I note your typical disdain for the anti-vaxxers. You probably have your reasons. I struggle to discount them as quickly. If I were a betting man, I would bet there are some pretty bright and well-reasoned ones in the mix. I don’t think I can predict the future well, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find out in 10 years the anti-vaxxers were right, for the right reasons, and that we should have given their reservations far more careful consideration[0].
If you care about being fair to that class of people[1], you need to put more thought into the position of anti-vaxxers.
I note zero comment, analysis, or consideration for people who got Covid and recovered. How do they fit into this whole mess? Ctrl-F “recover.” No hits.
You applaud France’s rules that would require recovered Covidees to get vaccinated. Is this your disdain for those who trust immune systems to do their jobs? Or did you and France just forget about their existence entirely? Maybe some third option I can’t fathom[2]?
You seem well-intentioned to me, and I read your posts thoroughly because I feel there’s signal here. But don’t be surprised if certain people, many of them, even very bright and well-reasoned ones, write you off as a political pro-vax hack.
Everything I’ve seen so far says vaccination is a political issue, not a health concern. The evidence we choose to consider, the experts we cite, and the science we believe seem to depend on the agenda we’re pushing.
____________
[0] Is “Fox News agrees with them” good enough to just write them off entirely, and ban them from the internet? Sure. Why not? Censorship has a long and illustrious historical record, full of good intentions and great results.
[1] If I’m being honest, my experience shows fairness in a political fight yields near zero benefit to anyone on either side of the political debate and costs a massive amount of stress. Hence, you probably shouldn’t bother being fair. Continue to be a pro-vaxxer, wear the badge proudly, and embrace the biases it gifts you.
[2] If I’m being honest, I’m not actually a terribly bright person. I consistently fail to be able to fathom the third option in the dichotomy.
Decisions about covid policy have been mostly political, but vaccines weren’t political before that. Consider smallpox. Smallpox was all over the world and apparently unbeatable. It was described in China in 340. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln got it, and if they died history could have gone way differently. https://rootsofprogress.org/smallpox-and-vaccines. It was just a thing that sometimes happened to people, and nothing could be done about it. Suddenly, as soon as vaccines were applied to a region. Smallpox was completely eliminated there.
A similar thing happened with Polio, Tetanus, Hepatitis A and B, Rubella, Measles, Hib, Whooping Cough, Pneumococcal Disease, Mumps, Diptheria… They are almost gone, and the only people who get them now are in places that haven’t gotten consistent and almost complete vaccination.
In fact, there’s one that most people alive remember. Chicken pox used to be seen as an inevitable childhood disease, to the point that people used to throw “pox parties” to get it over with. but when the vaccine was invented in 1995 it rapidly decreased, and I don’t know anyone my age who has gotten it (born in 1996). It’s pretty much gone now.
Zvi isn’t trying to have “fairness in a political fight”, as if the sides were equal. The “vaccines are effective” side is totally crushing the “vaccines are bad” side. And plague doesn’t care about your politics.
Strongly upvoted as well, and I agree with Vanilla_cabs—I don’t think it helps classifying everybody concerned about covid vaccines as anti-vaxers. Maybe we need a better term.
Here is an analysis taking into account recovered people with natural immunity in the US:
I don’t think it helps classifying everybody concerned about covid vaccines as anti-vaxers. Maybe we need a better term.
The better phrase would be ‘people with concerns about COVID vaccines’. (Hopefully these people would also have specific, and reasonable, concerns too.)
‘Anti-vax’ seems to reasonably cover people skeptical of, or hostile to, vaccination generally.
Do you have a tldr on why we might think anti-vaxxers were right for the right reasons? Seems like the default positions are “vaccines have obviously worked in the past and we’re pretty sure they’re gonna work in very similar ways today”, and I haven’t seen anything that changes my opinion much about either of those defaults.
Regardless of the general point, I think you’re making a noncentral fallacy here. This vaccine differs from the vaccine archetype for multiple reasons: it uses a new, different technology, it was rushed and we have no hindsight on its long-term side effects, it does not offer as strong a protection as expected from a typical vaccine (in particular, not strong enough to eradicate the virus even if it had maximum coverage), it’s used at the height of a pandemic with the risk of creating variants through recombination, the potential market has never been this huge, thus increasing the incentive for foul play. This is not a typical get-1-shot-go-carefree-for-10-years vaccine.
we have no hindsight on its long-term side effects
That’s going to be true of any new vaccine too, which isn’t helpful for deciding whether to create or use any new vaccine. (But we do have “hindsight” on every other vaccine.)
it does not offer as strong a protection as expected from a typical vaccine
We could play some reference class tennis with this one as I don’t think we’ve ever had a vaccine for a virus similar to this one. And it seems arguably reasonable to consider the ‘flu vaccine’ as ‘typical’ and that (those) seem to offer even less protection than these.
the potential market has never been this huge, thus increasing the incentive for foul play.
