I’ve seen a few people in the LessWrong community congratulate the community on predicting or preparing for covid-19 earlier than others, but I haven’t actually seen the evidence that the LessWrong community was particularly early on covid or gave particularly wise advice on what to do about it. I looked into this, and as far as I can tell, this self-congratulatory narrative is a complete myth.
Many people were worried about and preparing for covid in early 2020 before everything finally snowballed in the second week of March 2020. I remember it personally.
In January 2020, some stores sold out of face masks in several different cities in North America. (One example of many.) The oldest post on LessWrong tagged with “covid-19” is from well after this started happening. (I also searched the forum for posts containing “covid” or “coronavirus” and sorted by oldest. I couldn’t find an older post that was relevant.) The LessWrong post is written by a self-described “prepper” who strikes a cautious tone and, oddly, advises buying vitamins to boost the immune system. (This seems dubious, possibly pseudoscientific.) To me, that first post strikes a similarly ambivalent, cautious tone as many mainstream news articles published before that post.
If you look at the covid-19 tag on LessWrong, the next post after that first one, the prepper one, is on February 5, 2020. The posts don’t start to get really worried about covid until mid-to-late February.
How is the rest of the world reacting at that time? Here’s a New York Times article from February 2, 2020, entitled “Wuhan Coronavirus Looks Increasingly Like a Pandemic, Experts Say”, well before any of the worried posts on LessWrong:
The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe, according to many of the world’s leading infectious disease experts.
The prospect is daunting. A pandemic — an ongoing epidemic on two or more continents — may well have global consequences, despite the extraordinary travel restrictions and quarantines now imposed by China and other countries, including the United States.
The tone of the article is fairly alarmed, noting that in China the streets are deserted due to the outbreak, it compares the novel coronavirus to the 1918-1920 Spanish flu, and it gives expert quotes like this one:
It is “increasingly unlikely that the virus can be contained,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who now runs Resolve to Save Lives, a nonprofit devoted to fighting epidemics.
The worried posts on LessWrong don’t start until weeks after this article was published. On a February 25, 2020 post asking when CFAR should cancel its in-person workshop, the top answer cites the CDC’s guidance at the time about covid-19. It says that CFAR’s workshops “should be canceled once U.S. spread is confirmed and mitigation measures such as social distancing and school closures start to be announced.” This is about 2-3 weeks out from that stuff happening. So, what exactly is being called early here?
CFAR is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, as are Lightcone Infrastructure and MIRI, two other organizations associated with the LessWrong community. On February 25, 2020, the city of San Francisco declared a state of emergency over covid. (Nearby, Santa Clara county, where most of what people consider as Silicon Valley is located, declared a local health emergency on February 10.) At this point in time, posts on LessWrong remain overall cautious and ambivalent.
By the time the posts on LessWrong get really, really worried, in the last few days of February and the first week of March, much of the rest of the world was reacting in the same way.
From February 14 to February 25, the S&P 500 dropped about 7.5%. Around this time, financial analysts and economists issued warnings about the global economy.
Between February 21 and February 27, Italy began its first lockdowns of areas where covid outbreaks had occurred.
On February 25, 2020, the CDC warned Americans of the possibility that “disruption to everyday life may be severe”. The CDC made this bracing statement:
It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but more really a question of when it will happen — and how many people in this country will have severe illness.
Another line from the CDC:
We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare with the expectation that this could be bad.
On February 26, Canada’s Health Minister advised Canadians to stockpile food and medication.
The most prominent LessWrong post from late February warning people to prepare for covid came a few days later, on February 28. So, on this comparison, LessWrong was actually slightly behind the curve. (Oddly, that post insinuates that nobody else is telling people to prepare for covid yet, and congratulates itself on being ahead of the curve.)
In the beginning of March, the number of LessWrong posts tagged with covid-19 posts explodes, and the tone gets much more alarmed. The rest of the world was responding similarly at this time. For example, on February 29, 2020, Ohio declared a state of emergency around covid. On March 4, Governor Gavin Newsom did the same in California. The governor of Hawaii declared an emergency the same day, and over the next few days, many more states piled on.
Around the same time, the general public was becoming alarmed about covid. In the last days of February and the first days of March, many people stockpiled food and supplies. On February 29, 2020, PBS ran an article describing an example of this at a Costco in Oregon:
Worried shoppers thronged a Costco box store near Lake Oswego, emptying shelves of items including toilet paper, paper towels, bottled water, frozen berries and black beans.
“Toilet paper is golden in an apocalypse,” one Costco employee said.
Employees said the store ran out of toilet paper for the first time in its history and that it was the busiest they had ever seen, including during Christmas Eve.
A March 1, 2020 article in the Los Angeles Times reported on stores in California running out of product as shoppers stockpiled. On March 2, an article in Newsweek described the same happening in Seattle:
Speaking to Newsweek, a resident of Seattle, Jessica Seu, said: “It’s like Armageddon here. It’s a bit crazy here. All the stores are out of sanitizers and [disinfectant] wipes and alcohol solution. Costco is out of toilet paper and paper towels. Schools are sending emails about possible closures if things get worse.
In Canada, the public was responding the same way. Global News reported on March 3, 2020 that a Costco in Ontario ran out bottled water, toilet paper, and paper towels, and that the situation was similar at other stores around the country. The spike in worried posts on LessWrong coincides with the wider public’s reaction. (If anything, the posts on LessWrong are very slightly behind the news articles about stores being picked clean by shoppers stockpiling.)
On March 5, 2020, the cruise ship the Grand Princess made the news because it was stranded off the coast of California due to a covid outbreak on board. I remember this as being one seminal moment of awareness around covid. It was a big story. At this point, LessWrong posts are definitely in no way ahead of the curve, since everyone is talking about covid now.
On March 8, 2020, Italy put a quarter of its population under lockdown, then put the whole country on lockdown on March 10. On March 11, the World Health Organization declared covid-19 a global pandemic. (The same day, the NBA suspended the season and Tom Hanks publicly disclosed he had covid.) On March 12, Ohio closed its schools statewide. The U.S. declared a national emergency on March 13. The same day, 15 more U.S. states closed their schools. Also on the same day, Canada’s Parliament shut down because of the pandemic. By now, everyone knows it’s a crisis.
