What many people do not realize is that “the speed premium” is vastly higher when a deadly virus is doubling in reach every five to seven days.
We needed a billion masks weeks ago.
But thinking is slow. Eons ago, on March 13, I wrote,
My working assumption is that American business and political elites are two weeks behind in their attempts to address the virus crisis. The steps they are taking now were necessary two weeks ago. And the steps that are needed now will not be taken for another two weeks.
Here are some predictions going forward:
1. The FDA and CDC were slow and often counterproductive in this crisis. But going forward, praise will be heaped on these experts.
2. If and when public health experts finally adopt something like the masks and scarves strategy, they will fill the journals will research papers showing that lockdowns were the key to beating this crisis.
3. No matter how special-interest-fueled, unhelpful, or even counterproductive the $2 trillion “stimulus” turns out to be, economists will fill the journals with research papers showing how it saved the economy.
My point is that it does not pay to be right about the crisis. That is playing Game 1. What pays is to be on the side of the powerful elites. That is playing Game 2. And nothing makes me feel more bitter and betrayed than seeing all the Game 2ers out there, patting each other on the back and gaining in status.
Whose status should be going up? Probably Razib Khan, who on Twitter now styles himself “Self-quarantine if you Khan.”
On March 18, Razib Khan wrote,
To be frank, most of the skeptics of the impact of coronavirus are not very smart.
How about me? On March 12, I wrote,
Even though we have no symptoms and no reason to believe we have been infected, my wife and I are going to try to do everything reasonable to reduce outside contact for a while. Call it “social distancing” or self-quarantining.
How about the former Mencius Moldbug?
On February 1–February first!–Curtis Yarvin wrote,
there is no good reason for anyone to be flying across the Pacific. The same may soon be true of the Atlantic. And certainly, no one should be flying in or out of mainland China—except via a quarantine facility. . . And Western public health authorities, though their epidemiology remains first-rate, cannot say this, or even think it, because of their internationalist intellectual doctrine, just one aspect of the great American progressive tradition of government.
If I can guarantee one thing, it is that his status will not go up. I am not saying we should drop all our existing beliefs and adopt his, but we ought to take into consideration that his view of the world made him quicker to spot the threat.
Ah history. Friday the 13th was the turning point. Here is what I said in the comment thread:
I think the Wartime General analogy applies but in this war against a Steep S-Curve, every day is an opportunity to correct yesterday’s goofy Peacetime General mistakes. Today is a brand new 4-Week Battle.
Social Distancing and Scarves are mostly about signalling and team building, as far as I can tell.
Japan is opening up! You could go there. I think Hong Kong too. But yeah, most of the world is in lockdown unfortunately.
Travel restrictions for passengers travelling to/transiting through Hong Kong
We all have to get used to the notion of a 14-day Quarantine because it now applies to Americans travelling within America. Viruses have no ears, rhetoric doesn’t slow their spread.
That was the day after the travel ban to China. His status should rise for not being one of those who screamed ‘racist’ at the time.
What is amazing is that China got through the pandemic is two months. Yet, too many Americans have decided to keep making proposals that will extend the pandemic in the U.S. for six months are longer, kill more people than China, and crash the healthcare system just so their stock portfolio will be a little better.
Instead of setting artificial time lines, why not set performance benchmarks that will allow cities to ease restrictions such as when hospital are fully equipped and supplied, when there are enough mask for all essential workers, when everyone can purchase cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer.
Even if some states and cities ease off the restrictions, restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues should be the last places to open and no one who can work from home should be going back to work.
Also, as NYC is learning the testing and tracing does not really work is all of the paramedics and police are either sick or quarantined at home.
Crashing the health care system will improve people’s stock portfolios? In the words of Mr. Spock …
Did you not read all of the idiot comments that the cure is worse than the disease. That too many pundits and politicians are willing to send everyone back to work to help the economy while knowing that it will increase the spread of the disease and stretch the medical system beyond what it can handle.
What is interesting is people who believe that people will go back to vacations, sporting events, and bars just because President Trump tells them to go.
“What is amazing is that China got through the pandemic is two months.”
This might be true if they hadn’t allowed the virus to leave their borders, but I’m not willing to say they are done with this yet. Will be interesting to see if they hit a second (or third, etc) wave. Or whether they lock people down again to stop future breakouts.
