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>but lots of people were predicting a pandemic, even covid-like if I remember correctly.

If you look at [1] the January 2020 - predictions for 2030 thread here on HN, and look for hints of the Covid pandemic, there are only 3 mentions of any type of pandemic, and none of those was close to an actual hit. I did the reading, all of the reading.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278

Obviously I'm not talking about techbros on HN, almost none of whom knew anything about epidemiology, vaccines, or viruses until they all became experts by obsessively staring at youtube twitter and wikipedia for hours on end, predicting a pandemic before 2020.

Super interesting. I feel like just a very short time later, this would have been very different. I was on a flight from Germany to Japan via Shanghai on 7 January 2020 and in my memory, that "new virus from China" was already a concern (although only because I was passing through China), and about 2-3 weeks later, masks were sold out EVERYWHERE in Japan (or Tokyo at least).

It feels crazy now that, despite all that, I went to the Ghibli Museum with my friends at the end of February 2020 and it was packed with people (and barely anyone wearing a mask). Just a week later, my return flight to Germany was canceled and I became concerned that I might get stuck in Japan. By the way, I was able to get on a flight on 20 March 2020 (Narita to Frankfurt) and it was almost completely empty. Things happened so fast.

You could predict a pandemic at some point (and given the parameters of a pandemic say it would have to look something very much like COVID), it's very difficult to predict any given pandemic. In the same way that you could predict that there would be another war in europe, and roughly who would be on each side, but not the exact circumstances by which it would break out. And it's usually easy to find someone predicting any given event after it happens, because there's a lot of people saying lots of different things about the future (see market crashes for another great example).

> You could predict a pandemic at some point

Okay so the pandemic was predictable and it was predicted. I'm not interested in semantics quibbling if you want to say it wasn't predictable, I'm interested in the contradiction between claims that the pandemic was not predictable and yet other similarly hard to predict things are predictable.

When seen in his "world in 10 years"-view, it absolutely makes sense. If someone plans to build a house and bought the plot, you can predict that he will have a house in 10 years with quite high confidence. All the people who are in their forties now will probably have quite expected lives in their fifties and most of them will probably still be alive. We can be quite sure of this.

The world being in complete lockdown, in bonus with a large anti-science movement, or nukes being developed and used within a few years are quite advantageous predictions, to put it lightly.

And of course the pandemic was "quite easy" to predict ; the problem is that we have a lot of survivorship bias in those predictions. For every prediction that's "scarily precise" right now, hundreds have completely failed.

> When seen in his "world in 10 years"-view, it absolutely makes sense. If someone plans to build a house and bought the plot, you can predict that he will have a house in 10 years with quite high confidence.

It absolutely makes sense to say the pandemic was not predictable in a given 10-20 year timeframe. The issue is if that is the standard he sets then many of his other predictions are also not predictable.

Fair point!

I think it terms of response if there is say a 5% chance of a global pandemic happening in any one year the world won't act all that much differently than if there was a 0.1% chance. The board political and societal will to do something can only really be directed at things right in front of us.

I saw a quote recently along the lines of as much as spent on a single soccer team as the worlds budget for detecting near earth asteroids.

> lots of people were predicting a pandemic

yes — even William Gibson, in a book Stross references in this blog post by using its term “the klept.”

for that matter, Obama predicted it too, setting up a pandemics office, and he did that because as (again) Stross himself says in this blog post, this pandemic came along after two prior coronavirus pandemics.

(I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on this.)

> (I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on this.)

I suspect you (and parent) may have misunderstood him. IMO, he meant a pandemic (like COVID-19) - just like WWII - was predicted by a lot of people. What people could not predict (for both scenarios) was when it would happen.

Would anyone have predicted that a sizeable minority of people would simply deny the existence of the pandemic and/or refuse to do the most basic precautions to protect society?

Not ten years ago.

Yeah, that one has really thrown me for a loop. Just how willing a large segment of the population can be to "score points" against the other side... by killing themselves.

It is kind of funny, the pandemic could have been politicized the other way as well: "wear a mask to protect yourself from ethnic group's disease", and such.

But as it turned out, the primary concern was with just one man's ego, and trying to pretend that everything is fine... until it clearly wasn't.

fun fact, masks were politicized the other way during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. try "homosexual diseases threaten american families" on Google Images.

anyone who looked at the history of the 1918 pandemic in the US might have. a lot of the same things happened, for example fighting over masks. a guy was shot in San Francisco for refusing to wear a mask.

Was about to say this. The "explained" episode on the next pandemic from vox was downright conspiracy inducing given that it was released on Netflix like, what, 2 months before covid 19 hit?

Bill gates in the interviews talking about disease X still haunts me. As does the faux optimism espoused in that vox explained episode.

My point is that if bill gates predicts it, it was predicted.