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> But in February, there wasn't any sign of an economic downturn. Everyone was enjoying the bull market. First: I’m super sorry about what you’re going through

> But in February, there wasn't any sign of an economic downturn. Everyone was enjoying the bull market. First: I’m super sorry about what you’re going through and I hope things work out with your new employer. Second: I worry that “nobody could have known” will be the narrative. A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode and that the prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse. Super uncontroversial. And like, I’m just a guy. On an individual level, that excuse is unfortunate, but the individual level doesn’t matter much (except for the individual, of course). On an institutional and a governance level, we’re likely to excuse the failures of our leaders because we ourselves weren’t paying attention.

sonicxxg 7y ago
True, you could see this coming a month ago. This narrative is very naive. I closed all my stock positions back when the first cases outside China started to pop up, and nobody seemed to care enough to control it. I've been buying puts ever since, and could not be happier. When life gives you lemons, you need to make a lemonade, and not make excuses for your bad calls.
sonicggg 7y ago
True, you could see this coming a month ago. This narrative is very naive. I closed all my stock positions back when the first cases outside China started to pop up, and nobody seemed to care enough to control it. I've been buying puts ever since, and could not be happier. When life gives you lemons, you need to make a lemonade, and not make excuses for your bad calls.
phnofive 7y ago
Depending on the country and an observer’s cynicism, I think the majority of nations understood early on that it was already far too late to significantly dampen the impact of such a deadly and infectious virus. The United States government was thoroughly informed of this risk via Operation Dark Winter but never geared up for it - perhaps this is best managed by states once the infection crosses the border, but preparations on those levels weren’t completed either.
reidjs 7y ago
It’s not possible to predict the future, so I disagree with your stance that it was obvious a virus could cause an economic downturn like this. It comes across as victim blaming to me.
tcgv 7y ago
> A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode (...) Your circles seem to be the exception then. There are a lot of factors that affect personal perception of such matters, like proximity to inflicted areas, professional background (ex: medical), experiencing similar events in the past, etc. In hindsight it seems obvious that the world wasn't paying attention. But it took until February for western countries to realize the epidemic was already out of control, and the markets reacted. > prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse Anyone that knew this last month without a doubt could've made tons of money shorting positions in the stock market.
- ellyagg 7y ago
  He's probably talking about the rationalist community, and people did. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1233174331133284353 https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1233174331133284353
  - eropple 7y ago
    I assure you I am not talking about the aggressive curve-fitting community. Just...normal people. Nobody famous, not even any Chinese nationals. Just...fairly normal, if tech-worker-y, Americans and Europeans.
    - smnrchrds 7y ago
      By and large, both the general public and organizations were caught by surprise. If most people knew, the stocks would have tanked in January, not these past few days. Which brings an interesting question: how many of all the people you know who knew, yourself included, put their skin in the game and are now rich from the options they bought in January? If it is not many, I would argue it is better to say people suspected or feared, not that they knew.
      - eropple 7y ago
        It's a real big stretch from "certain enough to take personal precautions" to "is a stock head and wants to throw down puts". You get that normal people don't really give a damn about the stock market, yeah? Put a gun to my head and I can't tell you how a put works and I don't really care--I'm too busy buying a house. I did, however, rebalance almost entirely out of stocks three weeks ago and while I am not "now rich", my portfolio is doing a hell of a lot better than most folks'.
pnathan 7y ago
>Second: I worry that “nobody could have known” will be the narrative. A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode and that the prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse. Super uncontroversial. And like, I’m just a guy. Big same. I'm just another software engineer, albeit one with a taste for international news and a few China-focused specialists & one or two PRCs citizens that I follow on Twitter. This was predictable in early-mid Jan. Once the pics and discussion of the overloaded Wuhan hospitals and the measures the PRC had to take hit the English language world, it was pretty bloody obvious. The news had hit the popular English language papers by Jan 27[1], although I was reading about it somewhat earlier - Jan 12 at the latest[2]. A timeline can be found in [3]. Anyway, by Feb 1, institutions with a specialty in disease control should have been going full bore to address the incoming wave. Our public health officials, the officials they advise, and other health institutions should be held up to scrutiny and not covered with glory dust just because they had to act by the pace of events. [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7933719/Incredible-footage-shows-Chinas-1-000-bed-coronavirus-hospital-taking-shape-four-days.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7933719/Incredible-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/11/china-mystery-illness-outbreak-causes-first-death https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/11/china-mystery-... [3] https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-china/en/ https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
traitsnspecs 7y ago
If we had not taken prevention measures, the economic impact would be worse? I'm very skeptical of this. Keeps in mind that the disease has a 2-4% mortality rate among hospitalized patients, and the real rate is very likely to go down, not up, since most sick people do not immediately go to the hospital and there is an unknown-but-surmised-be-very-large population of infected people with mild symptoms. There is a real chance that our lockdown will kill more people through stress-induced heart attacks, suicides, and general fallout from food and income insecurity than the virus would have. My only takeaway from all of this is that our hospital system is really, really bad at handling any kind of temporary spike in disease or death. And I'm upset with our governor for panicking and putting the entire service industry out of a job, which may actually cause harm to them in great numbers beyond a probably sub-1% chance of dying from a flu-like illness.
- Twixes 7y ago
  2-4% is huge for a novel highly infectious disease. Our healthcare system is not prepared for that at all, without aggressive measures that's potential for hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in the US.
  - traitsnspecs 7y ago
    Fully agreed - but I'm wondering why the solution has been less bars, not more temporary hospitals, ala China.
    - Twixes 7y ago
      Temporary hospitals are being set up, but we simply don't have the capacity to build life–saving machines fast enough to handle the no-social distancing scenario. Neither did China, really.
- solotronics 7y ago
  Having live television feeds of people dying in the streets (like in Wuhan) would absolutely crater the economy and cause massive social unrest.
georgemcbay 7y ago
My "circles" (which include a friend married to a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor who had been in Wuhan last October) knew that COVID-19 was possibly a serious concern, but also "knew" that it could have wound up as another SARS (not that SARS wasn't terrible, but it was also very localized in terms of overall impact). I don't think we should excuse the many failures of our leaders, but I also don't think the now-obvious economic impact of this crisis was that clearcut even a month ago.
- epitrochoidal 7y ago
  >I don't think we should excuse the many failures of our leaders, but I also don't think the now-obvious economic impact of this crisis was that clearcut even a month ago. Good way of looking at it.
101404 7y ago
Maybe you should have told every single government in the world, because none predicted that it would have this huge of an impact. SARS1 pretty much stayed in China, MERS pretty much stayed in the Middle East. It was only when a country like Italy was caught by surprise that governments started to consider very far reaching measures.