Re: 1 – one thing that is certain is that the awards ceremonies at VIC and DAD will be especially opulent and the awards especially fat: game 2 is where the money is at and DVD and DAD had more money than they knew what to do with even before being inundated with all this new emergency money. When the Budget comes out next year, the dimensions of the colossal waste will be revealed in the year over year outlays by object class. If the USA had any game 1 journalists there might be a story.
VIC and DAD – cdc and fda. Auto-correct arghh
Since we are talking about getting out first with predictions here, I will predict that residential heating costs (electric and gas rates) are positively correlated with virus mortality rates. A warm, humid indoor environment is protective but unaffordable in places like Germany, Italy, Spain and New York where the wind and solar industries have seized political power and are denying the people access to cheap power. Cheap coal fueled power in places like Poland, Japan, South Korea and China allows people to shelter in place comfortably and healthily. Plus, so many people are forced to burn wood for heat in solar and wind industry controlled jurisdictions that the air quality is worse there as well.
This might be a good time for the libertarians to rethink their campaign to change tax and zoning laws to force the highest possible possible population densities. Mortality is definitely correlated with mortality. The problem now is a secondary wave of infections in lower density areas through the vector of people fleeing their high density urban paradises. The cities need to be contained and quarantined so that the rest of the country can continue to produce essentials like food, power, and medical supplies.
John Cochrane has an OpEd in the WSJ today. The full article at The Internet Archive is Flatten the Coronavirus Curve at a Lower Cost
Another very smart economist that can’t comprehend the nature of the immense challenge ahead.
If you use the massive testing and massive quarantine idea, then eventually hospitals will run out of care providers and emergency services will run out of responders.
At a time when medical logistics is stretched beyond its capabilities, it is amazing how many people want to poor gasoline to the figurative fire and watch it burn.
One of the signs of hospital collapse is that the health care workers continue to work while infected. The attrition of health care workers will come from PTSD and succumbing to the disease. America is at war. Each hospital is the Helms Deep of its community.
Well, the NY City hotspot seems very centers on Manhattan, Nassau cty, Suffolk cty (Hamptons) and Westchester cty. A lot of those will be wealthy Manhattanites who ran, just as hot spots in Florida and NY city dweller summer home areas will be.
It will be interesting if we get to see how this virus impacted poor vs. world-traveler/Spring-Breaker/cocktail party goer areas. Theoretically, this virus should be ravaging the homeless population, but there are no reports.
“What many people do not realize is that “the speed premium” is vastly higher when a deadly virus is doubling in reach every five to seven days.”
Finally, a good use case for hyperbolic discounting…
I think it will be interesting (and important?) to figure out what kind of mindset allowed people to spot this early and response as rationally as possible. My sense is that it does not correlate with political ideology/point of view particularly strongly. On the one hand, there were people on “the right” like Arnold Kling and Curtis Yarvin (scare quotes because that is a very fuzzy category). On the other hand, there was a lot of early warnings from Silicon Valley, which strikes me as largely not “the right”.
Clearly, I haven’t done any kind of systematic study of this. My sense is based entirely on the idiosyncratic set of blogs and social media inputs I’ve chosen for myself. It’s also based on the fact that I was worried very early, so I was on high alert for who else was worried very early.
Anyway, if I had to guess, I would guess that a key ingredient for the mindset of people who noticed and took it seriously early is an understanding of statistics, mathematics, and/or computer science. If I had to nail it down even further, I would guess that strong intuitions about exponential growth is a key component of the mindset.
One has to be able to separate those that called it right because they were being especially rational, smart, and informed, and those that got it right by luck or the coincidence of stopped clock showing the correct time, “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right thing for the wrong reason.”
You would especially want to be leery of people who looked like they “got it right” in terms of the zero-cost method of talking or writing about it, but who didn’t get it right in terms of taking it personally and seriously enough to secure their most important interests (and even then, mere hypersensitive and emotional panic hoarding and selling is not necessarily an indicator of reasoned decision-making).
This is really hard to do. I think few of the people who made the right calls the right way said anything publicly about it, mostly did what they had to do in private, both because there is an advantage to doing so early, but a disadvantage to appearing weird or strange or not doing and thinking whatever normal people are doing and believing.
There is also another kind of person who may have called it right and sounded the alarm, but who one should probably discount, and that is anyone in the business of getting lots of attention and sounding high-pitched alarms and who has a track record of exaggeration, error, and generally crying wolf. There are also similar people for whom big disasters or panics – especially those which can be leveraged to blame the right enemies – are either in their interest or for whom the occurrence of such things is a kind of wish fulfillment of strange psychological origin, for instance, the feeling of validation from being “right all along, even though you all called me crazy!”
