The U.S. government advice was pretty bad, but I don't think this was from lack of knowledge. I think it was more a deliberate attempt to downplay the effectiveness of masks to mitigate supply issues.

I also wouldn't expect the government to necessarily perform well on getting the truth out there quickly, or on responding well to low-probability / high impact events by taking EV+ actions that cause significant disruption to the public. Government officials have to worry about the risk of stoking public panic and similar indirect effects much more than most private individuals, including rationalist thinkers. For example, @Denkenberger🔸 mentions some rationalists figuring out who they wanted to be locked down with on the early side; deciding that the situation warrants this kind of behavior -- like deciding to short the stock market, or most other private-actor stuff -- doesn't require consideration of indirect effects like government statements do. Nor are a political leader's incentives aligned to maximize expected value in these sorts of situations.

So I'd consider beating the government to be evidence of competence, but not much evidence of particularly early or wise performance by private entities.

For balance, the established authorities' early beliefs and practices about COVID did not age well. Some of that can be attributed to governments doing government things, like downplaying the effectiveness of masks to mitigate supply issues. But, for instance, the WHO fundamentally missed on its understanding of how COVID is transmitted . . . for many months. So we were told to wash our groceries, a distraction from things that would have made a difference. Early treatment approaches (e.g., being too quick to put people on vents) were not great either.

The linked article shows that some relevant experts had a correct understanding early on but struggled to get acceptance. "Dogmatic bias is certainly a big part of it,” one of them told Nature later on. So I don't think the COVID story would present a good case for why EA should defer to the consensus view of experts. Perhaps it presents a good case for why EA should be very cautious about endorsing things that almost no relevant expert believes, but that is a more modest conclusion. 

Do you think the EA tendency toward many smaller-to-midsize organizations plays a role in this? I'm not in the industry at all, but the "comms-focused" roles feel more fundamental in a sense than the "digital growth" roles. Stated differently, I can imagine an org having the former but not the latter, but find it hard to envision an org with only the latter. If an org only has a single FTE available for "marketing-related" work, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the job description for that role is often going to lean in the comms-focused direction.

Although I think Yarrow's claim is that the LW community was not "particularly early on covid [and did not give] particularly wise advice."  I don't think the rationality community saying things that were not at the time "obvious" undermines this conclusion as long as those things were also being said in a good number of other places at the same time.

Cummings was reading rationality material, so that had the chance to change his mind. He probably wasn't reading (e.g.) the r/preppers subreddit, so its members could not get this kind of credit. (Another example: Kim Kardashian got Donald Trump to pardon Alice Marie Johnson and probably had some meaningful effect on his first administration's criminal-justice reforms. This is almost certainty a reflection of her having access, not evidence that she is a first-rate criminal justice thinker or that her talking points were better than those of others supporting Johnson's clemency bid.)

Thanks! I may be thinking about it too much from the consumer perspective of owning a condo in a 100-year-old building, where the noise of filtration is a major drawback and the costs of a broader modernization of HVAC systems would be considerable.

I haven't polled grocery store owners, but an owner would bear all the costs of improving air quality yet may capture few of the economic benefits. Although customers would care a lot in a pandemic, they probably wouldn't otherwise care in a way that increases profits -- and managers are incentivized toward short-term results. Cynically, most of their employees may not have paid sick time, so the owner may not even realize most of the benefit from reduced employee illness. (Of course, regulators could require compliance -- but that's not an awareness problem. So maybe the candidate intervention is lobbying?)

This is one of those scenarios in which I think it's easier to capture ~the full costs than the full benefits:

• Would you assign value to the indirect protective effect on those you live with (if any), friends, and family members? Apparently the flu household attack rate can be all over the place depending on strain and other factors, but 15-20% may be reasonable guesses in general (source: AI overview on Google search, very low confidence).
• This gets into some tricky situations with housemates; you're likely to all be better off if you mutually agree to consider the indirect protective effects on housemates when making your own decisions. But that effect is likely to be significantly greater with unvaccinated housemates than vaccinated ones. If you live with three other people, the first vaccination may have significant household spillover effects; the fourth not so much.
• Most people would pay to avoid the discomfort of having the flu (above and beyond the loss in productivity) or would demand payment to willingly undergo that discomfort. Maybe you could consider willingness to pay for pleasurable leisure activities, and then decide how many of those activities you'd be willing to forego to avoid enduring one average case of the flu?

