The way this is written, the syncretic allusions to different subject matter, the obsession with Bayes... I feel like I'm a teenager reading LessWrong articles about cognitive biases again. :')
A huge fraction of LessWrong articles are actually about current events politics, but since you can't talk about current events on that website they mainly just allude to it while describing how they think their ideology should apply to interpreting it. (I know they don't consider it an ideology but that's just the word that describes it best.)
I feel this way about the vaccine. “95% effective at preventing infection” etc etc. I really believed it would stop transmission which we also know now is not true. Should have been more skeptical.
And before you say “that was before variants” remember that wasn’t the messaging. The message was “it’s safe and effective and protects others” and also “employer: based on what the CDC says take the vaccine or lose your job”
A lot of damaged trust in institutions these last few years.
I would say what NIH put out may have been "propaganda". But propaganda for a good reason: Saving the civilization. Think Will Smith/I am a Legend. So far we know that vaccines did very little harm and very much saved lives. And they saved lives because many people believed what NIH was saying. In other words they made a good effort in good faith.
Of course if they go too inaccurate they will lose their credibility which is not good. So why would they do so, I think they didn't.
Certainly there was great cause for concern and need for prudence in the early days of the pandemic, but COVID-19 was never an end-of-the-world scenario. Your appeal to I am Legend reinforces the parent's argument.
>So far we know that vaccines did very little harm and very much saved lives. And they saved lives because many people believed what NIH was saying. In other words they made a good effort in good faith.
You are begging the question: did the benefits outweigh the cost?
To answer this, we need good data, unencumbered scientific debate, and time. There is reason to suspect at least some of the data and processes used to authorize vaccines were of poor quality, or perhaps even subverted; it is hopefully clear that scientific debate is more restricted than usual; and, we have not had time to observe any long-term effects of vaccines, especially on populations for which the risk of COVID-19 is extremely small (e.g. children).
There is a vast middle-ground between anti-vaxxer and vax-maximalist that a reasonable and prudent person can occupy.
>Of course if they go too inaccurate they will lose their credibility which is not good. So why would they do so, I think they didn't.
You are presupposing that our institutions are rational actors, and that they are acting deliberately. Institutions can fail to perform their essential functions without malice. A conspiracy is not required for a more-dangerous-than-COVID vaccine policy to have taken place.
Whether or not this actually happened is a matter of nuanced debate.
> You are begging the question: did the benefits outweigh the cost?
Certainly a retrospective is needed, I assume somebody is doing it. But even if it turned out that benefits did not outweigh the cost, that was unknowable at the beginning of the pandemic.
Therefore it was prudent and wise to err on the side of caution. Hindsight is 20-20. We know and knew that vaccines work. Vaccines save lives. That fact has not changed because of Covid has it?
In the US > 1 million people died because of Covid. Most of them unvaccinated. Without vaccines it could have been millions more deaths. And with less anti-vaccine propaganda, and better pro-vaccine propaganda, it would probably been many fewer deaths.
So rather than simply pondering (and suggesting) the question of whether "benefits outweighed the cost" we need to also consider the alternative-cost. How many more would have, or could have, died without the vaccines?
>So rather than simply pondering (and suggesting) the question of whether "benefits outweighed the cost" we need to also consider the alternative-cost. How many more would have, or could have, died without the vaccines?
Agreed. But you are not actually speaking to my point. My point is that you cannot assert the vaccines were net-positive at this time.
I think there is clear evidence about the benefits of Covid vaccines and very little evidence of their negative effects. There are both of course but the scientific and medical communities must provide their recommendations after weighing on the pros and cons.
Now of course I could neglect their advise, and adopt your, or anybody else's advise instead, if you have one. Would that make much sense to me? Who's advise should I follow? Those who suggested that "injecting bleach" might kill the virus. I think I BETTER follow the advise of the established medical and scientific community.
I can't prove to you they are 100% correct all of the time. But it makes rational sense to me and everybody to follow their advise, rather than any random layman's advise out there.
The clear evidence about benefits of Covid-vaccines to me is that most of the million+ people who died of Covid were unvaccinated and many more millions of people who were vaccinated did not die or get seriously ill.
So how many millions of people did get bad side-effects from the vaccine? I haven't seen that number, was it in the millions?
But millions of people did get bad "side effects" (they died) from following the advise of those who told them to be afraid of the vaccine, to treat the pandemic as a "democratic hoax".
The fact that people turn to sophistry in defense of valid criticisms is evidence enough that people were mislead. Never mind whether it was intentional or out of ignorance. 95% effective at what? Preventing death? Preventing serious disease? Preventing spread? Preventing variants? The truth has come out and it was far from "95% effective" at anything.