What do you mean by this exactly? That the “potential market” possibly includes everyone? That doesn’t seem to be that different than for other vaccinations, tho maybe you do have a point given that we’re all in the middle of a global pandemic, whereas more ‘typical vaccinations’ only have a ‘market’ for some narrow age cohort.
This is not a typical get-1-shot-go-carefree-for-10-years vaccine.
And it seems arguably reasonable to consider the ‘flu vaccine’ as ‘typical’ and that (those) seem to offer even less protection than these.
Which is why when someone wants to impress you with the historical track record of vaccines, the flu vaccine conspicuously remains out of the picture.
What do you mean by this exactly? That the “potential market” possibly includes everyone? That doesn’t seem to be that different than for other vaccinations
I guess maybe some other vaccines have a near-worldwide cover. Note that since world population and GDP has always been going up, every new global pandemic creates de facto an unprecedented huge potential market. Though not by much. So, I don’t know?
Ok, so at this point maybe we can agree that:
1/ The COVID vaccine is less efficacious than touted last year, when the population was convinced to wait and expect salvation from it.
But:
2/ Strangely, 1) does not seem to have led policy/opinion makers to shift their bets on other horses or mellow their speech. Actually, pro-vaccination speakers have greatly radicalized this year, now advocating more and more openly shaming and punishment of unvaccinated people.
That looks something like Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs if the cult was so powerful it could punish dissenders. And I’m honestly frightened by that.
2/ Strangely, 1) does not seem to have led policy/opinion makers to shift their bets on other horses or mellow their speech. Actually, pro-vaccination speakers have greatly radicalized this year, now advocating more and more openly shaming and punishment of unvaccinated people.
That looks something like Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs if the cult was so powerful it could punish dissenders. And I’m honestly frightened by that.
I agree that this is a Sad own-goal – politicizing the vaccination efforts – but that’s because I’m convinced that the vaccines are pretty effective.
But I don’t think it’s actually ‘strange’ that this happened; Sad, yes, but not strange (or thus unexpected).
One takeaway should already be obvious to anyone who’s concerned with AI alignment or read Superintelligence: don’t applaud when a growing potential tyrant does what you want.
don’t applaud when a growing potential tyrant does what you want
So, don’t “applaud” anything a “growing potential tyrant does”, beyond maybe something demonstrating that they’re not (or no longer) interested in ‘growing their tyranny’?
A better way of phrasing it might be “don’t applaud a growing potential tyrant who seizes additional power just because they happen to do something you want with it.” I do think the message is clear even without that change.
That is better! I didn’t think that the original comment directly linked the ‘doing something you want’ with ‘seizing power’ – that makes a lot more sense to me.
If a potential tyrant did something like relinquishing power, then by definition they wouldn’t be growing.
Edit: Oh, you mean the rule can be generalized, and after doing so seems too general for you? But it is the same rule. If you should applaud a single thing, that’d be something you want. So the implication goes both ways.
Meh – there seems to me to be a lot of ambiguity about what ‘applauding’ is, or what purposes it serves (or is intended to serve), but still, I’m confused why you wrote:
don’t applaud when a growing potential tyrant does what you want
instead of just:
never applaud a growing potential tyrant
Certainly the rule isn’t:
only applaud when a growing potential tyrant does what you do NOT want
As for your reply:
If a potential tyrant did something like relinquishing power, then by definition they wouldn’t be growing.
Okay – but a “potential tyrant” could be growing at some point and then, after relinquishing (some) power, either no longer growing, or growing slower, or even shrinking. I don’t understand why a ‘by definition’ argument clarifies this.
But still – why even bother to posit a rule about ‘applauding’ the actions of a potential tyrant at all? What’s your theory about the efficacy of such a rule? What’s the point? And why qualify such a rule to only those occasions when the potential tyrant “does what you want”?
And why qualify such a rule to only those occasions when the potential tyrant “does what you want”?
