Yes, though I think it’s important to be asking this question, both now and every few weeks, to check “Hmm, do we actually have comparative advantage here? Have we picked all the low-hanging fruit?”
There are roughly three reasons I see to focus on this:
To make sure we’re safe.
You can’t research x-risk if you’re dead, or your life is disrupted. Right now a lot of stuff is up in the air. Having an accurate model of both the coronavirus itself, and possibly downstream economic/political turmoil seem important, at least until we’ve narrowed down the scope of how bad things area. (Maybe in a month it turns out things aren’t that bad, but I think the error bars are wide enough to justify investing another month of thinking and preparation)
For standard EA Reasons.
I read your initial question as mostly asking within this frame. Is Coronavirus important, neglected, and tractable? Do we have comparative advantage at it?
I’m not sure about the answer to this question. On one hand, it’s definitely not neglected. But it does seem important and tractable, and I think it is a quite achievable goal for LessWrong but to be one of the best places on the internet to discuss it and get information.
My guess is that people who were working professionally on x-risk should most likely continue focusing on that, but I think for a lot of “freelance EA research” types, coronavirus is at least worth considering within the standard EA paradigm.
But I would not be surprised if the answer was “no, when you factor in the non-neglectedness, the QALYs or other impact here isn’t on par with usual EA effort.”
Tight feedback loops.
This is my biggest crux (after ensuring personal safety). What seems very significant about coronavirus to me is that it gives us a situation where:
a) there is clearly value to marginal thought, from people who aren’t necessarily specialists.
b) you will probably get an answer to “was I right?” on the timescale of months or a year, rather than years/decades, which is how most EA is.
I currently think it’s worth marshalling LW and EA towards coronavirus, mostly as an Exam to see how competent we are, intellectually and logistically. It’s a particularly good time to practice forecasting, research, first principles thinking, fermi-calculations, and collaboration. In the end, we’ll a) have a clear sense of our own capabilities, and b) moreso than usual times, it’ll be easier to signal our competence (assuming we turn out to be competent) to the rest of the world, possibly leveraging it into more people trusting us when it comes to more confusing domains.
On 1: How much time do people need to spend reading & arguing about coronavirus before they hit dramatically diminishing marginal returns? How many LW-ers have already reached that point?
On 3a: I’m pretty skeptical about marginal thought from people who aren’t specialists actually doing anything—unless you’re planning to organise tests or similar. What reason do you have to think LW posts will be useful?
On 3b: It feels like you could cross-apply this logic pretty straightforwardly to argue that LW should have a lot of political discussion; it has many of the same upsides, and also many of the same downsides. The very fact that LW has so much coronavirus coverage already demonstrates that the addictiveness of discussing this topic is comparable to that of politics.
Overall: my current estimate is that there’s about one more month of useful high-focus COVID work to do. Meanwhile, we’ll be shipping the “block covid content from frontpage” option within 24 hours, so the people sick of COVID content can easily tune it out (assuming they’re using LessWrong. Hmm, this is a good reminder that we should probably check in with GreaterWrong peeps about implementing the new tagging features)
Also, if you’re using LessWrong and you haven’t yet turned off the “Coronavirus” section at the top of the page, you already have the option in your recommendation settings to turn that off.
...
Answering other comments in more detail:
I do think #1 probably has the least remaining value for people who for whom it’s a live option to “get supplies and hole-up somewhere for months.”
The two reasons that I think at least some more thought is worthwhile here are:
Some people can’t actually hole up forever, and I think those people benefit from having good, up-to-date models that inform them of how risky things actually are
Some people may be worried about economic/political turmoil. I am more worried about those discussions turning Mindkiller-y, and not quite sure what to do about it. But, I think they are worth figuring-out-how-to-figure-out-without-turning-Mindkillery.
3a: I think there’s plenty of data-aggregation efforts that can be directed by high-context people, that mid-level-researchers can help.
I also think… the counterfactual posts that mid-level generalist researchers are going to do that aren’t about COVID probably also aren’t
3b: Politics isn’t bad because it’s addictive, it’s bad because it’s damaging to epistemics. (I do agree addictiveness means it should be “quarantined” somewhere [har har], but that part’s pretty easy)
Yes, though I think it’s important to be asking this question, both now and every few weeks, to check “Hmm, do we actually have comparative advantage here? Have we picked all the low-hanging fruit?”
