Takeaways from one year of lockdown

Knee-jerk reaction: WTF?? Was this common? How much of the Berkeley hub has been locking down this hard for this long? I had a general impression that the degree of paranoia among the Berkeley crowd was somewhat higher than seemed reasonable to me, but this seems way more over-the-top than I imagined.

... are people mentally ok?

↑ comment by emanuele ascani (emanuele-ascani) · 2021-03-02T09:49:12.594Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Berkeley people have it good. At least they are doing this together. Imagine being a Berkeley person at heart and being in a completely anti-Berkeley environment. 

Replies from: johnswentworth

↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2021-03-02T17:49:29.419Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I mean, the result I would hope for in such a situation is that social pressure would accelerate the probably-true realization that this level of paranoia simply does not make sense.

Replies from: Raemon, emanuele-ascani, emanuele-ascani

↑ comment by Raemon · 2021-03-02T20:33:41.001Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

A thing that I think this isn't modeling is exhaustion, negotiation/modeling fatigue, and in some cases trauma from earlier negotiations (I don't know if that was relevant to mingyuan but I know it was relevant in my grouphouse situations). By the time you get to the point where maybe you should take stock and re-evaluate everything, it's not really about "does the paranoia make sense?" it's "do you have the spare energy and emotional skills to change your S1 attitudes to a lot of things, while the crisis is still kinda ongoing."

Replies from: johnswentworth

↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2021-03-02T21:04:20.245Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Ah... and in a group house, if one out of N people lack the mental fortitude for this, the default action is for everyone to just not bring it up?

Replies from: Raemon

↑ comment by Raemon · 2021-03-02T21:17:04.077Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm not sure exactly how it played out for most people, my guess is more common is "bring it up, but the output is 'man I am too exhausted to negotiate this', and then there's nowhere for the conversation to go."

Things that strike me, as I try to think about "okay what coordination lessons do we learn from this?"

1. Maybe, the thing we Got Wrong was not refactoring more into smaller houses (I think lots of people did do this, but some didn't. My guess is people who refactored into smaller houses had a healthier time)

2. Maybe the thing we Got Wrong was not figuring out how to effectively respond to lots of fear/exhaustion/trauma while also leveling up at other coordination skills, such that we could continue to coordinate large groups. (I am mostly skeptical about this, I think we probably just didn't have the skills to do it and it would have made things worse. But, it's an option on the table)

3. Maybe it was overdetermined that things go pretty much how they went. BUT, now the situation is "Okay, we all just went through a big trial together. Maybe it turns out the only way to be able to withstand a huge trial in a psychologically healthy way is to already have undergone one.  

And now the situation is 'there's a way to process everything that happened that makes mental issues calcify, and a way to process them that makes you stronger for next time." And a good goal is to try to figure out the ways to process things such that the next time shit hits the fan, we're older/stronger/wiser people (and maybe can help newcomers who are less older/wiser/stronger to orient better? This is what tribal elders are for – they're old enough to know how to handle rarer emergencies)

Unfortunately it's totally possible to accidentally pressure people into responding "healthily" in a way that makes things worse instead of better, and I'm not sure how to think about that.

4. When I look back and think "what did we get wrong that we realistically could have done better?" I think the thing is having a clearer model that negotiations would calcify and people would get exhausted, and also that people wouldn't primarily be "applying agency and rationality" the whole way through, they would be settling into patterns, and choosing "the amount of relaxed/paranoid to be" rather than choosing "the right actions based on their goals and values." It's easier to dial-up and dial-down paranoia, than it is to change complex strategy. And we weren't factoring that in, but when I'm judging our rationality, that's what I think we could have credibly figured out in advance.

Replies from: johnswentworth, elityre, elityre

↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2021-03-02T21:38:56.230Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

my guess is more common is "bring it up, but the output is 'man I am too exhausted to negotiate this', and then there's nowhere for the conversation to go."

