This is a very useful point.

Maybe related: https://twitter.com/LACaldwellDC/status/1238870221672386563

The CDC's role is to protect the public as a whole, and communicate with them in ways that minimize the burden of diseases. That doesn't mean you shouldn't trust the CDC, just that you shouldn't assume their goal is to advance epistemic purity. But as far as I can tell, treating them as you sole source and doing exactly what they say, and encouraging others to do the same, would make us all better off than most of the personal advice lesswrong is advising.

If the CDC says "disposable masks reduce your chance of becoming infected very slightly," (which is likely true if you use them properly, which, to be clear, most people won't do,) what happens next? The entirely predictable result is that hospitals will not be able to buy them, hospital staff gets sick more often, and then there are staff shortages when they are needed most, leading to far more deaths. That almost certainly makes people as a whole worse off, so they don't do that. (People who wanted to be virtuous instead of selfish might even decide to only do what the CDC recommends.)

The CDC also need to communicate in ways that idiots won't misconstrue, and a nuanced discussion of interventions that are unscalable or that could be dangerous if done wrong, or that are difficult to do, would be similarly a really stupid thing for the CDC to publish. Maybe a few examples would help.

Is buying an oxygen concentrator a good idea [LW(p) · GW(p)]? Possibly, for some people who are able to understand the risks and benefits, and who can monitor their own blood oxygen level while sick enough to need to use. That's absolutely not something the CDC should advise people with a 8th grade reading level to try to do at home. After oxygen concentrators run out in stores because people on Lesswrong decide to do this, (and the people who are most likely to need them cannot get them because the supply is gone and companies that have them to sell have gone so far into price gouging that they stopped listing prices and need you to call for a quote,) is building your own oxygen concentrator to use in case of worst case outcome and ER overload a good idea? Maybe, if you can also monitor to make sure it's not spewing carcinogens along with the oxygen or putting burning oil into your lungs, which requires a fairly good understanding of engineering for medical devices.

This section is kind of confusing, and I have tweaked the wording a little bit to try to be clearer. The reason for the confusion is that there are two nested distributions here.

The first is that when a bunch of people get infected, they have different incubation periods; some of them start showing symptoms more quickly than others. This is what the 99th percentile refers to. This makes us uncertain about the incubation period that a particular person will have, but it is not a confidence interval; if we learned how long the incubation periods were for a very large number of people, it wouldn't make the 99th-percentile person's incubation period any closer to the mean incubation period.

The second distribution is our uncertainty about the first distribution; we don't know exactly what fraction of people will have extra-long incubation periods, or how long those periods will be--but we would if we observed enough people. This uncertainty is what the 9.7-17.2, 10.9-20.6, and 12.6-32.2 ranges are referring to.

As far as I can tell, the CDC hasn't uttered a literal lie about this

They definitely haven't written down a literal lie. A lot of news articles say or imply one though, and people are walking away with the impression the CDC has anti-recommended masks. A friend has suggested they're more actively discouraging masks in press conferences, but I couldn't find proof so I left that out.

It's certainly possible that uninformed usage of masks is net-negative, and that it's not possible to inform the general public of correct usage. I haven't seen any evidence of that though. Meanwhile, China is requiring them.

This is certainly possible, and it will never be possible to fully rule out second exposures in cases like this. But note that the 19- and 27-day outliers were not included in the data used by the linked paper that estimated a >14day right tail, and I think it's unlikely for untraced second exposures to have influenced its conclusion.

The brief post The Bizarre Adventures of the Surgical Mask by renaissance man-of-lists Piero Scaruffi makes a lot of similar arguments to the NYT article. Some quotes:

I am puzzled by a somewhat amusing phenomenon. There are thousands of people on social media screaming "Stop buying masks! They are useless". That's intriguing. If they are useless, why do you care?

...It is even stranger that some people reply: "hospitals need the masks". So... hospitals think that masks are useful? Then they are not useless. In fact, they seem to be indispensable. Then the correct statement would be: "Stop buying masks! They are extremely useful!"

