I’m vaccinated and so are my family. Yay for vaccines for keeping healthy people relatively healthy!
Based on what I currently know, I’m highly in favor of everyone I care about, including “generic random humans, in the US, and outside it” getting the vaccine if they have not already had covid because it will probably, on net, selfishly protect their own health… while society slowly collapses around them due to failed public health policies more generally.
The right policy, in my opinion, is regular mass testing.
Spit in a cup and mail it in, every single day, and get a stream of “negative negative negative”. Coupled with thoughtful quarantine policies, that might get us to eradication, and a return to normal everyday life :-)
...but in the US at least we aren’t aiming for eradication. We aren’t doing regular mass testing. We’re not setting up border medical testing and quarantines. We’re NOT getting ready to be healthy as a nation.
...
So then a thing that seems kind of insane(?) (like I keep hearing this, and keep not quite believing that it could be this way, and so I wonder if I’m hearing wrong, or if it really is just this stupid) is that apparently the vaccine mandate has no opt-out for “people who already got covid”?
So like… if I haven’t misunderstood this, this is asking people to RISK THEMSELVES FOR NO BENEFIT TO OTHERS OR TO SELF?
Because… they had covid and lived… so that’s better immunological protection than merely vaccinated people, right?
Like their previous infection protects them and also it makes them less likely to be infectious already so it protects others too...
So why the fuck is self-harm, for this group, then being mandated by the government?
What is the public policy logic here?
Seatbelts are a useful dividing line: from a libertarian political model it is fucked up to mandate them because everything the government does is coercive violence, and you shouldn’t use coercive violence unless it is an absolute fallback mechanism for maintaining the core of civilizational adequacy.
When people are burning down courthouses: that’s the time to use state power. Smash heads. Hold trials. Throw ’em in jail. When people are carjacking, or scaring kids in the street… that harms others: put em in jail.
BUT if “it is good for you and you aren’t doing it” is a reason to destroy people’s lives or livelihood using state power, then why not fire people or jail them if they don’t regularly brush their teeth or eat enough meat to get their B vitamins?
“Its good for them” is a BAD basis for using state power.
I admit that lots of random idiots like seatbelt laws because… seatbelts are nearly always the right move?
And they are idiots… so to them it looks like curmudgeonly resistance to do something OTHER than wear seatbelts just as a matter of personal principle.
The principle is good, but seatbelts aren’t the best place to fight that battle.
However, with a BLANKET vaccine mandate, there are people for whom this is a NET HARM, where it increases risks from “medical complications in general” for people who were already infected in a way that provides essentially no real benefits to them. And then this self-harm it doesn’t even help others that I’m aware of either, because they were already “essentially vaccinated” simply from having the disease already?
Also, they would be precisely the ones who would be mostly likely to have bad reactions? Because their immune system would freak out about the injections more than for other people? Right???
And also NONE OF THIS is advancing towards covid eradication?
So this mandate, for some people is just… pointless patient-harming authoritarianism?
I don’t understand how the blue tribe became “in favor, because its common sense” of doing pointless harm to random citizens for the sake of some OCD-like compulsion to get a number (the number vaccinated)… to 100%… even though actual complete success doesn’t even LOOK like 100% vaccination?
Maybe I’m modeling something wrong here, but the way my models work currently, this feels like more of a “kill shot” on vaccine mandates than any problem with kids.
Rogan’s point that Gupta is at far greater risk as a vaccinated healthy older adult, than a child would be unvaccinated, is completely correct and a kill shot when not tackled head on. None of our actions around children and this pandemic make any sense because we refuse to reckon with this. Gupta has no answer. The response ‘I think you have to draw a distinction between those that have immunity and those that don’t’ is not a meaningful answer here – saying the word ‘immunity’ and treating that as overwriting age-based effects is Obvious Nonsense and Gupta is smart enough to know that. As are his attempts to move back and forth between risk to self and risk to others when dealing with kids. If he wants to make the case that vaccinating kids is mostly about protecting others, that’s a very reasonable case, but you then have to say that part out loud.