This is a problem I've run into in other areas before. Some parts of my thoughts around it:

• Some people cannot handle stress, have little mental resilience, etc. In situations like this, their inability to cope will by-default impose costs on those around them.
  • It is often worth simply avoiding people-who-cannot-handle-stress for exactly this reason, unless they're bringing some large counterbalancing value to the table.
  • In an emergency, definitely try to keep such people out of the loop if possible. They will make things strictly worse.
  • If you are that sort of person, then you should be aware that you are probably doing this sometimes, and getting better at handling stressful things will make more people more willing to be around you. At the very least, learn to recognize the feelings and stay out of the way.
• Dealing with lots of fear/exhaustion/trauma: best-case, you've figured out ahead of time which people respond badly to mental stress. Those people have developed at least some ability to recognize the warning signs in themselves, and know that they should usually defer to others and try to stay out of the way.
• Saying "I am too exhausted to deal with this" is fine, once or twice. If you are too exhausted to deal with important things most of the time, then that is a rather big problem. At the bare minimum, defer/get out of the way so people who are not too exhausted can make progress.

Obviously this is... not a very kind way of framing things. But it is both true and important.

Replies from: Raemon, maia

↑ comment by Raemon · 2021-03-02T21:53:13.490Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think that's a totally valid way of framing things for an org. I think it's valid as part-of-the-frame for group houses. But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live. "Alice gets out of the way so that Bob and Cameron can make progress" isn't really workable when "progress" is built out of "Alice and Bob and Cameron having a healthy life together."

My frame on this is option #1 above, where "refactor into smaller houses so you can have fewer stakeholders", which goes along with "and people self-sort into groups of houses where people with similar preferences can have more agency over their lives." 

There was some intrinsic shittiness to the situation where a major thing early on is "well, we have a bunch of people living together, who weren't really filtered for 'How Well Do They Cope With Crisis Together?', and it's probably better if some of them leave, but being forced to leave your home suddenly is among the more stressful things that can happen to a person. So I see the key question as "how do negotiate who leaves, or, how people decide to stay together and what new norms they create, in a way that is fair."

Replies from: johnswentworth

↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2021-03-02T22:37:55.617Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

But, like the whole problem here is that the people who are stressed out / exhausted still need a place to live.

I think the problem is a bit harder than this. Even if you get a bunch of "can't deal with it" people together in one house, that house still ends up in a not-great place. They maybe don't block other people, so that's a plus, but it still sucks for them.

The bottom line here is, if someone does not have the mental capacity to deal with a problem themselves, then the only way to get a good solution is to outsource the thinking/deciding to someone else.

Replies from: Raemon

↑ comment by Raemon · 2021-03-03T03:44:04.761Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This feels like it's missing something important to me. I can say the object level things that feel off, but suspect this is more of a frame disagreement [LW · GW] situation (which I expect to be hard [LW · GW]).

On the straightforward, factual level: 

I think how well people can deal things is very contingent on their environment. In a world where they are constantly under pressure from a bunch of people with varying degrees of distrust, I think it can be really hard to deal with things. If they're in an environment where they more or less get to directly control their life, I expect them to fare much better. Both because they object-level get to live in ways that are good for them, and also because having self-directed-efficacy is good for people even if they don't get to use it to live exactly how they want.

When I imagine people splitting into sub-houses, I'm not imagining everyone splitting up based purely on how well they handle stress. I'm also imagining them splitting up based on what other things they actually want, and what style of stress management they prefer. i.e.

...do they prefer staying in their original home?

...do they prefer long walks in nature?

...do they prefer easy access to outdoor walks, or indoor hangouts, without other in person friends? Or are videocalls a good enough way to be social? Do they even care about being social?

...do they really want to remain in a city where they have lots of social or professional connections?

People vary on a lot of axes, and they form subgroups that enable each subgroup to thrive without as many competing access needs.

And then there's the fact that smaller groups just requires less negotiation, period.

Replies from: johnswentworth

↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2021-03-03T05:30:46.443Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I agree that this a dimension along which things can improve orthogonal to stress-capacity, and if improvement along this dimension reduces stress-level enough, the original problem can go away to a large extent.

