Isegoria

The Covid-19 coronavirus is indeed a wolf, Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist) argues:

In Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried “Wolf!”, the point of the tale is that eventually there was a wolf, but the boy was not believed because he had given too many false alarms. In my view, the Covid-19 coronavirus is indeed a wolf, or at least has the potential to be one. Many people, including President Trump, think we are over-reacting, because so many past scares have been exaggerated. I think that’s wrong.

Coming from you, a friend said to me the other day, that’s scary. I am known as an obsessive and serial debunker of false alarms. I have been at it for almost 40 years ever since I realised as a science journalist in the 1980s that acid rain was being wildly overblown as a threat to forests (I was right). This scepticism has served me well. I did not believe that mad cow disease would kill hundreds of thousands of people, as some “experts” were claiming in the mid 1990s. In the end just 177 died. Likewise, I refused to panic over bird flu, swine flu, SARS or ebola.

I set out to debunk exaggerated claims about the population explosion, peak oil and peak gas, nuclear winter, the ozone hole, pesticides, species extinction rates, genetically modified crops, sperm counts, ocean acidification and the millennium bug. In every case this made me unpopular and unfashionable, but close to the truth. I said climate change would happen more slowly and with less impact on storms, floods, droughts, sea ice and sea level than even some experts were claiming in the 1990s, let alone the extreme environmentalists, and it has.

It is very easy, in other words, to bet on the tendency of journalists and their readers to engage in a competitive auction of unjustified alarm. “The whole aim of practical politics,” said H.L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” And no, the fact that the millennium bug was a damp squib was not because we were well prepared; some countries and industries did nothing and were still fine.

So why don’t I think this hobgoblin is imaginary? First, because lethal plagues have a long track record. From the plague of Justinian to the Black Death to the Spanish flu of 1918 to the HIV epidemic, new diseases have proved they can burn through the human population with frightening efficiency. It’s true we have got better at eradicating infectious diseases through vaccinations, pills and public health, but most viruses are still very hard to cure and some are very easy to catch.

The second reason is that new diseases are often more dangerous than existing ones and this one has jumped from bats, possibly via pangolins. In the past respiratory viruses have generally proved to be low in virulence once they become highly contagious: hence the large number of rhinovirus, adenovirus and coronavirus strains that we call collectively, “the common cold”. Even flu has been relatively less lethal since the special wartime conditions of 1918. But when they first infect our species, viruses can encounter a vulnerable immune system and run riot.

The third reason for alarm in this case is the speed with which Covid-19 has crossed regional and international boundaries. It does seem to have acquired an unusual skill at getting passed on from one person to another, usually not making them so sick that they stay away from meeting other people, which is what prevents ebola causing pandemics, but yet being capable of killing about 1% of people it infects. This is the frightening combination of traits that we have feared might one day arise.

Then there is the effect of globalisation, and the huge growth in international travel. I wrote in my notes in 1996, when reviewing a book on new viruses, “If we persist in creating conditions in which viruses can be easily transmitted and amplified, then we will persist in experiencing waves of new viral epidemics. The problem lies in the ecology of our society, not destruction of the environment.” Human beings are just too tempting an ecosystem for an ambitious virus.

But we have indeed cried wolf over so many issues, that it has contributed to us being underprepared. We should have seen that globalisation would cause such a risk to grow ever larger and taken action to prevent a new virus appearing. We should have worried about things other than climate change.

Behavior geneticist Eric Turkheimer set out three laws of behavior genetics, Charles Murray reminds us (in Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class):

First law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
Second law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
Third law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

Murray adds some related findings:

Whether the topic was a Big Five characteristic such as extraversion or neuroticism or more specific characteristics such as tolerance, sense of well-being, or alienation, twin studies of heritability kept coming up with correlations for MZ twins that were more than twice the correlations for DZ twins, leaving no role for the shared environment.

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The literature on shared environment, nonshared environment, and heritability tells us that a family’s SES (income, parental education and occupation) is unimportant in explaining the cognitive abilities and personality traits that parents try hardest to promote.

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The bulk of the variance in success in life is unexplained by either nature or nurture. Researchers are lucky if they explain half of the variance in educational attainment with measures of abilities and socioeconomic background. They’re lucky if they can explain even a quarter of the variance in earned income with such measures. The takeaway for thinking about our futures as individuals is that we do not live in a deterministic world ruled by either genes or social background, let alone by race or gender.

COVID-19 could be pretty bad for you, Jacobian of LessWrong reminds us:

But the worst thing that could happen is that you’re seen doing something about the coronavirus before you’re given permission to.

I’ll defend this statement in a minute, but first of all: I am now giving you permission to do something about COVID-19. You have permission to read up on the symptoms of the disease and how it spreads. Educate yourself on the best ways to avoid it. Stock up on obvious essentials such as food, water, soap, and medicine, as well as less obvious things like oxygen saturation monitors so you know if you need emergency care once you’re sick. You should decide ahead of time what your triggers are for changing your routines or turtling up at home.