Which is why Rogan keeps coming back to this until Gupta admits it. Gupta was trying to have it both ways, saying he’s unconcerned with a breakthrough infection at 51 years old, and that young children need to be concerned about getting infected, and you really can’t have this one both ways. Eventually Gupta does bite the bullet that child vaccinations are about protecting others, not protecting the child (although he doesn’t then point out the absurdity of the precautions we force them to take), and frames the question in terms of the overall pandemic.
At least with kids you can explain that the little germ factories could otherwise be harboring germs that will take down their elders, so their is a pro-social reason to do something here to clear covid from that subpopulation that is inherently mixed into a larger population with people at risk from covid...
But this doesn’t really scan, because it doesn’t ERADICATE covid, it just mildly tweaks the R_t…
So far as I’m aware, vaccines are great, because they selfishly protect you from serious harms from covid while covid remains endemic, which it seems on track to be until… until maaaaaybe (if we are lucky) the next presidential election when someone runs on the slogan “Fuck Covid, Vote For Me” and gets elected and fixes the broken systems (plural) and eradicates covid?
But Biden ain’t gonna, just like Trump didn’t. (They are the same, in my book. They won an election and deserve a modicum of respect, but their leadership has been highly flawed and inadequate to the demands of this historical period.)
...
So, maybe I’m missing something important. But in the absence of any positive justification for forcing people who already had covid to get a pointless vaccine in order to stay employed, one starts looking for alternative reasons.
The best I have so far is: the firings ARE THE POINT.
Maybe the goal is to punish stupid weak people by driving them out of polite society and immiserating them and turning them against the law and the government and all of it?
The police have a bunch of people who are pro-Trump, and didn’t get vaccinated (and plausibly already got covid in the line of duty anyway), and imposing a health harming hazing ritual on them will either drive out the “disloyal to blue tribe” police or give them cognitive dissonance in favor of following stupid orders going forward? Working out these details, it seems very plausible that these people were fired because the goal might have been to fire them?
Why not just do a test to see if they’ve already got antibodies?
(Also, for that matter, if someone gets vaxxed and doesn’t form antibodies… they might be an infection risk and should perhaps be fired for being immuno-compromised in a role that apparently requires immune competence for the good of those they interact with? Like if there is a world of atoms “out there” that makes sense, and our public policies just internalize and react to “the sense of the world itself”, then… this is the kind of logic that you’d see going right along with a SANE “vaccine mandate” (that had an opt out for people who got their antibodies in a movie theatre rather than a clinic).)
...
Maybe the problem is that we can’t let the (private, for-profit) hospitals fill up?
But if that’s the issue, then just tell people: “If you stupid fuckers don’t have antibodies from a previous infection and don’t get vaxxed when you have the chance, and THEN you end up in the hospital, AND it starts to get full, you go to the bottom of the triage list”. That would just be justice of a sort: they make a choice, they experience the consequences. Simple. Clean. Honorable even?
...
I hate how dumb everyone seems about this and I hate how the actual things playing out lead me into this Kremlinological reading of the nuances of everything to decode “what the real deal is” after noticing that the stated actions make no sense.
I feel like I have to do sense-making almost purely from scratch, and I hate it.
That said, Zvi, this seemed like an unaddressed elephant to me:
(4) Also, his friend had a stroke and Rogan connected this to the vaccination, whether or not this actually happened.
(5) Rogan goes “holy ****” and gets concerned.
(6) Another of Rogan’s friends has what looks like a reaction to the vaccine, gets bedridden for 11 days. And another guy from ju-jitsu that he knows had what looked like another issue, having a heart attack and two strokes.
(7) A bunch of these reactions don’t get submitted to the official side effects register.
(8) Rogan concludes that side effects are likely to be underreported.
So point (8) there seems like a sound (though only partial and probabilistic) inference to me.
Not well sampled, of course.
But data censorship is terrible because once you know it is happening, all of a sudden everything downstream of that point becomes untrustworthy.
Data censorship is probably worse than bad sampling. Bad sampling is like “normal noise” (another convenience sample: yawn) whereas data censorship is “enemy action”… it deletes things BECAUSE of what they are likely to show, which the entity that deletes is trying to prevent people from knowing about.
Once you grant that people are trying to vaxmax the US population via any means necessary, even when it doesn’t make any sense (like for people with non-vax-based antibodies)… I personally trust Rogan’s anecdata more than I trust statistical summaries from researchers with an axe-to-grind.