Is honest discussion what you're trying to do? Did you expect to change the original poster's mind with a line-by-line list asserting the opposite of their own assertions? I find such posting kind of rude personally and almost never read such posts.
It’s not sophistry to point out that someone has unrealistic expectations.
Furthermore, you can’t ask yourself a bunch of questions and then ignorantly answer them all with “no” when vaccine efficacy studies set a clear definition of “effective”.
> vaccine efficacy studies set a clear definition of “effective”.
Those definitions changed after it became clear that the original definitions -- those on the basis of which the vaccines were authorized, and people pressured into obtaining them -- were not met.
If anyone had unrealistic expectations, it was policy-makers.
The first large peer-reviewed clinical trial published in NEJM in Dec 2020 had around 43,000 subjects and in that population there was about a 95% reduction in cases vs placebo. Over time, it is clearer that the effectiveness with respect to the all-cases end-point is less. But that appears to be less a function of lying and more a function of the incremental way in which biomedical science asymptotically approaches the truth through iterative study and better understanding of confounding variables etc.
It doesn't matter. What matters is that we don't see the number 100 anywhere, so one shouldn't pretend that anyone said the vaccine is 100% effective at anything with regard to prevention. If you decide to pretend someone did say that, it's not their fault.
It did lower transmission. Multiple studies confirmed this.
> remember that wasn’t the messaging
Yes, it wasn’t, because it’s generally considered bad practice to attempt to predict the future, and if they had you’d be complaining about them attempting to predict the future.
> the message was “it’s safe and effective and protects others”
All of the data agrees with this statement.
> A lot of damaged trust in institutions these last few years
The damage and trust lost was caused more by opportunistic politicans and mentally ill people than anything done by "institutions" assuming you mean Pfizer.
>I feel this way about the vaccine. “95% effective at preventing infection” etc etc. I really believed it would stop transmission which we also know now is not true.
The messaging was always that it would reduce the severity of the infection, not that it would stop transmission.
Manufacturers, CDC, etc. were explicitly clear about the difference between preventing infection and preventing severe illness upfront. If you heard, "How can you be so cruel? Take it for grandma," and went along with it thinking that that meant transmission is prevented, then you received that "message" from someone who - for lack of a better phrase here - was not an "official" messenger and/or was speaking out of ignorance, and you then opted to read no further into the accuracy of that statement yourself.
There are countless videos out there of officials touting that "the vaccinated do not transmit covid" but not that the goalposts have shifted, we're supposed to forget all about it.
Does "officials" mean the manufacturers and the bodies that approved the vaccines for use? Or does it mean politicians who spoke out of ignorance and/or opportunism?
when talking about mistrust, lying politicians are a fair target. There has been a lot of that going around this pandemic. If the argument is that the politicians lied but the CDC, WHO and other bodies did not... well I don't know what to tell you, they definitely did get caught lying. repeatedly.
Since we know that the NIH will block research that doesn't fit whatever is fashionable at the moment how can we trust anything they put out? If contrary results are forbidden then its not science. See for example this story from yesterday..
This is the cause of why NIH/Fauci said untrue things about Covid; he can't say true things, because new true information is too surprising and you'd lose trust in him due to it changing too fast.
Instead, he can only say things that "sound like what a trustworthy person would say", which is why they have to stick with medical dogma even when it's clearly expired.
No people dont trust fauci because of his absurd sense of entitlement and authority on something that is not knowable literally. You cannot unequivocally state that there will be no 10 year side effects for something that has not existed for 10 years. It is logically and physically impossible to make that statement and say it is a fact. Fauci confuses his opinion with the word fact. his hubris is why people don’t trust him.
> You cannot unequivocally state that there will be no 10 year side effects for something that has not existed for 10 years.
Sure you can. Vaccines aren't computer programs and their side effects can't be programmed to happen after waiting 10 years; instead, they'd happen very rarely at shorter times and then become more likely to happen over time. So you can catch them by very carefully observing a smaller population.
I'm in a study with a silly name (HERO-TOGETHER) which basically means Google emails you every other month to ask if you've died yet. So far I haven't.
Yikes, you can't post like this here. I've banned the account. Normally we give established accounts at least one warning before banning them, but your account has been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so frequently that it's far over the line.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Natural systems are massively complex. We know a lot, but it is still a small fraction. It's right to question things that seem too good to be true. Sometimes that may lead to further discovery about the underlying mechanisms. Although there are plenty of drugs out there that we don't know why they work, we just know that they do.
And on that note, most doctors (that you know personally anyways) will be skeptical of new treatments as they've seen the unintended consequences of previous miracle treatments. Things that have stood the test of time at least give you a better understanding of the potential outcomes.