sonicxxg 7y ago

True, you could see this coming a month ago. This narrative is very naive. I closed all my stock positions back when the first cases outside China started to pop up, and nobody seemed to care enough to control it. I've been buying puts ever since, and could not be happier. When life gives you lemons, you need to make a lemonade, and not make excuses for your bad calls.

sonicggg 7y ago

phnofive 7y ago

Depending on the country and an observer’s cynicism, I think the majority of nations understood early on that it was already far too late to significantly dampen the impact of such a deadly and infectious virus. The United States government was thoroughly informed of this risk via Operation Dark Winter but never geared up for it - perhaps this is best managed by states once the infection crosses the border, but preparations on those levels weren’t completed either.

reidjs 7y ago

It’s not possible to predict the future, so I disagree with your stance that it was obvious a virus could cause an economic downturn like this. It comes across as victim blaming to me.

tcgv 7y ago

> A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode (...) Your circles seem to be the exception then. There are a lot of factors that affect personal perception of such matters, like proximity to inflicted areas, professional background (ex: medical), experiencing similar events in the past, etc. In hindsight it seems obvious that the world wasn't paying attention. But it took until February for western countries to realize the epidemic was already out of control, and the markets reacted. > prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse Anyone that knew this last month without a doubt could've made tons of money shorting positions in the stock market.

