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.
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.