This great 2007 essay on hindsight bias is relevant when blaming people for not predicting the pandemic. With hindsight, we lay out the salient facts and it seems so clear. Experiments show that merely trying to adjust for hindsight bias doesn't work. 1/

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fkM9XsNvXdYH6PPAx/hindsight-bias

I have sympathy for those who were initially skeptical. Disaster predictions are frequent: nuclear war, Y2K, Peak Oil, WMDs, insectpocalypse. On first glance, coronavirus sounds like the latest doomsday thing that, for whatever reason, won't pan out. 2/ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature

If you do get into the details, coronavirus sounded bad, but I looked into insectpocalypse and that sounds bad too. I'm still not sure why it isn't killing us. But I shrugged, guessed it'd work out, and won a 26-month bet (2017-20) that we'd be fine. 3/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15503577

I don't mean that no-one is blameworthy, or that egregious mistakes are okay, especially by the people and organizations that are supposedly in charge of public health. This thread is partly to defend those who idly heard about it on the news and didn't think much of it. 4/

But it's also to defend against the strongest claims that various informed people were late. *Hindsight bias makes it inevitable that it would look like that.* Seriously, read that hindsight bias essay from the first tweet, it's excellent (and short). 5/

Considering the evidence for the event and imagining how likely the event would have seemed beforehand *is not a good way to know how likely it actually seemed*. You'll overestimate the likelihood if you do that, and probably still if you try to adjust for hindsight bias. 6/

In the absence of a good way to evaluate who actually should have predicted what and when, let's just praise those who were particularly early (e.g. @balajis and @kelseytuoc), and blame those who were particularly late. 7/end