All of Jess Kinchen Smith's Comments + Replies
your face
To clarify- is it face or mucous membranes? I've seen 'face' everywhere, and I can't really understand how touching my forehead would infect. Thanks!
4
4y
Face, sort of. The major vector of infection is getting virus into your noes/ mouth/ eyes etc, not really by touching your forehead. But instrumentally, I think full face is what makes sense here. Once you have touched your forehead, your face is not a clean zone anymore; when you go to bed and put your face on your pillow, you'll (possibly) be transferring virus there. Likewise once you thoroughly wash your hands once home and let yourself rub your face, you could be recontaminating your hands and spreading the virus from your forehead to some mucus membranes. Even if this wasn't the case, I think it is also easier to self control a "no-face" rule than make a judgement about exactly where your mucus membranes are every time you have a face itch (that itchy place near my eye is still skin, right?)
My first also implies avoiding touching your hair, but I haven't followed up on this (I avoid it myself and think it would be prudent in general but don't know what standard practice is among e.g. health care workers)
3. This means the virus is going to spread. Both models and reference class forecasting against diseases with similar R0 suggest that a large fraction of the population will be infected before treatments arrive, e.g. Harvard School of Public Health's Marc Lipsitch citing 40-70% of population infected.
Do you have any thoughts on the Metaculus estimate?
1
4y
I think it is a little low but right order of magnitude (lower when you asked this question).
Thanks. I've updated towards your estimate but 1/3 still seems high by my (all too human) intuitions.
P(it goes world scale pandemic) = 1/3, if I believe the exponential spreading math (hard to get my human intuition behind) and the long, symptom less, contagious incubation period
How do you arrive at 1/3 here?
8
4y
It's based on a few facts and swirling them around in my intuition to choose a single simple number.
Long invisible contagious incubation period (seems somewhat indicated but maybe is wrong) and high degree of contagiousness (the Ro factor) implies it is hard to contain and should spread in the network (and look something like probability spreading in a Markov chain with transition probabilities roughly following transportation probabilities).
The exponential growth implies that we are only a few doublings away from world scale pandemic (also note we're probably better at stopping things when their at small scale). In the exponential sense, 4,000 is half way between 1 and 8 million and about a third of the way to world population.
... current marginal cost of saving a human life is around $5k to $10k, and that under mildly optimistic assumptions about the growth of EA style charity, it will rise to $100k in a decade or so.
How did you arrive at the 100k figure?
"Possible Edge Cases in Dietary Effects on Animal Welfare"
When I do consume meat, it's 'humanely raised' (grass-fed etc. etc.) or wild-caught. I think the state of the art on the ethics and evidence around these food sources (vs. plausible substitutes) is muddy, and I want to publish my thoughts so someone can help me see things more clearly.
2
4y
I would personally find this very useful!
Thanks for making this!
A nitpick: the top-left Harvard logo should IMO be a few pixels toward center.