I’m very curious if this point was dealt with somehow.
There’s a ton of stuff here so I can’t take time to properly respond to it all, but I did want to note (I’ve talked about this before) my intuition pump around the data suppression question, and why I think it’s hugely unlikely there are much more common serious side effects.
Which is that there are tons of people both pro and anti vaccine who are actively on the prowl for such effects. If we catch even a whiff of anything, no matter how statistically irrelevant, it endangers the ability to use the vaccines at all—see J&J, and see the Moderna suspensions, over basically nothing in both cases. Thus, the Responsible Authorities are keeping eyes peeled looking for non-existent problems, and the anti-vax crowd is of course looking for any problems, and reporters know it’s a good story, and a lot of people would report hearing about such things especially if they knew multiple cases, etc etc.
It’s not that I trust it because the people in charge are saying so, it’s because my model says if the problems existed we would know. Rogan is the first I’ve heard who reported a personal pattern or other pattern of serious (not short term you feel bad) symptoms from the vaccines. E.g. I don’t know of anyone I know who knows anyone who had a non-short-term side effect of vaccination (or even thinks they did), whereas my personal trainer from pre-Covid is in terrible long term condition from Long Covid, etc. And the only other sources claiming to know such folks in multiples are, at best, ‘less credible than Rogan.’
Basically, when you have a huge anti-vax (not merely anti-mandate) faction, highly motivated to find things, you need to compare what evidence is found to what evidence you expect. And from Rogan’s particular perspective, even if this is mostly a timing coincidence, that evidence looks suspicious, but from yours and mine, it doesn’t (unless you have personal data I don’t know, if I missed it I apologize).
(Also, for that matter, if someone gets vaxxed and doesn’t form antibodies… they might be an infection risk and should perhaps be fired for being immuno-compromised in a role that apparently requires immune competence for the good of those they interact with?
Is this a reference to something in particular, or is it entirely hypothetical? Has anyone been discovered not to have an antibody response who was not already known to be generally immune compromised?
I’m curious about your opposition to seatbelt laws, seeing as not wearing one can potentially turn you into a dangerous projectile that could cause harm to others.
That’s not how anyone justifies that law, ever. “Human projectile harms to other people than the projectile” are very rare. No one optimizes this. It is a bad faith argument I’m pretty sure?
However, engaging with it as if it were in good faith… (maybe it is a good faith thought experiment?)
...you could have people buy extra insurance for paying out extra damages on that specific additional liability “having your body go flying and smash into other people” harm, and get a little logo on your insurance card, and that logo would mean cops couldn’t ticket you for seat belt stuff.
That would be the same move of “opting-out of coercive paternalism while complying with coherent and valid demands to protect others from harms via negligence or accident”.
If you can find someone who wrote a coherent article whose central pro-seatbelt argument is based on how seatbelts protect third parties from being struck by the catapulting bodies of idiots who didn’t wear their seatbelt, I’m happy to change my mind.
I admire the question! It shows that you saw the larger point and found another example by which to test the general principles. If I’m wrong, I’d be happy to learn something.
In this case, I observed a direct instance of this with High School sports annual checkup requirement, and back then I started to dig in my heels, but my reaction produced a sensical (if abstractly saddening) explanation, roughly:
If you get hurt playing a sport and sue, this requirement by the school selfishly protects the ongoing functioning of the school from your possible stupid lawsuit, and requiring this lowers the school’s insurance costs, and you don’t have to… you just don’t get to play sports if you don’t. Look, everyone already understands that sports are a luxury for the rich since even in public schools they require fees anyway. You capitulate and play… or refuse and don’t get to personally enjoy something fun and active and mostly healthy (though slightly personally dangerous).
Accepting a dysfunctional tort system as irreparable… and being selfish… you pay the “government dysfunction tax” and move along? It costs little. It protects the school’s budget. Its designers are able to acknowledge reality on the down low… sure… why not play along.
That was back then. Covid radicalized me to some degree.
It now seems abti-social-enough-to-deserve-moral-chiding to silently tolerate obvious-to-me dysfunction in my democratically elected government, because sometimes it really matters.
It would be better to stopfucking over the poor in ways that rich smart people can tolerate.
