Thinking About Lockdowns

[voice from the audience] Hey! Hey. Where's the Q&A?

[Grey] Oh… right. I lost track of time. [confusedly] What… year is it?

[retro video game sounds] How are you and Lady Grey doing during lockdown? We're fine. Though we have become real little homebody bots. Even more so than normal after we pulled up the drawbridge of Castle Grey and settled into our cozy quarantine. But this Q&A is getting ahead of itself.

Hello Internet. I hope you're doing alright. Lockdown is a weird, different time for all of us. And I know I promised this Q&A a while ago. But the problem has been because all my videos take a long time to make (even Q&A videos) I couldn't know into what state of the world this final video would set sail. A new dawn rising or an apocalyptic night setting. Impossible to know, so... let me first give an answer to an unasked question.

How do you make big decisions under uncertainty? For all decisions great and small, two things are true. One: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And two: the fog of the future hides vital information. This second point might sound so obvious it's not worth discussing but it's often forgotten when looking back at decisions you've already made. Giving a distorted perspective that decisions were clearer than they really were. When the reality is chiding yourself on a decision you should have made is sort of pointless.

Unless you're trying to learn something new for future decisions. And for something that looks like a novel global pandemic out in the fog, well, you're not going to have much information at hand and much of what you will have will be contradictory. So what to do? It's often advised to make a pro and con list when deciding. Which, is better than nothing I guess. But the format sort of implies each good thing is about as good as each bad thing is bad. Which is obviously not true.

Unfortunately, most good things have an upper limit to how good they can be, while bad things can be deeply bad. And a potential pandemic brings that forth with the specter of death. The simultaneous murder of every Future-You that would have been and could have been. So for risk calculations, that's like a negative infinity? Which really complicates things because Death looms everywhere.

To live life is to constantly risk death often with hilariously unbalanced calculations of you getting some tiny reward versus death getting to negative infinity you. But there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And with normal life, the trade-off is you try to ignore Death in the banal decisions of your day to day, (which lets you live life) but the risk is you can become oblivious to normal-seeming things that are really quite deadly.

And with a potential new Global Pandemic out in the fog there are a lot of normal-seeming things that might turn out to be really quiet deadly. Unfortunately, the information you need about that is also out there in the fog of the future. Then, when infection vectors and transmission rates and lethality and long-term complications are known, the decision will have been easy and you won't have under- or over-reacted. But it's now and you don't know.

There are risks and there are rewards. Everyone's calculation will be different but here's how it went for us. On my summer calendar were a lot of family visits and interesting and unique opportunities that were not replaceable. Losing those, not good. But, for my work, the aloner I am the better it usually goes. And personally, getting to wipe from my calendar every social obligation without hesitation or condemnation is not exactly a sacrifice.

Meanwhile, the Lady Grey is at unusually high risk of exactly this sort of pandemic mortality. Normal flu season is already not fun for us and this sort of thing potentially looming should make the calculation super clear for Castle Grey. Lock down early. Lock down long. But even for us, while we went into lockdown before our friends, it was still later than we should have in retrospect. Why? Well, it's that damn fog of the future again.

Information at the very start was uncertain and contradictory. Is this another flu? Well, every flu season is a risk for us, but we don't lockdown our lives for four months a year every year because that's too much of a trade-off. And with this, we felt a bit silly being the first ones to pull up the drawbridge and cancel all our plans. Looking back now, it looks like reckless delay, but of course, that's biased by the information Current-Us now have.

And, at the time of writing, we're facing the reverse problem. Lots of people are out and about as though life is back to normal. And there's pressure to accept invitations and opportunities. But we've learned from the past about feeling silly, and for us, the risk-reward calculation makes it clear that we still mustn't be too hasty to lower the drawbridge. That's the way for Castle Grey.

But an individual case can be easy in a way the civilizational case is not. So for that, let's discuss a theoretical global pandemic, not this particular global pandemic and how countries have to make decisions under the fog of the future, multiplied by millions of people.

So, is that a new global pandemic on the path? It's a little hard to see. Maybe it's another annual flu, which kills just a quarter to half million people a year. Or maybe it's another Spanish Flu that kills 25 to 50 million. Or maybe it's that once in a millennia Plague, 100 to 200 million. Those are big risks. So countries should lock down immediately, right?

Well, lockdowns are used because they're better at slowing a plague than nothing. But impermeable, they are not. A good lockdown is best spent to buy time to work out better treatments. Which, if a country locks down early and hard enough, and a treatment comes, that lockdown might save millions from the next plague. Assuming it is a plague.

But a hard lockdown will damage the economy. Now you might think the economy is the moneyed class checking their stonks on their smart phones, which it is, but it's also a measure of everything humans do that other humans value enough to pay for. Which is a lot. And includes the people and companies and governments working on better treatments, and all the people and companies and governments they depend on to be able to do that job.

National lockdown guarantees large economic harm immediately, and the downward curve of that harm accelerates. So a country needs to weigh that known harm against an upwardly accelerating curve of death, or potential death. Because, even in this video, this way of talking about a potential pandemic and drawing it out in the fog is too clear.

In reality, there's uncertain stories in a faraway place about how a dozen people might be sick from something maybe new. Based on that, if you were in charge of a country would you press the lockdown button and cause guaranteed economic harm immediately? Phawh, I dunno. And of course there isn't a lockdown button. That's again just a simplified way to just talk about the huge number of policy dials at hand. Which to turn up and which to turn down? Some really matter. Others don't. And you don't know which is which and underneath they're all interconnected in non-linear ways.

