January 29th on the EA Forum

For vanity reasons, I'm going to point out that it was actually the 26th.

The question in this post is "was Less Wrong a good alarm bell" and in my opinion only one of those links constitute alarm bells -- the one on EAForums. Acknowledging/discussing the existence of the coronavirus is vastly different from acknowledging/discussing the risk of the coronavirus.

• "Will ncov survivors suffer lasting disability at a high rate?" is a medical question that makes no implication about broader covid risk.
• "Some quick notes on hand-hygene" does not mention the coronavirus in the main post (but to be fair does have a coronavirus tag). It does make an offhand reference implying the coronavirus could be a "maybe pandemic" but this isn't a concrete estimation of actual risk
• "Concerning the recent 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak" is a fantastic post that makes concrete claims like it now seems reasonable to assign a non-negligible probability (>2%) to the proposition that the current outbreak will result in a global disaster (>50 million deaths resulting from the pathogen within 1 year). Per one of the comments, this was consistent with Metaculus.

Overall, I'd say that LessWrong was about on par with "having lunch conversations with Chinese-American coworkers" in terms of serving as an actual alarm bell. Moreover, in the case that we admit a weaker standard for what an alarm bell is, it's worth noting that we still don't really beat the stock market -- because it did respond to the coronavirus back in January. It just didn't respond strongly enough to convey an actual broad concrete risk.

I also would be somewhat hesitant about saying that the markets crashed on February 20th. The market continued crashing for quite a while, and this is when Wei Dai wrote some comments about his investment strategy, which, if you had followed it at that point would have still made you a good amount of money.

As someone who pretty regularly follows Less Wrong, I missed Wei Dai's investment strategy which makes me lean in the direction that most casual readers wouldn't have benefitted from it. The linked comment itself also doesn't have very strong valence, stating " The upshot is that maybe it's not too late to short the markets." Low valence open-thread comments don't really sound like alarm bells to me. Wei Dai has also acknowledged that this was a missed opportunity on EAforums.

Moreover, there was also an extremely short actionable window. On February 28th, the stock market saw a swift >5% bear market rally before the second leg of the crash which temporarily undid half the losses. Unless your confidence in "maybe its not too late to short the markets" was strong enough to weather through this, you would've probably lost money. This almost happened to me -- I sold the Thursday morning after Wei Dai's comment and bought back in Monday, netting a very meek ~3% gain.

Thanks for finding these! Even with them included, though, there's an obvious sharp discontinuity in volume of posting starting on Feb. 27th. There was early information was available in this community. Some people were thinking hard about it. But I think based on this, the majority of us were still waiting for other people to tell us there was a catastrophe at hand. And we kept waiting and waiting until the stock market let us know.

Based on that, I'd say that we have not yet achieved any kind of substantial collective coordination or debiasing. By and large, we're still passively waiting for the consensus to come to us and shake us out of complacency. I think we should feel especially chagrined given the constant conversation around black swans, catastrophic risk (specifically around pandemics), and the high level of mathematical competence in this community.

Thanks very much! For future reference, is there something else I should be doing besides pasting a shareable link generated by Google docs into the image URL box?