It would be better to stop lying by default about public matters.
Maybe other people don’t want to hold themselves to this standard, but I personally want to be able to look in the mirror without flinching.
“I’m hurting you (by restricting your legal moves under threat of punishment) for your own good” is not a valid policy justification in government as far as I can tell. It is an incorrigible pattern.
Anyone who falls back to that justification for the coercive use of government power has essentially admitted (whether they realize it or not) that their subjectively assessed strongest argument is inadequate, and so they are probably wrong.
On corrigibility: individuals know more about their situation and are affected more by their own choices, and when the law is locally counter-productive, they can’t propagate the local information in their head, which serves them and their interests (and thus is likely to serve any thoughtful person in very similar local circumstances in a generally valid way), back intothe overarching legal framework.
Thus every unusual circumstance becomes potentially quite painful in the presence of “paternalist” laws with no opt-out, that takes no feedback, and requires public discussion to change…
...and there are few mechanisms to shrink the scope and complexity of laws, which mostly grow over time, and so the default is for things to worsen over time.
Government (with a smarmy smile): I’m sorry, you have to X now. Self: Why? Government (rolling eyes at “another one of those people”): X is for your own good. Self: Nice! Yay for defaults that are selfishly beneficial to the average default accepting person… I will opt-out then. Government (exasperation fading into contempt): There is no opt-out. Self: Of course there is. We live in a good country. I’m not your slave. I’m also not the slave of your boss’s boss’s boss. Neither are you (unless you’re on an H1-B or something I guess (in which case you have my extreme sympathy)). So (barring other bad laws) you could also opt-out without super high costs if it mattered enough to you. Paternalist laws in (1) good countries are helpful-by-default when the country is benevolently run, but (2) they also need to have opt-outs for normally good and free people, and (3) sometimes they aren’t even beneficial when the government is actually out to get you. I judge X to not be selfishly beneficial to me for reasons that would take a while to explain… but one of the joy’s of being free is not needing to explain such things in cases like this… so where is my opt-out? Government (adopting a threatening tone): There. Is. No. Opt. Out.
This is where the “Self” character has various choices.
The lies have been revealed as lies in the text of the game… Now what?
When I project myself into that role, under a “radicalized by covid” frame that rejects stupid evil government not just as invalid, but as “morally praiseworthy to point out the problems of” then if I was the Self then I’d be tempted to “become the unit test case” and fight for my rights, until “the unit test that is me” turns green by me getting the thing that I think “helps me most”, rather than what the authoritarian thinks “helps me most”?
But I try to refrain from public self defense mostly (which is perhaps a higher standard than universalizes well).
The reason to refrain is a collection of obvious-to-me problems. What if I win but the victory doesn’t propagate up to the root cause and then back down to others, who are less powerful, in a helpful way? That isn’t morally praiseworthy… that would just advance my privileged legal status.
Also, I’d be very entangled, and it looks kind of selfish. So the signal isn’t very clear. Also, if I fail maybe it was because I was a bad test case and my flaws, in my case, might contaminate reasoning about the larger point (that I’m pretty sure is correct)?
So a cleaner thing, in terms of raising the civic sanity waterline, is to notice other people in the role of a self standing up to an evil and stupid government, and praise and defend them, while articulating the coherent principle, with the goal of propagating the general principle back into <any part of the system able to learn at all that remains hidden deep inside an otherwise sclerotic and dysfunctional and oligarchic disaster of the formerly good government of a nation I care about>.
A debate on what the previously-infected should be recommended etc. is valid imo, but has little to do with the questions around the *sociology* of the unvaccinated. I think it’s one of those talking points for the very-online/polarized, rather than a big deal for many out there.
So, I agree with the sociological point here. I am sort of “very online” I guess?
Also most unvaccinated people are dealing with real problems and deserve sympathy and sociological humanization and help. Maybe 3% of them would volunteer something like my critique, on their own?
However, I’m pretty sure they would “get it” almost instantly, and see me as a reasonably honest ally, and see that what I’m trying to fight for is each of them having a voice in their own goddamn medical treatment or else the right to opt out of an incoherent authoritarian socio-medical regime.
