factual level:
I think how well people can deal things is very contingent on their environment. In a world where they are constantly under pressure from a bunch of people with varying degrees of distrust, I think it can be really hard to deal with things. If they’re in an environment where they more or less get to directly control their life, I expect them to fare much better. Both because they object-level get to live in ways that are good for them, and also because having self-directed-efficacy is good for people even if they don’t get to use it to live exactly how they want.
When I imagine people splitting into sub-houses, I’m not imagining everyone splitting up based purely on how well they handle stress. I’m also imagining them splitting up based on what other things they actually want, and what style of stress management they prefer. i.e.
...do they prefer staying in their original home?
...do they prefer long walks in nature?
...do they prefer easy access to outdoor walks, or indoor hangouts, without other in person friends? Or are videocalls a good enough way to be social? Do they even care about being social?
...do they really want to remain in a city where they have lots of social or professional connections?
People vary on a lot of axes, and they form subgroups that enable each subgroup to thrive without as many competing access needs.
And then there’s the fact that smaller groups just requires less negotiation, period.
I agree that this a dimension along which things can improve orthogonal to stress-capacity, and if improvement along this dimension reduces stress-level enough, the original problem can go away to a large extent.
This post really bothered me. I think perhaps the best way to sum it up is this old post of Kelsey’s: https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/99440932816/saying-you-are-a-burden-on-society-is-just-such
Also… just because you’re dealing with a lot of fear, exhaustion, and trauma, and someone else isn’t, doesn’t mean you can trust them enough to outsource your decision-making process to them.
Also… it seems really unreasonable to say “if you can’t handle 10 hours of grueling negotiations about what COVID precautions to take, you’re weak and I need to cut you out of my life and/or take away decisionmaking power from you during times of stress.” I would guess that, uhh, most people are weak by that definition.
That link offers a good analogy for some situations which are not this situation. There are parts of society whose primary role is to help people through tough times, just as an umbrella’s primary role is to keep one dry in the rain. It is entirely unfair to call people “a burden” for using mechanisms which are there for that purpose.
By default, most relationships are not like this. People have their own lives to live. Imposing a year of strict lockdown on my roommates because I cannot handle a day of negotiations would not be fair to my roommates. They are not an umbrella whose purpose is to keep me dry of rain.
(And it’s not just imposing a burden on the roommates! Subjecting oneself to a year of strict lockdown, to avoid a day or even a week of hard/stressful thinking and negotiating, is not a good tradeoff. It’s a tradeoff which clearly reflects stress-impaired judgement. If I can’t handle the problem, outsourcing decision-making isn’t just good for those around me, it’s good for me too.)
This I definitely agree with, and I definitely am not saying that someone who cannot deal with the stress of thinking through a group problem should just defer to whoever’s most insistent. There are degrees of freedom in who to defer to. Deferring to norms of some broader group (e.g. general social norms) is one option, for instance. When one’s thinking/judgement is sufficiently impaired that better-than-typical results are unlikely, deferring to what everyone else does is a decent way to at least get typical results.
I think a major disconnect between your outlook here, and me (and I assume maia’s) outlook is… while it’s true that most relationships are not about being umbrellas to keep you dry, friendships are to some degree that, and housemates are disproportionately friendships.
They don’t have to be, and some people have different ways of conceptualizing friendship. But… basically insofar as I have roommates I’m not friends with, I think I’m making a mistake, or doing a temporary thing I hope will change. (Because: why would you want to live with people who you aren’t also cultivating some longterm relationship with? It’s a huge lost opportunity)
I think friendship is complicated. And, it’s certainly the case that I don’t want to subject my friends to a year of unnecessary precautions. (It’s my responsibility as a friend to try not to do that, and if I can’t not do that, get help minimizing the damage). But, yes, my friendships also explicitly come with my responsibility to help make sure they are okay when they are dealing with tough times, and to not drop people when they become inconvenient.
(If I was housemates with a friend who it turned out I was incompatible with during a crisis, I’d consider my goal to be to somehow refactor our living arrangement such that we were not imposing those costs on each other, so that I could continue to help them and be their friend from a position of slack and security. This might include helping them process their feelings and getting intellectually oriented, or renting temporary airBnBs while we sort things out, or each moving out)
This seems to be assuming “it’s possible to make outsource decisions in this way”, which just seems mostly false to me. You can outsource these decisions by giving up on your agency, but I think that’s a really big deal that would probably mostly make things worse.
On the other side of the equation:
I think people essentially have a responsibility to make sure they have enough slack, so that they don’t burden each other unnecessarily. i.e don’t pursue strategies that’ll reliably make you constantly need help from people around you, if other strategies are available. This includes noting how easily stressed out you are, and accounting for it. But, the thing is that covid was just a huge slack cost that was overdetermined to overwhelm many people’s usual slack buffer.
I think it’d probably have been a mistake to be maintaining enough slack for covid not to fuck you* up (that’d mean you’re just leaving value on the table most of the time. You can’t be prepared for every single type of emergency that might come up. I think people should maintain enough slack to weather, like, 3 minor emergencies coming up in a given week without having to dip into reserves, and covid just continuously soaked up more than that allocation each week, for months on end)
*for many values of ‘you’. Obviously some people vary here.
