Things I Learned Writing The Lockdown Post
Read the original on Astral Codex Ten →
Follows up on
↳ Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know — MMTYWTK · Jul 2021
Summary
A behind-the-scenes reflection on writing his big lockdown-effectiveness post -- unusually rich in method. Themes: Hanson's pull-the-rope-sideways (the smartest people kept redirecting to test-and-trace/vaccine-acceleration rather than the more-vs-less-lockdown tug-of-war); the multi-dimensional-analysis trap where thing #19 (Long COVID, emotional costs, incomparable cost types) overwhelms everything you can quantify (the marijuana-and-stoned-driving precedent); adversarial-collaboration-by-proxy (relaying critiques between experts who won't talk); deliberately using maximally-dumb models 'so dumb they can't lie' to bound effects; the asymmetric political-bias-adjustment / marked-vs-unmarked problem (flagging a conservative author's axe-to-grind but not liberal authors'); and the rationalist-trust-chain conflict of interest.
Why this score
Quality 75 · Excellent. Strong (upper): a dense, quotable meta-epistemics essay whose methodology lessons (rope-sideways, dumb-models-that-can't-lie, adversarial-collaboration-by-proxy, marked/unmarked bias) are broadly portable and genuinely useful; near the top of Strong.
Claude’s paradigm shift 52 · Moderate. Notable: several fresh, reusable framings for doing honest analysis of contested empirical questions.
Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Minor/within-discourse: a reflective methods essay with no direct material footprint.