For a long time, I’ve believed in the importance of not being alarmist. My immediate reaction to almost anybody who warns me of impending doom is: “I doubt it”. And sometimes, “Do you want to bet?”
So, writing this post was a very difficult thing for me to do. On an object-level, l realized that the evidence coming out of Wuhan looked very concerning. The more I looked into it, the more I thought, “This really seems like something someone should be ringing the alarm bells about.” But for a while, very few people were predicting anything big on respectable forums (Travis Fisher, on Metaculus, being an exception), so I stayed silent.
At some point, the evidence became overwhelming. It seemed very clear that this virus wasn’t going to be contained, and it was going to go global. I credit Dony Christie and Louis Francini with interrupting me from my dogmatic slumber. They were able to convince me —in the vein of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Inadequate Equilibria —that the reason why no one was talking about this probably had nothing to do whatsoever with the actual evidence. It wasn’t that people had a model and used that model to predict “no doom” with high confidence: it was a case of people not having models at all.
I thought at the time—and continue to think—that the starting place of all our forecasting should be using the outside view. But—and this was something Dony Christie was quite keen to argue—sometimes people just use the “outside view” as a rationalization; to many people, it means just as much, and no more than, “I don’t want to predict something weird, even if that weird thing is overwhelmingly determined by the actual evidence.”
And that was definitely true here: pandemics are not a rare occassion in human history. They happen quite frequently. I am most thankful for belonging to a community that opened my mind long ago, by having abundant material written about natural pandemics, the Spanish flu, and future bio-risks. That allowed me to enter the mindset of thinking “OK maybe this is real” as opposed to rejecting all the smoke under the door until the social atmosphere became right.
My intuitions, I’m happy to say, paid off. People are still messaging me about this post. Nearly two years later, I wear a mask when I enter a supermarket.
There are many doomsayers who always get things wrong. A smaller number of doomsayers are occasionally correct—good enough that it might be worth listening to them, but rejecting them, most of the time.
Yet, I am now entitled to a distinction that I did not think I would ever earn, and one that I perhaps do not deserve (as the real credit goes to Louis and Dony): the only time I’ve ever put out a PSA asking people to take some impending doom very seriously, was when I correctly warned about the most significant pandemic in one hundred years. And I’m pretty sure I did it earlier than any other effective altruist in the community (though I’m happy to be proven wrong, and congratulate them fully).
That said, there are some parts of this post I am not happy with. These include,
I only had one concrete prediction in the whole post, and it wasn’t very well-specified. I said that there was a >2% probability that 50 million people would die within one year. That didn’t happen.
I overestimated the mortality rate. At the time, I didn’t understand which was likely to be a greater factor in biasing the case fatality rate: the selection effect of missed cases, or the time-delay of deaths. It is now safe to say that the former was a greater issue. The infection fatality rate of Covid-19 is less than 1%, putting it into a less dangerous category of disease than I had pictured at the time.
Interestingly, one part I didn’t regret writing was the vaccine timeline I implicitly predicted in the post. I said, “we should expect that it will take about a year before a vaccine comes out.” Later, health authorities claimed that it would take much longer, with some outlets “fact-checking” the claim that a vaccine could arrive by the end of 2020. I’m pleased to say I outlasted the pessimists on this point, as vaccines started going into people’s arms on a wide scale almost exactly one year after I wrote this post.
Overall, I’m happy I wrote this post. I’m even happier to have friends who could trigger me to write it. And I hope, when the next real disaster comes, effective altruists will correctly anticipate it, as they did for Covid-19.
For a long time, I’ve believed in the importance of not being alarmist. My immediate reaction to almost anybody who warns me of impending doom is: “I doubt it”. And sometimes, “Do you want to bet?”
So, writing this post was a very difficult thing for me to do. On an object-level, l realized that the evidence coming out of Wuhan looked very concerning. The more I looked into it, the more I thought, “This really seems like something someone should be ringing the alarm bells about.” But for a while, very few people were predicting anything big on respectable forums (Travis Fisher, on Metaculus, being an exception), so I stayed silent.
At some point, the evidence became overwhelming. It seemed very clear that this virus wasn’t going to be contained, and it was going to go global. I credit Dony Christie and Louis Francini with interrupting me from my dogmatic slumber. They were able to convince me —in the vein of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Inadequate Equilibria —that the reason why no one was talking about this probably had nothing to do whatsoever with the actual evidence. It wasn’t that people had a model and used that model to predict “no doom” with high confidence: it was a case of people not having models at all.
I thought at the time—and continue to think—that the starting place of all our forecasting should be using the outside view. But—and this was something Dony Christie was quite keen to argue—sometimes people just use the “outside view” as a rationalization; to many people, it means just as much, and no more than, “I don’t want to predict something weird, even if that weird thing is overwhelmingly determined by the actual evidence.”
And that was definitely true here: pandemics are not a rare occassion in human history. They happen quite frequently. I am most thankful for belonging to a community that opened my mind long ago, by having abundant material written about natural pandemics, the Spanish flu, and future bio-risks. That allowed me to enter the mindset of thinking “OK maybe this is real” as opposed to rejecting all the smoke under the door until the social atmosphere became right.
My intuitions, I’m happy to say, paid off. People are still messaging me about this post. Nearly two years later, I wear a mask when I enter a supermarket.
There are many doomsayers who always get things wrong. A smaller number of doomsayers are occasionally correct—good enough that it might be worth listening to them, but rejecting them, most of the time.
Yet, I am now entitled to a distinction that I did not think I would ever earn, and one that I perhaps do not deserve (as the real credit goes to Louis and Dony): the only time I’ve ever put out a PSA asking people to take some impending doom very seriously, was when I correctly warned about the most significant pandemic in one hundred years. And I’m pretty sure I did it earlier than any other effective altruist in the community (though I’m happy to be proven wrong, and congratulate them fully).
That said, there are some parts of this post I am not happy with. These include,
I only had one concrete prediction in the whole post, and it wasn’t very well-specified. I said that there was a >2% probability that 50 million people would die within one year. That didn’t happen.
I overestimated the mortality rate. At the time, I didn’t understand which was likely to be a greater factor in biasing the case fatality rate: the selection effect of missed cases, or the time-delay of deaths. It is now safe to say that the former was a greater issue. The infection fatality rate of Covid-19 is less than 1%, putting it into a less dangerous category of disease than I had pictured at the time.
Interestingly, one part I didn’t regret writing was the vaccine timeline I implicitly predicted in the post. I said, “we should expect that it will take about a year before a vaccine comes out.” Later, health authorities claimed that it would take much longer, with some outlets “fact-checking” the claim that a vaccine could arrive by the end of 2020. I’m pleased to say I outlasted the pessimists on this point, as vaccines started going into people’s arms on a wide scale almost exactly one year after I wrote this post.
Overall, I’m happy I wrote this post. I’m even happier to have friends who could trigger me to write it. And I hope, when the next real disaster comes, effective altruists will correctly anticipate it, as they did for Covid-19.