↑ comment by maia · 2021-03-02T23:09:30.264Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This post really bothered me. I think perhaps the best way to sum it up is this old post of Kelsey's: https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/99440932816/saying-you-are-a-burden-on-society-is-just-such

Also... just because you're dealing with a lot of fear, exhaustion, and trauma, and someone else isn't, doesn't mean you can trust them enough to outsource your decision-making process to them.

Also... it seems really unreasonable to say "if you can't handle 10 hours of grueling negotiations about what COVID precautions to take, you're weak and I need to cut you out of my life and/or take away decisionmaking power from you during times of stress." I would guess that, uhh, most people are weak by that definition.

Replies from: johnswentworth, habryka4

↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2021-03-03T00:21:59.320Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That link offers a good analogy for some situations which are not this situation. There are parts of society whose primary role is to help people through tough times, just as an umbrella's primary role is to keep one dry in the rain. It is entirely unfair to call people "a burden" for using mechanisms which are there for that purpose.

By default, most relationships are not like this. People have their own lives to live. Imposing a year of strict lockdown on my roommates because I cannot handle a day of negotiations would not be fair to my roommates. They are not an umbrella whose purpose is to keep me dry of rain.

(And it's not just imposing a burden on the roommates! Subjecting oneself to a year of strict lockdown, to avoid a day or even a week of hard/stressful thinking and negotiating, is not a good tradeoff. It's a tradeoff which clearly reflects stress-impaired judgement. If I can't handle the problem, outsourcing decision-making isn't just good for those around me, it's good for me too.)

Also... just because you're dealing with a lot of fear, exhaustion, and trauma, and someone else isn't, doesn't mean you can trust them enough to outsource your decision-making process to them.

This I definitely agree with, and I definitely am not saying that someone who cannot deal with the stress of thinking through a group problem should just defer to whoever's most insistent. There are degrees of freedom in who to defer to. Deferring to norms of some broader group (e.g. general social norms) is one option, for instance. When one's thinking/judgement is sufficiently impaired that better-than-typical results are unlikely, deferring to what everyone else does is a decent way to at least get typical results.

Replies from: Raemon

↑ comment by Raemon · 2021-03-03T20:50:46.149Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

By default, most relationships are not like this. People have their own lives to live. Imposing a year of strict lockdown on my roommates because I cannot handle a day of negotiations would not be fair to my roommates. They are not an umbrella whose purpose is to keep me dry of rain.

I think a major disconnect between your outlook here, and me (and I assume maia's) outlook is... while it's true that most relationships are not about being umbrellas to keep you dry, friendships are to some degree that, and housemates are disproportionately friendships. 

They don't have to be, and some people have different ways of conceptualizing friendship. But... basically insofar as I have roommates I'm not friends with, I think I'm making a mistake, or doing a temporary thing I hope will change. (Because: why would you want to live with people who you aren't also cultivating some longterm relationship with? It's a huge lost opportunity)

I think friendship is complicated. And, it's certainly the case that I don't want to subject my friends to a year of unnecessary precautions. (It's my responsibility as a friend to try not to do that, and if I can't not do that, get help minimizing the damage). But, yes, my friendships also explicitly come with my responsibility to help make sure they are okay when they are dealing with tough times, and to not drop people when they become inconvenient.

(If I was housemates with a friend who it turned out I was incompatible with during a crisis, I'd consider my goal to be to somehow refactor our living arrangement such that we were not imposing those costs on each other, so that I could continue to help them and be their friend from a position of slack and security. This might include helping them process their feelings and getting intellectually oriented, or renting temporary airBnBs while we sort things out, or each moving out)

(And it's not just imposing a burden on the roommates! Subjecting oneself to a year of strict lockdown, to avoid a day or even a week of hard/stressful thinking and negotiating, is not a good tradeoff. It's a tradeoff which clearly reflects stress-impaired judgement. If I can't handle the problem, outsourcing decision-making isn't just good for those around me, it's good for me too.)

