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The pandemic made me a lot more favourable to rat/EA people & worldview (was already v favourable). Felt very warm to see the community make good calls early on- and use that knowledge not only to protect their own families, but get involved in helping out others
I keep running into rat/EA + adjacent people who have directly joined governments to assist with pandemic stuff, or set up independent systems to help ordinary people cope when governments couldn't. Very virtuous behaviour!
Even in Taiwan where the outbreak was very well-handled, there were volunteers involved in setting up the mask rationing and distribution system - and now the same is happening with vaccine distribution in the West
Also more on board with some of the theory: was a bit sceptical of the idea of "hinge moments" where you could have an outsize effect on events, but having seen points during the pandemic where one bit of bad reasoning or a faulty assumption led to thousands of deaths I get it
One pandemic lesson which might be a challenge for rat/EA ideas was the prior focus on tangible or measurable aspects of government capability when assessing risks.
People forecasting pandemic or any other sort of preparedness will inevitably focus on measurable things like stockpiles of equipment, training, planning etc but the thing that seems to have been most important in the crisis is the character and ability of the people in charge
So if you relied on pre-pandemic measures of state capacity to forecast virus performance you'd have ended up way off bc of the missing variable. Not clear what we could do about that problem yet but getting more people who have noticed it to think about it will certainly help.
EA types can have a positive impact on that somewhere though, not just through donating and building but by directly sharing the things they are good at with governments: forecasting, reasoning under uncertainty, making difficult tradeoffs. Lots to be hopeful about!
