I also believe I'm qualified to speak on this issue as I was very worried about this from a very early time (even bought masks in late January). Others have brought up some good points here but I would say that the key issue you had is failure to pay attention to details. It may be true that the news likes to cause unnecessary hype over things for attention, but it is the details of the situation that really set this one apart from others.
This is a good analysis.
I would say that the key issue you had is failure to pay attention to details.
I think it deserves attention how dawangy thought through the material details while disregarding how much the media did (or didn't) hype the virus. Material details matter. Hype doesn't.
When China quarantines an entire city, you should be afraid of what's in that city.
I think I'm qualified to answer this question because I was paying attention to COVID-19 since the Wuhan quarantine, many months before the pandemic spread to the West. The day person-to-person spread was confirmed in the United States, I sprung into action.
You made two mistakes.
Our ancestors must rarely have encountered cases of exponential growth, because our intuitions are no guide here
―Startup = Growth by Paul Graham
Here are the antidotes.
It's quite possible that you didn't make a mistake. There are a few hints at mistakes in the post, but that's presumably just a very short approximation of your actual reasoning.
I'd consider it problematic to treat degree of media panic as a decent proxy for actual risk. It's almost cliché by now to compare reporting on terrorism to that on heart disease, but still a valid pointer toward severe failures of this proxy.
I suspect you may also be looking back on the 2009 H1N1 reporting and condensing about a year or so of reporting into one "media panic" blob. Comparing newspaper article records at similar times from the first known infections, it looks like COVID-19 reporting actually took off much faster and stronger in tone than that for 2009 H1N1.
I think a third potential problem, not at the time but right now, is a hindsight bias. Now that we know that the event happened, it's tempting to update too far in favour of it having been likely beforehand. There are hundreds of new diseases and variants infecting people every year. During the first few weeks to months, their pandemic potential is often completely unknown. Paying little day-to-day attention to each one is rational for the general public, though not for epidemiologists or public health officials.
As a general probability, by the time a disease of this sort spreads to your own area (and therefore you should be changing your behaviour), there is almost always a lot more known and published about it. There is a low probability that any given person is going to be one of the unlucky first hundred thousand infected out of 8 billion people on the planet. By that time it's usually pretty well known whether it's likely to be serious enough to take action.
So perhaps your estimation wasn't really as miscalibrated as you think.
I think the answer here is pretty cut and dry.
"Media has a strong incentive to cause hype over things that aren't really dangerous trends."
This was your mistake. If you didn't believe your sources were trustworthy, then why didn't you find sources you could trust?
There were plenty of trustworthy sources of information early in the pandemic. A lot of credible people were talking about Covid a month before the mainstream media started prioritizing their coverage.
Media has a strong incentive to cause hype over things that aren't really dangerous trends
I think the inference here was 'media has a strong incentive to cause hype over stuff that doesn't matter, so surely they have an even stronger incentive to cause hype over stuff that is actually dangerous'. Empirically, this was wrong, but I'm confused about why!
The key moment was the realization that can spread easily.
We have much worse diseased by effect, like aids and ebola. Key thing is - we can limit the spread with moderate effort, even without vaccines. Once you could put together the belief that this one will not be contained, meant living in a different world and should have required adapting. At least internal.
Did you make a mistake? What behavior do you wish you'd undertaken, and what is the prediction you failed to make which would have made it happen?
I started working from home a few weeks before my peers, and I got KN95 masks early. And I had serious conversations to convince my folks to learn about grocery delivery and stop going to stores by early March. But otherwise, mostly followed the general recommendations.
You extrapolated two times from a single example. That's generally bad when dealing with risky situation. Just because no catastrophe happened in one example from which you are extrapolating doesn't mean that there's no problem.
Part of the reference class for Covid was SARS. It's very unclear why the Flu which is a far more distant virus should be a better comparison then SARS. SARS causing long-term CFS was very worrying at the beginning of the pandemic. Fortunately, long COVID isn't as common and strong as CFS was for SARS but it was clear that long-term effects were something to worry about from the beginning.