Don't mess up! Oh, and keep in mind, you will be judged, not about how good the decision was at the time (given the knowledge and trade-offs at the time) but you will be judged in the future by those looking backward where there is no fog and it was just so clear and obvious what to do. How could you possibly have not known that this was the next plague [slash] there was nothing to worry about all along?

Decisions under uncertainty are hard. Okay, well that was fun. Now on to some possibly tonally inappropriately chipper questions.

"Has lockdown affected tumbleweed?" I don't know, but I don’t doubt they're taking full advantage of the situation.

"How much do you think the world will change because of lockdown?" Long term, not a lot? It's easy when in a middle of a storm to think, "Wow, this is going to change everything forever!" But when the weather clears, people just go back to their regular lives and it's always, "Dear Princess Celestia, I didn’t learn a thing." I mean, that's often the best case.

What surprised me most (but really shouldn't have) is how little time it took for the pandemic to go from this is a humanity scale problem we must solve as a global humanity to fracturing in the usual tiresome ways with two groups each creating a totem, they can yell about how the other side is not just dumb but maliciously evil, which is very helpful.

So I guess I actually expect the next time round it will be worse because everyone living through this pandemic now will have picked their pandemic tribe when before they didn't have one.

"What do you miss most about going outside?" Taking a walk is really useful. Stuck on a problem or feeling anxious or just need a break? A little walk is the perfect solution in a way a treadmill desk just can't replicate. Even with a VR helmet. I've tried.

"How do you feel about the state of VR?" I bought my first set at the start of this lockdown and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. VR done well is truly a new medium to add to the list of film and books and even traditional gaming. It's just such a distinct experience.

And, especially when inside for weeks… or months on end, it's pretty good at tricking your brain into thinking you've gone somewhere else. The technology was over-hyped for two decades, but this is the start of something real, and Virtual Reality, along with Augmented Reality, is something I am pumped to see improve over the next two decades.

"What's the fifth most important station on Spaceship You?" The coffee station. Obviously.

"What about lockdown do you enjoy the most?" It's an amazing feeling of freedom to have a completely empty calendar. It makes me think of the end the school year, both as a student and a teacher. So excited to leave the pseudo-prison and all its pointless busywork and obligations, the structure of the human-imposed world fading away, and leaving me alone to be alone.

But summer can only be a season long. Eventually school and its tortuous tedium would return. And so it goes with pandemic season. The human-imposed world will return but the interregnum is nice.

"How will lockdown affect education in the future?" Well, I think primary and secondary school at least will be pretty unaffected, as we all jointly agree to pretend their primary purpose is education, not babysitification. But I think this quarantine has made plain some of the necessary lies of civilization around education, particularly higher education. But I leave what those are as an exercise for the viewer. For now.

"Your Spaceship You video made it seem like you have it all sorted in these strange times. How sorted would you say you feel, have you broken any of your rules?" Well, I feel pretty sorted. But I've been preparing for this my whole life, so I'm in a fortunate situation.

However part of the reason I made the Spaceship You video is because I was thinking of my younger self. When I first moved to London, I had college loans, no income, no job prospects, no social contacts, no real plans, just a room in shared accommodations. Those first few months in London were hard and had a global lockdown occurred then, it would have been a… dark situation.

So that video was a bit of a message in a bottle for my younger self of, "Hey, here's a bunch of stuff that will work for you. Do this and save yourself years of figuring it out." Because [spoiler], Spaceship You isn’t just a way to think about lockdown. It’s a way to think about your whole life.

Now, obviously my past self doesn't exist, because the past doesn't exist, so I can't send him a message, but human personality matrices are limited in possibility, so there are guaranteed to be lots of similar people who would be similarly receptive.

As for the second part, the rules get broken. But I don't call them rules in the video on purpose. They're targets. And the thing about a target is, no matter how good you are, no one hits the bullseye every time. A target is about taking aim.

"Have you actually placed colorful tape around the house to mark your zones?" No, but I did buy paint to make my office dark blue, the color I most associate with important work. It's the best way for me to make this part of my apartment feel as different from the rest as possible.

"What's the best board game for family quarantine time?" Oh, why Settlers of Catan, of course. If you haven't tried it, you really should.

"If you were a virus, what would your goal be?" To become irreplaceably symbiotic. Hitching a ride on the future of humanity is a better path to long term survival than killing your host. Viruses don't make plans, they just are. But they do tend to become less fatal over time for this very reason.

"Has the lockdown affected your schedule?" Oh, yes has it! I've made a calendaring discovery so great so monumental I've pulled it out of this Q&A because I want to propagandize it as far and wide as possible.

"What home-based exercises have given you the most benefit?" Without a doubt, weights. It’s simple and has the best return on investment. I don't like exercise. I never have. But a little set of weights have a lot going for them. You can start way easy and make spreadsheet-able progress quickly. Get yourself some dumbbells and a pull-up bar and you have maybe 65% the benefits of a gym without having to leave home.

"Are handshakes gone for good?" I hope so, but doubt it. I can only say they're gone for good for me.

"Has lockdown impacted your projects?" Oh yes. So last year I started working on videos for a playlist called Grey Goes Outside. And I had a really big Summer of Grey planned for some videos that were going to go on there and trips related to current projects and new places to visit and try to show people. But, then... yeah. Global pandemic.

My lockdown question for everyone has been: "When do you think you will next get on an airplane?" I’m curious for everyone’s answers because I don't know what the answer is for myself. How long will it be before I can visit an interesting place? I just don't know. The fog of the future, at this moment in time, is just too dense.

But, I'll put that playlist up on the screen now if you too are in lockdown and need a bit of vicarious outside viewing. See you next time, Internet. Stay safe.

[somber electronic music fades out]