So, did LessWrong call covid early? I see no evidence of that. The timeline of LessWrong posts about covid follow the same timeline that the world at large reacted to covid, increasing in alarm as journalists, experts, and governments increasingly rang the alarm bells. In some comparisons, LessWrong’s response was a little bit behind.
The only curated post from this period (and the post with the third-highest karma, one of only four posts with over 100 karma) tells LessWrong users to prepare for covid three days after the CDC told Americans to prepare, and two days after Canada’s Health Minister told Canadians to stockpile food and medication. It was also three days after San Francisco declared a state of emergency. When that post was published, many people were already stockpiling supplies, partly because government health officials had told them to. (The LessWrong post was originally published on a blog a day before, and based on a note in the text apparently written the day before that, but that still puts the writing of the post a day after the CDC warning and the San Francisco declaration of a state of emergency.)
Unless there is some evidence that I didn’t turn up, it seems pretty clear the self-congratulatory narrative is a myth. The self-congratulation actually started in that post published on February 28, 2020, which, again, is odd given the CDC’s warning three days before (on the same day that San Francisco declared a state of emergency), analysts’ and economists’ warnings about the global economy a bit before that, and the New York Times article warning about a probable pandemic at the beginning of the month. The post is slightly behind the curve, but it’s gloating as if it’s way ahead.
Looking at the overall LessWrong post history in early 2020, LessWrong seems to have been, if anything, slightly behind the New York Times, the S&P 500, the CDC, and enough members of the general public to clear out some stores of certain products. By the time LessWrong posting reached a frenzy in the first week of March, the world was already responding — U.S governors were declaring states of emergency, and everyone was talking about and worrying about covid.
I think people should be skeptical and even distrustful toward the claims of the LessWrong community, both on topics like pandemics and about its own track record and mythology. Obviously this myth is self-serving, and it was pretty easy for me to disprove in a short amount of time — so anyone who is curious can check and see that it’s not true. The people in the LessWrong community who believe the community called covid early probably believe that because it’s flattering. If they actually wondered if this is true or not and checked the timelines, it would become pretty clear that didn’t actually happen.
Edited to add on Monday, December 15, 2025 at 3:20pm Eastern:
I spun this quick take out as a full post here. When I submitted the full post, there was no/almost no engagement on this quick take. In the future, I’ll try to make sure to publish things only as a quick take or only as a full post, but not both. This was a fluke under unusual circumstances.
Feel free to continue commenting here, cross-post comments from here onto the full post, make new comments on the post, or do whatever you want. Thanks to everyone who engaged and left interesting comments.
YARROW: Boy, one would have to be a complete moron to think that COVID-19 would not be a big deal as late as Feb 28 2020, i.e. something that would imminently upend life-as-usual. At this point had China locked down long ago, and even Italy had started locking down. Cases in the USA were going up and up, especially when you correct for the (tiny) amount of testing they were doing. The prepper community had certainly noticed, and was out in force buying out masks and such. Many public health authorities were also sounding alarms. What kind of complete moron would not see what’s happening here? Why is lesswrong patting themselves on the back for noticing something so glaringly obvious?
MY REPLY: Yes!! Yes, this is true!! Yes, you would have to be a complete moron to not make this inference!! …But man, by that definition, there sure were an awful lot of complete morons around, i.e. most everyone. LessWrong deserves credit for rising WAY above the incredibly dismal standards set by the public-at-large in the English-speaking world, even if they didn’t particularly surpass the higher standards of many virologists, preppers, etc.
My personal experience: As someone living in normie society in Massachusetts USA but reading lesswrong and related, I was crystal clear that everything about my life was about to wrenchingly change, weeks before any of my friends or coworkers were. And they were very weirded out by my insistence on this. Some were in outright denial (e.g. “COVID = anti-Chinese racism” was a very popular take well into February, maybe even into March, and certainly the “flu kills far more than COVID” take was widespread in early March, e.g. Anderson Cooper). Others were just thinking about things in far-mode; COVID was a thing that people argued about in the news, not a real-world thing that could or should affect one’s actual day-to-day life and decisions. “They can’t possibly shut down schools, that’s crazy”, a close family member told me days before they did.
Dominic Cummings cited seeing the smoke as being very influential in jolting him to action (and thus impacting UK COVID policy), see screenshot here, which implies that this essay said something that he (and others at the tip-top of the UK gov’t) did not already see as obvious at the time.
A funny example that sticks in my memory is a tweet by Eliezer from March 11 2020. Trump had just tweeted:
So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
Eliezer quote-tweeted that, with the commentary:
9/11 happens, and nobody puts that number into the context of car crash deaths before turning the US into a security state and invading Iraq. Nobody contextualizes school shootings. But the ONE goddamn time the disaster is a straight line on a log chart, THAT’S when… [quote-tweet Trump]
We’re in Nerd Hell, lads and ladies and others. We’re in a universe that was specifically designed to maximally annoy numerate people. This is like watching a stopped clock, waiting for it to be right, and just as the clock almost actually is right, the clock hands fall off.
YARROW: Boy, one would have to be a complete moron to think that COVID-19 would not be a big deal as late as Feb 28 2020, i.e. something that would imminently upend life-as-usual. … What kind of complete moron would not see what’s happening here? Why is lesswrong patting themselves on the back for noticing something so glaringly obvious?
Not at all accurate. That’s not what I’m saying at all. It was a situation of high uncertainty, and the appropriate response was to be at least somewhat unsure, if not very unsure — yes, take precautions, think about it, learn about it, follow the public health advice. But I don’t think on February 28 anyone knew for sure what would happen, as opposed to made an uncertain call that turned out to be correct. The February 28 post I cite gives that sort of uncertain, precautionary advice, and I think it’s more or less reasonable advice — just a general ‘do some research, be prepared’ sort of thing.
It’s just that the post goes so far in patting itself on the back for being way ahead on this, when if someone in the LessWrong community had just posted about the CDC’s warning on the same day it was issued or had posted about it when San Francisco declared a public health emergency, or had made post noting that the S&P 500 had just fallen 7.5% and maybe that is a reason to be concerned, that would have put the first urgent warning about the pandemic a few days ahead of the February 28 post.