I have not acquired my position from anyone else that I’m aware of…
Except in the broad cultural sense that I am thoughtful, and reasonably well informed, and can do math, and have some leisure time, and am culturally downstream of Locke and Hobbes and Jefferson and Condorcet and the rest.
From my perspective, Zeynep is the one who is “really online”. I’ve tweeted 1481 times in 10 years. Zeynep has tweeted ~109,500 times over 12 years.
The thing I’m articulating is not a “talking point”. No one handed me media briefer just before I showed up on CNN or Fox or whatever other propaganda outlet people-who-watch-TV pay attention to lately.
I’m not in favor of polarization. I’m in favor of its opposite, subject to constraints of fairness, justice, and actual rationality (not the US government’s current official standard of rationality, which is abysmal because it is mostly used to justify obvious corruption).
I’m just trying to say something I think true and important for America (focusing on clean and clear political test cases that are currently failing for people other than me) and that I think America needs to remember if America is to have any hope of remaining a virtuous and free people engaged in virtuous self rule.
If Zeynep has heard other people say the same thing as me, and wants to propose that we are in a conspiracy with each other...
I could be wrong. I’m imperfect in many ways, and thinking perfectly is literally computationally intractable… so… if you see clearly articulable flaws in my current set of heuristics and hunches and cherished attachments, it would be nice to update to something that feels less “austerely demanding” :-/
Sorry, I should have emphasized that I’m actually in favor of mandating annual physical exams at some point in the future, as an alternative to vaccine mandates, because it would add a certain amount of flexibility. The government could just ask “Did this person get their physical exam?” and medical professionals could assess whether a person is “OK”, where the definition of “OK” might vary depending on current knowledge and individual circumstances.
I’m confident that we’ll start acquiring a lot more knowledge that will allow us to make assessments of how immune people are, without having to measure antibody levels every time - age, weight, sex, prior infection, whether they’re taking immunosuppressive medications, etc. At the same time, that starts to get into some deeply personal health information. So having that information “siloed” in a physical exam (a “black box” from the government’s perspective) ought to be more agreeable to those of us who want something that “feels” more normal but doesn’t disregard the lessons of the past 20 months.
Speaking to the table above: I don’t see numbers in the table or a methods section in the document.
This appears to be a legal compliance document, or maybe technical marketing, but it doesn’t seem like science or like an example rigorously adequate quality engineering.
From a legal perspective, all those “Not known” cells look like wiggle room for a legal defense to me in case things go sideways and lots of people get one of those side effects?
This does not bother me exactly.
My general model of the vaccines is that they are experimental medicine that is more likely to help than to hurt. All medical treatments are a gamble. FDA safety pronouncements in general don’t actually mean something is fully and generically safe for specific patients with specific issues. This is not a binary question, so the binary pronouncement is pretty silly, causing individual inefficiencies EITHER way the decision goes...
The eventual default for humans is death. As this gets predictably nearer, crazy bets to stave off death are more and more justified at an individual level. The early covid vaccines for “at risk groups” were a very large N experiment that I’ve updated on… mostly in the direction that “the vaccines are safe enough to be helpful enough for many people”.
In general, my advice for most people is to take the current vaccines. This advice is calibrated from a lot of data sources, including and especially macroscale efficacy hints from live clinical operations, which are experiments that produce observational data, even if people don’t want to admit that normal clinical practice is always at least partly “an experiment that is probably worth it”. Israel tends to go fast, and its government is likely to be benevolent to its own citizens, so I look to that market pretty often...
...but also my models assumed no major sources of data censorship in the reporting processes for vaccine side effects.
If that assumption in systematically wrong for some sources of data, then maybe my advice is miscalibrated? I haven’t reviewed things very much lately and have wide error bars here, and “anecdotes about censored data” would be relevant to the meta-question about how much my current object level impression was formed properly or not.
Could you be more specific about what you’ve observed, or what you think the observations justify in terms of newer (and presumably still tentative) conclusions? Do you know specifically that there’s no data censorship in various areas that you’ve used to form a similar “pro-vaccine” position to my own? Or are you similar to me in being “pro-covid-vaccine” in a way that could hypothetically shift if you found out some of the evidence you’ve seen was adversarially manipulated with a conscious intent to cause people like us to have the posterior that we both probably still have?
