Andrew Vlahos

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: 1. I had been too overconfi