I think the main prediction/expectation error many rationalists (including me) made, was expecting countries to either do practically nothing and let the virus run through the population like a wildfire, or respond heavily in a way that stomp it out in a few months. in both cases life goes back to normal in a few weeks/months, and if you know that it will only be a few months then taking extreme measures in that time frame makes sense.
Alas, what actually happened was this weird middle ground where we never quite eradicate the virus nor let it run wild, which drew out the problem for a year+.
I wasn’t prepared for that, and my thinking was too short term, so i also ended up sacrificing too much.
Yes! This is an important factor that I had written into a previous version. If I’d known at the outset that it would last a year I think (/hope) I would have made very different decisions. As it was the goalposts kept moving just a little further out, so it always felt like “can I keep doing this for 1-2 more months” rather than “would I reflectively want to do this for a whole year”.
I agree that expecting a more competent government response than we actually saw (almost anywhere [1]) was entirely reasonable, and that premised on that extreme action to manage tail risks was prudent for the first half of 2020.
Subsequently, I think the rationalist community underperformed wrt. understanding the ongoing crises; we’ve had excellent epistemology but only inconsistently translated that into “winning” as the problem moved from extreme uncertainty and tail risk, to a set of more detail-rich operational challenges. In a slogan, we’ve been long-Sequences and short-CFAR.
[1] In Australia we’ve had a lot of inadequate and needlessly costly policy responses to COVID—for example, I still see more concern about hand hygiene than masks, let alone ventilation—but substantially better than the USA or UK. Between what we did get right, geography, and luck daily life is back to normalish; though the vaccine rollout is inexcusably slow—even with literally nobody dying of COVID (~0.5 daily cases per million people; almost all incoming travellers in supervised quarantine) the economic benefits of moving faster would be huge (allowing potential-superspreader-events again; reduced cost-in-expectation of expensive+unlikely lockdowns). Overall I give Australia as a country a C- on the basis that what we did was barely adequate, and an B+ on the basis that it worked and substantially outperformed most peers.
I’m curious, what countries have and haven’t seen substantial focus on hand hygiene?
Japan has the three C’s of avoiding closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings as a main guidance. Japan also performed much better at outcome metrics.
I feel like this could be related to a problem of rationalists and people in general binarizing too much, either there’s extreme action 1 or extreme action 2, with no middle ground. And in general, this relates to one intuitive reason to be skeptical of extreme utopia or dystopia, even if my models say otherwise: We underestimate the chances of a middle ground situation.
Also a problem of ignoring non-extreme outcomes even though they don’t require as much optimization power as extreme outcomes.
I think the main prediction/expectation error many rationalists (including me) made, was expecting countries to either do practically nothing and let the virus run through the population like a wildfire, or respond heavily in a way that stomp it out in a few months. in both cases life goes back to normal in a few weeks/months, and if you know that it will only be a few months then taking extreme measures in that time frame makes sense.
Alas, what actually happened was this weird middle ground where we never quite eradicate the virus nor let it run wild, which drew out the problem for a year+.
I wasn’t prepared for that, and my thinking was too short term, so i also ended up sacrificing too much.
Yes! This is an important factor that I had written into a previous version. If I’d known at the outset that it would last a year I think (/hope) I would have made very different decisions. As it was the goalposts kept moving just a little further out, so it always felt like “can I keep doing this for 1-2 more months” rather than “would I reflectively want to do this for a whole year”.
I agree that expecting a more competent government response than we actually saw (almost anywhere [1]) was entirely reasonable, and that premised on that extreme action to manage tail risks was prudent for the first half of 2020.
Subsequently, I think the rationalist community underperformed wrt. understanding the ongoing crises; we’ve had excellent epistemology but only inconsistently translated that into “winning” as the problem moved from extreme uncertainty and tail risk, to a set of more detail-rich operational challenges. In a slogan, we’ve been long-Sequences and short-CFAR.
[1] In Australia we’ve had a lot of inadequate and needlessly costly policy responses to COVID—for example, I still see more concern about hand hygiene than masks, let alone ventilation—but substantially better than the USA or UK. Between what we did get right, geography, and luck daily life is back to normalish; though the vaccine rollout is inexcusably slow—even with literally nobody dying of COVID (~0.5 daily cases per million people; almost all incoming travellers in supervised quarantine) the economic benefits of moving faster would be huge (allowing potential-superspreader-events again; reduced cost-in-expectation of expensive+unlikely lockdowns). Overall I give Australia as a country a C- on the basis that what we did was barely adequate, and an B+ on the basis that it worked and substantially outperformed most peers.
I’m curious, what countries have and haven’t seen substantial focus on hand hygiene?
We have that here in Canada.
Japan has the three C’s of avoiding closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings as a main guidance. Japan also performed much better at outcome metrics.
I feel like this could be related to a problem of rationalists and people in general binarizing too much, either there’s extreme action 1 or extreme action 2, with no middle ground. And in general, this relates to one intuitive reason to be skeptical of extreme utopia or dystopia, even if my models say otherwise: We underestimate the chances of a middle ground situation.
Also a problem of ignoring non-extreme outcomes even though they don’t require as much optimization power as extreme outcomes.
Hmm, I’m not sure that’s the right way to look at it. Cause the way I would have seen those three scenarios at the time would be
Doing something quick and drastic is best
Not doing anything is bad
Doing this weird middle ground thing is worst
So it’s not that I gravitated towards expecting either the best or the worst, actually I wasn’t pessimistic enough!
“Flatten the curve!” they said.