Before Rationality gained a capital letter and a community, a psychologist developed a simple test to identify people who can override an intuitive and wrong answer with a reflective and correct one:
One of the questions is:
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Exponential growth is hard for people to grasp. Most people answer ’24’ to the above question, or something random like ’35’. It’s counter-intuitive to people that the lily pads could be barely noticeable on day 44 and yet completely cover the lake on day 48.
Here’s another question, see if you can get it:
In an interconnected world, cases of a disease outside the country of origin are doubling every 5 days. The pace is slightly accelerating since it’s easier to contain a hundred sick people than it is to contain thousands. How much of a moron do you have to be as a journalist to quote statistics about the yearly toll of seasonal flu given a month of exponential global growth of a disease with 20 times the mortality rate?
Human intuition is bad at dealing with exponential growth but it’s very good at one thing: not looking weird in front of your peers. It’s so good at this, in fact, that the desire to not look weird will override most incentives.
Journalists would rather miss out on the biggest story of the decade than stick their neck out with an alarmist article. Traders would rather miss out on billions of dollars of profits. People would rather get sick than do something that isn’t socially sanctioned.
Even today (2/26/2020), most people I’ve spoken to refuse to do minimal prep for what could be the worst pandemic in a century. It costs $100 to stock up your house with a month’s worth of dry food and disinfectant wipes (respirators, however, are now sold out or going for 4x the price). People keep waiting for the government to do something, even though the government has proven its incompetence in this area several times over.
But the cases aren’t rising geometrically. Wuhan is going to start closing temporary hospitals because more people are getting better than are getting sick.
Case increases in Japan and most other countries are linear, not geometric. The problem spots right now are Italy, Iran and Korea. Even in Korea cases are increasing linearly.
It is still not clear if this is SARS 2.0 or Spanish Flu 2.0. Personally I’m thinking SARS but we’ll see.
I hereby update my prediction.
Everyone is going to die.
Computing power.