There's some shockingly bad thinking in this article and I'm surprised that people seem to be taking it at face value. Picking just a few things that stood out to me:

> First, a bunch of generic smart people on Twitter who got things exactly right – there are too many of these people to name, but Scott Aaronson highlights “Bill Gates, Balaji Srinivasan, Paul Graham, Greg Cochran, Robin Hanson, Sarah Constantin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nicholas Christakis.”

This is pretty much the definition of cherry-picking. How many equally smart people got it wrong? Was there something in common among these particular people that led them to get it right, or did they hazard a guess on approximately the same information that everyone else had and then end up in the winning group?

There's a fun article somewhere in my bookmarks that I can't find right now, but it covers the phenomenon of some bettor -- at the race track, or the stock market, or something -- who has this crazy winning streak and nobody can figure out why. Maybe it's this person's lucky hat, or maybe it's the notes they take, or maybe... who knows. But the most compelling reason is that they just happen to be the 1 member of a very large group who, through probability alone, keeps winning.

This other article sort of mentions it in passing:

> The prosecution also had an expert witness, an economist named David DeRosa. He didn’t share Heeb’s views about poker. DeRosa used a computer to simulate what might happen if 1,000 people each tossed a coin 10,000 times, assuming a certain outcome — such as tails — was equivalent to a win and the number of times a particular person won the toss was random. But the results were remarkably similar to those Heeb presented: A handful of people appeared to win consistently, and another group seemed to lose a large number of times. This wasn’t evidence that a coin toss involved skill, just that — much like the infinite number of monkeys typing — unlikely events can happen if we look at a large enough group.

(https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/are-the-best-g...)

Back to the posted article...

> parachutes, etc. etc.

I mean, all kidding aside, there are enough parachute failures at this point to have a pretty good idea of the grim odds of surviving a fall from an aircraft without one.

There are some really good reasons for conservativism in medicine. We have lost many, many lives to cures, treatments, and preventions that were "common sense" and only later discovered to be wrong. Or, sometimes, work, but only accidentally. Scurvy is the historical go-to example here. Its cause and treatment has been discovered, lost, and rediscovered many times, and each time, there was some common-sense treatment for it that was wrong.

> Gallant wouldn’t have waited for proof. He would have checked prediction markets and asked top experts for probabilistic judgments. If he heard numbers like 10 or 20 percent, he would have done a cost-benefit analysis and found that putting some tough measures into place, like quarantine and social distancing, would be worthwhile if they had a 10 or 20 percent chance of averting catastrophe.

Gallant will spend his life preparing for the next disaster that has a 20% chance of occurring and will eventually end up living in a small off-the-grid cabin deep in the woods, slowly being poisoned by the well water that isn't being tested correctly or often enough.

There is an opportunity cost for preparing for disaster. I'm all for being at least a little bit prepared. My favorite hobby involves going out and retrieving people who were unprepared. But I never criticize them for getting into bad situations, because it can happen to any of us. (With the possible exception of people who don't evacuate from hurricane areas. Those people piss me off.)

You can't prepare for everything. Most of us have never lived through a situation like we're living through now. How believable would this all have been a year ago? Who could believe that we'd be willing to stop the world economy because of a virus?

The irritating nut of this is that this isn't necessarily something you can learn from. Okay, let's say you're one of the people that did the mental math and chose not to react -- a "Goofus", according to this article. So you learn from it, yeah? Next thing comes along with a 10% or 20% chance, you prepare for it. You're in California, so, earthquake: you fill up your garage with supplies. The earthquake never comes. Then there's a 10% or 20% chance of wildfire destroying your community... so you move, except the wildfire never hits that community. Armed robbery. Disease. Storms. All of these have some kind of low probability of happening, but will have super serious consequences if they do, so you -- remembering covid-19 -- prepare for each of them. Decades come and go, and eventually, you decide, hey, you're busy. You can't really deal with that thing right now. And besides, none of the others have happened. Except, this time the floods do come, and you're screwed again, and now some guy is writing about how all those people who didn't properly prepare for the flood had bad mental models for assessing risk.

> A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on face masks. It reviewed the evidence and found that they probably helped prevent the spread of disease. Then it asked: how did the WHO, CDC, etc get this so wrong?

Absent from the blog post he references is that there's uncertainty over whether face masks might actually increase the risk of infection among healthy populations of non-medical professionals. The thinking goes that some number of people don't know how to properly use the masks (which he covers) and that they end up touching their face more as a result, and that the masks that most people are using aren't great filters for this particular virus, so the net change in probability of getting infected is going up.

But this isn't a certainty. There isn't enough data to know for sure if this is true or not. Even after this pandemic runs its course, there will probably still be disagreement in the studies to come because of all the confounding factors at play.

It's a reasonable position though, and that's why people keep getting conflicting information on this. You can get some treatment of the debate and confusion around this from this discussion: https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fcwcn7/to_mask_or_... ...people are posting studies supporting one position, then rebutting them, then offering professional advice in one direction, and then others in another. It's a mess, and while that thread isn't rigorously scientific, essentially the same argument is happening at and between the CDC and WHO and others.