Statements of (purported) empirical fact are often strong Bayesian evidence of the speaker's morality and politics (i.e., what values one holds, what political coalition one supports), and this is a root cause of most group-level bad epistemics. For example someone who thinks eugenics is immoral is less likely (than someone who doesn't think that) to find it instrumentally useful to make a statement like (paraphrasing) "eugenics may be immoral, but is likely to work in the sense that selective breeding works for animals", so when someone says that, it is evidence for them not thinking that eugenics is immoral and therefore not belonging to a political coalition that holds "eugenics is immoral" as a part of its ideology.

I think for many people this has been trained into intuition/emotion (you automatically think that someone is bad/evil or hate them if they express a statement of fact that your political enemies are much more likely to make than your political allies) or even reflexive policy (automatically attack anyone who makes such statements).

This seems pretty obvious to me, but some people do not seem to be aware of it (e.g., Richard Dawkins seemed surprised by people's reacti

Anyone else look at the coronavirus outbreak and think this is how a future existential accident will play out, with policy always one step behind what's necessary to control it, because governments don't want to take the risk of "overreacting" and triggering large or very large political and economic costs "for no good reason". So they wait until absolutely clear evidence emerge, by which time it will be too late.

Why will governments be more afraid of overreacting than underreacting? (Parallel: We don't seem to see governments doing anything in this outbreak that could be interpreted as overreacting.) Well, every alarm up to that point will have been a false alarm. (Parallel: SARS, MERS, Ebola, every flu pandemic in recent history.)

Global equity markets may have underestimated the economic effects of a potential COVID-19 pandemic because the only historical parallel to it is the 1918 flu pandemic (which is likely worse than COVID-19 due to a higher fatality rate) and stock markets didn't drop that much. But maybe traders haven't taken into account (and I just realized this) that there was war-time censorship in effect which strongly downplayed the pandemic and kept workers going to factories, which is a big disanalogy between the two cases, so markets could drop a lot more this time around. The upshot is that maybe it's not too late to short the markets.

A descriptive model of moral change, virtue signaling, and cause allocation that I thought of in part as response to Paul Christiano's Moral public goods . (It was previously posted deep in a subthread and I'm reposting it here to get more attention and feedback before possibly writing it up as a top-level post.)

1. People are socially rewarded for exhibiting above average virtue/morality (for certain kinds of virtue/morality that are highly regarded in their local community) and punished for exhibiting below average virtue/morality.
2. As a result, we evolved two internal mechanisms: preference alteration (my own phrase) and preference falsification. Preference alteration is where someone's preferences actually change according to the social reward gradient, and preference falsification is acting in public according to the reward gradient but not doing so in private. The amounts of preference alteration and preference falsification can vary between individuals. (We have preference alteration because preference falsification is cognitively costly, and we have preference falsification because preference alteration is costly in terms of physical resources.)
3. Preference alteration changes o

After the hospitals fill up, the COVID-19 death rate is going to get a lot higher. How much higher? What's the fatality rate from untreated COVID-19?

This article may be an answer: it lumps together ICU, mechanical ventilation, and death into a "primary composite end point". That seems like an OK proxy for "death without treatment", right?

If so, Table 1 suggests fatality rate of 6% overall, 0% ages 0-14, 2% ages 15-49, 7% ages 50-64, 21% ages 65+. There's more in the table about pre-existing conditions and so on.

(ETA one more: 2.5% for people of all ages with no preexisting condition.)

Thoughts? Any other data?

(ETA: This should be viewed as a lower bound on fatality rate, see comments.)

Further alarming evidence of humanity's inability to coordinate (especially in an emergency), and also relevant to recent discussions around terminology: ‘A bit chaotic.’ Christening of new coronavirus and its disease name create confusion

ETA: It's out of stock again just a couple of hours later, but you can sign up for be notified when it's back in stock.

Possible source of medicine for COVID-19. Someone in the FB group Viral Exploration suggested inhousepharmacy.vu as an online pharmacy to buy medicine without prescription. I don't know them personally but they seem trustworthy enough. (ETA: Another seemingly trustworthy person has also vouched for it.) Hydroxychloroquine has been out of stock until a few minutes ago. I bought some myself in case the medical system get overwhelmed. Relevan

As of right now, I think that if business-as-usual continues in AI/ML, most unskilled labor in the transportation/warehousing of goods will be automatable by 2040.

Scott Anderson, Amazon’s director of Robotics puts it at over 10 years. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/1/18526092/amazon-warehouse-robotics-automation-ai-10-years-away.

I don’t think it requires any fundamental new insights to happen by 2040, only engineering effort and currently available techniques.

I believe the economic incentives will align with this automation once it becomes achievable.

Tran