This is a very low bar to jump over!
Anyway I read through that article. There's a lot of guff about Newcomb's paradox and Eliezer, and a single paragraph referencing COVID, with two links supporting your statement. I've clicked through those links and have come out unimpressed.
The first link is used to supported the claim that "The rationalist community was well ahead of the public": https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-p... .
Scott rightly highlights how the media and institutions got things wrong, but conversely gives only a few examples of "generic smart people on Twitter" getting some things right in the early days of the outbreak. He confesses that he himself did not predict the seriousness of COVID.
The second link is used to support the claim "the wider tech community, were using masks and stocking up on essential goods, even as others were saying to worry about the flu instead": https://putanumonit.com/2020/02/27/seeing-the-smoke/ .
The linked article was written at the end of February, when panic-buying had already firmly set in across the US.
There is nothing here about the reasoning or predictive abilities of the rationalist or EA community specifically. Nor is there any compelling comparison of its response compared to the wider public.
It looks like the Forum is confusing here: it has "Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness" [1] as one topic, and "Biosecurity" [2] as its largest subtopic. But when you click on the parent topic it's not showing the subtopic posts; I've filed a bug.
Older good biosecurity posts include:
* 2014: Good policy ideas that won’t happen (yet): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n5CNeo9jxDsCit9dj/...
* 2017: Biosecurity as an EA Cause Area: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eXgCREwL5PQWHEtvm/...
* 2021: Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/u5JesqQ3jdLENXBtB/...
[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/biosecurity-and-p...
"Some of the reasons I'm skeptical of natural risks are that first of all, they've never really happened before. Humans have obviously never been caused to go extinct by a natural risk, otherwise we would not be here talking. It doesn't seem like human civilization has come close to the brink of collapse because of a natural risk, especially in the recent past.
"You can argue about some things like the Black Death, which certainly caused very severe effects on civilization in certain areas in the past. But this implies a fairly low base rate. We should think in any given decade, there's a relatively low chance of some disease just emerging that could have such a devastating impact. Similarly, it seems like it rarely happens with nonhuman animals that a pathogen emerges that causes them to go extinct. I know there's one confirmed case in mammals. I don't know of any others. This scarcity of cases also implies that this isn't something that happens very frequently, so in any given decade, we should probably start with a prior that there's a low probability of a catastrophically bad natural pathogen occurring."
I wonder if this is a case of extrapolation fallacy? Modern human dynamical behaviour is significantly different to both animal behaviour and less modern behaviour. Viruses spread more easily in the age of global travel; those that used to be too deadly to spread very far suddenly have more opportunity.
EDIT: Reading this more carefully, the speaker does actually address globalisation, but seems to dismiss it as a counterargument and I'm not really sure why.
It would be interesting to understand how much of the "existential risk" category is devoted to biosecurity or pandemics, and how recent those posts are.
Pending the above, my tentative takeaway from this is that COVID - arguably the greatest threat to human health and wellbeing in the past several decades - seems to have been a minor/non-existent blip on their radar until it actually happened. This raises serious questions in my mind about the community's predictive abilities and/or bias.