The takeaway of that post, and the takeaway of people who congratulate the LessWrong community on calling covid early, is that this is evidence that reading Yudkowsky’s Sequences or LessWrong posts or whatever promotes superior rationality, and is a vindication of the community’s beliefs. But that is the wrong conclusion to draw if something like 10-80% of the overall North American population (these figures are loosely based on polling cited in another comment) was at least equally concerned about covid-19 at least as early. 99.999% of the millions of people who were as concerned or more as early or earlier than the LessWrong community haven’t read the Sequences and don’t know what LessWrong is. A strategy that would have worked better than reading the Sequences or LessWrong posts is: just listen to what the CDC is saying and what state and local public health authorities are saying.
It’s ridiculous to draw the conclusion that this a vindication of LessWrong’s approach.
Dominic Cummings cited seeing the smoke as being very influential in jolting him to action (and thus impacting UK COVID policy), see screenshot here.
I don’t see this as a recommendation for LessWrong, although it sure is an interesting historical footnote. Dominic Cummings doesn’t appear to be a credible person on covid-19. For example, in November 2024 he posted a long, conspiratorial tweet which included:
”The Fauci network should be rolled up & retired en masse with some JAILED. And their media supporters—i.e most of the old media—driven out of business.”
The core problem there is not that he hasn’t read LessWrong enough. (Indeed, reading LessWrong might make a person more likely to believe such things, if anything.)
Incidentally, Cummings also had a scandal in the UK around allegations that he inappropriately violated the covid-19 lockdown and subsequently wasn’t honest about it.
My personal experience: As someone living in normie society in Massachusetts USA but reading lesswrong and related, I was crystal clear that everything about my life was about to wrenchingly change, weeks before any of my friends or coworkers were. And they were very weirded out by my insistence on this.
Tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people in North America had experiences similar to this. The level of alarm spread across the population gradually from around mid-January to mid-March 2020, so at any given time, there were a large number of people who were much more concerned than another large number of people.
I tried to convince my friends to take covid more seriously a few days before the WHO proclamation, the U.S. state of emergency declaration, and all the rest made it evident to them that it was time to worry. I don’t think I’m a genius for this — in fact, they were probably right to wait for more convincing evidence. If we were to re-run the experiment 10 times or 100 times, their approach might prove superior to mine. I don’t know.
A funny example that sticks in my memory is a tweet by Eliezer from March 11 2020. Trump had just tweeted:
This is ridiculous. Do you think these sort of snipes are at all unique to Eliezer Yudkowsky? Turn on Rachel Maddow or listen to Pod Save America, or follow any number of educated liberals (especially those with relevant expertise or journalists who cover science and medicine) on Twitter and you would see this kind of stuff all the time. It’s not an insight unique to Yudkowsky that Donald Trump says ridiculous and dangerous things about covid or many other topics.
The version of the claim I have heard is not that LW was early to suggest that there might be a pandemic but rather that they were unusually willing to do something about it because they take small-probability high-impact events seriously. Eg. I suspect that you would say that Wei Dai was “late” because their comment came after the nyt article etc, but nonetheless they made 700% betting that covid would be a big deal.
I think it can be hard to remember just how much controversy there was at the time. E.g. you say of March 13, “By now, everyone knows it’s a crisis” but sadly “everyone” did not include the California department of public health, who didn’t issue stay at home orders for another week.
[I have a distinct memory of this because I told my girlfriend I couldn’t see her anymore since she worked at the department of public health (!!) and was still getting a ton of exposure since the California public health department didn’t think covid was that big of a deal.]
The version of the claim I have heard is not that LW was early to suggest that there might be a pandemic but rather that they were unusually willing to do something about it because they take small-probability high-impact events seriously. Eg. I suspect that you would say that Wei Dai was “late” because their comment came after the nyt article etc, but nonetheless they made 700% betting that covid would be a big deal.
Is there any better evidence of this than the example you cited? That comment from Wei Dei is completely ridiculous… Making a lot of money off of a risky options trade does not discredit the efficient market hypothesis.
Even assuming Wei Dei’s math is right (which I don’t automatically trust), the market guessing on February 10, 2020 that there was a 12% chance (or whatever it is) that the covid-19 situation would be as bad as the market thought it was on February 27, 2020 doesn’t seem ridiculous or crazy or a discrediting of the efficient market hypothesis.
(Also note the bias of people only posting about the option trades they do well on, afterward, in retrospect...)
I think it can be hard to remember just how much controversy there was at the time. E.g. you say of March 13, “By now, everyone knows it’s a crisis” but sadly “everyone” did not include the California public health department, who didn’t issue stay at home orders for another week.
By what date did the majority of LessWrong users start staying at home?
I doubt that there are surveys of when people stayed home. You could maybe try to look at prediction markets but I’m not sure what you would compare them to to see if the prediction market was more accurate than some other reference group.
I think the COVID case usefully illustrates a broader issue with how “EA/rationalist prediction success” narratives are often deployed.
That said, this is exactly why I’d like to see similar audits applied to other domains where prediction success is often asserted, but rarely with much nuance. In particular: crypto, prediction markets, LVT, and more recently GPT-3 / scaling-based AI progress. I wasn’t closely following these discussions at the time, so I’m genuinely uncertain about (i) what was actually claimed ex ante, (ii) how specific those claims were, and (iii) how distinctive they were relative to non-EA communities.
This matters to me for two reasons.
First, many of these claims are invoked rhetorically rather than analytically. “EAs predicted X” is often treated as a unitary credential, when in reality predictive success varies a lot by domain, level of abstraction, and comparison class. Without disaggregation, it’s hard to tell whether we’re looking at genuine epistemic advantage, selective memory, or post-hoc narrative construction.
Second, these track-record arguments are sometimes used—explicitly or implicitly—to bolster the case for concern about AI risks. If the evidential support here rests on past forecasting success, then the strength of that support depends on how well those earlier cases actually hold up under scrutiny. If the success was mostly at the level of identifying broad structural risks (e.g. incentives, tail risks, coordination failures), that’s a very different kind of evidence than being right about timelines, concrete outcomes, or specific mechanisms.