You're assuming that the default is harmless. If you are seeing a doctor to seek treatment for a condition and you do nothing you still have the condition and whatever it brings.
If you are deciding whether to get a vaccine for a deadly disease but 10% of the people who get it die you need to weigh that against probability you could get the disease and die. It's not 10% death vs nothing
I'm not saying to do nothing. I'm saying new isn't necessarily better. If there's a long standing treatment with good outcomes and low side effects, then maybe it's best to use the old treatment. Take traditional joint replacement verses the cobalt replacements as an example.
I agree. I would frame though as even if you are 99.9% certain of something, you can never be so certain as to how important that thing is relative to other things. Often you are certain about something but it turns out to be a minor detail in a bigger game.
Not to mention verifying evidence is very hard, manufacturing evidence can be cheap, and instutitions have a bad track record about evidences.
After 20 years of internet saving the lies of people forever, showing thousands of submarine articles, photoshopped pics and now deep faked materials, can we blame people?
Of course not, plus the last two decades included two bullshit wars (straight lies), an economic collapse where institutions lied, and hysteria over the severity of Covid on key demographics (masks, politicization, and lockdowns on non-critical demographics, e.g non-seniors).
And that’s just America (or the West). How anyone trusts foreign governments of the totalitarian type is something else entirely.
This is what drives me absolutely nuts whenever I read about current events. Pfizer had to pay the largest fine in US history for a fraud case, yet questioning their data (which we weren't allowed to see until they were sued) is forbidden. We spent decades destroying the middle east with the justification being based on lies, yet to question the motives of the US in the current war is to be a traitor. Fauci was the one in charge of the response to AIDS, which everyone seems to agree was horrendous, yet he's now a national hero.
I really struggle to understand how everyone can just go along with it all and forget about everything when the next thing starts.
> Fauci was the one in charge of the response to AIDS, which everyone seems to agree was horrendous, yet he's now a national hero.
That's a very self-serving argument cherry picking from history.
Fauci was initially hated by the AIDS activists in the 80s but worked to gain their trust. You also don't factor in the societal hate americans had towards the gay population preventing research towards a cure.
Here's an article that gives a detailed account of what it was like back in the 80's.
>"I really struggle to understand how everyone can just go along with it all and forget about everything when the next thing starts."
My worldview is that all of us are far more "in-the-present" than we realize. I sense most people want to help, want to conform with what is seen as serving the greater good, and are willing to follow the lead of what the group seems to be doing. Not only are we overloaded with information, if we aren't being reminded of what "the good guys" did in the past that was either wrong or hypocritical, we won't know to make a fuss of it. Same story with "the bad guys" having done good things in the past.
The most eye opening thing for me was seeing the American political left embrace Liz Cheney while the American political right disavowed her. That flip was unexpected, but it makes perfect sense when it comes to what is immediately expedient.
> Pfizer had to pay the largest fine in US history for a fraud case, yet questioning their data (which we weren't allowed to see until they were sued) is forbidden.
Questioning it is fine, and the data should be public.
But also note that Pfizer also has credibility because they have made a decently high ratio of non fraudulent claims since they have a history of making and selling medicines that work.
Yes, imo - because they don't just mistrust - they randomly trust alternatives.
Mistrust is warranted, definitely. Trusting random sources that fit their heavy bias is something we should all be hyper aware of and fight. Yet we don't.
See, when a person already has evidence that 'other' opinions cannot be trusted, due to the many things being talked about in this thread by GP; It gives credibility to the alternatives because they at least make sense to those people's confirmation bias.
Meanwhile, your own confirmation bias is being given credibility due to the things you believe to be true.
This is the truth of all information until proven as objective fact. Until proven as objective fact, anyone can claim your 'truth' is just subjective; and thus potentially and highly likely wrong.
And so it fuels the fire.
The only solution (AFAIK) to this is that everyone leave each other alone for a while and let them figure these things out for themselves by letting good ol father time teach us what is right and wrong. Time. It's one thing in the universe that might not be lying to us, at least all the time; unlike humans who can't stop lying in attempts to ego stroke over being right.
> The only solution to this is that everyone leave each other alone for a while and let them figure these things out for themselves by letting good ol father time teach us what is right and wrong. Time. It's one thing in the universe that might not be lying to us, at least all the time; unlike humans who can't stop lying in attempts to ego stroke over being right.
Man, i couldn't disagree more - about this actually working, that is. This seems to assume that with time we will progress. I have seen the opposite enough to believe that we can, but also can just as likely regress.
There are many out there that want to go back to removing rights from people based on skin tone, orientation, religion, gender, etc. Too frequently we reach a regression milestone that originally was projected to be the end of the regression, only to have us ramp up for the next regression milestone and fight over whether the next milestone is the end.
