Microcovid.org was a vital tool to many of us during the pandemic- I made a whole speech about it back at summer solstice. The back and forth over how finished covid is, plus a dependence entirely on volunteers, has pushed microcovid into something of a limbo. It's not clear what the best next step for it is. One option would be to update microcovid for new problems, but that’s a lot of work and I have a lot of uncertainty about how valuable any given improvement is. So I’d to collect some data.
How are you using microcovid now?
What is the minimum viable change that would create value for you, and what would that value be? The more explicit the better here- comments like “feature X would be worth $n to me” or “it enabled me to find a collaborated then enabled a project” are more useful than “I like it a lot”
What’s your dream microcovid, and what value would that create for you?
Anything else you’d like to share on this topic?
I’ve asked LW to enable the experimental agree/disagree feature for this post. The benefit of this is that you can boost particular data points without writing anything. The risk is that an individual's preferences get counted repeatedly: 5 people with the same opinion who write five posts and agree with all of the others’ identical points should be counted as 5 people, not 25. So I ask that you:
Not agree with comments substantially overlapping with a comment you write
If multiple comments make the same point, only click agree for one of them
This isn’t an exact science because comments will sometimes contain more than one point or make very similar but not totally identical points, but please do your best.
I've used microcovid occasionally, to make sure my intuitive feelings about risk were not completely crazy (and that did cause some updates; notably, putting numbers to staying outdoors had an influence.) I'm not a heavy user, but I do appreciate the work you've done!
I'd basically like to see more of the same - update microcovid.org for omicron and keep it going.
(FWIW, I'm in the Netherlands, where we just entered a new lockdown for omicron. So COVID unfortunately isn't "over".)
Agreed - I'm struggling to figure out how to apply microcovid estimates in the wake of omicron. Without an adjustment for that, it seems like no other improvements would matter. I would be willing to pay $1000 if microcovid were updated to reflect omicron. (Please agree with my post if you have a similar willingness to pay, and agree with JoachimSchipper's post if you just generally support updates for omicron but don't have a similar willingness to pay).
(I'm a little confused as to why it's not clear that this is the best next step for microcovid, and if anyone has suggestions for making ad-hoc adjustments to use microcovid given omicron, would appreciate them!)
My current shitty attempts to adjust manually are here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YtWqgzLDqxSvJDkCi/how-should-we-adjust-microcovid-estimates-for-omicron
Microcovid.org was a vital tool to many of us during the pandemic- I made a whole speech about it back at summer solstice. The back and forth over how finished covid is, plus a dependence entirely on volunteers, has pushed microcovid into something of a limbo. It's not clear what the best next step for it is. One option would be to update microcovid for new problems, but that’s a lot of work and I have a lot of uncertainty about how valuable any given improvement is. So I’d to collect some data.
I’ve asked LW to enable the experimental agree/disagree feature for this post. The benefit of this is that you can boost particular data points without writing anything. The risk is that an individual's preferences get counted repeatedly: 5 people with the same opinion who write five posts and agree with all of the others’ identical points should be counted as 5 people, not 25. So I ask that you:
This isn’t an exact science because comments will sometimes contain more than one point or make very similar but not totally identical points, but please do your best.