In fact, you should go do all those things before reading the rest of the post. I am not going to provide any more factual justifications for preparing. If you’ve been following the news and doing the research, you can decide for yourself. And if instead of factual justifications you’ve been following the cues of people around you to decide when it’s socially acceptable to prep for a pandemic, then all you need to know is that I’ve already put my reputation on the line as a coronaprepper.

Instead this post is about the strange fact that most people need social approval to prepare for a widely-reported pandemic.

As Eliezer reminded us, most people sitting alone in a room will quickly get out if it starts filling up with smoke. But if two other people in the room seem unperturbed, almost everyone will stay put. That is the result of a famous experiment from the 1960s and its replications — people will sit and nervously look around at their peers for 20 minutes even as thick smoke starts obscuring their vision.

The coronavirus was identified on January 7th and spread outside China by the 13th. American media ran some stories about how you should worry more about the seasonal flu. The markets didn’t budge. Rationalist Twitter started tweeting excitedly about R0 and supply chains.

Over the next two weeks, Chinese COVID cases kept climbing at 60%/day reaching 17,000 by February 2nd. Cases were confirmed in Europe and the US. The WHO declared a global emergency. The former FDA commissioner explained why a law technicality made it illegal for US hospitals to test people for coronavirus, implying that we would have no idea how many Americans have contracted the disease. Everyone mostly ignored him including all major media publications, and equity markets hit an all time high. By this point several Rationalists in Silicon Valley and elsewhere started seriously prepping for a pandemic and canceling large social gatherings.

On the 13th, Vox published a story mocking people in Silicon Valley for worrying about COVID-19. The article contained multiple factual mistakes about the virus and the opinions of public health experts.

On February 17th, Eliezer asked how markets should react to an obvious looming pandemic. Most people agreed that the markets should freak out and aren’t. Most people decided to trust the markets over their own judgment. As an avowed efficient marketeer who hasn’t made an active stock trade in a decade, I started at that Tweet for a long time. I stared at it some more. Then I went ahead and sold 10% of the stocks I owned and started buying respirators and beans.

By the 21st, the pandemic and its concomitant shortages hit everywhere from Iran to Italy while in the US thousands of people were asked to self-quarantine. Most elected officials in the US seemed utterly unaware that anything was happening. CNN ran a front page story about the real enemies being racism and the seasonal flu.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. of the New York Times recommends “going medieval” on coronavirus:

There are two ways to fight epidemics: the medieval and the modern.

The modern way is to surrender to the power of the pathogens: Acknowledge that they are unstoppable and to try to soften the blow with 20th-century inventions, including new vaccines, antibiotics, hospital ventilators and thermal cameras searching for people with fevers.

The medieval way, inherited from the era of the Black Death, is brutal: Close the borders, quarantine the ships, pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities.

For the first time in more than a century, the world has chosen to confront a new and terrifying virus with the iron fist instead of the latex glove.

At least for a while, it worked, and it might still serve a purpose.

The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, was able to seal off the city of Wuhan, where the Covid-19 outbreak began, because China is a place where a leader can ask himself, “What would Mao do?” and just do it. The bureaucracy will comply, right down to the neighborhood committees that bar anyone returning from Wuhan from entering their own homes, even if it means sleeping in the streets.

The White House, in defiance of recent American history, also opted to go medieval by aggressive measures like barring entry to non-Americans who were recently in China and advising Americans not to go to China or South Korea.

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This has led to much consternation among other public health experts, who argue that travel restrictions can cause more panic, misery and death than they prevent. Crowds may besiege hospitals, supercharging the infection rate. Closed borders can cut off vital medications like insulin. Factory and shop closings mean lost wages, hardships and possibly recession.

Also, quarantines feed racism and stigma.

Officially, the World Health Organization opposes travel and trade restrictions. It reiterated that even as it declared the epidemic a global emergency on Jan. 30.

But it now admits that they helped.

He tells a similar story of AIDS in New York City versus Cuba:

Meanwhile, the United States took a pro-legal-rights approach. Even offering an H.I.V. test was made illegal without a separate counseling session, which scared many away from testing. Although gay bathhouses were epicenters of transmission, there were long divisive fights over closing them.

After triple therapy was developed in the mid-1990s, most Cuban camps closed.

But the difference in lives saved by choosing brutality over freedom was stark: Cuba’s H.I.V. infection rate was for decades about one-sixth that of the American one. New York City and Cuba have roughly the same population. In the epidemic’s first 30 years, fewer than 2,500 Cubans died of AIDS. Over 78,000 New Yorkers — mostly gay men — did.

Steve Sailer asks, how useful in this particular crisis is decelerationism?

The respectable opinion has mostly been that it is inevitable that the infection gets into the United States so we should just keep the globalization pedal to the metal, because in the long run we’re all dead so whaddaya whaddaya?

My natural instinct, in contrast, is to try to decelerate, to spread the bad effects out longer. For example, we’ve got about a million hospital beds in this country, with a large fraction already in use every day. If the hospitals overflow, then things get very bad.

There are also reasons to be optimistic about next year or the year after for getting a vaccine.

But how much good can decelerationism do? I don’t really know, but we ought to be discussing the question of accelerationism vs. decelerationism.