Knee-jerk reaction: WTF?? Was this common? How much of the Berkeley hub has been locking down this hard for this long? I had a general impression that the degree of paranoia among the Berkeley crowd was somewhat higher than seemed reasonable to me, but this seems way more over-the-top than I imagined.
... are people mentally ok?
Multiple houses did this sort of thing.
There was also an enormous amount of social pressure to be extremely covid cautious. It was really over the top given the community demographics (very young!). This is part of the reason I recently left the Bay community.
I've talked to some people who locked down pretty hard pretty early; I'm not confident in my understanding but this is what I currently believe.
I think characterizing the initial response as over-the-top, as opposed to sensible in the face of uncertainty, is somewhat the product of hindsight bias. In the early days of the pandemic, nobody knew how bad it was going to be. It was not implausible that the official case fatality rate for healthy young people was a massive underestimate.
I don't think our community is "hyper-altruistic" in the Strangers Drowning sense, but we do put a lot of emphasis on being the kinds of people who are smart enough not to pick up pennies in front of steamrollers, and on not trusting the pronouncements of officials who aren't incentivized to do sane cost-benefit analyses. And we apply that to altruism as much as anything else. So when a few people started coordinating an organized response, and used a mixture of self-preservation-y and moralize-y language to try to motivate people out of their secure-civilization-induced complacency, the community listened.
This doesn't explain why not everyone eased up on restrictions once the epistemic Wild West of Febr...
While risk of death is clearly relatively low (especially when it gets people to consume medical services that might also reduce risk of death), the risk of long COVID isn't clearly very low.
To add more color to the inadequate equilibrium: I didn’t want to hang out with people with a lot of risk, not because of how bad COVID would be for me, but because of how it would limit which community members would interact with me. But this also meant I was a community member who was causing other people to take less risk.
We were like this for about a month, then my sanity dropped to critical levels, forcing us to have a conversation about what we were ok with in terms of like, going outside. This resulted in me going on bike rides very frequently all summer, which helped A LOT.
Then in late summer, we had another "figure out what probabilities we are OK with" session and decided that we were going to categorically allow hanging out masked and outside, because the sanity/risk tradeoff seemed very good.
(Then we moved to DC and a whole lot of things happened that we would otherwise not have been OK with risk-wise, but were necessary for moving, which we felt was very beneficial overall.)
At this point we're still at "don't go indoors at a place with other people" (we grocery shop only via delivery/pickup), "categorically allow masked outdoor hangouts." Also, we will go indoors with a P100/N95/KN95 if it's a rare and necessary event such as medical treatment.
Feels to me from reading the post that A) Having these conversations was MUCH more difficult for OP, because she lives in a house with many other people, whereas Roger and I mostly had these conversations with just the two of us and to a lesser exten...
Very fair reaction. I should note that among the people in my house, I have done the fewest things by a fair margin, so this is not exactly representative – although I am also not the most locked-down person I know, by a long shot. Of the people in my house, most have traveled in the past year, including internationally, but day to day we mostly just... see each other, work (with people in our bubble) and sometimes walk around. Our bubble expanded at one point, though it's still only ~12 people, since we lost a lot of housemates over the course of the year.
My mom and sister have been under a similar level of lockdown this whole time, though that makes more sense since my mom is in her 60s and also they had no friends in the first place and are really happy just chilling together with their bird.
(Honestly many of us have a not-that-mentally-okay year, but I wanted to steer away from that topic in this post because it's A Lot.)
Yeah IDEK man. Shit's cray.
I’ve got to ask, what is the most locked-down person you know doing? It’s hard to imagine being more locked down than you are!
One person moved to a cabin (pretty far from things but close enough for grocery delivery) and had no interaction whatsoever except with their partner, who until recently had no interaction with anyone at all either. Another person wears a positive-pressure suit for every interaction, including in some parts of their house.
I mean, the result I would hope for in such a situation is that social pressure would accelerate the probably-true realization that this level of paranoia simply does not make sense.