Because nobody needs to be warned not to applaud a potential tyrant who does not do what they want.
The idea is derived both from Superintelligence main metaphor, where sparrows try to raise an owl to solve all their problems, representing AGI without care for alignment, and past human history. In order to solve a problem, one feeds a monster that (quickly) ends up becoming much worse than the initial problem. I remember reading that in conquering the Aztec empire, Cortés took advantage of the resentment that existed between local tribes and the central government ; so did Caesar when he took over the Gaules. In fiction, the novel Brown Morning describes a slippery slope towards tyranny where some fail to react early because they’re not concerned or have something to gain. The novel is very naive and simplistic, but short, universal and to the point.
Here I’m reminding that the political actor that OP notes for their efficiency, reaches such ‘efficiency’ through oppressive measures, lacks the solid legitimacy required to impose such extreme measures, and has an history of playing fast and loose with the tenets of democracy that predates this crisis. That’s not a move in isolation, and if you look at the big picture, it’s clear that ‘public health’ or ‘saving lives’ is not the endgame of these measures. Therefore, supporting those measures would be short-sighted.
I’m pretty skeptical that this analysis applies to the specific example you mentioned – or not particularly strongly anyways.
But I didn’t interpret your original comment as, or even notice the possibility of it, directly linking the ‘doing something you want’ with ‘seizing more power’. aphyer’s comment helpfully clarified that.
Depends on the amount of the fine. But even if it was reasonable, the government of my country would need to produce at least 2 other components to make a credible good will attempt at saving lives:
They should be increasing the number of hospital beds available and hire health professionnals, instead of closing beds as they’ve been doing throughout the pandemic
They should set boundaries to the duration of the fine, promise not to raise it or lenghten it, and have a credible way of showing they’ll keep that promise, or, barring that, a track record of keeping their word. Instead, they have emergency powers, can pass decrees without parliament approval, and have consistently broken their words arguing that “the circumstances have changed”
I guess what I like about fines is that they have a well defined endpoint. They end when people have either complied with whatever they need to comply with OR they’ve paid the fine.
As for hospital beds—absolutely. In fact another reason I lean toward fines is that the money can be earmarked for very specific things, like treatment.
I’m not sold on the idea of everybody needing a booster shot forever, if that’s one of your concerns.
I note your typical disdain for the anti-vaxxers. You probably have your reasons. I struggle to discount them as quickly. If I were a betting man, I would bet there are some pretty bright and well-reasoned ones in the mix. I don’t think I can predict the future well, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find out in 10 years the anti-vaxxers were right, for the right reasons, and that we should have given their reservations far more careful consideration[0].
If you care about being fair to that class of people[1], you need to put more thought into the position of anti-vaxxers.
I note zero comment, analysis, or consideration for people who got Covid and recovered. How do they fit into this whole mess? Ctrl-F “recover.” No hits.
You applaud France’s rules that would require recovered Covidees to get vaccinated. Is this your disdain for those who trust immune systems to do their jobs? Or did you and France just forget about their existence entirely? Maybe some third option I can’t fathom[2]?
You seem well-intentioned to me, and I read your posts thoroughly because I feel there’s signal here. But don’t be surprised if certain people, many of them, even very bright and well-reasoned ones, write you off as a political pro-vax hack.
Everything I’ve seen so far says vaccination is a political issue, not a health concern. The evidence we choose to consider, the experts we cite, and the science we believe seem to depend on the agenda we’re pushing.
____________
[0] Is “Fox News agrees with them” good enough to just write them off entirely, and ban them from the internet? Sure. Why not? Censorship has a long and illustrious historical record, full of good intentions and great results.
[1] If I’m being honest, my experience shows fairness in a political fight yields near zero benefit to anyone on either side of the political debate and costs a massive amount of stress. Hence, you probably shouldn’t bother being fair. Continue to be a pro-vaxxer, wear the badge proudly, and embrace the biases it gifts you.
[2] If I’m being honest, I’m not actually a terribly bright person. I consistently fail to be able to fathom the third option in the dichotomy.
Decisions about covid policy have been mostly political, but vaccines weren’t political before that. Consider smallpox. Smallpox was all over the world and apparently unbeatable. It was described in China in 340. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln got it, and if they died history could have gone way differently. https://rootsofprogress.org/smallpox-and-vaccines. It was just a thing that sometimes happened to people, and nothing could be done about it. Suddenly, as soon as vaccines were applied to a region. Smallpox was completely eliminated there.