This seems to be assuming "it's possible to make outsource decisions in this way", which just seems mostly false to me. You can outsource these decisions by giving up on your agency, but I think that's a really big deal that would probably mostly make things worse.

Replies from: Raemon, johnswentworth

↑ comment by Raemon · 2021-03-03T21:05:48.132Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

On the other side of the equation: 

I think people essentially have a responsibility to make sure they have enough slack, so that they don't burden each other unnecessarily. i.e don't pursue strategies that'll reliably make you constantly need help from people around you, if other strategies are available. This includes noting how easily stressed out you are, and accounting for it. But, the thing is that covid was just a huge slack cost that was overdetermined to overwhelm many people's usual slack buffer. 

I think it'd probably have been a mistake to be maintaining enough slack for covid not to fuck you* up (that'd mean you're just leaving value on the table most of the time. You can't be prepared for every single type of emergency that might come up. I think people should maintain enough slack to weather, like, 3 minor emergencies coming up in a given week without having to dip into reserves, and covid just continuously soaked up more than that allocation each week, for months on end)

*for many values of 'you'. Obviously some people vary here.

↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2021-03-09T22:12:53.820Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You can outsource these decisions by giving up on your agency, but I think that's a really big deal that would probably mostly make things worse.

A pretty key piece of my thinking here is: if I emotionally cannot handle a decision, then "don't give up my agency" is not an option. My agency is already basically gone at that point. If I am not emotionally capable of choosing between at least two different decisions (e.g. engage in a long negotiation to change circumstances or keep going with status quo), then for agency-analysis purposes, I am a rock with my already-chosen decision written on it.

This is why we have things like power of attorney and living wills. At some point, there is no meaningful agency left to retain. The first-best option (i.e. retaining agency) is already gone, and it's time to move on to next-best.

Replies from: Raemon

↑ comment by Raemon · 2021-03-09T23:36:18.798Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

(John and I just chatted offline, and a point of confusion we resolved was that I thought John was saying something like "the majority people in the house who are able to do thinking better should take over the thinking for the people who are too overwhelmed to think", but the thing he meant was more like* "the people who are having trouble thinking should proactively find a person to be their lawyer, and/or help them think. Their "lawyer" should be whoever they trust most to help them." Which is a pretty different frame.

I happen to not think this would have worked very well – I think a key problem was that everyone was overwhelmed at once, so there was nobody you trusted to be your lawyer who actually had bandwidth to do so. But, this is more of a straightforward factual constraint than a deep disagreement. I agree that looking for people to help you think, and/or represent you at house meetings, is a useful approach in some cases)

*I'm not 100% sure I represented his viewpoint well here.

Replies from: johnswentworth

↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2021-03-09T23:54:33.106Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Endorsed.

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2021-03-02T23:19:45.817Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Also... it seems really unreasonable to say "if you can't handle 10 hours of grueling negotiations about what COVID precautions to take, you're weak and I need to cut you out of my life and/or take away decisionmaking power from you during times of stress." I would guess that, uhh, most people are weak by that definition.

To be clear, I do indeed think we have the luxury to exclude most people from our lives. Indeed any rule that doesn't exclude 90%+ of people from your life to a very large degree seems far too lax to me.

Also, 10 hours really doesn't seem that much over the course of a pandemic, so I do think the above holds for me. It just seems really really crucial to maintain coordination ability in crises, and this will require some harsh decisions.

↑ comment by Eli Tyre (elityre) · 2021-05-28T09:57:54.785Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

4. When I look back and think "what did we get wrong that we realistically could have done better?" I think the thing is having a clearer model that negotiations would calcify and people would get exhausted, and also that people wouldn't primarily be "applying agency and rationality" the whole way through, they would be settling into patterns, and choosing "the amount of relaxed/paranoid to be" rather than choosing "the right actions based on their goals and values." It's easier to dial-up and dial-down paranoia, than it is to change complex strategy. And we weren't factoring that in, but when I'm judging our rationality, that's what I think we could have credibly figured out in advance.

