LW Team Updates: Pandemic Edition (March 2020)
TL; DR
The LessWrong team has been throwing our combined might behind coronavirus efforts. As I see it, coronavirus is both of a problem immense proportion that we might be able to help with as well as a domain well suited to the development and application of rationality + rationality tools
Our efforts include:
A Coronavirus Research Agenda for the community to contribute research efforts towards.
A Link Database of Coronavirus Resources which have been vetted, rated, and briefly summarized.
Plus daily updates of the best additions to the database.
New tagging features which allow for:
A dedicated coronavirus tag page.
Filtering for coronavirus content (exclude or include).
A thread of Justified Practical Advice.
plus summary.
A Coronavirus Open Thread for coronavirus thoughts that don’t warrant their own post.
A Template Spreadsheet for Houses to coordinate their coronavirus quarantine and health statuses within and between themselves.
Online Events & Meetups
The first event, this Sunday 3⁄29, will be a livestream debate + meetup with Robin Hanson and Zvi Mowshowitz on whether we should intentionally expose parts of the population to the coronavirus in a controlled way.
When: Sunday, March 29 at 12:00 PDT (West Coast Time)
Full Update
2020 is turning out to be quite the year. I apologize that the LessWrong team hasn’t yet put out any updates so far: we’d lined up some great Q1 plans and then things got...messy.
The team’s attention is now fully focused on COVID-19. Habryka has some elaboration on why this is a top priority here.
Before I go any further, serious respect to the LessWrong community which has done a fantastic job addressing the coronavirus situation ahead of the curve. Really, the response has been very proportionate to the situation.
A Note on Additional Help
For the last several weeks, the LessWrong team has been contracting with Elizabeth to help lead coronavirus efforts, hence her name being attached to several of the below projects. Elizabeth has been a member of the extended LessWrong moderator team since possibly the rise of LW2.0 and may be recognized for her work on epistemic spotchecks and other research.
Current Projects
[This Sunday!! March 29] Online Events & Meetups
The LessWrong team is beginning to organise various online meetups and events. The plan is to experiment and explore which exact kinds of meetups can be made to work and with which tech.
The first event will be this Sunday, March 29: a live-streamed debate between Robin Hanson and Zvi Mowshowitz followed by an online meetup.
Sunday, March 29 at 12:00PM (PST / West Coast Time)
The LessWrong Coronavirus Research Agenda
Elizabeth has laid out concrete open questions related to coronavirus here. LessWrong/Rationality is about believing true things and taking actions that cause the best outcomes. In many ways, the coronavirus pandemic is an excellent test of our rationality. It’s a murky, high-uncertainty domain with high stakes.
I’ve been excited by the leading work the LessWrong community has done to date, and am further excited by the prospect of us pulling together communally for further answer the many questions that remain.
Right now, the top 3 concrete questions are:
How can we estimate how many people are infected in an area?
Where can we donate time and money to avert coronavirus deaths?
You do not need a background in biology to help out. Basic quantitative skills are sufficient to provide useful information. Ben Pace has further guidance in his How To Contribute Guide.
Coronavirus Links Database
On March 13th, The team launched a daily-updating database of links to coronavirus resources. Links are collected, sorted by topic, rated, and summarized. Top level categories include “Progression & Outcome”, “Spread & Prevention”, “Science”, “DIY”, and so on.
The goals is to make it easy to find important information, for examples, answers to questions like:
“What’s the best dashboard to follow global case counts?”
“What’s the best link to send to my parents?”
“How long does COVID-19 last on different material surfaces?”
“Where can I find that really good thread by Rob Wiblin I read last week?”
The link database was originally implemented as a Google Sheet but has just been migrated to live in the LessWrong site proper.
Daily Links Updates
In conjunction with the links database, the team has been posting a daily-updates post containing notable links which were added in the last day. For example:
Tagging/Filtering
The LessWrong team has been talking about “tagging” as a feature for a long-time now and head a prototype build as of last December. The coronavirus situation gives us extra reason to roll it out now: some people might wish to filter out the deluge of coronavirus related content and view posts on other topics. To this end, we’ve rolled out a limited version of tagging with just the “Coronavirus” tag.
Raemon describes the feature fully in this post here. The key thing to know is you click the gear next to Latest Posts to open up filtering options.
Hidden: no posts with this tag will be displayed
Required: only posts with this tag will be displayed
Default: posts with this tag will be displayed normally based on karma and time since posting.
Naturally, if you’re after everything we’ve got on coronavirus, visit the coronavirus tag page at www.lesswrong.com/tag/coronavirus.
Coronavirus Justified Practical Advice Thread (& Summary)
The team noticed early on that a lot of coronavirus advice was being shared, often without much explanation for why it was good advice. Thus was the Justified Practical Advice (JPA) Thread born. The thread is long, contains many interesting and hopefully useful ideas, but can also take a while to read. So we’ve also got the Justified Practical Advice Thread Summary which contains the best advice from the thread.
Coronavirus Open Thread
If you have something to say on coronavirus that’s not worth a top-level post, please share in the Coronavirus Open Thread.
House Coordination Spreadsheet & Isolation Levels
Raemon with the assistance of others put a great deal of effort into developing a spreadsheet template for houses within a community to coordinate on their health and quarantine status.
Coronavirus Household Isolation Coordination 1.2
The spreadsheet can be an excuse to think about isolation plans, discuss them with roommates, and create common knowledge of them. Subgoals include:
establishing guidelines for level-of-isolation (see second tab)
help with contract tracing
facilitate roommate swapping between higher-caution and lower-caution households
facilitate creation of multi-house cells that share an isolation level (where permitted by local quarantine laws, e.g. not California)
I find the second tab with “isolation levels” useful for thinking about exposure, risk, and various precautions.
Direct Research
Jim, Elizabeth, and others have been putting out some great direct research. Notable contributions include:
Upcoming Projects
I expect the team will want to remain agile in coming weeks and move our efforts to wherever seems most useful. Given that, I think it’s hard to commit specifically to what we’ll work on.
A project I’d like to work on if possible is moving us towards some kind of Wiki tech. I could see that being useful for establishing a Schelling location for the most up-to-date knowledge of given questions of interest, e.g. treatments for global spreading infection diseases.
How To Contribute
Ben Pace has written a guide on how to contribute to LessWrong’s coronavirus efforts. It so far details how to contribute to the Links Database and Research Agenda.
Feedback, Support, Questions, Etc.
We love to hear from people. If you want to talk to us about anything, please reach out:
Comment on this post
Intercom (icon in the bottom right, you might have to edit your user settings)
Email us at hello@lesswrong.com or support@lesswrong.com
Ask a question on www.lesswrong.com/questions
Message us on our Facebook page.
My 2-cent thought:
-COVID-19 virus is highly-contagious because of its long asymptomatic incubation phase.
-to reduce infection, a method of ealry detection during asymptomatic period may have some effect (instead of waiting for actual signs like fever, coughing)
-dogs have been researched to show ability of virus-sensing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4705269/
Shall dogs also sense COVID virus in the early phase? How can we evaluate this idea?
If the idea is worth taking serious concern, how can we propose to scientists? What can it help with the whole COVID situation?