...Did you notice that perfectly healthy World Health Organization officials always wear masks during their news briefings to reporters? It's because they now believe that you can transmit the virus even if you don't have the symptoms, so potentially anyone around you (healthy or sick) may be contagious.

...I am not competent enough to judge how effective a mask can be in the case of this covid-19. I am just intrigued that so many people have joined the anti-mask crusade despite these obvious logical contradictions.

He’s very independent and doesn’t try to compete in the attention landscape like most blogs, so I take it as a fairly strong datapoint that these are fairly obvious inconsistencies to the public.

The highly detailed slideshow on Covid-19 by Michael Lin (PhD-MD) has comments reminiscent of the OP. Lin says:

[The] CDC created a test requiring a slow RT-PCR reaction on a specific model of machine to be run overnight, not designing the right primers, and not realizing this for a month. This was both strategically (using 30-year-old technology) and tactically (designing wrong primers) incompetent. I would expect most graduate students to do better.

He also feels that the CDC is giving lousy information. In their FAQ, their answer to whether your child is at risk for Covid-19 fails to mention that children reliably have much milder disease courses than adults. He says:

It’s clear that kids get less sick if at all. Why doesn’t the CDC say so? It won’t hurt to tell the truth! If you provide such lousy information, people will stop trusting you.

I think this is consistent with the primary goal of communication from major institutions being to prevent people from doing stupid things, over and above being open and honest.

SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes the disease COVID-19. Most of these statements are about the underlying virus, not the disease.

Thanks for pointing out formatting errors, will fix.

I am under the impression that the 6ft number came out of the assumption that it only transmits using large droplets, which can move 6ft upon coughing or sneezing.

I think it's too early to rule out aerosol transmission (small droplets that cover larger distances, ex: Influenza transmission).

This article from CIDRAP does a pretty good job of explaining things around this, and mentions that MERS-CoV does have evidence of aerosol transmission, making it quite plausible.

This preprint mentioned that SARS-CoV-2 (which they called HCoV-19) survived for 3 hours as an aerosol and remained viable.

So the quoted claim may turn out to be inaccurate on this level as well, if perhaps somewhat understandable (given their political constraints and the data they had available).

Yes, it's important that the public should trust authorities. Pushing authorities to be more truthful helps, not harms, that goal.

Important in these considerations is also the meta level issues that arise when dealing with appeals to consequences [LW · GW]. There are also other considerations. For instance, if the fact that the cdc has made mistakes is never disseminated, then it becomes harder to hold it accountable for those mistakes and ensure that they don't happen again.

Responses to the general argument that trust in the CDC is good and diminishing it is bad have centered around this previous comment [LW(p) · GW(p)].

If you think other institutions are worse, I'd encourage you to write up parallel posts detailing why.

obvious info hazard

I wish people would stop throwing this term around willy-nilly.

Not only is it not obvious to me that this post is an “info hazard”, but I don’t really know what you even mean by it. Is it the definition used in this recent Less Wrong post [LW · GW]^[1], or perhaps the one quoted in this Less Wrong Wiki entry^[2]?

In any case, the OP seems to be presenting true (as far as I can tell) and useful (potentially life-saving, in fact!) information. If you’re going to casually drop labels like “infohazard” in reference to it, you ought to do a lot better than a justification-free “this is bad”. Civil or not, I’d like to see that critique.

If you think the OP is harmful, by all means do not let civility stop you from posting a comment that may mitigate that harm! If you really believe what you’re saying, that comment may save lives. So let’s have it!

EDIT: Like Zack [LW(p) · GW(p)], I will strong-upvote this extended critique if you post.

I would be utterly shocked if this post had a net positive effect.

To be clear, I expect this post to be directly positive for my friends and family to read. From my vantage point CDC is recommending severe underpreparation, and I need my mum, dad, and their families and friends to stop listening to the CDC and go and prepare for several months of self-imposed quarantine. I’ve fortunately gotten my mum to stockpile food, but I expect my dad will be harder, and I am glad I have a resource showing that the CDC is not to be trusted over simple math and common sense.

I am aware that losing institutional trust means coordination problems, but if your institution lies you mustn’t prop it up anyway just because it has power. Through misleading and dangerous advice, they’re forcing our hand here when we try to have an honest conversation, not the other way around.

