It sounds like you bore the brunt of some people’s overly paranoid risk assessments, and I’m sorry to hear that.
To be concrete about my model, sterilizing groceries was the right call in March 2020 but not by June 2020 (when we knew it very probably didn’t transmit through surfaces), and overall maximum-feasible alert was the right call in March 2020 but not by June 2020 (when we knew the IFR was low for healthy young people and that the hospitals were not going to be too overwhelmed).
“Be sure the act is effective” is not a good proxy for “take actions based on EV”. In March 2020, the officials were sure (based on a bad model) that COVID wasn’t airborne. We masked up all the same, not because we knew it would be effective but because the chance was large enough for the expected gain to outweigh the cost.
[[I acknowledge this is an out of scale reply, might make it a post one day soon. Thanks for reading]]
Thanks. I understand what you mean about EV. I just think problems sneak through in practice. In practice, people tend to weight things pretty badly and, especially in the middle of a mass-televised news cycle, be desperate for some control and hope things will work that won’t. So I claim “reasonableness” or “certainty” for at least one of the variables is important. Else we are going to have a lot of Pascal’s muggings.
To be concrete about my model too, even in March I think plenty of weird acts were the wrong call. It’s hard to explain what I meant when I said “check your intuition” but I basically mean, reason it out and extrapolate from what you know, and also heed red flags and weird vibes (like the community’s behavior starting to pattern-match mental illness and groupthink).
Anyway, we should expect that many (even most) interventions suggested at the early phase of a problem are somehow out-of-step with reality. The solution is not to do all of the ones your peers are doing just in case, as you seem to suggest, but to actively question and sort out the worst. You said we didn’t know masking would be effective but we did it anyway based on EV… But,that isn’t true. We did know masks were effective.So comparing EA masking to extreme-looking, always-speculative interventions does not follow. They are at different ends of the spectrum.
At risk of sounding harsh, EA is about using evidence and reason. I hope EAs don’t shrug mistakes off with “we needed more data”. We didn’t always need more data. We needed the community to reason for itself, as it did about masks.To go “Does that make sense to me?” Then, do the “reasonable” things only. I guess I wasn’t clear, but that’s what I meant when I said “be very sure the act is effective” and “act reasonably”. For acts without enough hard data, EAs could do better to check their intuition, model of the world, expected human behavior, and be more skeptical, even of copying other EAs.
Reasonableness and paranoia are by definition in conflict, so I’m disturbed that you essentially say that “paranoia” was the “right call” “(unless one was psychic)”. We never dismissed trying to make predictions as being “psychic” before. Could we not have done better in March? Do you look back at the early extreme reactions and find no reason to be skeptical of them? Other people were skeptical, and then correct. The truth of what was useful wasn’t in a time-activated lockbox. Even in March 2020, it existed in the world and was, if not observable, extrapolatable. I’m reminded of this EA short story:
”Impressive,” [the mirror] says with a voice cool and smooth.… “I didn’t think you could succeed with raw power alone. Some might say you didn’t.”...
“So? I killed the Broken King. I stopped the summoning of the Old Horrors,” [the hero] challenge[s]. “What more could I have done?”
“Now you are asking the right question,” the mirror laughs. “What more indeed? You must train yourself until the answer comes naturally as the spellforce in your veins.”
[Later:]
”Saved them? What could I do?” the hero frowns, and then the memories still settling in their head cohere. The mirror’s solution replays in vivid clarity...
“You should have taken the time to work it out,” the mirror chastises. “You were capable of it.”
Wrong is wrong. Something went wrong. It’s okay to be wrong. Attempting was good. Even failing is okay. And now let’s clarify that we should not repeat a tactic that went awry. We weren’t skeptical and selective enough in the beginning, and it took some EAs a year longer than you’d expect to get their heads screwed on straight again about the whole thing. That’s painful for everyone. But maybe it’s human nature. I’m updating that it is. If you start with extreme, paranoid behavior and your community is encouraging you to be paranoid rather than question the paranoia, I doubt most people find it easy to correct later.
We knew that surgeons and other medical personnel wear masks for a reason, because we can assume their doing so for centuries has been expensive and hospital interests/board members wouldn’t have kept it going if it weren’t doing something worth the effort. We knew that doctors and nurses were still wearing masks during Covid: in other words, the Covid pandemic did not just randomly time itself with the global realization that masks had always been pointless. We knew that other country’s citizens were wearing masks. We knew that COVID travelled through our breathing apparatus, which opens where the mask goes. Looking at the whole system, it is harder to be more sure than that. At some point you have to call your EV calculus what it is: “knowing something”.
