Here “we” means the broader EA and rationalist communities.

Learning from failures is just as important as learning from successes. This post describes a few cases of mistakes and failures which seem interesting from the learning perspective.

Failure to improve US policy in the first wave

Early in the pandemic, the rationality community was right about important things (e.g. masks), often very early on. We won the epistemic fight, and the personal instrumental fight. (Consider our masks discourse, or Microcovid use, or rapid testing to see our friends.)

At the same time, the network distance from the core of the community to e.g. people in the CDC is not that large: OpenPhil is a major funder for the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and the network distance from CHS to top public health institutions is presumably small. As such, we could say the US rationality community failed instrumentally, given their apparent short distance to influence.

Contrast this with the influence of LessWrong on UK policy via a single reader, Dominic Cummings. Or our influence on Czech policy (see What we tried).

Also, contrast this with the #masks4all movement. This movement was founded by the writer and speaker Petr Ludwig (pre COVID, he was developing something like his own version of rationality and critical thinking, independent of the LessWrong cluster). After the success of grass-roots activity in DIY mask-making in Czechia, which led to the whole country starting to use the masks within a week or so, he tried to export the "masks work" and “you can make them at home” meme globally. While counterfactuals are hard, this seems a major success, likely speeding up mask uptake in Western countries by weeks (consider the Marginal Revolution praise).

Where was the “microcovid calculator for countries”? (see EpiFor funding and medium-range models.)

Overreaction through 2021

Personal reactions within the community in February 2020 were sometimes exemplary; apparent overshoots (like copper tape on surfaces, postal package quarantines) were reasonable ex ante.

But the community was slow to update its behaviour in response to improved estimates of infection-fatality ratee, long COVID, and knowledge of aerosol and droplet transmission. Anecdotally, the community was slow to return to relatively safe things like outdoor activities, even after full vaccination.

While you...

Learning from crisis