(You said you didn’t want to spend hours on this, so please don’t feel obliged to reply, I just wanted to reply to the thing you said that seemed false in my personal experience.)

I wrote a big critique outlining why I think it's bad, but I couldn't keep it civil and don't want to spend another hour editing it to be

If you post it anyway (maybe a top-level post for visibility?), I'll strong-upvote it. I vehemently disagree with you, but even more vehemently than that, I disagree with allowing this class of expense to conceal potentially-useful information, like big critiques. (As it is written of the fifth virtue, "Those who wish to fail must first prevent their friends from helping them.")

I'm really not trying to make anyone feel bad

Shouldn't you? If the OP is actually harmful, maybe the authors should feel bad for causing harm! Then the memory of that feeling might stop them from causing analogous harms in analogous future situations. That's what feelings are for, evolutionarily speaking.

Personally, I disapprove of this entire class of appeals-to-consequences (simpler to just say clearly what you have to say, without trying to optimize how other people will feel about it), but if you find "This post makes the community harder to defend, which is bad" compelling, I don't see why you wouldn't also accept "Making the authors feel bad would make the community easier to defend (in expectation), which is good".

I don't recommend the site to friends or family because I know posts like this always pop up and I don't want to expose people to this...

This is just basically correct! Good job! :-)

Arguably, most thoughts that most humans have are either original or good but not both. People seriously attempting to have good, original, pragmatically relevant thoughts about nearly any topic normally just shoot themselves in the foot. This has been discussed [LW · GW] ad [LW · GW] nauseum [LW · GW].

This place is not good for cognitive children, and indeed it MIGHT not be good for ANYONE! It could be that "speech to persuade" is simply a cultural and biological adaptation of the brain which primarily exists to allow people to trick other people into giving them more resources, and the rest is just a spandrel at best.

It is admirable that you have restrained yourself from spreading links to this website to people you care about and you should continue this practice in the future. One experiment per family is probably more than enough.

--

HOWEVER, also, you should not try to regulate speech here so that it is safe for dumb people without the ability to calculate probabilities, detect irony, doubt things they read, or otherwise tolerate cognitive "ickiness" that may adhere to various ideas not normally explored or taught.

There is a possibility that original thinking is valuable, and it is possible that developing the capacity for such thinking through the consideration of complex topics is also valuable. This site presupposes the value of such cognitive experimentation, and then follows that impulse to whatever conclusions it leads to.

Regulating speech here to a level so low as to be "safe for anyone to be exposed to" would basically defeat the point of the site.

You're wrong about this. Trust in the CDC is not a single-variable scale and not a generically useful resource. Trust in the CDC is a mix of peoples' estimation of the CDC's competence, and their estimation of whether the CDC is biased towards under-response or over-response. It is severely harmful for people to over-estimate the CDC's competence, or to fail to recognize that the CDC is biased towards under-response.

Having previously over-estimated CDC's competence caused many parties which could have been bypassing the CDC to create and deploy tests, to fail to respond in time. I expect that decision-makers currently relying on the CDC's competence will implement distancing measures and ban gatherings much too late.

The main reason we might want people to over-estimate the CDC's competence is that this trust could be used to solve coordination problems. However, the coordination problems that CDC could plausibly solve--closing airports, banning public gatherings, and implementing quarantines--are problems that it solves using legal power, not using generic community trust. To the extent that community trust is required to implement such measures, knowing that the CDC has been consistently biased towards under-response will make it easier, to a greater degree than knowing that they've been incompetent will make it harder.

My evaluation is that reducing trust in the CDC has net-positive consequences. But note that, separately, I don't think an evaluation of this depth is typically required before truthfully speaking about an organization's credibility. I expect that nearly all of the time, when trading off between speaking truth and empowering an institution, speaking truth is the correct move, and those who think otherwise will be mistaken.

This is a type of post that should have been vetted with someone for infohazards and harms before being posted, and pending that, I think it should be deleted by moderators or removed by the authors.

