In 2020, Solstice feels more appropriate than it ever has.
Solstice is about the uncaring nature of the universe. 2020 sure showed us that.
Solstice is about how people are the one thing in the universe that can make it a slightly more caring, slightly better place to be. 2020 showed us that, too.
And Solstice is about how our actions make the difference.
Let’s go back to February of this year – you know, about one hundred years ago.
Back then, the coronavirus was just some little event happening far away. I remember people at work making jokes about how they built a field hospital in one day in Wuhan, when it takes us months to change one line of code.
And in mid-February, Bayesian Choir started cancelling rehearsals. That was what triggered me to wonder if I should start caring about this thing.
A few weeks later, I went home from the office for the last time. A week after that, the Bay Area locked down, and much of the rest of the country followed.
LessWrong was surprisingly on the ball about coronavirus. I got a sense that this was going to be important at least a week, maybe two weeks, before most of the US started freaking out about it. Some people in the rationalist community started paying attention even earlier, as early as January or even late December of 2019.
But what did it buy us?
Those two or three weeks don’t seem as important now, after nine months of lockdown.
Well, it was profitable for the one or two people who managed to short the stock market at exactly the right time.
But even though those two or three weeks don’t seem important now… I think we do get some points for noticing, and for caring, even in the face of headlines about “If everyone washed their hands, we wouldn’t need to ban handshakes!” In the counterfactual world where everyone else pretended coronavirus didn’t matter while it ripped through the country leaving overwhelmed hospitals and millions dead behind it, if we had managed to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe, I think we would have gotten, let’s say, a few more points, relative to the rest of the world.
In point of fact, I think the biggest mistake we made, in those early days, was expecting that no one else would care.
It’s an understandable mistake, especially given the aforementioned headlines. And given how little most of the world seems to care about so many things that are important, but only show up with a sample size greater than a hundred. In other words, it’s hard for most people to grasp low-probability, high-expected-value events.
But this year, we found out that if you pitch it the right way, and if you simplify it down, and make it political enough, but not too political… some people will decide that they’d rather stay alone in their house and watch Netflix, instead of taking a low –but not that low! – probability of killing their Grandma or themselves. I call that a win. That’s a low bar, maybe, but we’ve passed it nonetheless. And it’s not a bar that most rationalists I know expected this country to pass, back in late February.
Why did some rationalists see COVID coming earlier than the rest of the world? There are a lot of possible reasons for this, and we could analyze them for future decisionmaking. For now, I want to focus on two oversimplified reasons. One, they were paying attention when no one else was. And two, they were keeping their eyes on the prize.
Paying attention when no one else was. You can’t catch black swan events before everyone else does without spending time yelling about things everyone else thinks are crazy and never going to happen. You’re not always going to be right, but when you are, it’ll be impressive as hell.
Keeping their eyes on the prize. Knowing whether something matters requires knowing what matters. And it requires having some method of estimation or measurement of how much something will matter. You have to do the math. How many people will get it? How fast? How many of them will die?
What I want to say now is that we have to keep doing those things, and that’s going to look different now that the rest of the world cares about COVID. There are entire research teams publishing papers analyzing a single superspreader event – one of which, by the way, is a big reason I concluded that this small gathering is safe.
Paying attention when no one else is, and keeping our eyes on the prize.
That’s not necessarily going to be COVID, anymore.
Keep yourself safe, of course. Wear a seatbelt, wear a mask, for the love of God don’t go to a restaurant indoors. Vaccines are coming. The value of social distancing has gone up, and the cost has gone down, dramatically. We won’t have to do it much longer, and there’s a good chance that if we keep it up, no one here will get COVID, ever, period.
But don’t forget, either, that 100% of people not diagnosed with COVID-19… will still die. There are plenty of problems left in the world.
COVID isn’t over, and there’s a lot we can learn from it.
But the most important thing, now and always: keep your eyes on the prize.
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