Update: I’m quite surprised that the total expected deaths has gone down in today’s update. I would have expected it to rise after this week’s data.
kjz
Karma: 262
As a fellow amateur, I greatly appreciate your recent posts trying to understand the events of the last few months, as well as your willingness to publicly and humbly acknowledge your ongoing uncertainty and to update your beliefs based on new evidence. I feel that you may be being too hard on yourself here though—some comments below.
Investors weren’t failing to synthesize the early information or waiting for someone to yell “fire!” They were waiting to see confirmed international community spread, rather than just a few cases popping up here and there.
The coincidence of faster spread of COVID-19 internationally and the beginnings of the stock market crash suggest that hard evidence of community spread of a deadly disease is the world’s evidential benchmark for an economic downturn.
As you point out, the onset of international community spread does seem to be the tipping point for the stock market crash. But the possibility that it might spread beyond China/East Asia must have been apparent throughout Jan and early Feb. Why was this not reflected in market volatility? VIX also stayed very flat until Feb. 20, the same time the markets started to decline. Wei Dai pointed out that this was a contributing factor to the gains on his options trade. I could see stocks themselves remaining high until there was evidence of international community spread, but VIX/option prices at the time suggest markets failed to price in any substantial chance of this happening until it had actually happened.
To argue otherwise is to say that it should be obvious COVID-19 was highly contagious based on some other form of evidence. That’s not impossible.
I think there was a lot of evidence COVID-19 was highly contagious based on the reports from China. What was unclear at the time was 1. if China could control the initial outbreak successfully, and 2. if a few cases did spread, could other governments identify and quarantine incoming cases to prevent escalation to full community spread. Markets may have greatly underestimated the chances of these two scenarios playing out the way they did.
This kind of intellectual work is extremely difficult; only a few people care about it enough to make the attempt, so I’m getting far less feedback than I would for other activities.
Totally agree. Predicting is hard, and predictions often look foolish with the benefit of hindsight. In this case, even understanding the past with the benefit of hindsight is challenging! But still worth doing, to try to understand the world better (or at least less wrongly).
A major league baseball player who hits a home run has far more in common with an MLB player who hits a foul ball than a child who hits a home run.
True—but the only way for a child to reach the majors is through continued practice. Keep swinging!
Could we get any info about the risk of spreading through talking by looking at infection rates among members of the deaf community who use sign language? It seems they would be much less likely to spread the virus through communication. Not sure if there would be a strong enough signal to noise ratio to draw any conclusions, but may be worth looking into.
Maybe others have noticed this as well, but Scott Alexander is now cautiously optimistic about the NYT situation, and has put some recent articles back up on the website.
This could also lead to an interesting race dynamic between biotech/pharma companies in the near future. If a novel disease target protein is identified and DeepMind decides to license their technology, all companies would in theory have access to the same structural information at the same time. Then it becomes a matter of who can execute screening, medicinal chemistry optimization, and clinical evaluation the fastest. Having a strategy in place to be the first to obtain patents for chemical matter modulating that target protein would also be a large advantage in this kind of situation.
An additional, unrelated note: the model of The Dictator’s Handbook suggests that incentives push away from the middle, towards total democracy (when there are already a large number of key supporters) or total autocracy (where the number of key supporters approaches one). But don’t other models suggest that the middle state of oligarchy is actually the default, and that both democracy and monarchy tend to decay towards oligarchy over time? And aren’t examples of this widespread? I notice that I am confused.
I haven’t read The Dictator’s Handbook or know what models there are already, but an autocrat could choose to convert to oligarchy to ensure a stable succession plan (assuming they felt no other autocrat could successfully wield power other than them), and a democracy could become an oligarchy if no individual could seize enough power to directly become an autocrat, but a group working together could. Under the right circumstances these incentives could overwhelm the ones going in the opposite direction.
For clarification, would you consider an amino acid sequence designed to have a certain function to pass this test? For example, a sequence that generates a protein capable of binding selectively to specific RNA sequences?
Yup, that would be another good example. I would guess that sequences designed for functions like these will be developed faster than sequences designed for shape, because the incentives to do so already exist. If you generate a gear or axle, what could you do with it? Are there known applications for such things? Ultimately we could imagine molecular machines made of such a toolkit, but that seems like another level of complexity. (Although perhaps it could tie in with work along the lines of Fraser Stoddart’s group.)
Fascinating stuff!
I looked through many combinations of the images, and found myself having a distinctive disgust reaction to quite a few, to the point of feeling slightly nauseous. Curious if anyone else has experienced this? I imagine it could be related to the uncanny valley in robotics… which is a little frightening.
I agree, many were quite pleasing as well, especially the adorable avocado armchairs and many of the macro photographs. Another personal favorite are the tetrahedra made of fire—they are exactly how I would picture Sauron, if Tolkien had described him as a tetrahedron.
The nauseating ones included:
Several to do with bats, the worst to me being “a stack of bats” on the table. Part of the problem is I was expecting to see bats (the sporting equipment), so bats (the animal) came as an unpleasant surprise. Not totally surprising this might cause nausea though, given the connection between bats and disease.
Agree with arielroth about some of the national food ones. They reminded me of the display foods you see at some kiosk-type food stations—the shape of the real thing, but just enough off to look completely unedible.