This does seem like a super-important lesson to me.

It also feels like it gives me some insight into the gears of why the world is mad. 

↑ comment by Eli Tyre (elityre) · 2021-05-28T09:55:11.445Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My guess is people who refactored into smaller houses had a healthier time)

Really? I would not guess this. It seems like having more people around in your day-to-day social environment is on-net better.

Replies from: Raemon, mingyuan

↑ comment by Raemon · 2021-05-28T18:25:28.116Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If you have a small number of people who are totally on the same page and feel chill, those people can actually go out and interact with other people without "I want to give my friend a hug" being a 10-person-negotiation.

Normally I like living with lots of people, but during covid my life got way less stressful when I slimmed down to just living with 1 person.

[Oh, mingyuan already said this in way more detail. Coolio]

↑ comment by mingyuan · 2021-05-28T16:17:51.001Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

No, Ray is almost certainly right. Everyone I talked to who lived with one exactly one other person (my sister and my mom, and lots of people with their romantic partners) had a way better time than everyone I know who lived in a group house, N=50+. (I can think of maybe one exception?) This is partly about it being easier to negotiate with just one other person, as mentioned in the post, but also just everything being less difficult with just one other person. It's easier to avoid them if you're feeling anti-social; it's easier to build routines alongside just one other person than with a bunch of unreliable housemates; it's easier to notice which of your social needs are not being met and seek out alternative ways to meet them, rather than feeling socially burned out by being around other people 24/7 and yet also not having your needs met.

Obviously I'm primarily talking about pairs of people who like and care about each other, like family members or romantic partners. However, I think some of the benefits would still apply even if it was a randomly assigned roommate. And maybe even still if it was someone you hated, because I think I'd rather live with one person I hated than with multiple people I hated. Not sure though.

In general I think the ability to choose who you interact with is what matters. Feelings of isolation come because you don't reach out to the people you'd like to interact with (maybe because of anxiety about reaching out, maybe because you don't have anyone you'd like to reach out to), but that's at least fixable. Whereas being in a situation where you're forced to interact with a bunch of people all the time whether you want to or not is harder to escape just by application of your own agency. I'd rather live alone and have to put in the activation energy to reach out to people, than live with others and feel totally trapped. Maybe there's such thing as an extrovert for whom having people around is just pretty much an unqualified good, but I don't think I know anyone like that.

Finally, I'll note that Ray's comment is coming from a place of experience – his house noticed quite early on that spending the pandemic together would be a bad idea, and Ray and his partner (who moved somewhere on their own), as well as C (who went to live on his own) seem to have had a pretty good time by their self-reports that I've heard.

↑ comment by emanuele ascani (emanuele-ascani) · 2021-03-09T20:37:59.851Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My risk should be from 19% to 82% probability in the next six months. This, if I always remain in the house. In order to avoid that, I should put my life on hold and get a full-time job I dislike. And people call me exaggerated and crazy both IRL and online. Long-term consequences of Covid are what worry me the most. Idk how to deal with this tbh. Genuinely asking. 

 

Replies from: johnswentworth

↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2021-03-09T22:18:01.788Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Where do you live? At least in the US, I would find these numbers implausible. 19-82% is the background chance for a random person in the US, taking completely typical measures, to have had COVID. That definitely does not look like always remaining in the house.

Replies from: emanuele-ascani

↑ comment by emanuele ascani (emanuele-ascani) · 2021-03-09T22:49:50.723Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Italy. House of 5 people. A city with around 1k cases per day for a few months. One person goes to school, sees friends, invites friends into the house. Another travels abroad or inside the country for a few days every 10 days or so and doesn't always get tested when returning. When he is in the house he also invites his girlfriend, eats out, sees friends, etc. In the microcovid test site I put 5 ppl house with 10 close contacts for lack of better options. Sounds reasonable?

