It’s sort of a weird shift in perspective to read the latest SSC post and see the list of people praised for getting things right: all Westerners, many of whom started tweeting about it in mid-February or so, all seemingly distinguished by their ability to do cost-benefit analyses and reasoning under uncertainty.
When like, you know who else got it right? The entire city of Hong Kong. Back in mid-January, before there was a single case in Hong Kong, my Hong Kong coworkers were already warning me to avoid crowds and wear a mask when I went outside. The city effectively went on lockdown as soon as the first cases were reported, and it wasn’t the actions of a few informed people in the government, either (the widely reviled chief executive was in Davos at the time, and it took a strike by hospital workers to get the government to take steps like “restrict travel from mainland China”).
Idk, it’s obviously not that everyone in Hong Kong has rationality superpowers. I guess they just have a cultural script of “potential deadly pandemic -> start taking precautionary measures” which … sounds pretty reasonable in retrospect but apparently most of the world just doesn’t have.
This is the most cliche takeaway ever from a white person living in Asia but I think it has pushed me a bit towards appreciating the ways in which we can learn from other cultures, etc. Like, sometimes I think that the internet has connected the whole world into one big unified cultural blob–and then I see things from Chinese social media, which has a fuckton of people and its own totally different (and incomprehensible, to me) set of memes and aesthetics and hot-button issues. Hong Kong social media overlaps with Western social media a bit–they’ll both comment on articles in the New York Times or whatever–but it also has its own set of issues and views, and it’s impressive how with all this information traveling at the speed of light it still manages to stay about a month ahead of the discourse on my facebook.