Rogan offered evidence of data censorship. I’m just curious how much to update on it.
If there is significant systematic data censorship than we are all reduced to Rogan’s level of data, namely, observation of people in our immediate circle and their immediate contacts, so one degree of separation. This is 17th century science. It is not likely to give us a strong enough signal to update in any direction.
VAERS data used to be sufficient to ascertain vaccine safety in the past. Can you trust VAERS data for covid vaccines? When it comes to death reports closely following vaccination it gives a signal which is 200 times stronger than for flu vaccines. Can this signal be explained by FDA urging medical professionals to report literally every death occurring after vaccines? If VAERS is broken, what other sources can we use to estimate just how and in what direction VAERS is broken?
For example, can we compare the number of anaphylactic allergic reactions compiled by sources other than VAERS and the number of these reactions reported in VAERS?
I think this will be my last response. I can see VAERS and hypothetically I could download it and do some datascience on it, perhaps?
However, until just now I didn’t know that that system existed… and then I had to search for it (not follow a helpful link from you) and probably someone else has done datascience on that already...
So since you know about such things, why aren’t you teaching me? Why aren’t you linking to helpful stuff to tell me exactly how and why vaccines are safe making a positive case from these data sources you know about and trust? Or tracking down such research conducted by someone with government funding, but also where you actually respect the researchers personally and personally vouch for their work?
This is 17th century science.
Hey, they invented calculus, the slide rule, and the first human powered submarine, and they discovered carbon, phosphorus, and bacteria.… on essentially zero budget. Don’t knock it till you try it, maybe?
Part of my overarching thesis is that the entire “system system” is trash until proven to be non-trash. Covid has shown me, over and over and over and over again that every time I make an assumption about the diligent benevolent systematic competence of the US government I am surprised in a negative way shortly thereafter.
I don’t think this applies to all of society, just the parts that have protectionist guarantees from the government, including the protectionist guarantees offered by parts of the government to other parts of the government.
As articulated by Richard Smith (for many years the chair of the Cochrane Library Oversight Committee, member of the board of the UK Research Integrity Office, and cofounder of the Committee on Medical Ethics (COPE)):
Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously have proved to be false, and, 40 years on from Lock’s concerns, we are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.
I don’t think this actually means we’ve lost 4 centuries of scientific capacity, myself… you’re the one who said that if data censorship was common then it would be that bad. I
I think we’ve only fallen back to maybe the 1870s or or perhaps to just before WW1 or so… the problems we’re having are translating things that wikipedia already knows, and can explain in small words into the actual practices of powerful people, like hospital administrators, pension planners, presidents, bond raters, tenured sociologists, and so on.
All I’m claiming is that there might be a LOT of people who should be fired (but who won’t be fired (and that’s most of why they’re doing a shitty job))… who are currently getting paid by the US tax payers in exchange for essentially injecting noise into processes that care for the US tax payers, and thus harming the US tax payers.
I am certain of nothing, and I want to test everything in proportion to my doubt and the thing’s importance. That is all.
When people start doing their own data science on VAERS database, the result sometimes looks like this document. Do you want to explain why covid vaccines appear to be 100 times less safe than flu vaccines?
It seems like you’re talking as if your goal is to score point in a debate with an opponent; your comments are only minimally useful from the standpoint of helping an honest interlocutor gain understanding. Yet it seems to me that JenniferRM shows all possible signs of being such an honest interlocutor (and indeed you are far more likely to find the latter on Less Wrong than the former).
I think I’m opposed to the vaccine mandate.
This is NOT about being opposed to vaccines.
I’m vaccinated and so are my family. Yay for vaccines for keeping healthy people relatively healthy!
Based on what I currently know, I’m highly in favor of everyone I care about, including “generic random humans, in the US, and outside it” getting the vaccine if they have not already had covid because it will probably, on net, selfishly protect their own health… while society slowly collapses around them due to failed public health policies more generally.
The right policy, in my opinion, is regular mass testing.
Spit in a cup and mail it in, every single day, and get a stream of “negative negative negative”. Coupled with thoughtful quarantine policies, that might get us to eradication, and a return to normal everyday life :-)
...but in the US at least we aren’t aiming for eradication. We aren’t doing regular mass testing. We’re not setting up border medical testing and quarantines. We’re NOT getting ready to be healthy as a nation.