A similar thing happened with Polio, Tetanus, Hepatitis A and B, Rubella, Measles, Hib, Whooping Cough, Pneumococcal Disease, Mumps, Diptheria… They are almost gone, and the only people who get them now are in places that haven’t gotten consistent and almost complete vaccination.
In fact, there’s one that most people alive remember. Chicken pox used to be seen as an inevitable childhood disease, to the point that people used to throw “pox parties” to get it over with. but when the vaccine was invented in 1995 it rapidly decreased, and I don’t know anyone my age who has gotten it (born in 1996). It’s pretty much gone now.
Zvi isn’t trying to have “fairness in a political fight”, as if the sides were equal. The “vaccines are effective” side is totally crushing the “vaccines are bad” side. And plague doesn’t care about your politics.
Strongly upvoted as well, and I agree with Vanilla_cabs—I don’t think it helps classifying everybody concerned about covid vaccines as anti-vaxers. Maybe we need a better term.
Here is an analysis taking into account recovered people with natural immunity in the US:
https://youtu.be/vJy8jdunpFw?t=520
Personally, I’m wondering if antibody dependent enhancement could explain some weird patterns we are starting seeing now in highly-vaccinated places.
The better phrase would be ‘people with concerns about COVID vaccines’. (Hopefully these people would also have specific, and reasonable, concerns too.)
‘Anti-vax’ seems to reasonably cover people skeptical of, or hostile to, vaccination generally.
Do you have a tldr on why we might think anti-vaxxers were right for the right reasons? Seems like the default positions are “vaccines have obviously worked in the past and we’re pretty sure they’re gonna work in very similar ways today”, and I haven’t seen anything that changes my opinion much about either of those defaults.
Regardless of the general point, I think you’re making a noncentral fallacy here. This vaccine differs from the vaccine archetype for multiple reasons: it uses a new, different technology, it was rushed and we have no hindsight on its long-term side effects, it does not offer as strong a protection as expected from a typical vaccine (in particular, not strong enough to eradicate the virus even if it had maximum coverage), it’s used at the height of a pandemic with the risk of creating variants through recombination, the potential market has never been this huge, thus increasing the incentive for foul play. This is not a typical get-1-shot-go-carefree-for-10-years vaccine.
That’s going to be true of any new vaccine too, which isn’t helpful for deciding whether to create or use any new vaccine. (But we do have “hindsight” on every other vaccine.)
We could play some reference class tennis with this one as I don’t think we’ve ever had a vaccine for a virus similar to this one. And it seems arguably reasonable to consider the ‘flu vaccine’ as ‘typical’ and that (those) seem to offer even less protection than these.
What do you mean by this exactly? That the “potential market” possibly includes everyone? That doesn’t seem to be that different than for other vaccinations, tho maybe you do have a point given that we’re all in the middle of a global pandemic, whereas more ‘typical vaccinations’ only have a ‘market’ for some narrow age cohort.
Yes, this, sadly, seems to be very much the case.
Which is why when someone wants to impress you with the historical track record of vaccines, the flu vaccine conspicuously remains out of the picture.
I guess maybe some other vaccines have a near-worldwide cover. Note that since world population and GDP has always been going up, every new global pandemic creates de facto an unprecedented huge potential market. Though not by much. So, I don’t know?
Ok, so at this point maybe we can agree that:
1/ The COVID vaccine is less efficacious than touted last year, when the population was convinced to wait and expect salvation from it.
But:
2/ Strangely, 1) does not seem to have led policy/opinion makers to shift their bets on other horses or mellow their speech. Actually, pro-vaccination speakers have greatly radicalized this year, now advocating more and more openly shaming and punishment of unvaccinated people.
That looks something like Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs if the cult was so powerful it could punish dissenders. And I’m honestly frightened by that.
I agree that this is a Sad own-goal – politicizing the vaccination efforts – but that’s because I’m convinced that the vaccines are pretty effective.
But I don’t think it’s actually ‘strange’ that this happened; Sad, yes, but not strange (or thus unexpected).
FWIW, strongly upvoted, despite thinking that the term ‘anti-vax’ perpetuates a false dichitomy that poisons the well.
