It sounds to me like you’re expecting too much from all information. Consider the information that physical matter is made of atoms, which are about a nanometer across, and have positively charged protons and neutrons in the center, and then much smaller electrons whizzing around in orbits. This has been revolutionary for society, leading to so much ability to do engineering and chemistry and understanding cosmology and so forth.
A typical teenager learning this information for the first time might ask “what utility will this give me personally?” and find it has little direct application. Yet I would not advise them that this information is not worth knowing.
That’s the first point, that information doesn’t need to be directly connected to an outcome to be worth knowing.
The second point is that fine gradations in information are valuable. I can imagine someone similarly saying “Why should it be valuable to anyone to know the difference between Apple Stock being $285 versus $275? Surely we should just care whether it’s doing well or not? Why don’t we just replace it with the words “Great” “Good” “Bad” “Worse”? Yet often small signs tell us something. A few percentage points of dip can imply that a new product release went poorly. A change in CEO leading to stock price raising a few points can indicate very good things about this new CEO.
In this case, I find information like “8% chance of a pandemic” valuable in lots of ways.
It helps me to know how often we get 8% chance pandemics. I wish I could look back over the decades and see how often pandemics got to being this likely. This generally helps me understand our civilizational resilience and how much of an issue pandemics are.[1]
It helps me to know how much to keep tracking it. If the prediction market gave it <1% then I would be like “Great, this is an update that I can stop thinking about it and stop tracking it.” At this range I expect we’re fine but I will still be on the lookout for more info.
I also like knowing the specific probabilities so I can learn which events have an important effect. For instance, it’s currently around 5%. There may be many news stories about this pandemic, and seeing which ones cause movement vs which ones don’t, will help me build a model of what information actually matters.
Added: The third point is that public legibility is a massive value-add, and could well be most of the value. Given that it’s public, it makes me more confident that, if it were to get higher, people would notice and warn me. Much of the news landscape is just people arguing whether something is an emergency (which our memetics are perversely incentivized to say is true all of the time), so whether lots of people are acting alarmed just isn’t something most people can be very sensitive to changes in. The change from 5% to 50% is serious for me and yet I don’t know how to tell that difference from the tone of people on twitter or in many media outlets, especially when they are not themselves precise.
To go into more detail on this, I had an LLM write the following so that the math checked out: you can imagine a world where every year carries a 5% pandemic risk, and another world where every 15 years carries a 75% pandemic risk. Over 60 years, both imply 3 expected pandemics, but they suggest very different prevention strategies: steady-state risk reduction in the first case, versus identifying and defusing rare high-risk transition periods in the second.
It sounds to me like you’re expecting too much from all information. Consider the information that physical matter is made of atoms, which are about a nanometer across, and have positively charged protons and neutrons in the center, and then much smaller electrons whizzing around in orbits. This has been revolutionary for society, leading to so much ability to do engineering and chemistry and understanding cosmology and so forth.
A typical teenager learning this information for the first time might ask “what utility will this give me personally?” and find it has little direct application. Yet I would not advise them that this information is not worth knowing.
That’s the first point, that information doesn’t need to be directly connected to an outcome to be worth knowing.
The second point is that fine gradations in information are valuable. I can imagine someone similarly saying “Why should it be valuable to anyone to know the difference between Apple Stock being $285 versus $275? Surely we should just care whether it’s doing well or not? Why don’t we just replace it with the words “Great” “Good” “Bad” “Worse”? Yet often small signs tell us something. A few percentage points of dip can imply that a new product release went poorly. A change in CEO leading to stock price raising a few points can indicate very good things about this new CEO.
In this case, I find information like “8% chance of a pandemic” valuable in lots of ways.
It helps me to know how often we get 8% chance pandemics. I wish I could look back over the decades and see how often pandemics got to being this likely. This generally helps me understand our civilizational resilience and how much of an issue pandemics are.[1]
It helps me to know how much to keep tracking it. If the prediction market gave it <1% then I would be like “Great, this is an update that I can stop thinking about it and stop tracking it.” At this range I expect we’re fine but I will still be on the lookout for more info.
I also like knowing the specific probabilities so I can learn which events have an important effect. For instance, it’s currently around 5%. There may be many news stories about this pandemic, and seeing which ones cause movement vs which ones don’t, will help me build a model of what information actually matters.
Added: The third point is that public legibility is a massive value-add, and could well be most of the value. Given that it’s public, it makes me more confident that, if it were to get higher, people would notice and warn me. Much of the news landscape is just people arguing whether something is an emergency (which our memetics are perversely incentivized to say is true all of the time), so whether lots of people are acting alarmed just isn’t something most people can be very sensitive to changes in. The change from 5% to 50% is serious for me and yet I don’t know how to tell that difference from the tone of people on twitter or in many media outlets, especially when they are not themselves precise.
To go into more detail on this, I had an LLM write the following so that the math checked out: you can imagine a world where every year carries a 5% pandemic risk, and another world where every 15 years carries a 75% pandemic risk. Over 60 years, both imply 3 expected pandemics, but they suggest very different prevention strategies: steady-state risk reduction in the first case, versus identifying and defusing rare high-risk transition periods in the second.