Edit: Italy's vaccination rate sucks. Not gonna see a vaccine for me or anyone in the house with risky behavior till 2022

Replies from: johnswentworth

↑ comment by johnswentworth · 2021-03-09T23:47:02.685Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Ah... "always remain in the house" is not the right way to think about your options here. Your roommates are apparently acting about like the broader populace, and therefore have exposure rates about like the broader populace. If you want to have lower exposure rates than that, then the thing-you-need-to-do is not to always remain in the house, but rather to avoid significant exposure to your roommates.

Indeed, spending more time outside the house might be a good strategy.

Replies from: emanuele-ascani, Benito

↑ comment by emanuele ascani (emanuele-ascani) · 2021-03-09T23:53:07.940Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

True. Thanks for the good tip. I might actually implement it now that the weather and temperature are nicer.

↑ comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2021-03-09T23:52:10.677Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

"He really flipped the sign in that argument"

↑ comment by emanuele ascani (emanuele-ascani) · 2021-03-02T19:50:06.577Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The result is more paranoia ,_,

Also, I specifically want to say: Thank you for writing this post, even though it's very vulnerable and suggests that both you and your housemates were wrong about a really important thing. Please accept this gift of hedons and social status in exchange.

This is an important conversation for all of us to have.

I think the main prediction/expectation error many rationalists (including me) made, was expecting countries to either do practically nothing and let the virus run through the population like a wildfire, or respond heavily in a way that stomp it out in a few months. in both cases life goes back to normal in a few weeks/months, and if you know that it will only be a few months then taking extreme measures in that time frame makes sense.

Alas, what actually happened was this weird middle ground where we never quite eradicate the virus nor let it run wild, which drew out the problem for a year+.

I wasn't prepared for that, and my thinking was too short term, so i also ended up sacrificing too much.

I was recently tracking down a reference in the Sequences and found that the author was so afraid of COVID that he failed to seek medical care for appendicitis and died of sepsis.

Wow! Who was that?

and the faint but pretty smell of vanilla.

I think you mean "...and a presumption that once our eyes watered." (As time passes, this is increasingly how I feel about my grandmother dying of coronavirus.)

AFAICT, fear (especially fear as a background that is just always there, for months and months) has huge effects on me and many others that are bad for thinking, initiative, activated caring, and real companionship (or being conscius at all, sort of), and that it requires actively training courage or bravery or action/initiative/activated-caring to overcome this. I notice this a lot in the AI risk context, and sometimes in the "what's happening to America / the West?" context, and also most times that somebody is e.g. afraid they have cancer.

My personal experience of the covid year has been good; but your post seems to me to have a lot in it that bears on the broader thing about fear-in-general, and I think talking more about the detailed effects of fear in the context of this post, covid, AI risk or any other context would be amazing.

Thanks for posting this. A lot of relatable feels and useful takeaways here.

(Reposting some of this from a lower-level comment)

From this post and my own experience, I'm getting the sense that living in a large group house was actually a pretty big detriment for many folks during COVID. You'd think it would be a good thing, because you can get your social bar filled just socializing with each other. And maybe that's true. But it increases the amount of negotiation about risks literally exponentially, which makes it much easier to lapse into a default of "nothing is allowed and no one does anything." Even though that's actually very costly.

It was much easier for me and my spouse to handle negotiation about e.g. "I want to go on bike rides because my sanity is at critical levels," because that was basically just one negotiation we had to have, instead of having 8 similarly-sized negotiations for each risky thing each person wanted to do and every objection brought up by every other person.

Also, we're married and have been together for almost 10 years, so we've had a lot more practice at this kind of thing with the two of us. I also enjoyed your earlier post about how being in a group house together doesn't mean you're ready to be, basically, married to all the people you live with, meaning you aren't ready to have these huge life-changing negotiations about collective decisions that you need to make together. Whereas in marriage that sort of thing is par for the course.

Thanks for the post; I think this type of reflection is very valuable. The main takeaway from this line of thought for me is that we're in a community which selects for scrupulosity and caution as character traits, which then have a big impact on how we think about risks. This has various implications for thinking about AI, which I won't get into here.

