> I should learn to never read anything from random people working in areas they don't have any expertise in.
This is one clear lesson that can be drawn from the pandemic.
This is one clear lesson that can be drawn from the pandemic.
Consider that many governments with professional public health departments, including those of the richest countries in the world, downplayed the unfolding disaster, completely blew it on containment as a result, and are now reduced to using _extremely_ expensive lockdown measures to try to buy time until someone can come up with a better idea.
Meanwhile, plenty of randos on the internet did the straightforward epidemiological math in January/February and correctly deduced what was coming.
I think a clearer lesson is that, sometimes, the designated professional experts will fail to outsmart a fairly simple and very well known system of differential equations.
If you find this conclusion terrifying, well, I agree.
Governments are ultimately run on a day to day basis by politicians. Proactive measures to prevent a crisis are a much tougher action to justify, especially if they negatively affect people in a way more direct than just spending their tax dollars, than reacting to a crisis. If anything I think this crisis should teach us something about how governments make choices.
I did some little thinking and modelling of my own late Feb, and reached the correct conclusions by following a simple exponential model, having very basic understanding of epidemiology, and being mindful of error bars (mostly ones created by me being a layman in the field).
On the other hand, I trusted WHO and CDC on masks around February; even posted things to HN to that extent. I now regret it and consider it a failure of not doing enough first-principles reasoning, and not digging into the feeling of confusion I had when reading the official advice.
What I got blindsided by was supply chain impacts. I read the daily updates on /r/supplychain with fascination; while I realized things are interconnected, I didn't realize just how much and in what non-obvious ways.
Bottomline, the lesson I draw from the pandemic is to trust myself a bit more, and attempt to carefully reason from first principles more often.
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Plenty of epidemiologists did the math and were talking about the situation on Twitter in January and February. I know because I was following them before China locked down. There were articles and interviews in the press from actual experts (Marc Lipsitch, Neil Ferguson, Michael Mina, Michael Osterholm) during that time.
There were science journalists (Helen Branswell, Kai Kupferschmidt) writing back then who were great at contextualizing the emerging information about the epidemic.
Dr Nancy Messonnier at the CDC warned that "Disruption to everyday life might be severe" on February 25th.
Meanwhile, randos were racking up karma across the internet with their back of the napkin bullshit.