As a response to this, the moderator team did indeed reach out (CC'ing David) to one of the people I think David and I both consider to be among the best informed decision-makers in biorisk. With their permission, here is the key excerpt from their response: 

> [Me summarizing David:] David is under the impression that people like Elizabeth and Jim are under an obligation to show posts like this to people in biorisk like yourself and definitely not publish if you had any objections (and that posts that don't do so should be immediately deleted). Do you think they are under that obligation and that we should delete posts of this type?

I do not think they are under an obligation to do this. If the post contained object-level nonobvious content related to generating or exacerbating biorisks, I would consider them under a moral obligation to do so, the strength of which would depend on the particulars of the situation. 

If the post overemphasizes the degree to which it's handled the outbreak badly only mildly-moderately, or based on reasonable-seeming lines of argumentation in my view, I'd likely consider that within the reasonable range of opinions/perspectives to hold and share on forums like LW. If the post was highly misleading, such that I thought it communicated the wrong picture of the CDC, then I'd think it was epistemically virtuous to make top-level updates, and if the authors refused to do that, writing a counter-post explaining why their post was misleading would seem like a good thing to do to me, though not something I'd want to demand, if I were in position to demand such a thing, which I don't consider myself to be. 

Overall, my sense is that you made a prediction that people in biorisk would consider this post an infohazard that had to be prevented from spreading (you also reported this post to the admins, saying that we should "talk to someone who works in biorisk at at FHI, Openphil, etc. to confirm that this is a really bad idea").

We have now done so, and in this case others did not share your assessment (and I expect most other experts would give broadly the same response). I think the authors were correct in predicting a response like this if they had ran it by anyone else, and I also don't think they were under any obligation to run the post by anyone else. This is not in any way a post that is particularly likely to contain infohazards, and I feel very comfortable with people posting posts in this general reference class without running them by anyone else first.

Of course, please continue to point out any errors and ask for factual corrections to the post. And downvote the post if you think it is overall more misleading than helpful. A really big reason for posting things like this publicly is so that we can correct any errors and collectively promote the most important information to our attention. But it seems clear to me that this post does not constitute any significant infohazard that the LessWrong team should prevent from spreading.

I do also think that it is important for LessWrong to have a good infohazard policy, in particular for more object-level ideas, both in biorisk and artificial intelligence. In those domains, I would have probably followed your recommended policy of drafting the post until we had run the post by some more people. I am also happy to chat more with you about what our policies in these more object-level domains should be.

It does seem to me that your comments on this post (and your private messages, and postings to other online groups warning of infohazards in this space) have overall been quite damaging to good discourse norms, and I would strongly request that you stop asking people to take posts down, in particular in the way you have here. Our ability to analyze ideas on the basis of their truth-value, and not the basis of their political competitiveness and implications is one of our core strengths on LessWrong, and it appears to me that in this thread you've at least once argued for conclusions you think are prosocial, but not actually true [LW(p) · GW(p)], which I think is highly damaging.

You've also claimed that hard to access expert-consensus was on your side, when it evidently is not, which I think is also really damaging, since I do think our ability to coordinate around actually dangerous infohazards requires accurate information about the beliefs of our experts, and it seems to me that overall people will walk away with a worse model of that expert consensus after reading your comments.

Most of the consensus that has been built around infohazards in the bio-x-risk community is about the handling of potentially dangerous technological inventions, and major security vulnerabilities. You claimed here (and other places) that this consensus also applied to criticizing government institutions during times of crisis, which I think is wrong, and also has very little chance of actually ever reaching consensus (at least in crises of this type).

The effects of your comments have also been quite significant. The authors of this post have expressed large amounts of stress to me and others. I (and others on the mod team like Ben [LW · GW]) have spent multiple hours dealing with this, and overall I expect authority-based criticism like this to have very large negative chilling effects that I think will make our overall ability to deal with this crisis (and others like it) quite a bit worse. You have also continued writing comments like this in private messages and other forums adjacent to LessWrong, with similar negative effects. While I don't have jurisdiction over those places, I can only implore you strongly to cease writing comments of this type, and if you think something is spreading misinformation, to instead just criticize it on the object-level. Here, on LessWrong, where I do have jurisdiction, I still don't think I am likely to invoke my moderator powers, but I am going to strong-downvote any future comments like this (and have already done so for this one).