I like this comment. This topic is always at risk to devolving into a generalized debate between rationalists and their opponents, creating a lot of heat but not light. So it’s helpful to keep a fairly tight focus on potentially action-relevant questions (of which the comment identifies one).
I’ve been around EA pretty deeply since 2015, and to some degree since around 2009. My impression is that overall it’s what you guessed it might be: “selective memory, or post-hoc narrative construction.” Particularly around AI, but also in general with such claims.
(There’s a good reason to make specific, dated predictions publicly, in advance, ideally with some clear resolution criteria.)
I don’t exactly trust you to do this in an unbiased way, but this comment seems the state-of-the-art and I love retrospectives on COVID-19. Plausibly I should look into the extent that your story checks out, plus how EA itself, the relevant parts of twitter or prediction platforms like Metaculus compared at the time (which I felt was definitely ahead).
I wrote this comment on Jan 27, indicating that it’s not just a few people worried at the time. I think most “normal” people weren’t tracking covid in January.
I think the thing to realize/people easily forget is that everything was really confusing and there was just a ton of contentious debate during the early months. So while there was apparently a fairly alarmed NYT report in early Feb, there were also many other reports in February that were less alarmed, many bad forecasts, etc.
It would be easy to find a few examples like this from any large sample of people. As I mentioned in the quick take, in late January, people were clearing out stores of surgical masks in cities like New York.
My overall objection/argument is that you appear to selectively portray data points that show one side, and selectively dismiss data points that show the opposite view. This makes your bottom-line conclusion pretty suspicious.
I also think the rationalist community overreached and their epistemics and speed in early COVID were worse compared to, say, internet people, government officials, and perhaps even the general public in Taiwan. But I don’t think the case for them being slower than Western officials or the general public in either the US or Europe is credible, and your evidence here does not update me much.
It’s clear that in late January 2020, many people in North America were at least moderately concerned about covid-19.
I already gave the example of some stores in a few cities selling out of face masks. That’s anecdotal, but a sign of enough fear among enough people to be noteworthy.
What about the U.S. government’s reaction? The CDC issued a warning about travelling to China on January 28 and on January 31, the U.S. federal government declared a public health emergency, implemented a mandatory 14-day quarantine for travelers returning to China, and implemented other travel restrictions. Both the CDC warning and the travel restrictions were covered in the press, so many people knew about it, but even before that happened, a lot of people said they were worried.
Here’s a Morning Consult poll from January 24-26, 2020:
An Ipsos poll of Canadians from January 27-28 found similar results:
Half (49%) of Canadians think the coronavirus poses a threat (17% very high/32% high) to the world today, while three in ten (30%) think it poses a threat (9% very high/21% high) to Canada. Fewer still think the coronavirus is a threat to their province (24%) or to themselves and their family (16%).
Were significantly more than 37% of LessWrong users very concerned about covid-19 around this time? Did significantly more than 16% think covid-19 posed a threat to themselves and their family?
It’s hard to make direct, apples-to-apples comparisons between the general public and the LessWrong community. We don’t have polls of the LessWrong community to compare to. But those examples you gave from January 24-January 27, 2020 don’t seem different from what we’d expect if the LessWrong community was at about the same level of concern at about the same time as the general public. Even if the examples you gave represented the worries of ~15-40% of the LessWrong community, that wouldn’t be evidence that LessWrong users were doing better than average.
I’m not claiming that the LessWrong community was clearly significantly behind. If it was behind at all, it was only by a few days or maybe a week tops (not much in the grand scheme of things), and the evidence isn’t clear or rigorous enough to definitively draw a conclusion like that. My claim is just that the LessWrong community’s claim to have called the pandemic early is pretty clearly false or at least, so far completely unsupported.
I recommend looking at the Morning Consult PDF and checking the different variations of the question to get a fuller picture. People also gave surprisingly high answers for other viruses like Ebola and Zika, but not nearly as high as for covid.
If you want a source who is biased in the opposite direction and who generally agrees with my conclusion, take a look here and here. I like this bon mot:
In some ways, I think this post isn’t “seeing the smoke,” so much as “seeing the fire and choking on the smoke.”
This is their conclusion from the second link:
If the sheer volume of conversation is our alarm bell, this site seems to have lagged behind the stock market by about a week.
Unless there is some evidence that I didn’t turn up, it seems pretty clear the self-congratulatory narrative is a myth.
This is a cool write-up! I’m curious how much/if you Zvi’s COVID round-ups you take into account? I wasn’t around LessWrong during COVID, but, if I understand correctly, those played a large role in the information flow during that time.
The first post listed there is from March 2, 2020, so that’s relatively late in the timeline we’re considering, no? That’s 3 days later than the February 28 post I discussed above as the first/best candidate for a truly urgent early warning about covid-19 on LessWrong. (2020 was a leap year, so there was a February 29.)
That first post from March 2 also seems fairly simple and not particularly different from the February 28 post (which it cites).
Following up a bit on this, @parconley. The second post in Zvi’s covid-19 series is from 6pm Eastern on March 13, 2020. Let’s remember where this is in the timeline. From my quick take above:
On March 8, 2020, Italy put a quarter of its population under lockdown, then put the whole country on lockdown on March 10. On March 11, the World Health Organization declared covid-19 a global pandemic. (The same day, the NBA suspended the season and Tom Hanks publicly disclosed he had covid.) On March 12, Ohio closed its schools statewide. The U.S. declared a national emergency on March 13. The same day, 15 more U.S. states closed their schools. Also on the same day, Canada’s Parliament shut down because of the pandemic.
Zvi’s post from March 13, 2020 at 6pm is about all the school closures that happened that day. (The U.S. state of emergency was declared that morning.) It doesn’t make any specific claims or predictions about the spread of the novel coronavirus, or anything else that could be assessed in terms of its prescience. It mostly focuses on the topic of the social functions that schools play (particularly in the United States and in the state of New York specifically) other than teaching children, such as providing free meals and supervision.
This is too late into the timeline to count as calling the pandemic early, and the post doesn’t make any predictions anyway.
The third post from Zvi is on March 17, 2020 and it’s mostly a personal blog. There are a few relevant bits. For one, Zvi admits he was surprised at how bad the pandemic was at that point:
Regret I didn’t sell everything and go short, not because I had some crazy belief in efficient markets, but because I didn’t expect it to be this bad and I told myself a few years ago I was going to not be a trader anymore and just buy and hold.
