Non-EA interests include chess and TikTok (@benthamite). We are probably hiring: https://metr.org/hiring
Feedback always appreciated; feel free to email/DM me or use this link if you prefer to be anonymous.
Thanks for collecting this timeline!
The version of the claim I have heard is not that LW was early to suggest that there might be a pandemic but rather that they were unusually willing to do something about it because they take small-probability high-impact events seriously. Eg. I suspect that you would say that Wei Dai was "late" because their comment came after the nyt article etc, but nonetheless they made 700% betting that covid would be a big deal.
I think it can be hard to remember just how much controversy there was at the time. E.g. you say of March 13, "By now, everyone knows it's a crisis" but sadly "everyone" did not include the California department of public health, who didn't issue stay at home orders for another week.
[I have a distinct memory of this because I told my girlfriend I couldn't see her anymore since she worked at the department of public health (!!) and was still getting a ton of exposure since the California public health department didn't think covid was that big of a deal.]
Your answer is the best that I know of, sadly.
A thing you could consider is that there are a bunch of EAGx's in warm/sunny places (Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, etc.). These cities maybe don't meet the definition of "hub", but they have enough people for a conference, which possibly will meet your needs.
+1 to maintaining justification standards across cause areas, thanks for writing this post!
Fwiw I feel notably less clueless about WAW than about AI safety, and would have assumed the same is true of most people who work in AI safety, though I admittedly haven't talked to very many of them about this. (And also haven't thought about it that deeply myself.)
I doubt that there are surveys of when people stayed home. You could maybe try to look at prediction markets but I'm not sure what you would compare them to to see if the prediction market was more accurate than some other reference group.