A pretty key piece of my thinking here is: if I emotionally cannot handle a decision, then “don’t give up my agency” is not an option. My agency is already basically gone at that point. If I am not emotionally capable of choosing between at least two different decisions (e.g. engage in a long negotiation to change circumstances or keep going with status quo), then for agency-analysis purposes, I am a rock with my already-chosen decision written on it.
This is why we have things like power of attorney and living wills. At some point, there is no meaningful agency left to retain. The first-best option (i.e. retaining agency) is already gone, and it’s time to move on to next-best.
(John and I just chatted offline, and a point of confusion we resolved was that I thought John was saying something like “the majority people in the house who are able to do thinking better should take over the thinking for the people who are too overwhelmed to think”, but the thing he meant was more like* “the people who are having trouble thinking should proactively find a person to be their lawyer, and/or help them think. Their “lawyer” should be whoever they trust most to help them.” Which is a pretty different frame.
I happen to not think this would have worked very well – I think a key problem was that everyone was overwhelmed at once, so there was nobody you trusted to be your lawyer who actually had bandwidth to do so. But, this is more of a straightforward factual constraint than a deep disagreement. I agree that looking for people to help you think, and/or represent you at house meetings, is a useful approach in some cases)
*I’m not 100% sure I represented his viewpoint well here.
Endorsed.
To be clear, I do indeed think we have the luxury to exclude most people from our lives. Indeed any rule that doesn’t exclude 90%+ of people from your life to a very large degree seems far too lax to me.
Also, 10 hours really doesn’t seem that much over the course of a pandemic, so I do think the above holds for me. It just seems really really crucial to maintain coordination ability in crises, and this will require some harsh decisions.
This does seem like a super-important lesson to me.
It also feels like it gives me some insight into the gears of why the world is mad.
Really? I would not guess this. It seems like having more people around in your day-to-day social environment is on-net better.
If you have a small number of people who are totally on the same page and feel chill, those people can actually go out and interact with other people without “I want to give my friend a hug” being a 10-person-negotiation.
Normally I like living with lots of people, but during covid my life got way less stressful when I slimmed down to just living with 1 person.
[Oh, mingyuan already said this in way more detail. Coolio]
No, Ray is almost certainly right. Everyone I talked to who lived with one exactly one other person (my sister and my mom, and lots of people with their romantic partners) had a way better time than everyone I know who lived in a group house, N=50+. (I can think of maybe one exception?) This is partly about it being easier to negotiate with just one other person, as mentioned in the post, but also just everything being less difficult with just one other person. It’s easier to avoid them if you’re feeling anti-social; it’s easier to build routines alongside just one other person than with a bunch of unreliable housemates; it’s easier to notice which of your social needs are not being met and seek out alternative ways to meet them, rather than feeling socially burned out by being around other people 24⁄7 and yet also not having your needs met.
Obviously I’m primarily talking about pairs of people who like and care about each other, like family members or romantic partners. However, I think some of the benefits would still apply even if it was a randomly assigned roommate. And maybe even still if it was someone you hated, because I think I’d rather live with one person I hated than with multiple people I hated. Not sure though.
In general I think the ability to choose who you interact with is what matters. Feelings of isolation come because you don’t reach out to the people you’d like to interact with (maybe because of anxiety about reaching out, maybe because you don’t have anyone you’d like to reach out to), but that’s at least fixable. Whereas being in a situation where you’re forced to interact with a bunch of people all the time whether you want to or not is harder to escape just by application of your own agency. I’d rather live alone and have to put in the activation energy to reach out to people, than live with others and feel totally trapped. Maybe there’s such thing as an extrovert for whom having people around is just pretty much an unqualified good, but I don’t think I know anyone like that.
Finally, I’ll note that Ray’s comment is coming from a place of experience – his house noticed quite early on that spending the pandemic together would be a bad idea, and Ray and his partner (who moved somewhere on their own), as well as C (who went to live on his own) seem to have had a pretty good time by their self-reports that I’ve heard.
My risk should be from 19% to 82% probability in the next six months. This, if I always remain in the house. In order to avoid that, I should put my life on hold and get a full-time job I dislike. And people call me exaggerated and crazy both IRL and online. Long-term consequences of Covid are what worry me the most. Idk how to deal with this tbh. Genuinely asking.
Where do you live? At least in the US, I would find these numbers implausible. 19-82% is the background chance for a random person in the US, taking completely typical measures, to have had COVID. That definitely does not look like always remaining in the house.
Italy. House of 5 people. A city with around 1k cases per day for a few months. One person goes to school, sees friends, invites friends into the house. Another travels abroad or inside the country for a few days every 10 days or so and doesn’t always get tested when returning. When he is in the house he also invites his girlfriend, eats out, sees friends, etc. In the microcovid test site I put 5 ppl house with 10 close contacts for lack of better options. Sounds reasonable?
Edit: Italy’s vaccination rate sucks. Not gonna see a vaccine for me or anyone in the house with risky behavior till 2022
Ah… “always remain in the house” is not the right way to think about your options here. Your roommates are apparently acting about like the broader populace, and therefore have exposure rates about like the broader populace. If you want to have lower exposure rates than that, then the thing-you-need-to-do is not to always remain in the house, but rather to avoid significant exposure to your roommates.
Indeed, spending more time outside the house might be a good strategy.
True. Thanks for the good tip. I might actually implement it now that the weather and temperature are nicer.
“He really flipped the sign in that argument”
The result is more paranoia ,_,