...
So then a thing that seems kind of insane(?) (like I keep hearing this, and keep not quite believing that it could be this way, and so I wonder if I’m hearing wrong, or if it really is just this stupid) is that apparently the vaccine mandate has no opt-out for “people who already got covid”?
So like… if I haven’t misunderstood this, this is asking people to RISK THEMSELVES FOR NO BENEFIT TO OTHERS OR TO SELF?
Because… they had covid and lived… so that’s better immunological protection than merely vaccinated people, right?
Like their previous infection protects them and also it makes them less likely to be infectious already so it protects others too...
So why the fuck is self-harm, for this group, then being mandated by the government?
What is the public policy logic here?
Seatbelts are a useful dividing line: from a libertarian political model it is fucked up to mandate them because everything the government does is coercive violence, and you shouldn’t use coercive violence unless it is an absolute fallback mechanism for maintaining the core of civilizational adequacy.
When people are burning down courthouses: that’s the time to use state power. Smash heads. Hold trials. Throw ’em in jail. When people are carjacking, or scaring kids in the street… that harms others: put em in jail.
BUT if “it is good for you and you aren’t doing it” is a reason to destroy people’s lives or livelihood using state power, then why not fire people or jail them if they don’t regularly brush their teeth or eat enough meat to get their B vitamins?
“Its good for them” is a BAD basis for using state power.
I admit that lots of random idiots like seatbelt laws because… seatbelts are nearly always the right move?
And they are idiots… so to them it looks like curmudgeonly resistance to do something OTHER than wear seatbelts just as a matter of personal principle.
The principle is good, but seatbelts aren’t the best place to fight that battle.
However, with a BLANKET vaccine mandate, there are people for whom this is a NET HARM, where it increases risks from “medical complications in general” for people who were already infected in a way that provides essentially no real benefits to them. And then this self-harm it doesn’t even help others that I’m aware of either, because they were already “essentially vaccinated” simply from having the disease already?
Also, they would be precisely the ones who would be mostly likely to have bad reactions? Because their immune system would freak out about the injections more than for other people? Right???
And also NONE OF THIS is advancing towards covid eradication?
So this mandate, for some people is just… pointless patient-harming authoritarianism?
I don’t understand how the blue tribe became “in favor, because its common sense” of doing pointless harm to random citizens for the sake of some OCD-like compulsion to get a number (the number vaccinated)… to 100%… even though actual complete success doesn’t even LOOK like 100% vaccination?
Maybe I’m modeling something wrong here, but the way my models work currently, this feels like more of a “kill shot” on vaccine mandates than any problem with kids.
At least with kids you can explain that the little germ factories could otherwise be harboring germs that will take down their elders, so their is a pro-social reason to do something here to clear covid from that subpopulation that is inherently mixed into a larger population with people at risk from covid...
But this doesn’t really scan, because it doesn’t ERADICATE covid, it just mildly tweaks the R_t…
So far as I’m aware, vaccines are great, because they selfishly protect you from serious harms from covid while covid remains endemic, which it seems on track to be until… until maaaaaybe (if we are lucky) the next presidential election when someone runs on the slogan “Fuck Covid, Vote For Me” and gets elected and fixes the broken systems (plural) and eradicates covid?
But Biden ain’t gonna, just like Trump didn’t. (They are the same, in my book. They won an election and deserve a modicum of respect, but their leadership has been highly flawed and inadequate to the demands of this historical period.)
...
So, maybe I’m missing something important. But in the absence of any positive justification for forcing people who already had covid to get a pointless vaccine in order to stay employed, one starts looking for alternative reasons.
The best I have so far is: the firings ARE THE POINT.
Maybe the goal is to punish stupid weak people by driving them out of polite society and immiserating them and turning them against the law and the government and all of it?
The police have a bunch of people who are pro-Trump, and didn’t get vaccinated (and plausibly already got covid in the line of duty anyway), and imposing a health harming hazing ritual on them will either drive out the “disloyal to blue tribe” police or give them cognitive dissonance in favor of following stupid orders going forward? Working out these details, it seems very plausible that these people were fired because the goal might have been to fire them?