So... I think I expected the lockdown to be a Long Time when it started, and I thought it was worth it (and went into it a bit earlier than others). It seems worth pointing out I have low socialization needs, many of which I meet online, and so I think the tradeoffs for me are a bit different than for others. [It's been sad to not go to any AIRCS workshops, or do any in-person Circling, or so on, but even in retrospect I think I'd rather not have paid the COVID risk for them. Most of the things that I would do now that seem sensible--like Tai Chi classes in the park--are currently canceled because of local guidelines, such that I don't have useful decisions to contribute there.]

When I read this, tho, it feels to me like the main difference is something like that between 'living in fear' and 'taking precautions.' I think I was doing the latter--I decided to not do things in much the way that I would have decided it was too far to travel to the thing, and I sought out ways to find substitutes for things that were too expensive. [Not being able to spend time with my boyfriend in person for the first few months meant experimenting with various ways to spend time with him online, for example.]

The main way in which I think one would put me in the 'living in fear' category--deciding to 'just lock down' instead of trying to time when based on case counts and so on--is a situation where I think in retrospect I was right (because the case count numbers were incorrect at the time), tho could have expressed my reasoning more clearly.

This also reminds me of how precarious the group house ecosystem is. I think most houses can't survive long-term at 80-90% capacity, and most people in group houses can't easily switch to living alone, and there's not a great mechanism for moving people between houses in a way that is good for longer-term compatibility instead of short-term satisficing. [I think people have considered building a tool for this for many years, but it never seemed worth it / never overcame the coordination barrier, and when we needed it there wasn't spare capacity to build it and deploy it.] I think the underlying factors keeping people in group houses are here to stay, and so perhaps we should invest more in making things better.

The stress of negotiation/management of COVID precautions destroyed my intellectual productivity for a couple of months at the start of the pandemic. So I rented a place to live alone, which luckily happened to be possible for me, and the resulting situation is much closer to normal than it is to the pre-move situation during the pandemic. There is no stress, as worrying things are no longer constantly trying to escape my control without my knowledge, there's only the challenge of performing "trips to the surface" correctly that's restricted to the time of the trips and doesn't poison the rest of my time.

How much of your stress do you think was the result of living in a group house, and thus feeling that you had to get roommates’ consent to very normal things like going on a date or a walk? I know some people seem to like the group house thing, but damn, I like making my own decisions.

I’d like to see survey data on rationalists’ responses to the pandemic. Does this exist (should i make it exist?) I suspect the incredibly super-cautious are more vocal, thus distorting our perception of what others are doing.

Personally, I’m avoiding indoor restaurants/bars and indoor socializing and I wear masks when required. But I have no problem with outdoor socializing, going to restaurants and stores, and I’ve gone on several pandemic vacations.

It's been another year, I guess. Time is weird. I meant to write a followup post but I don't know that I've learned anything new since I wrote this. I'd welcome others' thoughts on this, a year out.

This post is fascinating to me because I have no idea what to say. I keep coming back to it, reading the new comments, starting to type, and giving up. It seems like the kind of thing where I should be able to think "what would I do" and generate some opinion, but I have no idea what I would do, or what should have been done.

I would be very interested to see more people reflecting on situations like this and thinking about what should have been done. This was obviously an unusual event, but not so unusual that I don't expect future events to resemble it in many ways.

This seems super important, thanks for sharing.

I fairly strongly believe the "frontloaded too much and ran out of steam" hypothesis, but also I'm not sure what we could have done instead.

I think a number of people were saying "we should bunker down for a month until we know more", and the thing we maybe-could-have-done was set concrete dates for "followup and re-evaluate." I think that'd have helped nonzero but not much.

I think it was exacerbated by, right around the time we might have done a second round of Do Lots Of Coordination, the official Shelter In Place order hit, and at the time I responded with "well, I guess that supercedes whatever house spreadsheet coordination I was doing", and gave up on that.

Re: the "but tail risks" thing, I think that made sense in the first couple months of the pandemic, but stopped making sense by late 2020.

