social and brain weird bad, coronavirus 

me: we should meet up! anycreature wanna meet up? meet up! cool animals! dirtspace! anycreature? everycreature is out of meetup range. sad. ;-;
anycreature: hey i'm gonna be in meetup range—
me, instantly: no. what? no. absolutely not. bad. how dare you. what are you even doing? you should be at home! don't you know there's a pandemic on!!

coronavirus 

to be fair to everycreature else, I never actually evaluated anything; when the pandemic hit I just went WELP i guess i'm not going ANY WHERE until this is ALL OVER and then proceeded to stay in the same place for the ensuing *glances at watch* 2 years and 6 months and counting

coronavirus 

is it okay to travel? is it okay to meet up with creatures who are traveling? i don't know! i just /assumed/ it wasn't!

coronavirus, capitalism, reality is horrible, --- 

the obvious answer is “go look on the CDC website; anything it says you can do, you can do”, but we know that institutions have killed creatures trying to rush this along, and i'm not certain anymore that that source is trustworthy

the capitalists want us to ignore the pandemic and resume business as usual so that they can go back to extracting wealth at prior volumes, and to hell with all the creatures they scar and kill in the process. i don't want to contribute to that. i want to do this /right./ no matter how long i have to wait.

but how do i even know what i need to do?

coronavirus, capitalism, reality is horrible, --- 

i'm not a doctor or an epidemiologist or a data scientist. i don't know how this stuff works. i mean, i /want/ everything to go back to normal, but since they couldn't manage to fix this in TWO AND A HALF FUCKING YEARS, it's very clear at this point that it's going to be a long and painful recovery, if at all.

coronavirus, capitalism, reality is horrible, --- 

is this an advice request? i don't know. probably not, because some creatures on here have been doing things that are /definitely/ unsafe. i mostly don't know what's in and what's out, but i /do/ know that conventions are off the table.

i don't know who i can trust.

coronavirus, capitalism, reality is horrible, --- 

@moonbolt It's useful to come up with order of magnitude risk estimates of getting sick with covid (risk of dying if sick, risk of <sufficiently bad outcome> if sick) and, which is harder, OoM estimates of risks of getting sick under various conditions. (There is an obvious problem here with defining "sick" -- you need to ensure that both of these use the same meaning of sick.) Afterwards, you can compare incremental risks of decisions with risks of other things you might be deciding to do (e.g. skiing, getting somewhere by car, riding a bike). This should give you an intuition for risk levels, or at the very least should give you an estimate for the level of risk you're fine with.

Also, staying at home might have risks attached to it (because you move less, because your daily routine is falling apart less, etc.). I haven't tried estimating them, but doing so might also be helpful.

coronavirus, capitalism, reality is horrible, --- 

@robryk
I'm not confident I can do that correctly
even if I could, how do I include the estimated risk of me getting other creatures sick?

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coronavirus, capitalism, reality is horrible, --- 

@moonbolt

First, second part: There are two reasons you would care. One of them is safety of people you directly interact with and the other is Kantian approach to affecting the societal outcome.

For the first of these, I expect those people are doing some estimates of their own or are following some rule-based approach. I'd ask them. If that fails to yield anything useful, I'd put myself in their position, see what I'd be doing then, and behave in a way that me-in-their-position would find fine. Thus the problem reduces to the original one.

For the second, I stopped trying to reevaluate it a long time ago, because I consistently concluded that this produced requirements that were less strict than the ones produced by other concerns. (That's basically always the case when you aim at a lower chance of contracting covid than the societal average.)

I'm going to redo my estimates for the original question soonish, so will write them up while doing them in a following post.

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