He argues New York City is not locking down soon enough and San Francisco is not locking down completely enough. About San Francisco, one thing he says is:
Local responses much better. Still inadequate. San Francisco on strangely incomplete lock-down. Going on walks considered fine for some reason, very strange.
I don’t know how sound this was given what experts knew at the time. It might have been the right call. I don’t know. I will just say that, in retrospect, it seems like going outside was one of the things we originally thought wasn’t fine that we later thought was actually fine after all.
The next post after that isn’t until April 1, 2020. It’s about the viral load of covid-19 infections and the question of how much viral load matters. By this point, we’re getting into questions about the unfolding of the ongoing pandemic, rather than questions about predicting the pandemic in advance. You could potentially go and assess that prediction track record separately, but that’s beyond the scope of my quick take, which was to assess whether LessWrong called covid early.
Overall, Zvi’s posts, at least the ones included in this series, are not evidence for Zvi or LessWrong calling covid early. The posts start too late and don’t make any predictions. Zvi saying “I didn’t expect it to be this bad” is actually evidence against Zvi calling covid early. So, I think we can close the book on this one.
Still open to hearing other things people might think of as evidence that the LessWrong community called covid early.
I spun this quick take out as a full post here. When I submitted the full post, there was no/almost no engagement on this quick take. In the future, I’ll try to make sure to publish things only as a quick take or only as a full post, but not both. This was a fluke under unusual circumstances.
Feel free to continue commenting here, cross-post comments from here onto the full post, make new comments on the post, or do whatever you want. Thanks to everyone who engaged and left interesting comments.
I’ve seen a few people in the LessWrong community congratulate the community on predicting or preparing for covid-19 earlier than others, but I haven’t actually seen the evidence that the LessWrong community was particularly early on covid or gave particularly wise advice on what to do about it. I looked into this, and as far as I can tell, this self-congratulatory narrative is a complete myth.
Many people were worried about and preparing for covid in early 2020 before everything finally snowballed in the second week of March 2020. I remember it personally.
In January 2020, some stores sold out of face masks in several different cities in North America. (One example of many.) The oldest post on LessWrong tagged with “covid-19” is from well after this started happening. (I also searched the forum for posts containing “covid” or “coronavirus” and sorted by oldest. I couldn’t find an older post that was relevant.) The LessWrong post is written by a self-described “prepper” who strikes a cautious tone and, oddly, advises buying vitamins to boost the immune system. (This seems dubious, possibly pseudoscientific.) To me, that first post strikes a similarly ambivalent, cautious tone as many mainstream news articles published before that post.
If you look at the covid-19 tag on LessWrong, the next post after that first one, the prepper one, is on February 5, 2020. The posts don’t start to get really worried about covid until mid-to-late February.
How is the rest of the world reacting at that time? Here’s a New York Times article from February 2, 2020, entitled “Wuhan Coronavirus Looks Increasingly Like a Pandemic, Experts Say”, well before any of the worried posts on LessWrong:
The tone of the article is fairly alarmed, noting that in China the streets are deserted due to the outbreak, it compares the novel coronavirus to the 1918-1920 Spanish flu, and it gives expert quotes like this one:
The worried posts on LessWrong don’t start until weeks after this article was published. On a February 25, 2020 post asking when CFAR should cancel its in-person workshop, the top answer cites the CDC’s guidance at the time about covid-19. It says that CFAR’s workshops “should be canceled once U.S. spread is confirmed and mitigation measures such as social distancing and school closures start to be announced.” This is about 2-3 weeks out from that stuff happening. So, what exactly is being called early here?
CFAR is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, as are Lightcone Infrastructure and MIRI, two other organizations associated with the LessWrong community. On February 25, 2020, the city of San Francisco declared a state of emergency over covid. (Nearby, Santa Clara county, where most of what people consider as Silicon Valley is located, declared a local health emergency on February 10.) At this point in time, posts on LessWrong remain overall cautious and ambivalent.
By the time the posts on LessWrong get really, really worried, in the last few days of February and the first week of March, much of the rest of the world was reacting in the same way.
From February 14 to February 25, the S&P 500 dropped about 7.5%. Around this time, financial analysts and economists issued warnings about the global economy.
Between February 21 and February 27, Italy began its first lockdowns of areas where covid outbreaks had occurred.
On February 25, 2020, the CDC warned Americans of the possibility that “disruption to everyday life may be severe”. The CDC made this bracing statement:
Another line from the CDC:
On February 26, Canada’s Health Minister advised Canadians to stockpile food and medication.
The most prominent LessWrong post from late February warning people to prepare for covid came a few days later, on February 28. So, on this comparison, LessWrong was actually slightly behind the curve. (Oddly, that post insinuates that nobody else is telling people to prepare for covid yet, and congratulates itself on being ahead of the curve.)
In the beginning of March, the number of LessWrong posts tagged with covid-19 posts explodes, and the tone gets much more alarmed. The rest of the world was responding similarly at this time. For example, on February 29, 2020, Ohio declared a state of emergency around covid. On March 4, Governor Gavin Newsom did the same in California. The governor of Hawaii declared an emergency the same day, and over the next few days, many more states piled on.
Around the same time, the general public was becoming alarmed about covid. In the last days of February and the first days of March, many people stockpiled food and supplies. On February 29, 2020, PBS ran an article describing an example of this at a Costco in Oregon:
A March 1, 2020 article in the Los Angeles Times reported on stores in California running out of product as shoppers stockpiled. On March 2, an article in Newsweek described the same happening in Seattle:
In Canada, the public was responding the same way. Global News reported on March 3, 2020 that a Costco in Ontario ran out bottled water, toilet paper, and paper towels, and that the situation was similar at other stores around the country. The spike in worried posts on LessWrong coincides with the wider public’s reaction. (If anything, the posts on LessWrong are very slightly behind the news articles about stores being picked clean by shoppers stockpiling.)
On March 5, 2020, the cruise ship the Grand Princess made the news because it was stranded off the coast of California due to a covid outbreak on board. I remember this as being one seminal moment of awareness around covid. It was a big story. At this point, LessWrong posts are definitely in no way ahead of the curve, since everyone is talking about covid now.