I have zero faith in humans ability to cope here. I'm not sure on the solution, but to me it feels like we have a series of radio broadcasts which purposefully brainwash us and our only inclination is to turn the volume up, and make sure the neighbor can hear it through our windows.
I am very, very pessimistic on our ability to dig out of this when we still willfully dug ourselves in to begin with.
1. I never said it would happen quickly. Thing is, humans are rather impatient generally speaking. Especially when they think they are correct about something and must spread the enlightenment of their ego unto others.
Time, doesn't wait on us. We wait on it.
Here's an example: I play some MMO's now and then, and with the kind where people are fighting over territory in the game, all sorts of real world type politics ensue. Sure, it's just a game, but those are real people playing, meaning real brains doing things that they do; even in the real world. People who are actually morally upstanding act one way, and people who are actually terrible under their societal masks are... well... the other.
Sometimes you get to deal with drama that is absolute bullshit, where the people who are less than morally upstanding cast out a bunch of lies, mistruths, and royal stinkers.
What's the best way to deal with this? You just keep on doing what you do, provided it's not actually wrong, and leave them alone. What happens?
Well, in my experience, the rest of the actually morally decent and upstanding people take notice of this, and then go on to cast out the liar.
Now, you may want to say "But that's just a video game" or "That's just the internet".
But I disagree entirely to the ends of the earth. Humans are humans, no matter how or where they communicate. The only difference is that some have less inhibitions to do certain things, much like how alcohol affects them.
So the end result for me in these kinds of situations both IRL and online, is eventually people wise up. They eventually figure out that Manu40 isn't really the problem, and the real problem is the other asshole. (I say it that way, because I absolutely can be an asshole if I want to be.)
I've seen this sort of things play out with myself, and others, so many times; that I cannot agree with you. I can see where you come from though. Which brings me to #2.
2. Generally speaking, most of those problems you speak about in regards to rights, religion, race, gender, sex, orientations, etc, etc... most of these problems stem from people not leaving each other the F alone. These all stem from people being overly concerned, or angered by, or jealous of, or etc other feelings about other people.
I.E. If they just left each other alone, most things would be fine.
But humans don't like doing that, because again; ego. (And possibly a tinge of societal narcissism.)
You have zero faith in humans ability to cope; but might I ask you without seeming to be attacking you, if perhaps that might be part of the problem here.
You are not alone in your feelings, and so others act in a way to try to rectify each other in the guise of their opinions being holier than thou.
Do you see now why I say Time and leaving each other alone would help solve this problem?
I'm not saying it is going to resolve itself immediately or overnight in any way. It could take a long, long time. Weeks, months, even possibly years.
What I AM saying, is that so long as people are constantly getting up in each others face and shoving their opinions down each others ears and throats; none of this will get any better, until it gets bloody. And then, it could still be argued that it never got better; it's just the killers are all that's left over.
Not victors, killers. Because there is no victory in killing each other over opinions, and that's what this will turn into if people don't get over themselves, and leave each other the F alone.
I mean shit, I'm guilty of it right now too by even replying to you to potentially help have you see things from my point of view; and so are you in reverse.
Ideally, we'd all just stop typing and talking, and just mind our own damn business.
But that's hard, because like it or not; some of us are actually right, and yes you and I could be wrong right now. The solution could be something that neither of us have even thought of yet.
lol, I don't blame you for guessing that one, but no. I did have an account once upon a time ago, but I never went very far with it.
I speak of other games like New World and good ol ARK. I guess one might not consider these to be an MMO, but I do, since there are many players on many servers; though the numbers may vary.
father time? time by itself does not explain anything... is the new evidence that happens over time the one that teaches us. We are just doomed to a mostly monotonic growing time function. So we need action not that invitation to sit down and wait for the next time chunk to hit.
> Yes, imo - because they don't just mistrust - they randomly trust alternatives.
> Mistrust is warranted, definitely. Trusting random sources that fit their heavy bias is something we should all be hyper aware of and fight. Yet we don't.
Not exactly, IMHO mistrust is a two step process: 1. mistrust and 2. find alternatives to trust instead, in that order. I think 1 always starts first, through 2 can accelerate/reinforce it.
Mistrust puts one in an awkward, unsupported position in a world where things are way to complicated for one person to process, and it should be expected that it will take a long time for an individual to find an adequate replacement for institutions that have lost their trust (probably through trial-trusting other institutions then mistrusting them, too).
People trust what they FEEL good about. If two equally professional looking sources say different things. One says "you are doing something wrong, you will have to change how you think" and the other says "someone else is doing something wrong, you are thinking correctly" then they will trust the second source.
Even when the amount of evidence grows for the first source they will trust the second.
This is especially true if they will lose face for having trusted the second source.
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