Yep, agree—I think it was warranted to be extremely cautious in February/March, and then the ideal behavior would have been to become much less cautious as more information came in. In practice, I think many people remained extremely cautious for a full year (including my family) out of some combination of inertia and exhaustion about renegotiating what had been strenuously negotiated in the first place.
Some people furthermore tried very aggressively to apply social pressure against fully vaccinated people holding events and returning to normalcy in spring of 2021, which I think was an even more clear-cut mistake given the incredibly high pre-omicron vaccine efficacy. I am not actually sure I know anyone who I believe missed in the incautious direction, and if we’d had equal misses in both directions I’d feel a lot better about our community decisionmaking.
Yep, agree—I think it was warranted to be extremely cautious in February/March, and then the ideal behavior would have been to become much less cautious as more information came in. In practice, I think many people remained extremely cautious for a full year (including my family) out of some combination of inertia and exhaustion about renegotiating what had been strenuously negotiated in the first place.
Some people furthermore tried very aggressively to apply social pressure against fully vaccinated people holding events and returning to normalcy in spring of 2021, which I think was an even more clear-cut mistake given the incredibly high pre-omicron vaccine efficacy. I am not actually sure I know anyone who I believe missed in the incautious direction, and if we’d had equal misses in both directions I’d feel a lot better about our community decisionmaking.
There’s a certain rationalist-adjacent meditation retreat I can think of.