I am French and the “incentive” OP talks about is blackmail by a president who just got disavowed in elections (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lections_r%C3%A9gionales_fran%C3%A7aises_de_2021#Synth%C3%A8se_des_r%C3%A9sultats LREM, the governing party, gets 0,52% of voter’s votes on the first round).
I’ve been writing a piece explaining the background of these “incentives” but since it’s a political issue, I don’t think it can find a place on LW (see the recent debate on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BY5f7iEzHtEDJLXS7/prediction-what-war-between-the-usa-and-china-would-look).
One takeaway should already be obvious to anyone who’s concerned with AI alignment or read Superintelligence: don’t applaud when a growing potential tyrant does what you want.
So, don’t “applaud” anything a “growing potential tyrant does”, beyond maybe something demonstrating that they’re not (or no longer) interested in ‘growing their tyranny’?
A better way of phrasing it might be “don’t applaud a growing potential tyrant who seizes additional power just because they happen to do something you want with it.” I do think the message is clear even without that change.
That is better! I didn’t think that the original comment directly linked the ‘doing something you want’ with ‘seizing power’ – that makes a lot more sense to me.
If a potential tyrant did something like relinquishing power, then by definition they wouldn’t be growing.
Edit: Oh, you mean the rule can be generalized, and after doing so seems too general for you? But it is the same rule. If you should applaud a single thing, that’d be something you want. So the implication goes both ways.
Meh – there seems to me to be a lot of ambiguity about what ‘applauding’ is, or what purposes it serves (or is intended to serve), but still, I’m confused why you wrote:
instead of just:
Certainly the rule isn’t:
As for your reply:
Okay – but a “potential tyrant” could be growing at some point and then, after relinquishing (some) power, either no longer growing, or growing slower, or even shrinking. I don’t understand why a ‘by definition’ argument clarifies this.
But still – why even bother to posit a rule about ‘applauding’ the actions of a potential tyrant at all? What’s your theory about the efficacy of such a rule? What’s the point? And why qualify such a rule to only those occasions when the potential tyrant “does what you want”?
Because nobody needs to be warned not to applaud a potential tyrant who does not do what they want.
The idea is derived both from Superintelligence main metaphor, where sparrows try to raise an owl to solve all their problems, representing AGI without care for alignment, and past human history. In order to solve a problem, one feeds a monster that (quickly) ends up becoming much worse than the initial problem. I remember reading that in conquering the Aztec empire, Cortés took advantage of the resentment that existed between local tribes and the central government ; so did Caesar when he took over the Gaules. In fiction, the novel Brown Morning describes a slippery slope towards tyranny where some fail to react early because they’re not concerned or have something to gain. The novel is very naive and simplistic, but short, universal and to the point.
Here I’m reminding that the political actor that OP notes for their efficiency, reaches such ‘efficiency’ through oppressive measures, lacks the solid legitimacy required to impose such extreme measures, and has an history of playing fast and loose with the tenets of democracy that predates this crisis. That’s not a move in isolation, and if you look at the big picture, it’s clear that ‘public health’ or ‘saving lives’ is not the endgame of these measures. Therefore, supporting those measures would be short-sighted.
I’m pretty skeptical that this analysis applies to the specific example you mentioned – or not particularly strongly anyways.
But I didn’t interpret your original comment as, or even notice the possibility of it, directly linking the ‘doing something you want’ with ‘seizing more power’. aphyer’s comment helpfully clarified that.
Would you be more comfortable with a more traditional measure like imposing a hefty fine on people who don’t get vaccinated?
Depends on the amount of the fine. But even if it was reasonable, the government of my country would need to produce at least 2 other components to make a credible good will attempt at saving lives:
They should be increasing the number of hospital beds available and hire health professionnals, instead of closing beds as they’ve been doing throughout the pandemic
They should set boundaries to the duration of the fine, promise not to raise it or lenghten it, and have a credible way of showing they’ll keep that promise, or, barring that, a track record of keeping their word. Instead, they have emergency powers, can pass decrees without parliament approval, and have consistently broken their words arguing that “the circumstances have changed”
I guess what I like about fines is that they have a well defined endpoint. They end when people have either complied with whatever they need to comply with OR they’ve paid the fine.
As for hospital beds—absolutely. In fact another reason I lean toward fines is that the money can be earmarked for very specific things, like treatment.
I’m not sold on the idea of everybody needing a booster shot forever, if that’s one of your concerns.
Ok, it seems we have something to work with, then. Amounts and validity periods can be negotiated.