3 ms·

The rationalist and EA communities are often credited for taking Covid much more seriously sooner than most and the media did. https://unherd.com/2020/12/how-ra

• n4r9 4y ago
  > Sooner than most and the media. This is a very low bar to jump over! Anyway I read through that article. There's a lot of guff about Newcomb's paradox and Eliezer, and a single paragraph referencing COVID, with two links supporting your statement. I've clicked through those links and have come out unimpressed. The first link is used to supported the claim that "The rationalist community was well ahead of the public": https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-prediction/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-p... . Scott rightly highlights how the media and institutions got things wrong, but conversely gives only a few examples of "generic smart people on Twitter" getting some things right in the early days of the outbreak. He confesses that he himself did not predict the seriousness of COVID. The second link is used to support the claim "the wider tech community, were using masks and stocking up on essential goods, even as others were saying to worry about the flu instead": https://putanumonit.com/2020/02/27/seeing-the-smoke/ https://putanumonit.com/2020/02/27/seeing-the-smoke/ . The linked article was written at the end of February, when panic-buying had already firmly set in across the US. There is nothing here about the reasoning or predictive abilities of the rationalist or EA community specifically. Nor is there any compelling comparison of its response compared to the wider public.