A thing that I think this isn't modeling is exhaustion, negotiation/modeling fatigue, and in some cases trauma from earlier negotiations (I don't know if that was relevant to mingyuan but I know it was relevant in my grouphouse situations). By the time you get to the point where maybe you should take stock and re-evaluate everything, it's not really about "does the paranoia make sense?" it's "do you have the spare energy and emotional skills to change your S1 attitudes to a lot of things, while the crisis is still kinda ongoing."
I'm not sure exactly how it played out for most people, my guess is more common is "bring it up, but the output is 'man I am too exhausted to negotiate this', and then there's nowhere for the conversation to go."
Things that strike me, as I try to think about "okay what coordination lessons do we learn from this?"
1. Maybe, the thing we Got Wrong was not refactoring more into smaller houses (I think lots of people did do this, but some didn't. My guess is people who refactored into smaller houses had a healthier time)
2. Maybe the thing we Got Wrong was not figuring out how to effectively respond to lots of fear/exhaustion/trauma while also leveling up at other coordination skills, such that we could continue to coordinate large groups. (I am mostly skeptical about this, I think we probably just didn't have the skills to do it and it would have made things worse. But, it's an option on the table)
3. Maybe it was overdetermined that things go pretty much how they went. BUT, now the situation is "Okay, we all just went through a big trial together. Maybe it turns out the only way to be able to withstand a huge trial in a psychologically healthy way is to already have undergone one. ...
my guess is more common is "bring it up, but the output is 'man I am too exhausted to negotiate this', and then there's nowhere for the conversation to go."
This is a problem I've run into in other areas before. Some parts of my thoughts around it:
This post really bothered me. I think perhaps the best way to sum it up is this old post of Kelsey's: https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/99440932816/saying-you-are-a-burden-on-society-is-just-such
Also... just because you're dealing with a lot of fear, exhaustion, and trauma, and someone else isn't, doesn't mean you can trust them enough to outsource your decision-making process to them.
Also... it seems really unreasonable to say "if you can't handle 10 hours of grueling negotiations about what COVID precautions to take, you're weak and I need to cut you out of my life and/or take away decisionmaking power from you during times of stress." I would guess that, uhh, most people are weak by that definition.
That link offers a good analogy for some situations which are not this situation. There are parts of society whose primary role is to help people through tough times, just as an umbrella's primary role is to keep one dry in the rain. It is entirely unfair to call people "a burden" for using mechanisms which are there for that purpose.
By default, most relationships are not like this. People have their own lives to live. Imposing a year of strict lockdown on my roommates because I cannot handle a day of negotiations would not be fair to my roommates. They are not an umbrella whose purpose is to keep me dry of rain.
(And it's not just imposing a burden on the roommates! Subjecting oneself to a year of strict lockdown, to avoid a day or even a week of hard/stressful thinking and negotiating, is not a good tradeoff. It's a tradeoff which clearly reflects stress-impaired judgement. If I can't handle the problem, outsourcing decision-making isn't just good for those around me, it's good for me too.)
Also... just because you're dealing with a lot of fear, exhaustion, and trauma, and someone else isn't, doesn't mean you can trust them enough to outsource your decision-making process to them.
T...
I think that's a totally valid way of framing things for an org. I think it's valid as part-of-the-frame for group houses. But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live. "Alice gets out of the way so that Bob and Cameron can make progress" isn't really workable when "progress" is built out of "Alice and Bob and Cameron having a healthy life together."
My frame on this is option #1 above, where "refactor into smaller houses so you can have fewer stakeholders", which goes along with "and people self-sort into groups of houses where people with similar preferences can have more agency over their lives."
There was some intrinsic shittiness to the situation where a major thing early on is "well, we have a bunch of people living together, who weren't really filtered for 'How Well Do They Cope With Crisis Together?', and it's probably better if some of them leave, but being forced to leave your home suddenly is among the more stressful things that can happen to a person. So I see the key question as "how do negotiate who leaves, or, how people decide to stay together and what new norms they create, in a way that is fair."
Ah... "always remain in the house" is not the right way to think about your options here. Your roommates are apparently acting about like the broader populace, and therefore have exposure rates about like the broader populace. If you want to have lower exposure rates than that, then the thing-you-need-to-do is not to always remain in the house, but rather to avoid significant exposure to your roommates.
