So do you think that the actual travel restrictions that happened were just a waste of time, and we should have had fully open borders?
Or do you think that the restrictions that we had (late and partial) were the optimal disease-fighting policy (again, neglecting political considerations)?
Yes it has always been clear to me that shutting down travel from one specific place where you think the disease is is not going to work.
Here in Europe, I have had to postpone personal vacations because the borders have indeed been shut and are only now reopening. Given that Europe actually did close its borders, both external and internal, do you think that it would have been a good idea to go ahead and do that in January, assuming away the political problem?
Good post David!
I applaud posts like this. It's a great tradition that we do them.
I believe the conversation about border closures was with me on Twitter?
Are we at a stage yet where we can answer counterfactual questions about what would have happened if all international flights had been shut off in January (Assuming away the political problem)?
It's probably only worth using ecosia if you think your time is virtually worthless. Tree planting is mostly a useless activity in the grand scheme of things, though one gets into a somewhat complicated calculation to show this.
Google claims there are 3*10^12 trees in the world, ecosia claims to have planted about 10^8. Trees are in an equilibrium with a bunch of stuff like atmospheric CO2 as well. Your personal contribution to the number of trees via ecosia is likely ~ a few trees (not clear whether they reach maturity though).
Do anything else useful with your time before this.
There is a simple explanation to this: It turns out that being a good rationalist with access to an option trading account is actually an edge.
I also realized that the market was wrong and told friends to pull out of equities in mid-February. They didn't listen.
which animals?
alarmist. Good Judgement's Dashboard has less than a 20% chance of over 350k deaths -
It's changed substantially since you wrote this BTW. It's now 54%
There are definitely some materials that will resist it. There would be a one-off cost to replace materials, then mostly not much change.
But what about the ~3 months of lockdown and massive Economic disruption that we had to go through? Don't you that that could have been avoided by closing our borders tightly in January? Do we have evidence to either confirm or exclude that now?