There are roughly three reasons I see to focus on this:
To make sure we’re safe.
You can’t research x-risk if you’re dead, or your life is disrupted. Right now a lot of stuff is up in the air. Having an accurate model of both the coronavirus itself, and possibly downstream economic/political turmoil seem important, at least until we’ve narrowed down the scope of how bad things area. (Maybe in a month it turns out things aren’t that bad, but I think the error bars are wide enough to justify investing another month of thinking and preparation)
For standard EA Reasons.
I read your initial question as mostly asking within this frame. Is Coronavirus important, neglected, and tractable? Do we have comparative advantage at it?
I’m not sure about the answer to this question. On one hand, it’s definitely not neglected. But it does seem important and tractable, and I think it is a quite achievable goal for LessWrong but to be one of the best places on the internet to discuss it and get information.
My guess is that people who were working professionally on x-risk should most likely continue focusing on that, but I think for a lot of “freelance EA research” types, coronavirus is at least worth considering within the standard EA paradigm.
But I would not be surprised if the answer was “no, when you factor in the non-neglectedness, the QALYs or other impact here isn’t on par with usual EA effort.”
Tight feedback loops.
This is my biggest crux (after ensuring personal safety). What seems very significant about coronavirus to me is that it gives us a situation where:
a) there is clearly value to marginal thought, from people who aren’t necessarily specialists.
b) you will probably get an answer to “was I right?” on the timescale of months or a year, rather than years/decades, which is how most EA is.
I currently think it’s worth marshalling LW and EA towards coronavirus, mostly as an Exam to see how competent we are, intellectually and logistically. It’s a particularly good time to practice forecasting, research, first principles thinking, fermi-calculations, and collaboration. In the end, we’ll a) have a clear sense of our own capabilities, and b) moreso than usual times, it’ll be easier to signal our competence (assuming we turn out to be competent) to the rest of the world, possibly leveraging it into more people trusting us when it comes to more confusing domains.
On 1: How much time do people need to spend reading & arguing about coronavirus before they hit dramatically diminishing marginal returns? How many LW-ers have already reached that point?
On 3a: I’m pretty skeptical about marginal thought from people who aren’t specialists actually doing anything—unless you’re planning to organise tests or similar. What reason do you have to think LW posts will be useful?
On 3b: It feels like you could cross-apply this logic pretty straightforwardly to argue that LW should have a lot of political discussion; it has many of the same upsides, and also many of the same downsides. The very fact that LW has so much coronavirus coverage already demonstrates that the addictiveness of discussing this topic is comparable to that of politics.
Overall: my current estimate is that there’s about one more month of useful high-focus COVID work to do. Meanwhile, we’ll be shipping the “block covid content from frontpage” option within 24 hours, so the people sick of COVID content can easily tune it out (assuming they’re using LessWrong. Hmm, this is a good reminder that we should probably check in with GreaterWrong peeps about implementing the new tagging features)
Also, if you’re using LessWrong and you haven’t yet turned off the “Coronavirus” section at the top of the page, you already have the option in your recommendation settings to turn that off.
...
Answering other comments in more detail:
I do think #1 probably has the least remaining value for people who for whom it’s a live option to “get supplies and hole-up somewhere for months.”
The two reasons that I think at least some more thought is worthwhile here are:
Some people can’t actually hole up forever, and I think those people benefit from having good, up-to-date models that inform them of how risky things actually are
Some people may be worried about economic/political turmoil. I am more worried about those discussions turning Mindkiller-y, and not quite sure what to do about it. But, I think they are worth figuring-out-how-to-figure-out-without-turning-Mindkillery.
3a: I think there’s plenty of data-aggregation efforts that can be directed by high-context people, that mid-level-researchers can help.
I also think… the counterfactual posts that mid-level generalist researchers are going to do that aren’t about COVID probably also aren’t
3b: Politics isn’t bad because it’s addictive, it’s bad because it’s damaging to epistemics. (I do agree addictiveness means it should be “quarantined” somewhere [har har], but that part’s pretty easy)
Even for people that are working professionally on x-risk, it’s probably harder now, and likely to continue to be harder, to focus on x-risk anyways.