Indeed, spending more time outside the house might be a good strategy.
Also, I specifically want to say: Thank you for writing this post, even though it's very vulnerable and suggests that both you and your housemates were wrong about a really important thing. Please accept this gift of hedons and social status in exchange.
This is an important conversation for all of us to have.
I think the main prediction/expectation error many rationalists (including me) made, was expecting countries to either do practically nothing and let the virus run through the population like a wildfire, or respond heavily in a way that stomp it out in a few months. in both cases life goes back to normal in a few weeks/months, and if you know that it will only be a few months then taking extreme measures in that time frame makes sense.
Alas, what actually happened was this weird middle ground where we never quite eradicate the virus nor let it run wild, which drew out the problem for a year+.
I wasn't prepared for that, and my thinking was too short term, so i also ended up sacrificing too much.
Yes! This is an important factor that I had written into a previous version. If I'd known at the outset that it would last a year I think (/hope) I would have made very different decisions. As it was the goalposts kept moving just a little further out, so it always felt like "can I keep doing this for 1-2 more months" rather than "would I reflectively want to do this for a whole year".
I was recently tracking down a reference in the Sequences and found that the author was so afraid of COVID that he failed to seek medical care for appendicitis and died of sepsis.
Wow! Who was that?
and the faint but pretty smell of vanilla.
I think you mean "...and a presumption that once our eyes watered." (As time passes, this is increasingly how I feel about my grandmother dying of coronavirus.)
Justin Corwin (obituary, LW account), quoted in this post. I'm sorry about your grandmother. And about Justin, and that death exists in general :(
Fuck. I’m shocked to hear about a nice LessWronger like Corwin dying. That feels closer to home in some ways than many of the deaths I’ve known.
I’m also sorry to Gwern about your grandmother :(
AFAICT, fear (especially fear as a background that is just always there, for months and months) has huge effects on me and many others that are bad for thinking, initiative, activated caring, and real companionship (or being conscius at all, sort of), and that it requires actively training courage or bravery or action/initiative/activated-caring to overcome this. I notice this a lot in the AI risk context, and sometimes in the "what's happening to America / the West?" context, and also most times that somebody is e.g. afraid they have cancer.
My personal experience of the covid year has been good; but your post seems to me to have a lot in it that bears on the broader thing about fear-in-general, and I think talking more about the detailed effects of fear in the context of this post, covid, AI risk or any other context would be amazing.
Thanks for posting this. A lot of relatable feels and useful takeaways here.
(Reposting some of this from a lower-level comment)
From this post and my own experience, I'm getting the sense that living in a large group house was actually a pretty big detriment for many folks during COVID. You'd think it would be a good thing, because you can get your social bar filled just socializing with each other. And maybe that's true. But it increases the amount of negotiation about risks literally exponentially, which makes it much easier to lapse into a default of "nothing is allowed and no one does anything." Even though that's actually very costly.
It was much easier for me and my spouse to handle negotiation about e.g. "I want to go on bike rides because my sanity is at critical levels," because that was basically just one negotiation we had to have, instead of having 8 similarly-sized negotiations for each risky thing each person wanted to do and every objection brought up by every other person.
Also, we're married and have been together for almost 10 years, so we've had a lot more practice at this kind of thing with the two of us. I also enjoyed your earlier post about how being in a group house together doesn't mean you're ready to be, basically, married to all the people you live with, meaning you aren't ready to have these huge life-changing negotiations about collective decisions that you need to make together. Whereas in marriage that sort of thing is par for the course.
Yes, 100%. We started with ~10 people in the house, and gained and lost various people over the course of the year. There were greatly varying levels of trust among the pairwise relationships – the rough categories being (1) me and my partner, and some other sets of best friends, (2) long-time housemates, (3) newer housemates, and (4) a totally random squatter who we worked really hard to kick out before shit got real. That is just so much to negotiate.