I think the rest of it was a building up of noticing little irregularities that gave overall feeling of unease. The misspelled letters on the storefronts, the animals made of strange textures, the view from my old apartment in San Francisco—but wait, there should be a shop on that corner! And that street should go uphill, not downhill! So much felt familiar at first glance, but just wrong after a little closer inspection, and it added up to a stronger effect after some time.
Not really nauseating, but along the same line of feeling wrong to me, were the golf clubs. I’ve played golf for a long time so I’ve seen a lot of pictures of clubs, and these images seemed normal at first glance but then wait, why does that one have a shaft coming out of both sides of the clubface? And those are just clubfaces with nothing attached. And those grooves would never get the ball out of the sand. Why would anyone ever make anything like that? Because they wouldn’t, and that gets to the heart of the discomfort. They have “clubiness”, but they’re not clubs.
On another note, an example I found really impressive was how every other country I looked at had only generic stadium images, but China’s were instantly recognizable as the Bird’s Nest from the Olympics.
(But I wonder if the architect of the Bird’s Nest would look at those images and say, those beams would never support the weight of the structure! Look, that one’s cracked! It’s so wrong!)
I agreed at the time with the sentiments of this and similar discussions of free money available through prediction markets, although I didn’t overcome the inertia enough to make any trades. However, yesterday’s events have made me question how well I was calibrated. Have others been feeling similarly?
I’m also a fan of 3-2-1 voting, and I think it has another strong advantage—it’s the one I could most easily see explaining to my friends across the political spectrum, having them understand how it works and its potential advantages quickly, and leave thinking it might be worth a shot and maybe even discussing it with their friends. Some anecdata: I live in a state where ranked choice voting failed to pass in the recent election. A few years ago, before anyone knew ranked choice would even be on the ballot, I tried to explain how it worked, and was met with a few types of dismissals: many thought it was too complicated and couldn’t follow along*, while one friend’s reply was “no, in an election you should just get one vote, and that’s that”. I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that, or if it was even his true rejection, but it was an interesting response.
But with 3-2-1, I feel like I could explain it to the same people and many would immediately get it and have a positive impression of it and actually remember it again later. Why? Because now I can point out how the candidate on the other side who they can’t stand is gonna get knocked out in round 2. Like, not even in the finals… in round 2! Because obviously way more people hate that other party than my party, and then we just have knock off some Libertarian or whoever, and we’ll win every time! And even once they realize a different pool of candidates might emerge and change the dynamic, at least that terrible candidate who they’re thinking about right now would never win.
Plus, the name itself is very memorable, underscores its simplicity, and is very chantable (for better or worse—I feel somewhat uncomfortable pointing this out, but it seems relevant to a discussion about political systems).
*to be clear, these are smart, reasonable people who would easily understand the concept given enough time. it felt like they were trying to play out elections in their head, realized it was taking too long to figure out during a normal conversation span (understandably), so just figured “forget it” and changed the subject.
I remember reading around the beginning of the pandemic that Bill Gates was going to do exactly that: subsidize production of many different vaccine candidates with his own money, and accept the sunk cost for any vaccines that ended up not working. I haven’t seen anything about this idea recently though, and it seems he has not been (at least publicly) behind any vaccine production efforts. Any idea why? To avoid perceived competition with Operation Warp Speed?
A bit off topic maybe, but when I read the original post, the part that resonated the most with me, and is now always in the back of mind during political discussions with my friends, is this:
Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
I’ve seen the first part condensed elsewhere on the site to “debate is war; arguments are soldiers”, which is the phrasing I generally use in conversation. This sets the stage for the key insight “you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side”. When I say that, the message often seems to get through, and people seem to think a little more reflectively. The tone of the conversation can soften and it can lead to a more nuanced and less combative discussion. I’ve even had people say, “Yeah, my side might be wrong about a few things, even though they’re still way better than that other side.”
Which, in general, I consider a huge win.
I prefer “get”. It implies more strongly that if someone actually needs to convince others of their argument, they need to make sure their message is as concise and optimized as possible, before trying to convince anyone. As the original post says:
What if you need all that nuance and to coordinate thousands of people?
You still only get five words.
Happy to give an ‘outsider’ viewpoint!
It’s funny, at the point where I had only read the post and not discussed it with anyone, I never parsed “politics is the mindkiller” as any of “politics=boo” or “you are not smart/rational enough to debate politics with me” or even “your mind has been so killed by politics that we can’t have a conversation where we understand each other”. I always thought of it as “politics kills everybody’s mind, like it or not, especially if they’re not aware of it”, and felt mostly sympathy for all of us that this is the case. In conversations, I only use “politics is the mindkiller” in the sense of “look what this is doing to all of us, no matter what side you’re on!” and always after we have shared examples of how both sides have behaved badly. I think doing it this way can help them start to see through the “must support our arguments, must attack theirs” pattern, which is probably so hardwired into people that they never realize it exists. I know I never did, until I read this post.
[Question] Any rationalist judges?
Which, because you only get five (or ten) words, shows up on the headlines as “Past Covid infection gives 5 months of immunity, study suggests”.
I expect many will read just the headline, and start to claim that it is known that past Covid infection gives exactly 5 months of immunity, and this will become the commonly remembered message going forward.
I didn’t look at the study itself, but how do they know the initial infections were “real” infections? Is it possible they are effectively just finding the false positive rate from the initial infection testing?
Interesting that the model hasn’t been updated since April 13, which was the point when daily deaths started to rise above the model’s predictions.