On March 8, 2020, Italy put a quarter of its population under lockdown, then put the whole country on lockdown on March 10. On March 11, the World Health Organization declared covid-19 a global pandemic. (The same day, the NBA suspended the season and Tom Hanks publicly disclosed he had covid.) On March 12, Ohio closed its schools statewide. The U.S. declared a national emergency on March 13. The same day, 15 more U.S. states closed their schools. Also on the same day, Canada’s Parliament shut down because of the pandemic. By now, everyone knows it’s a crisis.
So, did LessWrong call covid early? I see no evidence of that. The timeline of LessWrong posts about covid follow the same timeline that the world at large reacted to covid, increasing in alarm as journalists, experts, and governments increasingly rang the alarm bells. In some comparisons, LessWrong’s response was a little bit behind.
The only curated post from this period (and the post with the third-highest karma, one of only four posts with over 100 karma) tells LessWrong users to prepare for covid three days after the CDC told Americans to prepare, and two days after Canada’s Health Minister told Canadians to stockpile food and medication. It was also three days after San Francisco declared a state of emergency. When that post was published, many people were already stockpiling supplies, partly because government health officials had told them to. (The LessWrong post was originally published on a blog a day before, and based on a note in the text apparently written the day before that, but that still puts the writing of the post a day after the CDC warning and the San Francisco declaration of a state of emergency.)
Unless there is some evidence that I didn’t turn up, it seems pretty clear the self-congratulatory narrative is a myth. The self-congratulation actually started in that post published on February 28, 2020, which, again, is odd given the CDC’s warning three days before (on the same day that San Francisco declared a state of emergency), analysts’ and economists’ warnings about the global economy a bit before that, and the New York Times article warning about a probable pandemic at the beginning of the month. The post is slightly behind the curve, but it’s gloating as if it’s way ahead.
Looking at the overall LessWrong post history in early 2020, LessWrong seems to have been, if anything, slightly behind the New York Times, the S&P 500, the CDC, and enough members of the general public to clear out some stores of certain products. By the time LessWrong posting reached a frenzy in the first week of March, the world was already responding — U.S governors were declaring states of emergency, and everyone was talking about and worrying about covid.
I think people should be skeptical and even distrustful toward the claims of the LessWrong community, both on topics like pandemics and about its own track record and mythology. Obviously this myth is self-serving, and it was pretty easy for me to disprove in a short amount of time — so anyone who is curious can check and see that it’s not true. The people in the LessWrong community who believe the community called covid early probably believe that because it’s flattering. If they actually wondered if this is true or not and checked the timelines, it would become pretty clear that didn’t actually happen.
Edited to add on Monday, December 15, 2025 at 3:20pm Eastern:
I spun this quick take out as a full post here. When I submitted the full post, there was no/almost no engagement on this quick take. In the future, I’ll try to make sure to publish things only as a quick take or only as a full post, but not both. This was a fluke under unusual circumstances.
Feel free to continue commenting here, cross-post comments from here onto the full post, make new comments on the post, or do whatever you want. Thanks to everyone who engaged and left interesting comments.
My gloss on this situation is:
YARROW: Boy, one would have to be a complete moron to think that COVID-19 would not be a big deal as late as Feb 28 2020, i.e. something that would imminently upend life-as-usual. At this point had China locked down long ago, and even Italy had started locking down. Cases in the USA were going up and up, especially when you correct for the (tiny) amount of testing they were doing. The prepper community had certainly noticed, and was out in force buying out masks and such. Many public health authorities were also sounding alarms. What kind of complete moron would not see what’s happening here? Why is lesswrong patting themselves on the back for noticing something so glaringly obvious?
MY REPLY: Yes!! Yes, this is true!! Yes, you would have to be a complete moron to not make this inference!! …But man, by that definition, there sure were an awful lot of complete morons around, i.e. most everyone. LessWrong deserves credit for rising WAY above the incredibly dismal standards set by the public-at-large in the English-speaking world, even if they didn’t particularly surpass the higher standards of many virologists, preppers, etc.
My personal experience: As someone living in normie society in Massachusetts USA but reading lesswrong and related, I was crystal clear that everything about my life was about to wrenchingly change, weeks before any of my friends or coworkers were. And they were very weirded out by my insistence on this. Some were in outright denial (e.g. “COVID = anti-Chinese racism” was a very popular take well into February, maybe even into March, and certainly the “flu kills far more than COVID” take was widespread in early March, e.g. Anderson Cooper). Others were just thinking about things in far-mode; COVID was a thing that people argued about in the news, not a real-world thing that could or should affect one’s actual day-to-day life and decisions. “They can’t possibly shut down schools, that’s crazy”, a close family member told me days before they did.
Dominic Cummings cited seeing the smoke as being very influential in jolting him to action (and thus impacting UK COVID policy), see screenshot here, which implies that this essay said something that he (and others at the tip-top of the UK gov’t) did not already see as obvious at the time.
A funny example that sticks in my memory is a tweet by Eliezer from March 11 2020. Trump had just tweeted:
Eliezer quote-tweeted that, with the commentary:
Not at all accurate. That’s not what I’m saying at all. It was a situation of high uncertainty, and the appropriate response was to be at least somewhat unsure, if not very unsure — yes, take precautions, think about it, learn about it, follow the public health advice. But I don’t think on February 28 anyone knew for sure what would happen, as opposed to made an uncertain call that turned out to be correct. The February 28 post I cite gives that sort of uncertain, precautionary advice, and I think it’s more or less reasonable advice — just a general ‘do some research, be prepared’ sort of thing.
It’s just that the post goes so far in patting itself on the back for being way ahead on this, when if someone in the LessWrong community had just posted about the CDC’s warning on the same day it was issued or had posted about it when San Francisco declared a public health emergency, or had made post noting that the S&P 500 had just fallen 7.5% and maybe that is a reason to be concerned, that would have put the first urgent warning about the pandemic a few days ahead of the February 28 post.