And then if you have two ~10-person bubbles that want to collide, with the same problem of varying levels of trust, everyone's feelings get involved, and so you're like, "well, I miss hugging my friend, but there's no way it's worth dragging 20 people into it." And someone sends you their microCOVID spreadsheet but they admit they haven't been filling it out reliably, and neither have your housemates been reporting their microCOVIDs reliably, and you just throw up your hands and give up forever.
And also, there was a time when having 9 housemates meant that it didn't feel important to seek out other interaction, and then that was no longer true and I didn't adjust. I haven't even been video calling friends this year, even though I always feel good after I do. So there's definitely a measure of social inertia there that has nothing to do with fear of COVID.
As a data point, I found it to be a net positive to live in a smallish group house (~5 people) during the pandemic. The negotiations around covid protocols were time-consuming and annoying at times, but still manageable because of the small number of people, and seemed worth it for the benefits of socializing in person to my mental well-being. It also helped that we had been living together for a few years and knew each other pretty well. I can see how this would quickly become overwhelming with more people involved, and result in nothing being allowed if anyone can veto any given activity.
Thanks for the post; I think this type of reflection is very valuable. The main takeaway from this line of thought for me is that we're in a community which selects for scrupulosity and caution as character traits, which then have a big impact on how we think about risks. This has various implications for thinking about AI, which I won't get into here.
So... I think I expected the lockdown to be a Long Time when it started, and I thought it was worth it (and went into it a bit earlier than others). It seems worth pointing out I have low socialization needs, many of which I meet online, and so I think the tradeoffs for me are a bit different than for others. [It's been sad to not go to any AIRCS workshops, or do any in-person Circling, or so on, but even in retrospect I think I'd rather not have paid the COVID risk for them. Most of the things that I would do now that seem sensible--like Tai Chi classes in the park--are currently canceled because of local guidelines, such that I don't have useful decisions to contribute there.]
When I read this, tho, it feels to me like the main difference is something like that between 'living in fear' and 'taking precautions.' I think I was doing the latter--I decided to not do things in much the way that I would have decided it was too far to travel to the thing, and I sought out ways to find substitutes for things that were too expensive. [Not being able to spend time with my boyfriend in person for the first few months meant experimenting with various ways to spend time with him online, for ex...
The stress of negotiation/management of COVID precautions destroyed my intellectual productivity for a couple of months at the start of the pandemic. So I rented a place to live alone, which luckily happened to be possible for me, and the resulting situation is much closer to normal than it is to the pre-move situation during the pandemic. There is no stress, as worrying things are no longer constantly trying to escape my control without my knowledge, there's only the challenge of performing "trips to the surface" correctly that's restricted to the time of the trips and doesn't poison the rest of my time.
This seems super important, thanks for sharing.
I fairly strongly believe the "frontloaded too much and ran out of steam" hypothesis, but also I'm not sure what we could have done instead.
I think a number of people were saying "we should bunker down for a month until we know more", and the thing we maybe-could-have-done was set concrete dates for "followup and re-evaluate." I think that'd have helped nonzero but not much.
I think it was exacerbated by, right around the time we might have done a second round of Do Lots Of Coordination, the official Shelter In Place order hit, and at the time I responded with "well, I guess that supercedes whatever house spreadsheet coordination I was doing", and gave up on that.
It's been another year, I guess. Time is weird. I meant to write a followup post but I don't know that I've learned anything new since I wrote this. I'd welcome others' thoughts on this, a year out.
This post is fascinating to me because I have no idea what to say. I keep coming back to it, reading the new comments, starting to type, and giving up. It seems like the kind of thing where I should be able to think "what would I do" and generate some opinion, but I have no idea what I would do, or what should have been done.
I would be very interested to see more people reflecting on situations like this and thinking about what should have been done. This was obviously an unusual event, but not so unusual that I don't expect future events to resemble it in many ways.
How much of your stress do you think was the result of living in a group house, and thus feeling that you had to get roommates’ consent to very normal things like going on a date or a walk? I know some people seem to like the group house thing, but damn, I like making my own decisions.
I’d like to see survey data on rationalists’ responses to the pandemic. Does this exist (should i make it exist?) I suspect the incredibly super-cautious are more vocal, thus distorting our perception of what others are doing.
