I wish I could see you all right now. But I’m just going to pretend that you’re all out there somewhere, behind my computer.
A few years ago at Solstice I told the story of an old man who owned a lodge at Mount Saint Helens. When the volcano was about to erupt, threatening to destroy his lodge and whole life’s work, he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. Despite some clear signs that the mountain was about to blow, he wouldn’t leave, and he went down with his cabin.
I hoped our community would be different. That when the signs pointed to an impending disaster, we would notice and take action.
At the beginning of this year, there was an outbreak of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan. A lot of major news outlets, like the Washington Post, downplayed the risks. As late as the end of February they confidently admonished those concerned, saying there was more to worry about from the flu than this new virus.
We didn’t buy it. The new coronavirus was spreading in countries around the world. And the death rate, while uncertain, looked significantly higher than the flu. The unprecedented lockdown of the entire province of Hubei, with over 50 million people, was another sign that this time, things were different.
So we acted, we told our friends and families to buy food and toilet paper, to be prepared for shortages. We went through the literature to understand respiratory virus transmission dynamics. Shared information on Lesswrong and in facebook groups. We designed quarantine protocols, and thought about how to assess risk in this environment of uncertainty.
When the CDC said there was no evidence that masks protected the wearers from infection, we considered the Bayesian evidence of mask effectiveness, and we bought n95s.
A thing I like about this community, it’s not just that people try to figure out what’s true. It’s that they believe that true things can be figured out. That while the world is complex and messy and often not amenable to RCTs, we can still reduce our uncertainty.
The last year was significant to me, not just because it was weird and bad and different. Not just because I worried for my friends and family. This year is meaningful to me because it presents an opportunity I’ve never had before.
To learn from an unfolding catastrophe. A global pandemic. The first of its kind in my lifetime, and in my parents lifetimes, and my grandparents lifetimes. And I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to learn from something so significant, at such scales.
I want to know is how we did. You, me, the rationality community, our health departments, our governments, our civilization. I want to know what our predictions, our responses, our successes and our failures, tell us about where we are, and where we need to improve to get where we want to go.
I’m pretty happy that this community recognized the threat early on and it took it seriously. Which isn’t to say we didn’t make any big mistakes. I know I made some. But overall, I’m proud that we fought this thing with our eyes open. That we didn’t blink when the storm hit.
I can’t quite say the same for our federal government. I think they really fumbled the early response. In February, the CDC’s tests didn’t work. The FDA wouldn’t let universities use the PCR tests they had already developed. So we were blind to extent that the coronavirus was spreading in our country.
A lot of mistakes were made. Coordination is hard. Risk assessment is hard. Public health policy in a chaotic, polarized, aging bureaucracy is hard.
But if I step back a little bit, and try to put this in perspective, I think the world is handling this rather well.
It used to be, that a pandemic was the bizarre hand of a mad, angry god. Now, a pandemic is the result of a virus, with a spike protein that binds well with certain human cell receptors. And also, if we block those receptors, by injecting some RNA into our bodies, and getting our cells to produce some little bits that train our immune system to produce other bits that prevent this virus, from binding to those cell receptors, we can prevent infection.
And yes, we probably could have produced and tested a vaccine faster, but the fact remains, that we have never produced and tested, so many doses of a vaccine in such a short period of time. And it’s good that we’ve come a long way, because we have a long way to go.
We beat smallpox because we learned how it worked, and how it could be stopped. The story with Covid is the same, except that we learned faster, and better.
I think that future challenges are going to be harder, maybe a lot harder. Some of them aren’t going to give us good feedback. For some of them, there will be no second chances at all.
So I say, let’s take the opportunity we have to learn from this year. Let’s notice our mistakes and our confusions and the things we failed to predict. Let’s be proud of each other for where we did well, where we learned, where we grew.
I’m certainly proud of you all, not just for getting through this, but for staying curious and keeping your eyes open.
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