I hadn’t seen DirectedEvolution’s review, so it was useful evidence for me. The questions Yarrow picked for determining whether LW was early seemed fair on the LW side (what other question than “did people on LW talk about COVID-19 early on” would one even be asking?), if not on the side of governments and the mainstream media. Even though DirectedEvolution’s review exists I remember people claiming LW was early on COVID-19, so Yarrow’s independent look into it is still useful. (Again, I know Yarrow is not set up to be fair to LW, but even unfair/biased information sources can be useful if one can model the degree/way in which they’re biased.) I think the statement “LW was early on COVID-19″[[1]] (which I used to believe!) is just wrong? I haven’t seen counter-evidence, yet people continue saying it.
I’d say e.g. that Metaculus came out far ahead of basically anyone else, with the first market being published on the 19th of January. (I’m looking at my predictions from the time on Metaculus and PredictionBook and there was a lot of fast updating based on evidence. I wish more LWers had forecasting track records (like this one) instead of vaguely talking about “Bayes points”[[2]].)
These kinds of retrospectives are in general not done very often, and follow-up/investigation of common claims are rare and kinda annoying to do, so I want to signal-boost empirical posts like the one I linked.
I think at minimum you have to credit the trading gains many LessWrongers made at the time, and MicroCovid.
Yeah, Yarrow is not trying to be fair. MicroCovid was cool, as was VaccinateCA. Maybe I’ll take a look into how many trading gains LWers made at the time, though this suffers from obvious selection bias. (I, for example, made no gains at the time, because I didn’t see the signal to start an investment account early on.)
Complicatedly I think LW settled more firmly on “this is a problem” while there was a bunch of political positioning in March/early April, but my understanding is that (inter-)governmental health organizations were earlier, even if their governments didn’t listen to them. My impression is that the general population wasn’t very worried until basically a week before lockdowns, and the polls Yarrow uses to refute this aren’t very convincing to me because I just don’t trust polls, in general—it’s very cheap to say “I’m worried”, but expensive to do anything about it.
<microrant>I’m baffled that this has gotten into parlance, it seems like a purely social fiction??? Another way of assigning status with almost no grounding in any kind of measurement?</microrant>
I don’t understand. Like, dozens of people have linked to evidence of LW being early on COVID, compared to basically any other reference class of smart educated people who didn’t specifically specialize in disease prevention (and even there, people took it more seriously).
What do you mean by “early”? Is this some kind of weird definitional dispute? It was extremely blatantly obvious that while I was preparing with my friends and trying to gather evidence about disease spread, and mortality rates, that practically no one else was taking it seriously. Also, lots of people we know made huge returns in the market betting on their COVID beliefs, which also clearly indicates the same thing (that LW was substantially earlier than comparably smart other groups).
Lots of people have given lots of evidence! I don’t know what you want!
I hadn’t seen DirectedEvolution’s review, so it was useful evidence for me. The questions Yarrow picked for determining whether LW was early seemed fair on the LW side (what other question than “did people on LW talk about COVID-19 early on” would one even be asking?), if not on the side of governments and the mainstream media. Even though DirectedEvolution’s review exists I remember people claiming LW was early on COVID-19, so Yarrow’s independent look into it is still useful. (Again, I know Yarrow is not set up to be fair to LW, but even unfair/biased information sources can be useful if one can model the degree/way in which they’re biased.) I think the statement “LW was early on COVID-19″ [[1]] (which I used to believe!) is just wrong? I haven’t seen counter-evidence, yet people continue saying it.
I’d say e.g. that Metaculus came out far ahead of basically anyone else, with the first market being published on the 19th of January. (I’m looking at my predictions from the time on Metaculus and PredictionBook and there was a lot of fast updating based on evidence. I wish more LWers had forecasting track records (like this one) instead of vaguely talking about “Bayes points” [[2]] .)
These kinds of retrospectives are in general not done very often, and follow-up/investigation of common claims are rare and kinda annoying to do, so I want to signal-boost empirical posts like the one I linked.
Yeah, Yarrow is not trying to be fair. MicroCovid was cool, as was VaccinateCA. Maybe I’ll take a look into how many trading gains LWers made at the time, though this suffers from obvious selection bias. (I, for example, made no gains at the time, because I didn’t see the signal to start an investment account early on.)
There were other misses from the LW side like this Zvi roundup.
Complicatedly I think LW settled more firmly on “this is a problem” while there was a bunch of political positioning in March/early April, but my understanding is that (inter-)governmental health organizations were earlier, even if their governments didn’t listen to them. My impression is that the general population wasn’t very worried until basically a week before lockdowns, and the polls Yarrow uses to refute this aren’t very convincing to me because I just don’t trust polls, in general—it’s very cheap to say “I’m worried”, but expensive to do anything about it.
<microrant>I’m baffled that this has gotten into parlance, it seems like a purely social fiction??? Another way of assigning status with almost no grounding in any kind of measurement?</microrant>
I don’t understand. Like, dozens of people have linked to evidence of LW being early on COVID, compared to basically any other reference class of smart educated people who didn’t specifically specialize in disease prevention (and even there, people took it more seriously).
What do you mean by “early”? Is this some kind of weird definitional dispute? It was extremely blatantly obvious that while I was preparing with my friends and trying to gather evidence about disease spread, and mortality rates, that practically no one else was taking it seriously. Also, lots of people we know made huge returns in the market betting on their COVID beliefs, which also clearly indicates the same thing (that LW was substantially earlier than comparably smart other groups).
Lots of people have given lots of evidence! I don’t know what you want!