Seeing the Smoke

This is partly a test run of how we'd all feel and react during a genuine existential risk. Metaculus currently has it as a 19% chance of spreading to billions of people, a disaster that would certainly result in many millions of deaths, probably tens of millions. Not even a catastrophic risk, of course, but this is what it feels like to be facing down a 1/5 chance of a major global disaster in the next year. It is an opportunity to understand on a gut level that, this is possible, yes, real things exist which can do this to the world. And it does happen.

It's worth thinking that specific thought now because this particular epistemic situation, a 1/5 chance of a major catastrophe in the next year, will probably arise again over the coming decades. I can easily imagine staring down a similar probability of dangerously fast AGI takeoff, or a nuclear war, a few months in advance.

Curated. I found this both an object-level-helpful post for the coronavirus situation, as well as a generally relevant rationality post.

I think this is on the edge of how much a post can be "aim-to-persuade" while feeling reasonable to curate, but it served an important function in this case and I don't think I would have suggested Jacob change much about the post in that dimension. I liked that my primary takeaway from the post was not "you should worry about coronavirus" but you have social permission to worry if you think it's appropriate.

For people who are interested in model-driven discussion of how to prepare and what concrete things to worry about (or not), I recommend this thread.

The central point of this article was that conformism was causing society to treat COVID-19 with insufficient alarm. Its goal was to give its readership social sanction and motivation to change that pattern. One of its sub-arguments was that the media was succumbing to conformity. This claim came with an implication that this post was ahead of the curve, and that it was indicative of a pattern of success among rationalists in achieving real benefits, both altruistically (in motivating positive social change) and selfishly (in finding alpha).

I thought it would be useful to review 2020 COVID-19 media coverage through the month of February, up through Feb. 27th, which is when this post was published on Putanumonit. I also want to take a look at the stock market crash relative to the publication of this article.

Let's start with the stock market. The S&P500 fell about 13% from its peak on Feb. 9th to the week of Feb. 23rd-Mar. 1st, which is when this article was published. Jacob sold 10% of his stocks on Feb. 17th, which was still very early in the crash. The S&P500 went on to fall a total of 32% from that Feb. 9th peak until it bottomed out on Mar. 15th. At least some gains would be made if stocks had been repurchased in the 5 months between Feb. 17th and early August 2020. I don't know how much profit Jacob realized, presuming he eventually reinvested. But this looks to me like a convincing story of Jacob finding alpha in an inefficient market, rather than stumbling into profits by accident. He didn't do it via insider knowledge or obsessive interest in some weird corner of the financial system. He did it by thinking about the basic facts of a situation that had the attention of the entire world, and being right where almost everybody else was making the wrong bet.

Let's focus on the media. The top US newspapers by circulation and with a national primary service area are USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. I'm going to focus on coverage in the NY Times, because I have free access through my institution to their articles, and because they have a convenient feature for searching their articles by date. I'm going to just look at articles that contained the terms "COVID" or "Coronavirus."

Feb. 1-7

NY Times ran 85 articles. Article subtitles described the virus "spreading around the world," a lot of "first deaths" and "suspected cases" in countries around the world and American cities, and "confirmed case counts" articles in the low dozens. We were getting promises from the government to "contain" COVID-19, border closures, and following the story of the passangers trapped on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, various attempts at drugs and tests, the death of Dr. Li Wenliang (another seer of smoke), and ramping up of face mask production in France (months before they were officially declared effective as an antiviral agent).

Two crucial articles in retrospect were the controversy over the existence of asymptomatic COVID, and an article on Feb. 2nd saying that COVID looks "increasingly like a pandemic." The latter article is a hodgepodge of contradictory quotes from various authority figures about various aspects of pandemic prediction (containment, asymptomatic spread, detection abilities, infectiousness, mortality).

I think these two articles were the most important in retrospect from this week's NY Times coverage, and they comprised about 2% of the articles. Almost everything else was human interest stories, dramas, when the crucial fact in retrospect for predicting the pandemic was just the geographic spread, infectiousness, and mortality statistics. There was very loud noise in the overall media landscape, and you had to be screening out almost everything in order to find the couple of articles that mattered. Even if you did find them, you had to get beyond the "controversy" frame and pick out the important points: it may very well spread asymptomatically, it is very infectious, it has a roughly 2% mortality rate (times 7 billion people). Every article contained the refrain "we don't know how deadly/destructive/widespread this will become." "Nobody knows" is a variant on "no evidence," and it should come with menacing background music, not numbness.

Feb. 8-15

Another 85 articles. Now, we're getting hard figures. 80 million sick, 1.7 million dead. "Will the Coronavirus cause a recession?"

Truly, the award for stupidest subtitle ever goes to an opinion piece by a social psychologist, Dr. David DeSteno.

How Fear Distorts Our Thinking About the Coronavirus
The solution isn’t to try to think more carefully. It’s to trust the experts.

His argument was:

"When people spend more time considering an issue but don’t have the relevant facts at hand to make an informed decision, there are more opportunities for their feelings to fill in the blanks... Most people don’t possess the medical knowledge to know how and when to best address viral epidemics, and as a result, their emotions hold undue sway."

This was followed by some promotion of his own research, and a call to trust "data-informed expertise."

Overall coverage this week gives me an impression of a marked uptick in concern. Mostly, it's tracking "what is happening right now," rather than making predictions for the future. As such, we get lots of detail: the effect of Covid on particular industries, death milestones, cancellations of various events, human interest stories, first cases/deaths in particular locations. Journalists seem bound not to tie it all together, but to provide multiple perspectives (i.e. controversies) from credible-sounding authorities.