It sounds like you bore the brunt of some people’s overly paranoid risk assessments, and I’m sorry to hear that.
To be concrete about my model, sterilizing groceries was the right call in March 2020 but not by June 2020 (when we knew it very probably didn’t transmit through surfaces), and overall maximum-feasible alert was the right call in March 2020 but not by June 2020 (when we knew the IFR was low for healthy young people and that the hospitals were not going to be too overwhelmed).
“Be sure the act is effective” is not a good proxy for “take actions based on EV”. In March 2020, the officials were sure (based on a bad model) that COVID wasn’t airborne. We masked up all the same, not because we knew it would be effective but because the chance was large enough for the expected gain to outweigh the cost.
[[I acknowledge this is an out of scale reply, might make it a post one day soon. Thanks for reading]]
Thanks. I understand what you mean about EV. I just think problems sneak through in practice. In practice, people tend to weight things pretty badly and, especially in the middle of a mass-televised news cycle, be desperate for some control and hope things will work that won’t. So I claim “reasonableness” or “certainty” for at least one of the variables is important. Else we are going to have a lot of Pascal’s muggings.
To be concrete about my model too, even in March I think plenty of weird acts were the wrong call. It’s hard to explain what I meant when I said “check your intuition” but I basically mean, reason it out and extrapolate from what you know, and also heed red flags and weird vibes (like the community’s behavior starting to pattern-match mental illness and groupthink).
Anyway, we should expect that many (even most) interventions suggested at the early phase of a problem are somehow out-of-step with reality. The solution is not to do all of the ones your peers are doing just in case, as you seem to suggest, but to actively question and sort out the worst. You said we didn’t know masking would be effective but we did it anyway based on EV… But, that isn’t true. We did know masks were effective. So comparing EA masking to extreme-looking, always-speculative interventions does not follow. They are at different ends of the spectrum.
At risk of sounding harsh, EA is about using evidence and reason. I hope EAs don’t shrug mistakes off with “we needed more data”. We didn’t always need more data. We needed the community to reason for itself, as it did about masks. To go “Does that make sense to me?” Then, do the “reasonable” things only. I guess I wasn’t clear, but that’s what I meant when I said “be very sure the act is effective” and “act reasonably”. For acts without enough hard data, EAs could do better to check their intuition, model of the world, expected human behavior, and be more skeptical, even of copying other EAs.
Reasonableness and paranoia are by definition in conflict, so I’m disturbed that you essentially say that “paranoia” was the “right call” “(unless one was psychic)”. We never dismissed trying to make predictions as being “psychic” before. Could we not have done better in March? Do you look back at the early extreme reactions and find no reason to be skeptical of them? Other people were skeptical, and then correct. The truth of what was useful wasn’t in a time-activated lockbox. Even in March 2020, it existed in the world and was, if not observable, extrapolatable. I’m reminded of this EA short story:
”Impressive,” [the mirror] says with a voice cool and smooth.… “I didn’t think you could succeed with raw power alone. Some might say you didn’t.”...
“So? I killed the Broken King. I stopped the summoning of the Old Horrors,” [the hero] challenge[s]. “What more could I have done?”
“Now you are asking the right question,” the mirror laughs. “What more indeed? You must train yourself until the answer comes naturally as the spellforce in your veins.”
[Later:]
”Saved them? What could I do?” the hero frowns, and then the memories still settling in their head cohere. The mirror’s solution replays in vivid clarity...
“You should have taken the time to work it out,” the mirror chastises. “You were capable of it.”
Wrong is wrong. Something went wrong. It’s okay to be wrong. Attempting was good. Even failing is okay. And now let’s clarify that we should not repeat a tactic that went awry. We weren’t skeptical and selective enough in the beginning, and it took some EAs a year longer than you’d expect to get their heads screwed on straight again about the whole thing. That’s painful for everyone. But maybe it’s human nature. I’m updating that it is. If you start with extreme, paranoid behavior and your community is encouraging you to be paranoid rather than question the paranoia, I doubt most people find it easy to correct later.
We knew that surgeons and other medical personnel wear masks for a reason, because we can assume their doing so for centuries has been expensive and hospital interests/board members wouldn’t have kept it going if it weren’t doing something worth the effort. We knew that doctors and nurses were still wearing masks during Covid: in other words, the Covid pandemic did not just randomly time itself with the global realization that masks had always been pointless. We knew that other country’s citizens were wearing masks. We knew that COVID travelled through our breathing apparatus, which opens where the mask goes. Looking at the whole system, it is harder to be more sure than that. At some point you have to call your EV calculus what it is: “knowing something”.