Personally, I’m avoiding indoor restaurants/bars ...
Re: the "but tail risks" thing, I think that made sense in the first couple months of the pandemic, but stopped making sense by late 2020.
A year of lockdown also has a lot of tail risk and the person who had the sepsis death died to tail risk of the lockdown.
Not consuming health care services and mental health consequences of reduced social interactions both have dangerous tail risks.
And by the time we knew the important, action-relevant information like transmission vectors and all that jazz, we were already used to being afraid, and we failed to adjust.
This sentence is basically true of me as well, but without the emotional valence. My version:
And by the time I knew the important, action-relevant information like transmission vectors and all that jazz, I was already settled into a rhythm of pretty intense lock down, and I failed to adjust.
In retrospect, I wish I had spent more time traveling to to see and talk with people I kno...
I was living on my own, but I locked down on 9 March. From when my SO had to leave the country on 21 March, to when I was kicked out of the country in Jan, the only person I had physical contact with was one hug on 20 September. The friend was on day 14 of her own quarantine. And when I finished the quarantine in the old/new country in Feb, that was the first time someone had seen my face in person since my SO.
I got my first ever car in Jan 2020 because I didn't want to risk public transport. I bought lots of food and masks etc. I convinced my workplace to...
I wonder if this was partly due to groupthink, eg within your house. Wikipedia has a useful definition:
“a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
This is definitely not what happened, but maybe a related thing happened. The Wikipedia article talks about aiming to minimize conflict / agree at all costs, which is very much not what happened in my house (Habryka is a conflict maximizer! always argue!!). There was definitely some measure of wanting to avoid conflict, but only insofar as people don't like hurting each other, not because of conformity pressure. I think the more important factor was fear of the unknown / pressure to accommodate the most risk-averse person in the bubble (which I'm ashamed to say was me).
The more interesting thing to explore here would be how my bubble and some of the surrounding community ended up in this inadequate equilibrium, where it would be better for all of us to take more risk, but we can't coordinate to do so.
Thank you for writing this up. Would you be willing to share what your household's (you make it sound like a group of > 2 adults making decisions as peers) stated group goals were around December 2019, March 2020, and December 2020? Your post sounds to me like it describes the experience of falling onto several nested loops of optimizing for a proxy or aspect of a goal rather than the goal itself. (Microcovid measurement and isolation as proxy for avoiding contracting or spreading a pathogen, absolute minimization of exposure chance as proxy for general...
As of today, I've been in full-on, hardcore lockdown for an entire year. I have a lot of feelings – both about the personal social impacts of lockdown and about society being broken – that I won't go into in this public space. What I want to figure out in this post is what rationality-relevant lessons I can draw from what happened in my life this past year.
(Meta: This post is not well-written and is mostly bullet points, because the first few versions I wrote were unusable but I still wanted to publish it today.)
Observations
Some facts about my lockdown:
Some observations about other people with similar levels of caution:
On negotiations:
On hopelessness:
Taking all these observations together, it's clear to me that my social group has been insanely overcautious, to our great detriment. I think this has been obvious for quite a while, but I didn't and still don't know how to act on that information.
It seems like extreme caution made sense at first, when we didn't know much. And by the time we knew the important, action-relevant information like transmission vectors and all that jazz, we were already used to being afraid, and we failed to adjust. Looking back at case counts, my behavior in the summer was completely unreasonable – I felt afraid of my housemates going on walks while wearing masks!
So one blocker on expanding the range of actions we were taking was that we'd gotten used to it. Another blocker was that, even if I were to have gone back to living my life as normally as I could, that would still not be very normal. I think it didn't seem that worth it to me to take any risks at all, as long as I couldn't have my life back anyway. I briefly entertained the idea of a Berkeley rationalist 'megabubble', but backed off when case counts went up again, someone I knew got long COVID just from outdoor, masked, distanced socializing, and also I realized that it would just be really a whole fucking lot of work to coordinate.
Takeaways
Here are some takeaways re: rationality:
I have now run out of time to write this post, which is probably for the best since it is just rambling at this point. I will end with a quote: