I said we should be very concerned in January, albeit not very publicly.
The link says:
Initial (naive) estimates of CFR are always overstated because of selection bias for the most serious cases. So our bayesian prior should be a non-trivial proportion of asymptomatic cases. And ignoring this is why we routinely overestimate severity of new outbreaks.
That’s not to say that we don’t need to be very concerned, but policymakers and public health officials need to be cautious about damaging credibility by repeatedly crying wolf. But the balance between avoiding alarm and ensuring sufficient response is a very difficult one.
I definitely would not have read this as saying “we should be very concerned”, if that’s one of the things you meant to communicate.
I also followed the herd too much from expert circles, and my twitter feed from infectious disease epidemiology circles was behind even my slow self in recognizing that this was a incipient disaster back in March.
Woah, this is interesting and really alarming.
Because I was slow to move from the base-rate, I underestimated the severity of COVID-19 for too long. I’m unsure how to fix that, since most of the time it’s the right move, and paying attention to every new event is very expensive in terms of mental energy. (Suggestions welcome!)
Zeynep Tufekci is an even clearer example. She’s a sociologist and journalist who was writing about how it was “our civic duty” to prepare for coronavirus as early as February. She was also the first mainstream media figure to spread the word that masks were probably helpful.
Totally at random today, reading a blog post on the Mongol Empire like all normal people do during a crisis, I stumbled across a different reference to Zeynep. In a 2014 article, she was sounding a warning about the Ebola pandemic that was going on at the time. She was saying the exact same things everyone is saying now – global institutions are failing, nobody understands exponential growth, travel restrictions could work early but won’t be enough if it breaks out. She quoted a CDC prediction that there could be a million cases by the end of 2014. “Let that sink in,” she wrote. “A million Ebola victims in just a few months.”
In fact, this didn’t happen. There were only about 30,000 cases. The virus never really made it out of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
I don’t count this as a failed prediction on Zeynep’s part. First of all, because it could have been precisely because of people like her sounding the alarm that the epidemic was successfully contained. But more important, it wasn’t really a prediction at all. Her point wasn’t that she definitely knew this Ebola pandemic was the one that would be really bad. Her point was that it might be, so we needed to prepare. She said the same thing when the coronavirus was just starting. If this were a game, her batting average would be 50%, but that’s the wrong framework.
Zeynep Tufecki is admirable. But her admirable skill isn’t looking at various epidemics and successfully predicting which ones will be bad and which ones will fizzle out. She can’t do that any better than anyone else. Her superpower is her ability to treat something as important even before she has incontrovertible evidence that it has to be.
The whole article seems worth reading, especially if it’s true that epidemiologists under-reacted to this. It’s clearly correct that most people shouldn’t follow every pandemic closely—even most epidemiologists shouldn’t follow every pandemic closely. But it’s important that we get the base level of alarm correct—it might be correct to overreact somewhat to the vast majority of pandemics, if that’s what it takes to avoid underreacting to the big one. And it’s important that people be very explicit about how carefully they’ve been looking into this or that specific pandemic, so that we can collectively know which epidemiologists and other observers to pay the most attention to.
I think Tyler’s way too impressed by himself and his discipline than he should be. There’s a saying about economists making fortune tellers look good that seems appropriate here. And he probably shouldn’t be posting insulting things about epidemiologists in the same breath as saying most economists are just as bad—which he followed up with saying he wants to be rude by asking questions he could have spent half an hour googling—he hadn’t even done basic research. I also think that people on lesswrong give too little credit to public health officials for being properly cautious about overreacting, especially given that even for COVID-19, many people are saying that we went too far, and the economic harms were not worth the damage.
Next, should academics and public servants in epidemiology simply be paid more? No, and no. If anything, there is not enough disincentive to enter academia, since there are so many more good applicants than spots, across disciplines. Something else needs to be fixed there first. (Everything, actually.) And government isn’t set up well to pay people more in ways that gets better candidates—doubling salaries wouldn’t be enough to get anyone more competent to run for the Senate, much less be a senior government appointee, unless they already wanted to do that and didn’t actually care about the money. (There are other ways we underpay and sabotage government that money could fix, but that’s a different discussion.) And I’m surprised that an economist doesn’t know enough about these structures to see why higher pay isn’t a useful lever.
Strong-upvoted! I admire you for writing this.
The link says:
I definitely would not have read this as saying “we should be very concerned”, if that’s one of the things you meant to communicate.
Woah, this is interesting and really alarming.
Scott Alexander writes:
The whole article seems worth reading, especially if it’s true that epidemiologists under-reacted to this. It’s clearly correct that most people shouldn’t follow every pandemic closely—even most epidemiologists shouldn’t follow every pandemic closely. But it’s important that we get the base level of alarm correct—it might be correct to overreact somewhat to the vast majority of pandemics, if that’s what it takes to avoid underreacting to the big one. And it’s important that people be very explicit about how carefully they’ve been looking into this or that specific pandemic, so that we can collectively know which epidemiologists and other observers to pay the most attention to.
This also makes me wonder what people think of:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/what-does-this-economist-think-of-epidemiology.html
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/04/from-my-email-a-note-about-epidemiology.html
I think Tyler’s way too impressed by himself and his discipline than he should be. There’s a saying about economists making fortune tellers look good that seems appropriate here. And he probably shouldn’t be posting insulting things about epidemiologists in the same breath as saying most economists are just as bad—which he followed up with saying he wants to be rude by asking questions he could have spent half an hour googling—he hadn’t even done basic research. I also think that people on lesswrong give too little credit to public health officials for being properly cautious about overreacting, especially given that even for COVID-19, many people are saying that we went too far, and the economic harms were not worth the damage.
Also see this thread: https://twitter.com/davidmanheim/status/1235274008142270466
Next, should academics and public servants in epidemiology simply be paid more? No, and no. If anything, there is not enough disincentive to enter academia, since there are so many more good applicants than spots, across disciplines. Something else needs to be fixed there first. (Everything, actually.) And government isn’t set up well to pay people more in ways that gets better candidates—doubling salaries wouldn’t be enough to get anyone more competent to run for the Senate, much less be a senior government appointee, unless they already wanted to do that and didn’t actually care about the money. (There are other ways we underpay and sabotage government that money could fix, but that’s a different discussion.) And I’m surprised that an economist doesn’t know enough about these structures to see why higher pay isn’t a useful lever.