The previous post, Making Vaccines post was one of the top-upvoted posts of all time. I think it’s great for LW-folk to actually go off and do Actual Science™, and then even better to follow that up with reporting on the results, and then even better to report negative results, and then even better still to list out their thoughts on what those negative results actually mean and how to continue reasoning about the domain.
I remain somewhat uncertain how to think about the RadVac vaccine in particular, but I think both this post and the previous one are great to read from a standpoint of “orienting towards science” – seeing the world as something we can understand, and that we’re not only allowed to reason about, but allowed to go out and Interact With The Physical World in order to learn more about.
I agree that posting the results was the correct thing to do, and appreciate that John is trying to figure out if this is useful—but I actually claim the post is an example of how rationality is hard, and even pursuing it can be misleading if you aren’t very, very careful.
In The Twelve Virtues of Rationality, this post gets virtue points for the first (curiosity, for looking into whether it works,) third (lightness, being willing to update marginally on evidence,) fourth (evenness, updating even when the evidence isn’t in the direction desired,) sixth (empiricism, actually testing something,) and tenth (precision, specifying what was expected.) But virtue is certainly not a guarantee of success, even for completely virtuous approaches.
I think this tries to interpret data correctly, but falls short on the eleventh virtue, scholarship. For those who want to do Actual Science™, the first step is to know about the domain, and make sure your experiment is valid and useful. Going out and interacting with reality is valuable once your models are good enough to be able to interpret evidence. But Science is hard. (Perhaps not as hard as rationality, at least in some ways, but still very, very difficult.) In this case, without checking what the specific target being tested for was, as Christian notes, the data doesn’t actually provide useful evidence. And if he had a (recent) asymptomatic case of COVID, the result would have been positive, which is evidence that the vaccine doesn’t work, but would have been interpreted as evidence that it did.
Curated.
The previous post, Making Vaccines post was one of the top-upvoted posts of all time. I think it’s great for LW-folk to actually go off and do Actual Science™, and then even better to follow that up with reporting on the results, and then even better to report negative results, and then even better still to list out their thoughts on what those negative results actually mean and how to continue reasoning about the domain.
I remain somewhat uncertain how to think about the RadVac vaccine in particular, but I think both this post and the previous one are great to read from a standpoint of “orienting towards science” – seeing the world as something we can understand, and that we’re not only allowed to reason about, but allowed to go out and Interact With The Physical World in order to learn more about.
I agree that posting the results was the correct thing to do, and appreciate that John is trying to figure out if this is useful—but I actually claim the post is an example of how rationality is hard, and even pursuing it can be misleading if you aren’t very, very careful.
In The Twelve Virtues of Rationality, this post gets virtue points for the first (curiosity, for looking into whether it works,) third (lightness, being willing to update marginally on evidence,) fourth (evenness, updating even when the evidence isn’t in the direction desired,) sixth (empiricism, actually testing something,) and tenth (precision, specifying what was expected.) But virtue is certainly not a guarantee of success, even for completely virtuous approaches.
I think this tries to interpret data correctly, but falls short on the eleventh virtue, scholarship. For those who want to do Actual Science™, the first step is to know about the domain, and make sure your experiment is valid and useful. Going out and interacting with reality is valuable once your models are good enough to be able to interpret evidence. But Science is hard. (Perhaps not as hard as rationality, at least in some ways, but still very, very difficult.) In this case, without checking what the specific target being tested for was, as Christian notes, the data doesn’t actually provide useful evidence. And if he had a (recent) asymptomatic case of COVID, the result would have been positive, which is evidence that the vaccine doesn’t work, but would have been interpreted as evidence that it did.
They did test fot antibodies before taking RadVac. That was a prrcaution to lower the probability, that they would get antibodies due to infection.
Hence “(recent)”
People, off topic, but why does the site show my e-mail addess and not my user name ? How can I change it ?
I edited your account to change your name. (I’m an admin.) Hope that’s alright now!
Thanx a lot !