If you do believe that we should change our infohazard policies to include cases like this, then you are welcome to argue for that by making a new top-level post. But please don't claim that we already have norms, policies and broad buy-in, and that a post like this should have already been taken down, which is just evidently wrong.

I will of course leave Jim and/or Elizabeth to give their thoughts on the ethics of the situation, but I was surprised to see you take this line David, so I wanted to briefly share my perspective with you.

The US govt is majorly failing to deal with coronavirus, and in many worlds the fatalities will be massive (10million plus). At some point it will be undeniable and hopefully the CDC and so on will be able to give the important quarantining advice, and I'll support them at that time.

But in the meantime, my honest impression, for reasons accurately described above about their recommendations (around things like masks aren't helpful and claiming that community spread hasn't happened when they've in-principle not tested for it), is that they've been dishonest and misleading, leading people to substantially underestimate the risk.

Perhaps you think the post is actually false on those charges, and if so that criticism is good and proper and I endorse it wholeheartedly. But if not, I'm understanding your position to be that we should not point out the dishonesty and misleading information for the greater good. While I can imagine many politicians are indeed in that situation, I always feel that here, on LessWrong, we should try to actually be able to talk honestly and openly about the truth of the matter, and be a place where we can actually build an accurate map and not systematically self-deceive for this reason. That's my perspective on the matter that leads me to be pretty positively disposed to the above post ethically.

(I'm overloaded with various emergency prep stuff today and can't have a super long convo today – should be able to reply tomorrow though.)

the Unilateralists's curse

The underlying statistical phenomenon is just regression to the mean: if people aren't perfect about determining how good something is, then the one who does the thing is likely to have overestimated how good it is.

I agree that people should take this kind of statistical reasoning into account when deciding whether to do things, but it's not at all clear to me that the "Unilateralist's Curse" catchphrase is a good summary of the policy you would get if you applied this reasoning evenhandedly: if people aren't perfect about determining how bad something is, then the one who vetoes the thing is likely to have overestimated how bad it is.

In order for the "Unilateralist's Curse" effect to be more important than the "Unilateralist's Blessing" effect, I think you need additional modeling assumptions to the effect that the payoff function is such that more variance is bad. I don't think this holds for the reference class of "blog posts criticizing institutions"? In a world with more variance in blog posts criticizing institutions, we get more good criticisms and more bad criticisms, which sounds like a good deal to me!

I want to apologize, and make sure there is a clear record of what I think both on the object level, and about my comment, in retrospect. (For other mistakes I made, not related to this comment, see here [LW · GW].)

I handled this very poorly, and wasted a significant amount of people's time. I still think that the claims in the post were materially misleading, (and think some of the claims still are, after edits.) The authors replaced the section saying not to listen to the CDC with a very different disclaimer, which now says: "Notably we’re not saying any of the things they do recommend are bad." I think we should have a clear norm that potentially harmful things need a much greater degree of caution than it displayed. But calling for it to be removed was stupid.

Above and beyond my initial comment, critically, I screwed up by being pissed off and responding angrily below about what I saw as an uninformed and misleading post, and continued to reply to comments without due consideration of the people involved in both the original post, and the comments. This was in part due to personal biases, and in part due to personal stress, which is not an excuse. This led to what can generously be described as a waste of valuable people's time, at a particularly bad time. I have apologized to some of those those involved already, but wanted to do so publicly here as well.

Reviewing the arguments

I initially said the post should have been removed. I also used the term "infohazard" in a way that was alarmist - my central claim was that it was damaging and misleading, not that it was an infohazard in the global catastrophic risk sense that people assumed.

Several counterarguments and response to my claim that it should be taken down were advanced follow. I originally responded poorly, so I wanted to review them here, along with my view on the strength of the claims.

1) I should not have been a jerk.

I was dismissive and annoyed about what seemed to me to be many obvious factual errors. My attitude was a mistake. It was also stupid for a number of reasons, and at the very least I should have contacted the authors directly and privately, and been less confrontational. Again, I apologize.

