Rationalist Town Hall: Pandemic Edition
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260
Is anyone taking the perspective that extreme lock down for >6 months is worse than the slight chance of permanent disability and death?
I have a social bubble that’s about 100 people which still represents social distancing via a 95% reduction in my real social interactions. I have hosted multiple outdoor parties confirmed as not super spreading events, including one favorably reviewed by the lead contact tracer for San Mateo County. I regularly get food delivery and eat in outdoor restaurants. I’ve been to the Black Rock Desert for four weekends this year. Eating inside a restaurant in a Vegas casino and transiting the Grand Sierra Casino in Reno to a hotel room have felt like the riskiest things I have done this pandemic and are around the level of things I regret doing.
I’m happy to be the punching bag for the fatalistic perspective that the cure is worse than the disease given how much we now know about the disease, but it seems like this perspective should be represented.
I also likely had “asymptomatic” covid in early February and took an experimental therapeutic/vaccine about a month ago that may provide me with another six months of immunity or resistance.
Realistically I’ll have difficulty making this event because I’m cleaning up an all night Halloween party in rural California with no 4G and spotty 3g, if you moved it to Monday or Tuesday on my account I could definitely attend.
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I'd like to spend a little time acknowledging good projects executed and work done by rationalists in response to Covid. Here are some that come to mind, but it's definitely not all of them, can people help me add to the list?
- Epidemic Forecasting, a project that amongst other things took superforecasters and used them to answer decision-relevant questions for various governments and vaccine trials. This was led by many LessWrongers including Jacob Lagerros, Josh Jacobson, Jan Kulveit, Connor Flexman, and more. My sense is that this project was unsuccessful in causing major change (e.g. preventing 10k deaths), but was nonetheless a strongly worthwhile effort, and the relevant people learned a lot about the world and its inadequacies.
- MicroCovid.org, a project lead by LessWronger Catherio that built the best microcovid calculator I know and has been used by many rationalists in their group coordination and personal assessment. (She wrote about it on LW here.)
- LessWrong Coronavirus Links Database (announcement) and LessWrong Coronavirus Research Agenda, where the LW team built a useful links database and also paid Elizabeth Van Nostrand to do+lead some research on LessWrong. (Got a bunch of traffic during the start of the virus, and was linked in places like stripe.com/covid-19.) LW also had a justified practical advice thread in February that was widely read and I think helped people get serious about Covid.
- Zvi Mowshowitz's weekly Covid updates (e.g. most recent one here) have been an invaluable source of information for many.
- Sarah Constantin posted much analysis of covid and it (especially this) was very valuable early on, I know I leaned on it for figuring out my risks.
Want to just give credit to all the non-rationalist coauthors of microcovid.org! (7 non-rationalists and 2 "half-rationalists"?)
I've learned a LOT about the incredible power of trusted collaborations between "hardcore epistemics" folks and much more pragmatic folks with other skillsets (writing, UX design, medical expertise with ordinary people as patients, etc). By our powers combined we were able to build something usable by non-rationalist-but-still-kinda-quantitative folks, and are on our way to something usable by "normal people" 😲.
We've been able to get a lot more scale of distribution/usage/uptake with a webapp, than if we had just released a spreadsheet & blogpost. And coauthors put everything I wrote through MANY rounds of extensive writing/copy changes to be more readable by ordinary folks. We get feedback often that we've changed someone's entire way of thinking about risks and probabilities. This has surprised and delighted me. And I think the explicit synthesis between rationalist and non-rationalist perspectives on the team has been directly helpful.
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That's all awesome to hear :)
Also several other LW posts I found personally useful, including:
- Bucky on the growth rate
- Jacobian giving people permission to prepare
- Discussion of masks on LW and SSC
- Jim and Elizabeth's analysis of the CDC gave me a bunch of data about how the CDC operated and how much to rely on them
There's more at the Coronavirus tag page.
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I heard someone wanted to know about usage statistics for the microcovid.org calculator. Here they are!
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I would like to ask the panel:
How would you design a study in order to confirm whether or not there are long-term consequences after recovering from COVID-19?
Nothing I have seen so far seems convincing.
I found this paper on a long term followup of SARS recoveries: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/415378
Naturally, not enough time has passed to do a similar follow up.
It’s important to sample people from all severities of COVID-19 include “asymptomatic”. It seems likely that the mildest cases of COVID-19 come with no long term disability and that of course being intubated for a month on a cocktail of fentanyl, propofol, and valium comes with serious long term consequences. The question then is how severe and likely are chronic health problems of young to middle aged vitamin d sufficient people that experience Covid-19 with severity somewhere between a regular cold and flu.
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I'd like to hear discussion of which COVID-related metrics are most useful for making personal risk decisions. Daily new cases per capita? Death rates? Test positivity rate? R0? Obviously, the right risk tradeoff will vary with a person's location (not to mention circumstances, values, etc.) so it would be very useful to have a better understanding of how to measure how bad the pandemic is in my area.
And I hope people from California or NYC will keep in mind that their governments are much, much stricter than most in the U.S.
Moved to answer, is fine to make this request as an answer for people to vote on interest (you don't have to talk about this, it most just increases the likelihood Zvi will talk about this).
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The culture of local areas here varies enormously in California. Rural California is full of anti mask Republicans and indoor dining is open. I ate inside of an empty French Chinese restaurant in Contra Costa County two weeks ago. Parties on the delta have been wilder than ever over the course of the summer because there was nothing else to do.
In SF and Berkeley, people give you weird looks for not wearing a mask, in Oakland outside of the hot spots people don’t really care.
Politics towards strict lockdowns seem to overlap pretty strictly with liberal social justice advocating attitudes.
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I'm not an expert because I don't live there, but my understanding is California's initial stay-at-home order was exceptionally strict, and indoor social gatherings are STILL banned, with outdoor gatherings subject to tight rules. Indoor restaurant dining is also banned in some places, and masks outdoors are required. My guess would be that California is in the top three states, possibly the top one, as far as strictness goes.
https://covid19.ca.gov/stay-home-except-for-essential-needs/
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Sunday November 1st, 12:00PM (PT) to 14:00PM (PT)
Can you please give the time in UTC? I don't trust myself to figure out whether daylight savings time applies to you.
I'd like to see discussion on how a persons behavior should change after they have had covid, how much should we trust that immunity.
Alright! I'll see you all at 12 noon.
The plan is:
- Zvi will give a presentation on Covid updates over the course of the pandemic, followed by Q&A.
- Then we'll have a more open discussion, framed around questions and comments from the attendees via the chat, involving me, Zvi, Divia, Anna, and Habryka and more.
For the latter part, I'll be taking a lot of discretion (semi-dictatorial) with managing who's talking and who isn't (i.e. around choosing when people's mics are on and off) because I've never been part of this kind of event with somewhere around 100 people on a Zoom call, and we'll be figuring it out as we go.
I think we can have a fairly real group conversation, but please bear with us as we figure out the conversational norms for an event this large.
I really would have loved to attend, but won't be able to make it at that time. Will you (with permission of the participants, I imagine) record the meeting, or maybe write some possibly anonymised summary of the discussion after?
Thanks!
I think this time I will probably not record it, while we're getting used to it all, because on the margin people don't feel comfortable being videoed. But probably we'll make some notes in a google doc during it that can be shared.
Out of interest, can you not make it because of time zone or because you're generally busy Sundays? 12-2 PT is the time I always pick when I want something to work internationally, so am interested to know why people can't make it.
I am not able to make it because of a one-off other appointment (a flight, actually). So I don't think this is very informative for the sake of planning. Usually my Sundays are unclaimed.