On the costs side:

• 1.5 hr is a lot to get a flu vaccine by US standards; they are available on a walk-in basis at pharmacies everywhere. That's not a critique of your analysis, of course.
• Could you call ahead and ensure that where you were going to get the vaccine used Influvac or Vaxigrip? (I assume fewer places would stock Fluenz, anyway due to cost.)
• For most people, the hours of their day do not have equal value or utility. I can't -- at least not on a regular basis -- realistically use the 14th most valuable hour of my day for renumerative work, but I could use it to get a vaccine. In other words, there's a limit on how many hours I can sustain higher-demand activities. In contrast, when I get the flu, I think the loss in productivity hits the relevant time slots more evenly.

I don't know if those adjustments would flip the end result for you -- but I think accounting for them would make it a close call and would show how modest differences in the factors (e.g., personal circumstances that make getting the vaccine less time-consuming) would flip the outcome.

To clarify, does our "crazy" vote consider all possible causes of crazy, or just crazy that is caused by / significantly associated with AI?

If advocating now is a pre-requisite to advocating later, advocating now is part of the cost. By opting not to pay it, you aren’t increasing the overall cost-effectiveness of the LGBT rights movement, you’re just juicing your own numbers.

I think that relies on a certain model of the effects of social advocacy. Modeling is error-prone, but I don't think our activist in 1900 would be well-served spending significant money without giving some thought to their model. More often, I think the model for getting stuff done looks more like a more complicated version of: Inputs A and B are expected to produce C in the presence of a sufficient catalyst and the relative absence of inhibiting agents.

Putting more A into the system isn't going to help produce C if the rate limit is being caused by the amount of B available, the lack of the catalyst, or the presence of inhibiting agents. Although money is a useful input that is often fungible at various rates to other necessary inputs, and sometimes can influence catalyst & inhibitor levels, sometimes it cannot (or can do so very inefficiently and/or at levels beyond the funder's ability to meaningfully influence).

Sometimes for social change, having the older generation die off or otherwise lose power is useful. There's not much our hypothetical activist could do to accelerate that. One might think, for instance, that a significant decline in religiosity and/or the influence of religious entities is a necessary reagent in this model. While one could in theory put money into attempting to reduce the influence of religion in 1900s public life, I think there would be good reasons not to pursue this approach. Rather, I think it could make more sense for the activist to let the broader cultural and demographic changes to do some of the hard work for them.

There's also the reality that efforts often decay if there isn't sufficient forward momentum -- that was the intended point of the Pikachu welfare example. Ash doesn't have the money right now to found a perpetual foundation for the cause that will be able to accomplish anything meaningful. If he front-loads the money -- say on some field-building, some research grants, some grants to graduate students -- and the money runs out, then the organizations will fold, the research will grow increasingly out of date, and the graduate students will find new areas to work in.

You can you only care about providing free hologram entertainment to disadvantaged children, but since holograms are very expensive today, you’ll wait until they’re much cheaper. But shouldn’t you be responsible for making them cheaper? Why are you free-riding and counting on others to do that for you, for free, to juice your philanthropic impact?

The more neutral-to-positive way to cast free-riding is employing leverage. I'm really not concerned about free-riding on for-profit companies, or even much governmental work (especially things like military R&D, which has led to various socially useful technologies).

That's not an accounting trick in my book -- there are clear redistributive effects here. If I spend my money on basic science to promote hologram technology, the significant majority of the future benefits of my work are likely going to flow to future for-profit hologram companies, future middle-class+ people in developed countries, and so on. Those aren't the benefits I care about, and Big Hologram isn't likely to pay it forward by mailing a bunch of holograms to disadvantaged children (in your terminology, they are going to free-ride off my past efforts). 

As a society, we give corporations and similar entities certain privileges to incentivize behavior because a lot of value ends up leaking out to third parties. For example, the point of patents is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Art" with the understanding that said progress becomes part of the commons after a specified time has passed. Utilizing that progress after the patent period has expired isn't some sort of shady exploitation of the researcher; it is the deal society made in exchange for taking affirmative actions to protect the researcher's IP during the patent period. 

I like this comment. This topic is always at risk to devolving into a generalized debate between rationalists and their opponents, creating a lot of heat but not light. So it's helpful to keep a fairly tight focus on potentially action-relevant questions (of which the comment identifies one).

I think Joseph is pointing out the 's in the first example, the added "the" in the second