2) Telling people to check with others before posting, and threatening to remove posts which were not so checked, is censorship, which is harmful in other ways.

As I mentioned above, saying the post should be removed was stupid, but I maintain, as I did then, that when a person is unsure about whether saying something is a good idea, and it is consequential enough to matter, they should ask for some outside advice. I think this should be a basic norm, one that lesswrong and the rationality community should not just recommend but where feasible, should try to enforce. I do think that there was a reasonable sense of urgency in getting the message out in this case, and that excuses some level of failure to vet the information carefully.

3) We should encourage people to say true things even when harmful, or as one person said "I'd want people to err heavily on the side of sharing information even if it might be dangerous."

This stops short of Nietzschean honesty, but I still don't think this holds up well. First, as I said, I think the post was misleading, so this simply does not apply. But the discussion in the comments and privately pushed on this more, and I think it's useful to clarify what I claimed. I agree that we should not withhold information which could be important because of a vague concern, and if this post were correct, it would fall under that umbrella. However, what the post seem to me to try to do is collect misleading statements to make it clearer that a bad organization is, in fact, bad - playing level 2 regardless of truth. That seems obviously unacceptable. I do not think lying is acceptable to pursue level 2 goals in Zvi's explanation of Simulacra [LW · GW], except in dire circumstances.

But the principle advocated here says to default to level 1 brutal / damaging honesty far more often than I think is advisable, not to lie. My initial impression what the the CDC was doing far better than it in fact was, and that the negative impacts were greatly under-appreciated.

I can understand why the balance of how much truth to say when the effect is damaging is critical, and think that Lesswrong's norms are far better than those elsewhere. I agree that the bare minimum of not actively lying is insufficient, but as I said above, I disagree with others about how far to go in saying things that might be harmful because they are true.

4) We should not attempt to play political games by shielding bad organizations and ignoring or obscuring the truth in order to build trust incorrectly.

I think this is a claim that people should never play level 3 [LW · GW]. I endorse this. I agree that I was attempting to defend an institution that was doing poorly from claims that it was doing poorly, on the basis that a significant fraction of those claims were unfair. As I said above, this would be a defense. In retrospect, the organization was far worse than I thought at the time, as I realized far too late, and discussed more here [LW · GW]. On the other hand, many of the claims were in fact misleading, and I don't think that false attacks on bad things are OK either.

This is a very serious concern that we discussed before publishing- especially the parts about masks and potential racial differences. Ultimately we made some accommodations but decided that publishing was the best thing, for the following reason:

The usefulness of trust in the CDC is not independent of the quality of the job the CDC is doing. There is a level of mishandling bad enough that excess trust in the CDC would cost people's lives. I don't know if we're at that level- I sure hope we're not, both selfishly and altruistically- but it is really important to know when we are. And if we shut down information sharing on the assumption that trust in the CDC is good, we rob ourselves of the ability to identify that. Blind (performance of) trust also precludes the possibility that the CDC could be induced into a better response.

I'm curious what information would make you chance your mind about trust in the CDC being net positive, and how that information would be accessible.

If and to the degree and in the circumstances and ways that the CDC is trustworthy, I desire to believe that the CDC is trustworthy.

If and to the degree and in the circumstances and ways that the CDC is untrustworthy, I desire to believe that the CDC is untrustworthy.

Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

If you tell me that my statement that someone else is lying to us about important factual information that we need to get right in order to keep us and our friends and loved ones safe is true but harmful, and I need to delete my statement, because it is important that people believe the lying liars who are lying for our own good, and I should exercise prior restraint before I point out such things?

I too am surprised by this objection coming from David. But I also want to point out that it seems like it is mostly David's objection, and the vast majority here are supportive of the post.

It also seems like David thinks the post contains errors, and he says he would not have been anything like this vocal otherwise. Obviously we should work out quickly whether or not the post does contain errors, and correct any we find.

Note to downvoters: While I disagree with this comment, it expresses a real concern and opens a conversation that does very much need to happen. So I've upvoted it back out of the negatives, and think it should probably stay positive.