The fact that pandemics were a big risk was a belief that a lot of people in our community held before COVID-19, to the extend that it was seen as a bigger GCR then unfriendly AI by many people in our census. Treating swine flu as evidence that pandemics aren't a huge problem seems to me generally bad reasoning about tail risk.
Back in April 2020, I made an alarm bell for the next pandemic. It attempts to capture in checklist form some of the qualities of COVID that, in retrospect, could have signaled that this was no Swine Flu. I think there are basically two ways we could have avoided this mistake:
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I'm curious at what point you believed you didn't need to worry about it and at what point you updated. I think it's hard to answer this question without knowing that (although I don't personally know how to answer it anyway).
I want to commend Andrew Vlahos for identifying a place his beliefs need to be updated and seeking out improvement. This is what Less Wrong is all about.
How could I have done better?
Well, you don't know, what you don't know. Would you have found it less absurd if you had known more about polio? Other lung diseases? Other diseases that caused permanent brain damage?
Note: I accidently moved this to drafts, and when I republished it it seems to have gone into "Latest" again. Sorry
Mod note: I moved the publication date back to its original date and removed this notice.
Back when you were underestimating Covid, how much did you hear from epidemiologists? Either directly or filtered through media coverage?
I was going to give an answer about how "taking the outside view" should work, but I realized I needed this information first.
In the early days of COVID, I listened to the This Week in Virology podcast (which is hosted by virologists) because I wanted to hear from experts. I was surprised by how they weren't much better than the mainstream media at predicting what would happen. This could be because they were virologists and not epidemiologists.
At the start of the pandemic, I heard that Covid was likely to be a problem. I didn't pay much attention, because I remembered the Swine Flu "pandemic", and Covid was getting less attention than Swine Flu did at the time. I also knew that the media has a strong incentive to cause hype over things that aren't really dangerous trends. I am in an age range very unlikely to die from disease, and claims of a lung plague causing lasting brain problems sounded absurd.
I figured that if a disease about as deadly as the regular flu caused so much panic, and Covid caused less and mainly harmed people already at respiratory risk, I didn't need to worry about it.
I eventually updated my beliefs, but I don't see how I could have avoided making my mistake. How could I have done better?
Now that a bunch of answers are in, I will say what I think the mistakes were.
First of all, a clarification. I heard about it sometime in early February (I don't remember specifically since I wasn't paying much attention), and I re-examined the data and updated my belief in whether it was a problem at the beginning of March, when I noticed that even people who normally don't worry about things like this started considering a lockdown. Remember: I knew it was spreading, I thought that it wouldn't be much worse than regular diseases.
The mistake wasn't "I should have listened to the trustworthy sources instead of the untrustworthy ones". I didn't know much about which sources were the most reliable, and what I did know wouldn't have helped. For example, I know that where people put their own money is much more reliable than what they tell other people to do (why prediction markets are so much more accurate than other things). However, the US stock market reached an all time high on February 12, indicating that people whose whole job is paying attention to this stuff weren't worried at all.
The mistakes I did do were these:
My mistake was not re-evaluating this belief based on things that almost became big. I should have updated based on Ebola and SARS but didn't.
2. Personal experience said it was even less dangerous than the flu. My elderly great-aunt tested positive in late February, but was almost asymptomatic. Also, my parents and I got a bad cold at the end of January with the same symptoms (dry cough, fever, got better then a few days later it became bad again), and although we didn't think to test it at the time, once we heard of covid we thought that was probably it. Our symptoms definitely weren't worth freaking out about. I probably should have payed more attention to other people's reports of worse symptoms, although my prior of "lung virus causes permanent brain damage" was much less than "placebo effect and/or typical media terrible statistics", and although genetic variation is real it didn't seem likely to have "shut down the country" level severity. I'm not quite sure how this mistake could have been fixed.
3. I should have checked a source about China, not just from places that don't have much covid yet. I'm not fluent in Chinese, but I really should have at least checked how strictly they were quarantining and compared it to what they did during SARS. I didn't really look into it at all.
4. There was another problem, but this would take longer to explain and would need its own post.