'The Rationality community was never particularly focused on medicine or epidemiology. And yet, we basically got everything about COVID-19 right and did so months ahead of the majority of government officials, journalists, and supposed experts'
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Figuring out how to win the Brexit referendum proved MUCH easier than persuading critical people of what to do. Ditto in constitutional crisis july-december2019. And similarly March & Sep 2020 re covid
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Main problem viz politics is the incentives program critical institutions NOT to learn & to reject Rationalism. One of biggest mistakes v smart/accomplished ppl make re politics is they assume senior politicians are trying to solve problem X sort of rationally. No! Almost never
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As points out -- & which I've observed up close repeatedly -- politicians aren't even close to rational about elections that directly affect their own careers on short timescales...
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I'd probably get independent teams of superforecasters like those involved in epidemicforecasting.org, ensure their anonymity forever, have them predict the outcomes of different interventions, and pay them in retrospect based on accuracy. Call them "a panel of in-house experts".
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Did the Norman, Bar-Yam, Taleb (Jan 2020) paper ever reach you guys? It was influential in the US at least to get flights from China stopped, but it's influence sadly ended there.
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