Crisis and opportunity during coronavirus

post by jacobjacob · 2020-03-12T20:20:55.703Z · LW · GW · 6 comments

Contents

    Why does this seem like a good opportunity?
    How can you contribute?
  Addendum on profiting from outbreaks
None
6 comments

Note: please put on your own oxygen mask first. Don’t engage with this post if you haven’t taken appropriate measures to prepare yourself and your family; and plausibly don’t engage if you haven’t taken measures to ensure you can do so while staying stable and grounded [LW · GW].


We face a time of global crisis. But in spite of the unfolding tragedy – or perhaps because of it – this will also be a time of great opportunity. If you have the skills, slack [LW(p) · GW(p)], and willingness to act, it might make sense to start looking for ways to contribute (regardless of whether you’re seeking personal gain or altruistic benefit).

Why does this seem like a good opportunity?

There’s a question of whether the current situation should change your overall cause-prioritisation, in determining what’s most useful to work on over a >1 year time-scale.

This depends on where you started in your beliefs. To many readers, this likely does not provide any high-level updates, as we already believed that pandemics were a major risk for which the world was underprepared, and that the major institutions in charge were dysfunctional. (Nonetheless, I am learning a massive amount by living through a time of global crisis when I have the epistemic ability and agency to understand what’s happening and take action.)

Beyond that, there’s the question of whether this is a window of opportunity. Even if your long-term goals remain after this pandemic, are there actions which will have an extraordinarily high leverage now, compared to other times?

I think there are a few reasons for thinking so.

How can you contribute?

I want to distinguish two kinds of windows of opportunities. For lack of a better term, I’ll call them “social” and “causal” [LW · GW].

Social windows of opportunity. Suddenly people are willing to listen to new advice, and consider different actions than they previously would. Hence there are attempts to get people to sign social pledges to self-quarantine and epidemiologists are signing open letters to tech giants. More nefariously, lawmakers are smuggling their pet policy proposal into things that look like corona response measures. When all is said and done, it seems plausible the overton window for biorisk policy will have shifted massively, and that might bring with it other surprising opportunities as well.

Causal windows of opportunity. There are also many new problems to be solved, where you can build a tool or other solution that actually changes the world in a mechanistic way, and which isn't primarily about convincing other people of things.

For example:

The Coronavirus Tech Handbook is an excellent resource summarising what people are building to fight the outbreak. Many projects are urgently looking for collaborators.

Even if you don't have tech skills, there are other ways of finding great opportunity in times of crisis.

Some of history’s most successful trades (1, 2) occurred during crises. There will likely be many financial opportunities during this crisis as well. (LessWronger user Wei Dai posted about how he successfully shorted the S&P500 [LW(p) · GW(p)] a few weeks back, and saw 700% returns already before the crashes of the recent week.) (This is not financial advice and if you have no trading experience now might be a particularly bad time to start.)

We have also seen a massive failure of responsible institutions to respond appropriately and provide reliable information [LW · GW]. This means there's a shortage and need for reliable research and advice. This situation requires thinking for ourselves [LW · GW].

Due to the existence of niche online communities doing this, I started seriously thinking and preparing [LW · GW] when there were 2 cases in my home country. A week and a half later I went home to my family and helped them prepare, as the only mask-wearing person at an empty row in the back of an otherwise full plane. There were 20 confirmed cases. My mom initially yelled at me and felt embarrassed when none of her friends were taking action, and asked why the authorities didn't say much. I left 5 days later. The case count had grown exponentially to >400. A friend in med school told me to "wash my hands and don't panic". I left from an airport where staff wore neither gloves nor masks, and shorted the local stock market. As I'm writing this two days later the case count is almost 700.

The jury is still out, but sadly this seems to be a time where it's critically important to be able to take your beliefs seriously even when they go much further than official advice and mainstream behaviour . There will likely be many more opportunities over the coming months were good judgement and independent research can make an important difference. The LessWrong page of posts tagged coronavirus is one place to find and contribute to open questions. [? · GW]

Addendum on profiting from outbreaks

I strongly believe that that traders and entrepreneurs who try to gain profit during this crisis are not immoral. Rather, they are incredibly important. All this “flatten the curve” business is about smoothing out demand peaks over time. And financial markets (futures markets in particular) are one of the key technologies our society has for coordinating to efficiently allocate resources across time. For example, it might have been hugely beneficial if someone with foresight would have stockpiled massive amounts of medical ventilators months back and thereby caused suppliers to increase production (it seems plausible this might have been worth it even if they wouldn’t have sold those stockpiled ventilators at a massive markup). The actual stockpiling of masks that happened might also have been beneficial for this reason (but I am highly uncertain about this claim and wouldn't bet highly on it).

More generally, the coming year will present a massive wealth transfer, in various ways, to the prepared from the unprepared (or those unable to prepare, due to lack of money, knowledge [LW · GW], or some other key prerequisite). I don’t know what the implications of this will be. But once again, it might be worth a few hours of your time thinking about what opportunities it might generate.

tags: Coronavirus

6 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by lisperati · 2020-03-13T01:11:15.766Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Problem: Sick or elderly neighbors who can't get groceries and don't know anyone in the neighborhood to ask for help.

Solution: We put fliers into all the mailboxes in our neighborhood just this evening, giving people our phone numbers and an online group we're managing so that we can coordinate future grocery store runs (and other support activities)

Replies from: Sean_o_h
comment by Sean_o_h · 2020-03-14T20:09:47.770Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This is super awesome. Thank you for doing this.

comment by jacobjacob · 2020-03-17T17:28:46.904Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

After working on a pandemic forecasting dashboard for a week, I should add an additional reason for why this is a good opportunity:

Access to resources

Software developers are an incredibly scarce resource, and they'll charge massive salaries compared to many other jobs. But over the last week, I've received numerous offers from devs who are willing to volunteer 15+ hours a week.

Human attention is also scarce and it's hard to contact people. But when our team reached out to more senior connections or collaborators, we've had a 100% reply rate.

If you're working on important covid-19 projects, there's an incredible number of people willing to help out at prices far below market rate.

comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2021-12-27T18:28:36.546Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Crisis and opportunity during coronavirus [LW · GW] seemed cute to me at the time, and now I feel like an idiot for not realizing it more. My point here is "this post was really right in retrospect and I should've listened to it at the time". This post, combined with John's "Making Vaccine", have led me to believe I was in a position to create large amounts of vaccine during the pandemic, at least narrowly for my community, and (more ambitiously) made very large amounts (100k+) in some country with weak regulation where I could have sold it. I'm not going to flesh out the argument here, and it's not airtight, but it was really bad that I didn't seriously consider this until 2021, or other projects at this level of ambitiou. The post was also out very early (March 12th) which I appreciate. I give this a +4.

(This review is taken from my post Ben Pace's Controversial Picks for the 2020 Review [LW · GW].)

comment by ChristianKl · 2020-03-13T17:20:58.287Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The question of whether or not increased ventilation helps to reduce infection in spaces where multiple people share the space seems to me a very urgent one.

If ventilation helps, it seems to be very important to get the idea out there that people should increase ventilation at any event that still happens and where there are many people. This includes public transportation and trains.

comment by skybrian · 2020-03-13T19:04:10.174Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm wondering what's a way to keep better tabs on what people are talking in the rationalist community without reading everything? There is a lot of speculation, but sometimes very useful signal.

I feel like I'm reasonably in touch from reading Slate Star Codex and occasionally checking in here, and yet the first thing I saw that really got my attention was "Seeing the Smoke" getting posted on Hacker News. I guess I'm not following the right people yet?