The takeaway of that post, and the takeaway of people who congratulate the LessWrong community on calling covid early, is that this is evidence that reading Yudkowsky’s Sequences or LessWrong posts or whatever promotes superior rationality, and is a vindication of the community’s beliefs. But that is the wrong conclusion to draw if something like 10-80% of the overall North American population (these figures are loosely based on polling cited in another comment) was at least equally concerned about covid-19 at least as early. 99.999% of the millions of people who were as concerned or more as early or earlier than the LessWrong community haven’t read the Sequences and don’t know what LessWrong is. A strategy that would have worked better than reading the Sequences or LessWrong posts is: just listen to what the CDC is saying and what state and local public health authorities are saying.
It’s ridiculous to draw the conclusion that this a vindication of LessWrong’s approach.
I don’t see this as a recommendation for LessWrong, although it sure is an interesting historical footnote. Dominic Cummings doesn’t appear to be a credible person on covid-19. For example, in November 2024 he posted a long, conspiratorial tweet which included:
”The Fauci network should be rolled up & retired en masse with some JAILED.
And their media supporters—i.e most of the old media—driven out of business.”
The core problem there is not that he hasn’t read LessWrong enough. (Indeed, reading LessWrong might make a person more likely to believe such things, if anything.)
Incidentally, Cummings also had a scandal in the UK around allegations that he inappropriately violated the covid-19 lockdown and subsequently wasn’t honest about it.
Tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people in North America had experiences similar to this. The level of alarm spread across the population gradually from around mid-January to mid-March 2020, so at any given time, there were a large number of people who were much more concerned than another large number of people.
I tried to convince my friends to take covid more seriously a few days before the WHO proclamation, the U.S. state of emergency declaration, and all the rest made it evident to them that it was time to worry. I don’t think I’m a genius for this — in fact, they were probably right to wait for more convincing evidence. If we were to re-run the experiment 10 times or 100 times, their approach might prove superior to mine. I don’t know.
This is ridiculous. Do you think these sort of snipes are at all unique to Eliezer Yudkowsky? Turn on Rachel Maddow or listen to Pod Save America, or follow any number of educated liberals (especially those with relevant expertise or journalists who cover science and medicine) on Twitter and you would see this kind of stuff all the time. It’s not an insight unique to Yudkowsky that Donald Trump says ridiculous and dangerous things about covid or many other topics.
Thanks for collecting this timeline!
The version of the claim I have heard is not that LW was early to suggest that there might be a pandemic but rather that they were unusually willing to do something about it because they take small-probability high-impact events seriously. Eg. I suspect that you would say that Wei Dai was “late” because their comment came after the nyt article etc, but nonetheless they made 700% betting that covid would be a big deal.
I think it can be hard to remember just how much controversy there was at the time. E.g. you say of March 13, “By now, everyone knows it’s a crisis” but sadly “everyone” did not include the California department of public health, who didn’t issue stay at home orders for another week.
[I have a distinct memory of this because I told my girlfriend I couldn’t see her anymore since she worked at the department of public health (!!) and was still getting a ton of exposure since the California public health department didn’t think covid was that big of a deal.]
Is there any better evidence of this than the example you cited? That comment from Wei Dei is completely ridiculous… Making a lot of money off of a risky options trade does not discredit the efficient market hypothesis.
Even assuming Wei Dei’s math is right (which I don’t automatically trust), the market guessing on February 10, 2020 that there was a 12% chance (or whatever it is) that the covid-19 situation would be as bad as the market thought it was on February 27, 2020 doesn’t seem ridiculous or crazy or a discrediting of the efficient market hypothesis.
(Also note the bias of people only posting about the option trades they do well on, afterward, in retrospect...)
By what date did the majority of LessWrong users start staying at home?
I doubt that there are surveys of when people stayed home. You could maybe try to look at prediction markets but I’m not sure what you would compare them to to see if the prediction market was more accurate than some other reference group.
That seems like the crux of the matter!
I think the COVID case usefully illustrates a broader issue with how “EA/rationalist prediction success” narratives are often deployed.
That said, this is exactly why I’d like to see similar audits applied to other domains where prediction success is often asserted, but rarely with much nuance. In particular: crypto, prediction markets, LVT, and more recently GPT-3 / scaling-based AI progress. I wasn’t closely following these discussions at the time, so I’m genuinely uncertain about (i) what was actually claimed ex ante, (ii) how specific those claims were, and (iii) how distinctive they were relative to non-EA communities.
This matters to me for two reasons.
First, many of these claims are invoked rhetorically rather than analytically. “EAs predicted X” is often treated as a unitary credential, when in reality predictive success varies a lot by domain, level of abstraction, and comparison class. Without disaggregation, it’s hard to tell whether we’re looking at genuine epistemic advantage, selective memory, or post-hoc narrative construction.
Second, these track-record arguments are sometimes used—explicitly or implicitly—to bolster the case for concern about AI risks. If the evidential support here rests on past forecasting success, then the strength of that support depends on how well those earlier cases actually hold up under scrutiny. If the success was mostly at the level of identifying broad structural risks (e.g. incentives, tail risks, coordination failures), that’s a very different kind of evidence than being right about timelines, concrete outcomes, or specific mechanisms.
I like this comment. This topic is always at risk to devolving into a generalized debate between rationalists and their opponents, creating a lot of heat but not light. So it’s helpful to keep a fairly tight focus on potentially action-relevant questions (of which the comment identifies one).
I’ve been around EA pretty deeply since 2015, and to some degree since around 2009. My impression is that overall it’s what you guessed it might be: “selective memory, or post-hoc narrative construction.” Particularly around AI, but also in general with such claims.
(There’s a good reason to make specific, dated predictions publicly, in advance, ideally with some clear resolution criteria.)
Thank you, this is very good. Strong upvoted.
I don’t exactly trust you to do this in an unbiased way, but this comment seems the state-of-the-art and I love retrospectives on COVID-19. Plausibly I should look into the extent that your story checks out, plus how EA itself, the relevant parts of twitter or prediction platforms like Metaculus compared at the time (which I felt was definitely ahead).
See eg traviswfisher’s prediction on Jan 24:
https://x.com/metaculus/status/1248966351508692992
Or this post on this very forum from Jan 26:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g2F5BBfhTNESR5PJJ/concerning-the-recent-2019-novel-coronavirus-outbreak
I wrote this comment on Jan 27, indicating that it’s not just a few people worried at the time. I think most “normal” people weren’t tracking covid in January.
