I don’t use microCOVID much. Two things I’d like from the site:
A simple, reasonable, user-friendly tool for non-rationalists I know who are more worried about COVID than me (e.g., family).
A tool I can use if a future strain arises that’s a lot more scary. Something fast and early, that updates regularly as new information comes in.
The latter goal seems more useful in general, and my sense is that microCOVID isn’t currently set up to do that kind of thing—the site currently says “Not yet updated for the Omicron variant”, over a month in.
For the latter goal, updating fast matters more than meticulously citing sources and documenting all your reasoning. I see less need for a ‘GiveWell of microCOVID’ (that carefully defends every claim), and more value in a sort of Bayesian approach where you take the individuals with the best forecasting track record on COVID-related things, ask for their take on all the uncertain parameters, and then let people pick their favorite forecaster (or favorite aggregation method) from a dropdown menu.
A thing that sticks out is that I don’t actually know who has a good forecasting track record – I know some people have made predictions but those predictions aren’t aggregated anywhere I know that makes it easy to check.
I voted disagree, because at this point there have been plenty of COVID forecasting tournaments hosted by Good Judgement, Metaculus and several 3rd parties. Metaculus alone has 400 questions in the COVID category, a lot of which have 100+ predictions. I personally would find it quite easy to put together a group of forecasters with legibly good track record on COVID, but from working in this space I also do have a sense of where to start looking and who to ask.
I also tried and failed to get my family to use it :( Among other things, I think they bounced off particularly hard on the massive drop-down of 10 different risk categories of ppl and various levels of being in a bubble.
I don’t think the blocker here was fundamentally quantitative—they think a bunch about personal finance and budgeting, so that metaphor made sense to them (and I actually expect this to be true for a lot of non-STEM ppl). Instead, I think UX improvements could go a long way.
My guess is that the focus on bubbles no longer makes sense, since almost no one is doing that now. Beyond that, I struggle to know what trade offs could make microcovid UI more approachable, without making it not microcovid. A number of people (including me) already complain it’s too restrictive, and cutting down on options makes that worse. It’s really not obvious to me that the value generated by doing existing microcovid, but simpler, outweights the loss of configurability. Also I literally don’t know how to make it simpler or more inviting beyond tossing out options. I don’t mean it can’t be done, I mean I’m terrible UI designer who literally can’t think of anything.
So I’d be really interested in:
arguments that microcovid is at the wrong place on the pareto frontier
ways to improve usability that don’t trade off against specificity for power users
other numerical tools that could be useful to your family that aren’t microcovid
For the last one: raemon has suggested a unitless assesment of “how risky is today compared to other days?” (and maybe location comparisons as well), created using microcovid, local prevalence numbers, and a single default human.
This will be a bit of a disappointing answer (sorry in advance), but I indeed think UI-space is pretty high-dimensional and that there are many things you can do that aren’t just “remove options for all users”. Sadly, the best I way I know of how to implement this is to just do it myself and show the result; and I cannot find the time for that this week.
I don’t use microCOVID much. Two things I’d like from the site:
A simple, reasonable, user-friendly tool for non-rationalists I know who are more worried about COVID than me (e.g., family).
A tool I can use if a future strain arises that’s a lot more scary. Something fast and early, that updates regularly as new information comes in.
The latter goal seems more useful in general, and my sense is that microCOVID isn’t currently set up to do that kind of thing—the site currently says “Not yet updated for the Omicron variant”, over a month in.
For the latter goal, updating fast matters more than meticulously citing sources and documenting all your reasoning. I see less need for a ‘GiveWell of microCOVID’ (that carefully defends every claim), and more value in a sort of Bayesian approach where you take the individuals with the best forecasting track record on COVID-related things, ask for their take on all the uncertain parameters, and then let people pick their favorite forecaster (or favorite aggregation method) from a dropdown menu.
A thing that sticks out is that I don’t actually know who has a good forecasting track record – I know some people have made predictions but those predictions aren’t aggregated anywhere I know that makes it easy to check.
I voted disagree, because at this point there have been plenty of COVID forecasting tournaments hosted by Good Judgement, Metaculus and several 3rd parties. Metaculus alone has 400 questions in the COVID category, a lot of which have 100+ predictions. I personally would find it quite easy to put together a group of forecasters with legibly good track record on COVID, but from working in this space I also do have a sense of where to start looking and who to ask.
Ah, good to know.
I also tried and failed to get my family to use it :( Among other things, I think they bounced off particularly hard on the massive drop-down of 10 different risk categories of ppl and various levels of being in a bubble.
I don’t think the blocker here was fundamentally quantitative—they think a bunch about personal finance and budgeting, so that metaphor made sense to them (and I actually expect this to be true for a lot of non-STEM ppl). Instead, I think UX improvements could go a long way.
My guess is that the focus on bubbles no longer makes sense, since almost no one is doing that now. Beyond that, I struggle to know what trade offs could make microcovid UI more approachable, without making it not microcovid. A number of people (including me) already complain it’s too restrictive, and cutting down on options makes that worse. It’s really not obvious to me that the value generated by doing existing microcovid, but simpler, outweights the loss of configurability. Also I literally don’t know how to make it simpler or more inviting beyond tossing out options. I don’t mean it can’t be done, I mean I’m terrible UI designer who literally can’t think of anything.
So I’d be really interested in:
arguments that microcovid is at the wrong place on the pareto frontier
ways to improve usability that don’t trade off against specificity for power users
other numerical tools that could be useful to your family that aren’t microcovid
For the last one: raemon has suggested a unitless assesment of “how risky is today compared to other days?” (and maybe location comparisons as well), created using microcovid, local prevalence numbers, and a single default human.
This will be a bit of a disappointing answer (sorry in advance), but I indeed think UI-space is pretty high-dimensional and that there are many things you can do that aren’t just “remove options for all users”. Sadly, the best I way I know of how to implement this is to just do it myself and show the result; and I cannot find the time for that this week.
What kind of simplifications would you like to see, while keeping the product something that’s still fundamentally microcovid?