My impression is that the people who made “early right calls for the right reasons” are in two camps.
1. People with special access and exposure to inside information not available to the general public. “Here are the internal communications of the Chinese Communist Party which we intercepted and reveal that … ” – “Oh, good God! Hey, Jimmy, get my broker on the line right away, will ya?” And while we associate Silicon Valley types with “tech”, I think it’s increasingly clear that what makes the fortunes is private access to insights derived from hoards of information.
2. Quirky, smart, successful people. Above average in traits leading them to be disagreeable, argumentative, contrarian, but also with decent track records of being socially well-adjusted enough to function at a high level and to have achieved some genuine accomplishments. By quirky I mean with some aspect of character or personality that makes them much less sensitive than normal to ordinary social conformity pressures. That can be combined with a special reference social group or flush material circumstances which serve to insulate oneself from negative social consequences of going against the grain, but the aspect of personality remains indispensable.
At a somewhat higher level, one might ask what implication one can draw from the fact that the number of members of both camps is so astonishingly low and that they weren’t able to have any appreciable influence on financial markets or high-level decision-making until long after sufficient information was available to justify alarm.
These are good points. I think you’re right that there is a significant personality component to it, and I strongly agree that one would need to filter out people who were right for uninteresting or irrelevant reasons (e.g., because they cry wolf about every possible outbreak). Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Noah, all modesty aside, I think I got it right at every point given the limited available information. I’m only bringing it up because I found it shocking how “strong intuitions about exponential growth” mislead many very smart people.
The accumulative growth in these type of biological systems forms an S-Curve (Logistics Curve) and new infections form a Bell Curve. An exponential curve is a good way to estimate the steepest part of the S-Curve but projecting an exponential curve too far out creates non-sensical predictions.
I’ve been thinking about your question too. The specialized knowledge isn’t enough. You have to have the ability to recombine this knowledge in new ways and apply it to new problems you have never seen before. It is the Zero-to-One aha moments that are required, and an ability to focus on the “Good Enough” under extreme time, resource, and information constraints.
I’m curious about cases in which strong intuitions misled people. If you can point to some examples, I would appreciate it.
With respect to your later comment, yes, we’re in a different problem space now, but it still may be valuable in the future to understand who saw this coming early on (keeping in mind the additional factors Handle pointed out above).
I haven’t seen many (or any) cases of people extrapolating exponential growth too far out. Yes, eventually we should expect a sigmoid function, but as far as I can tell, even now, we are well short of the inflection point. We certainly were a few weeks or months ago, and when you’re well short of the inflection point, exponential growth is important to understand.
I also agree that specialized knowledge isn’t sufficient. But I do think it’s necessary.
Kling has a long list of posts that I think illustrate “cases in which strong intuitions misled people”. I am only allowed one link before my comment gets stuck in moderation so I’ll use Robin Hanson’s Herd Immunity post. Richard Epstein’s article(s) share my emphasis on S-Curves/Bell-Curves but fails to recognize that S-Curves can be so steep that they resemble an Exponential curve. There was comment by Steve Sailer in one of Arnold’s posts that gave a link to a model by lifelong epidemiologist that was insisting that he had accurately predicted the economic dollar amounts of All-Out-Now vs. Flatten-the-Curve strategies and told me that my criticism was dead wrong. Watching the Canadian Public Health officials give their daily updates made me realize that there is a hard divide between the On-the-Ground epidemiologists and the Exponential-Model epidemiologists represented by the Ontario level Dr. David Williams and the Ottawa City top public health official, respectively. The Ottawa press keeps reporting the Sky-Is-Falling prediction of thousands of undetected Community Transmission cases every time they find one case without an obvious Travel or Close Contact history. I’ve learned to ignore any information based on City of Ottawa officials. When chains of community transmission are sustained, you will see the rapid increase in other metrics. Some people have a better sense of “what should I see if this assumption/intuition is true” than others.
Over the last few weeks I keep experiencing this moment when I read something so obviously wrong that it makes me laugh out loud at the same time as being horrified by the implications. There must be a word for that.
By the way, predicting the trajectory of the problem early is pure history now. We are facing a new problem-space today and the mistakes or successes of yesterday or last week are no longer important and can adjust to the new conditions and make good decisions.