I think the thing to realize/people easily forget is that everything was really confusing and there was just a ton of contentious debate during the early months. So while there was apparently a fairly alarmed NYT report in early Feb, there were also many other reports in February that were less alarmed, many bad forecasts, etc.
It would be easy to find a few examples like this from any large sample of people. As I mentioned in the quick take, in late January, people were clearing out stores of surgical masks in cities like New York.
Why does this not apply to your original point citing a single NYT article?
It might, but I cited a number of data points to try to give an overall picture. What’s your specific objection/argument?
My overall objection/argument is that you appear to selectively portray data points that show one side, and selectively dismiss data points that show the opposite view. This makes your bottom-line conclusion pretty suspicious.
I also think the rationalist community overreached and their epistemics and speed in early COVID were worse compared to, say, internet people, government officials, and perhaps even the general public in Taiwan. But I don’t think the case for them being slower than Western officials or the general public in either the US or Europe is credible, and your evidence here does not update me much.
Let’s look at the data a bit more thoroughly.
It’s clear that in late January 2020, many people in North America were at least moderately concerned about covid-19.
I already gave the example of some stores in a few cities selling out of face masks. That’s anecdotal, but a sign of enough fear among enough people to be noteworthy.
What about the U.S. government’s reaction? The CDC issued a warning about travelling to China on January 28 and on January 31, the U.S. federal government declared a public health emergency, implemented a mandatory 14-day quarantine for travelers returning to China, and implemented other travel restrictions. Both the CDC warning and the travel restrictions were covered in the press, so many people knew about it, but even before that happened, a lot of people said they were worried.
Here’s a Morning Consult poll from January 24-26, 2020:
An Ipsos poll of Canadians from January 27-28 found similar results:
Were significantly more than 37% of LessWrong users very concerned about covid-19 around this time? Did significantly more than 16% think covid-19 posed a threat to themselves and their family?
It’s hard to make direct, apples-to-apples comparisons between the general public and the LessWrong community. We don’t have polls of the LessWrong community to compare to. But those examples you gave from January 24-January 27, 2020 don’t seem different from what we’d expect if the LessWrong community was at about the same level of concern at about the same time as the general public. Even if the examples you gave represented the worries of ~15-40% of the LessWrong community, that wouldn’t be evidence that LessWrong users were doing better than average.
I’m not claiming that the LessWrong community was clearly significantly behind. If it was behind at all, it was only by a few days or maybe a week tops (not much in the grand scheme of things), and the evidence isn’t clear or rigorous enough to definitively draw a conclusion like that. My claim is just that the LessWrong community’s claim to have called the pandemic early is pretty clearly false or at least, so far completely unsupported.
Thanks, I find the polls to be much stronger evidence than the other things you’ve said.
I recommend looking at the Morning Consult PDF and checking the different variations of the question to get a fuller picture. People also gave surprisingly high answers for other viruses like Ebola and Zika, but not nearly as high as for covid.
If you want a source who is biased in the opposite direction and who generally agrees with my conclusion, take a look here and here. I like this bon mot:
This is their conclusion from the second link:
This is a cool write-up! I’m curious how much/if you Zvi’s COVID round-ups you take into account? I wasn’t around LessWrong during COVID, but, if I understand correctly, those played a large role in the information flow during that time.
I haven’t looked into it, but any and all new information that can give a fuller picture is welcome.
Yeah! This is the series that I am referring to: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/rencyawwfr4rfwt5C.
As I understand it, Zvi was quite ahead of the curve with COVID and moved out of New York before others. I could be wrong, though.
The first post listed there is from March 2, 2020, so that’s relatively late in the timeline we’re considering, no? That’s 3 days later than the February 28 post I discussed above as the first/best candidate for a truly urgent early warning about covid-19 on LessWrong. (2020 was a leap year, so there was a February 29.)
That first post from March 2 also seems fairly simple and not particularly different from the February 28 post (which it cites).
Following up a bit on this, @parconley. The second post in Zvi’s covid-19 series is from 6pm Eastern on March 13, 2020. Let’s remember where this is in the timeline. From my quick take above:
Zvi’s post from March 13, 2020 at 6pm is about all the school closures that happened that day. (The U.S. state of emergency was declared that morning.) It doesn’t make any specific claims or predictions about the spread of the novel coronavirus, or anything else that could be assessed in terms of its prescience. It mostly focuses on the topic of the social functions that schools play (particularly in the United States and in the state of New York specifically) other than teaching children, such as providing free meals and supervision.
This is too late into the timeline to count as calling the pandemic early, and the post doesn’t make any predictions anyway.
The third post from Zvi is on March 17, 2020 and it’s mostly a personal blog. There are a few relevant bits. For one, Zvi admits he was surprised at how bad the pandemic was at that point:
He argues New York City is not locking down soon enough and San Francisco is not locking down completely enough. About San Francisco, one thing he says is:
I don’t know how sound this was given what experts knew at the time. It might have been the right call. I don’t know. I will just say that, in retrospect, it seems like going outside was one of the things we originally thought wasn’t fine that we later thought was actually fine after all.
The next post after that isn’t until April 1, 2020. It’s about the viral load of covid-19 infections and the question of how much viral load matters. By this point, we’re getting into questions about the unfolding of the ongoing pandemic, rather than questions about predicting the pandemic in advance. You could potentially go and assess that prediction track record separately, but that’s beyond the scope of my quick take, which was to assess whether LessWrong called covid early.
Overall, Zvi’s posts, at least the ones included in this series, are not evidence for Zvi or LessWrong calling covid early. The posts start too late and don’t make any predictions. Zvi saying “I didn’t expect it to be this bad” is actually evidence against Zvi calling covid early. So, I think we can close the book on this one.
Still open to hearing other things people might think of as evidence that the LessWrong community called covid early.
I spun this quick take out as a full post here. When I submitted the full post, there was no/almost no engagement on this quick take. In the future, I’ll try to make sure to publish things only as a quick take or only as a full post, but not both. This was a fluke under unusual circumstances.
Feel free to continue commenting here, cross-post comments from here onto the full post, make new comments on the post, or do whatever you want. Thanks to everyone who engaged and left interesting comments.