And by the time we knew the important, action-relevant information like transmission vectors and all that jazz, we were already used to being afraid, and we failed to adjust.

This sentence is basically true of me as well, but without the emotional valence. My version: 

And by the time I knew the important, action-relevant information like transmission vectors and all that jazz, I was already settled into a rhythm of pretty intense lock down, and I failed to adjust.

In retrospect, I wish I had spent more time traveling to to see and talk with people I know in other parts of the country. I did consider this [LW · GW], but I concluded that I shouldn't.

3 concrete things that I failed to account for:

• Quantitatively, how bad it is for me to catch COVID in expectation, and especially how likely I was to get permanent chronic fatigue (which is a very bad outcome).
• How effective P100 masks are (I now think of them as "it's as if you're vaccinated for as long as you're wearing it, which gives a different tenor to my sense of risk.)
• That I could rent a minivan, and set it up for sleeping in so I wouldn't need to pay for hotels or deal with the communal spaces of hotels.

I wonder if this was partly due to groupthink, eg within your house. Wikipedia has a useful definition:

“a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

I like how detailed this post is

I was living on my own, but I locked down on 9 March. From when my SO had to leave the country on 21 March, to when I was kicked out of the country in Jan, the only person I had physical contact with was one hug on 20 September. The friend was on day 14 of her own quarantine. And when I finished the quarantine in the old/new country in Feb, that was the first time someone had seen my face in person since my SO.

I got my first ever car in Jan 2020 because I didn't want to risk public transport. I bought lots of food and masks etc. I convinced my workplace to let everyone work from home if they wanted to (me!) a couple of weeks before the government lockdown. The last restaurant I went to was March 8 2020.

The major factors in my opinion were:

• I don't want to kill anyone by mistake, and most of the old people weren't wearing masks properly. (And my literal next door neighbours were a very old couple who also didn't wear their masks properly).
• I don't want long covid. If I get sick, I'm on my own. I lived alone, and I had zero family in the country. There would be nobody who would be able to help me if something happened. And my building had no elevator, so I'd need to climb up four flights of stairs while being out of breath for however long it took to convalesce.
• Most people around me weren't taking adequate precautions. I know many people who got COVID, but nobody who died from it.

Some differences from mingyuan:

• I was okay with outdoors (in a forest) meetings with one (or possibly two) other people. That being said, that only happened a total of three times.
• I was okay with going to further places (I finally had a car!), so long as I was away from people. I did a few same-day solo road trips (packed my own lunch and ate in the car), and lots of exploration (and virtual dates with my SO).
• I did interact with others (e.g., groceries and some necessities.)

Some similarities:

• When things started to open up (e.g., in the summer), people threw caution to the wind. Government allowed e.g. up to 10 people to meet in restaurants etc, so these were definitely out. People wouldn't wear masks when outdoors even in large groups.

I did end up expanding my network of Rats (online) and learning a lot of things, though.

Right now, I'm staying with my younger sister, and she's vaccinated because of her work, so yay. There's a visa application in progress to see if I can return to the previous country, but when I go will depend on how accessible vaccinations are here vs there.

For now, I'm satisfied with what I did, and I think it was reasonable all things considered. One concern I have in the long term is that seeing crowds and unmasked people gets a visceral reaction, including e.g. in old movies. I'll need to retrain myself, because I don't want to end up with agoraphobia.

Thank you for writing this up. Would you be willing to share what your household's (you make it sound like a group of > 2 adults making decisions as peers) stated group goals were around December 2019, March 2020, and December 2020? Your post sounds to me like it describes the experience of falling onto several nested loops of optimizing for a proxy or aspect of a goal rather than the goal itself. (Microcovid measurement and isolation as proxy for avoiding contracting or spreading a pathogen, absolute minimization of exposure chance as proxy for general health and well-being, etc) This makes me wonder what kind of house agreement or instantiation of "let's keep everyone safe and healthy" type goals could have been sufficient to catch a rationalist in this type of spiral earlier