I wonder what I should make of the fact that people I know who think a lot about risk (SREs, quants, etc.) are much more likely to still be taking covid precautions than random people.
@danluu I suspect it's less that we have better understanding of the risks in a purely quantitative sense than we understand "no idea what the error bars are *really* like on this, but it's a cheap precaution and the downside of not doing this could be really bad. This is a no-brainer, right?"
(And as an ex-quant-dev, I have strong opinions about the quants who understood risk vs. those who believed their models. Approximately right vs. precisely wrong.)
@danielellis I agree, but also flus kill a lot, just not all at once (nor overwhelming the health systems to make it worse) due to lack of immunity. I sometimes wonder if other diseases have subtle long-term effects that are just really hard to pick out of the background. I mean, we poisoned our lungs with lead for decades and I don't think the macro effects of that are clear still?
Given all that, I still love the way we might have accidentally driven B/Yamagata 'flu to extinction.
Re subtle long-term effects: people were finding correlations between number of (major) infections in one's past life and IQ. Obvious alternate hypothesis that's hard to eliminate: higher IQ causes people to be better at avoiding major infections.