ellyagg 7y ago
He's probably talking about the rationalist community, and people did. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1233174331133284353 https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1233174331133284353
- eropple 7y ago
  I assure you I am not talking about the aggressive curve-fitting community. Just...normal people. Nobody famous, not even any Chinese nationals. Just...fairly normal, if tech-worker-y, Americans and Europeans.
  - smnrchrds 7y ago
    By and large, both the general public and organizations were caught by surprise. If most people knew, the stocks would have tanked in January, not these past few days. Which brings an interesting question: how many of all the people you know who knew, yourself included, put their skin in the game and are now rich from the options they bought in January? If it is not many, I would argue it is better to say people suspected or feared, not that they knew.
    - eropple 7y ago
      It's a real big stretch from "certain enough to take personal precautions" to "is a stock head and wants to throw down puts". You get that normal people don't really give a damn about the stock market, yeah? Put a gun to my head and I can't tell you how a put works and I don't really care--I'm too busy buying a house. I did, however, rebalance almost entirely out of stocks three weeks ago and while I am not "now rich", my portfolio is doing a hell of a lot better than most folks'.

pnathan 7y ago

>Second: I worry that “nobody could have known” will be the narrative. A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode and that the prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse. Super uncontroversial. And like, I’m just a guy. Big same. I'm just another software engineer, albeit one with a taste for international news and a few China-focused specialists & one or two PRCs citizens that I follow on Twitter. This was predictable in early-mid Jan. Once the pics and discussion of the overloaded Wuhan hospitals and the measures the PRC had to take hit the English language world, it was pretty bloody obvious. The news had hit the popular English language papers by Jan 27[1], although I was reading about it somewhat earlier - Jan 12 at the latest[2]. A timeline can be found in [3]. Anyway, by Feb 1, institutions with a specialty in disease control should have been going full bore to address the incoming wave. Our public health officials, the officials they advise, and other health institutions should be held up to scrutiny and not covered with glory dust just because they had to act by the pace of events. [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7933719/Incredible-footage-shows-Chinas-1-000-bed-coronavirus-hospital-taking-shape-four-days.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7933719/Incredible-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/11/china-mystery-illness-outbreak-causes-first-death https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/11/china-mystery-... [3] https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-china/en/ https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...

traitsnspecs 7y ago

If we had not taken prevention measures, the economic impact would be worse? I'm very skeptical of this. Keeps in mind that the disease has a 2-4% mortality rate among hospitalized patients, and the real rate is very likely to go down, not up, since most sick people do not immediately go to the hospital and there is an unknown-but-surmised-be-very-large population of infected people with mild symptoms. There is a real chance that our lockdown will kill more people through stress-induced heart attacks, suicides, and general fallout from food and income insecurity than the virus would have. My only takeaway from all of this is that our hospital system is really, really bad at handling any kind of temporary spike in disease or death. And I'm upset with our governor for panicking and putting the entire service industry out of a job, which may actually cause harm to them in great numbers beyond a probably sub-1% chance of dying from a flu-like illness.

Twixes 7y ago
2-4% is huge for a novel highly infectious disease. Our healthcare system is not prepared for that at all, without aggressive measures that's potential for hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in the US.
- traitsnspecs 7y ago
  Fully agreed - but I'm wondering why the solution has been less bars, not more temporary hospitals, ala China.
  - Twixes 7y ago
    Temporary hospitals are being set up, but we simply don't have the capacity to build life–saving machines fast enough to handle the no-social distancing scenario. Neither did China, really.
solotronics 7y ago
Having live television feeds of people dying in the streets (like in Wuhan) would absolutely crater the economy and cause massive social unrest.

georgemcbay 7y ago

My "circles" (which include a friend married to a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor who had been in Wuhan last October) knew that COVID-19 was possibly a serious concern, but also "knew" that it could have wound up as another SARS (not that SARS wasn't terrible, but it was also very localized in terms of overall impact). I don't think we should excuse the many failures of our leaders, but I also don't think the now-obvious economic impact of this crisis was that clearcut even a month ago.

epitrochoidal 7y ago
>I don't think we should excuse the many failures of our leaders, but I also don't think the now-obvious economic impact of this crisis was that clearcut even a month ago. Good way of looking at it.

101404 7y ago

Maybe you should have told every single government in the world, because none predicted that it would have this huge of an impact. SARS1 pretty much stayed in China, MERS pretty much stayed in the Middle East. It was only when a country like Italy was caught by surprise that governments started to consider very far reaching measures.