Note that this constitutes a rebuttal of DeSteno's perspective. If journalists can't tell which experts are credible, and experts aren't directly dialoging with each other and coming to a consensus, then the public can't get their questions answered by "trusting the experts."

Feb. 16-22

Just 65 articles this week. Note that the NY Times date search is not perfectly reliable: some of these articles are actually from prior to this date range. We did get one forward-looking prediction about COVID in the USA, calling it a "tremendous public health threat." But we were also getting "fear spreads faster than the Coronavirus itself"-type articles.

Feb. 23-27

108 articles in 5 days.

One podcast asks, "but how bad could the coronavirus get?" and actually tries to answer the question, unlike our "nobody knows"-type articles from a couple of weeks prior. Unfortunately, no transcript, but it links to an article on how to protect your family. Also, an opinion piece from the 24th pointing out that we were never going to contain covid and that it was headed for a pandemic. It was in this time period that we started to see many articles admitting that the virus had established itself in the USA, that we were headed for a pandemic, that the stocks were sliding, that school closures were in the offing, and a general sense of "we're in for it."

So in the context of this media coverage, I think that Jacob's article here is less of a way-ahead-of-the-curve article relative to the media, and more of an in-group message that was approximately in step with the landscape of NY Times coverage in the week it was published.

My retrospective read is that the more important function of this post, for us, was that it was an in-group message. It was also going a step further. Instead of "this is what you can do to protect your family," as we saw in the Times, it was "this is what you should be doing." That's valuable. And it was timed approximately correctly from that perspective.

Would it have been possible to get an article like this out a week or two earlier? In some ways, I think this post isn't "seeing the smoke," so much as "seeing the fire and choking on the smoke." Which is still a lot better than many were doing at the time!

There is little doubt, and it has been obvious for some time, that COVID-19 will become as endemic as the other coronaviruses, those of cold and flu. If you are young and healthy, your chances of dying is about 1 in 500 (from the same source as your data): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/

Significantly higher than the flu, but not "oh my God, we all gonna die!" high. So,

YOU WILL GET EXPOSED TO COVID-19

virus with 90%+ confidence, within the next year or two. You may well remain asymptomatic, of course and not even know that you have been infected.

Yes, you should stock up and such, but only because of the disproportional auto-immune reaction by the freaking out society. Just like with 9/11, the most harm will came from the people reacting to it. So, a better question is not to how to prepare for the coming pandemic, but how to prepare for the inevitable mass panic and overreaction. It is likely to be bad for a few months, then it will blow over, with some residual long tail dragging on for some time, like it happened with basically every scary event in history, lately including 9/11 and the subprime crisis.

Look on the bright side. If it turns out to be a disaster of Black Death proportions, the survivors will be in a much stronger bargaining position in a post-plague labour market.

The tone of this post, including the title, reminds me of an exchange between two characters on the TV show Deadwood (HBO, 2004-2006):

Wild Bill Hickok:
You know the sound of thunder, don't you, Mrs. Garrett?

Alma Garrett:
Of course.

Wild Bill Hickok:
Can you imagine that sound if I asked you to?

Alma Garrett:
Yes I can, Mr. Hickok.

Wild Bill Hickok:
' Your husband and me had this talk, and I told him to head home to avoid a dark result. But I didn't say it in thunder. Ma'am, listen to the thunder.

It would be useful to compare it to the previous pandemic possibilities: SARS, swine flu, avian flu.

People correctly try to reason by analogy - but it is important to find the differences.

In your attempt to sound Rational, you have merely restated the platitude, "would you jump off a bridge if your friends did it?" You claim that you are a follower of efficient markets, but then you say that this was an acceptable exception. Great news, you got lucky this once. Don't defect again, you overestimate yourself.

If you live in a nation that has universal and free healthcare, then there is in fact very little reason to worry.

Wash your hands and practice good hygiene.

• As you should anyway, because that reduces the spread of other diseases inc. flu and colds, which are already endemic.

If you live in a nation like the USA, then you should worry, for several reasons:

1. Many workers cannot afford to take any time off, and cannot afford to go to their doctor for any treatment until it is already life threatening to them. By that time they are likely to have spread it to customers and colleagues.

2. Many people cannot afford immunizations. Their insurance doesn't cover them, or their co-pay is high.

3. These workers also work physically closely with colleagues, and are more likely to travel on buses due to the cost.

Full-service restaurants are commonly extremely low pay (below minimum wage) with little to no health coverage. Yes, there are laws/regulations about food service, but they are routinely ignored - staff can't afford time off and managers turn a blind eye.

There is currently no vaccine and no cure - only general support. So no amount of money will save you from death if you are one of the unfortunate few whose immune system cannot destroy the virus before multiple organ failure.

The group with the highest risk of death (~15%) from Covid19 are old men with heart problems, esp. if they have further co-morbidities.

We can thus predict that quite a few old, rich men are going to die because of the US healthcare system.

If Covid19 worries you, then campaign for free healthcare for all because it is the only way to protect yourself from it - and the future viruses that will inevitably follow.

If the total number of people who have been infected by coronavirus doubles every five days, then doesn't that mean that a normal person infected with coronavirus infects one other person in five days? It's not very transmissible.

By all means sell off your stocks (I have) and maybe stock up a bit on food (I haven't) but the Rational person wouldn't panic. We're not all going to die of water lily poisoning.