Why not just do a test to see if they’ve already got antibodies?
(Also, for that matter, if someone gets vaxxed and doesn’t form antibodies… they might be an infection risk and should perhaps be fired for being immuno-compromised in a role that apparently requires immune competence for the good of those they interact with? Like if there is a world of atoms “out there” that makes sense, and our public policies just internalize and react to “the sense of the world itself”, then… this is the kind of logic that you’d see going right along with a SANE “vaccine mandate” (that had an opt out for people who got their antibodies in a movie theatre rather than a clinic).)
...
Maybe the problem is that we can’t let the (private, for-profit) hospitals fill up?
But if that’s the issue, then just tell people: “If you stupid fuckers don’t have antibodies from a previous infection and don’t get vaxxed when you have the chance, and THEN you end up in the hospital, AND it starts to get full, you go to the bottom of the triage list”. That would just be justice of a sort: they make a choice, they experience the consequences. Simple. Clean. Honorable even?
...
I hate how dumb everyone seems about this and I hate how the actual things playing out lead me into this Kremlinological reading of the nuances of everything to decode “what the real deal is” after noticing that the stated actions make no sense.
I feel like I have to do sense-making almost purely from scratch, and I hate it.
That said, Zvi, this seemed like an unaddressed elephant to me:
So point (8) there seems like a sound (though only partial and probabilistic) inference to me.
Not well sampled, of course.
But data censorship is terrible because once you know it is happening, all of a sudden everything downstream of that point becomes untrustworthy.
Data censorship is probably worse than bad sampling. Bad sampling is like “normal noise” (another convenience sample: yawn) whereas data censorship is “enemy action”… it deletes things BECAUSE of what they are likely to show, which the entity that deletes is trying to prevent people from knowing about.
Once you grant that people are trying to vaxmax the US population via any means necessary, even when it doesn’t make any sense (like for people with non-vax-based antibodies)… I personally trust Rogan’s anecdata more than I trust statistical summaries from researchers with an axe-to-grind.
I’m very curious if this point was dealt with somehow.
There’s a ton of stuff here so I can’t take time to properly respond to it all, but I did want to note (I’ve talked about this before) my intuition pump around the data suppression question, and why I think it’s hugely unlikely there are much more common serious side effects.
Which is that there are tons of people both pro and anti vaccine who are actively on the prowl for such effects. If we catch even a whiff of anything, no matter how statistically irrelevant, it endangers the ability to use the vaccines at all—see J&J, and see the Moderna suspensions, over basically nothing in both cases. Thus, the Responsible Authorities are keeping eyes peeled looking for non-existent problems, and the anti-vax crowd is of course looking for any problems, and reporters know it’s a good story, and a lot of people would report hearing about such things especially if they knew multiple cases, etc etc.
It’s not that I trust it because the people in charge are saying so, it’s because my model says if the problems existed we would know. Rogan is the first I’ve heard who reported a personal pattern or other pattern of serious (not short term you feel bad) symptoms from the vaccines. E.g. I don’t know of anyone I know who knows anyone who had a non-short-term side effect of vaccination (or even thinks they did), whereas my personal trainer from pre-Covid is in terrible long term condition from Long Covid, etc. And the only other sources claiming to know such folks in multiples are, at best, ‘less credible than Rogan.’
Basically, when you have a huge anti-vax (not merely anti-mandate) faction, highly motivated to find things, you need to compare what evidence is found to what evidence you expect. And from Rogan’s particular perspective, even if this is mostly a timing coincidence, that evidence looks suspicious, but from yours and mine, it doesn’t (unless you have personal data I don’t know, if I missed it I apologize).
Is this a reference to something in particular, or is it entirely hypothetical? Has anyone been discovered not to have an antibody response who was not already known to be generally immune compromised?
I’m curious about your opposition to seatbelt laws, seeing as not wearing one can potentially turn you into a dangerous projectile that could cause harm to others.
That’s not how anyone justifies that law, ever. “Human projectile harms to other people than the projectile” are very rare. No one optimizes this. It is a bad faith argument I’m pretty sure?
However, engaging with it as if it were in good faith… (maybe it is a good faith thought experiment?)
...you could have people buy extra insurance for paying out extra damages on that specific additional liability “having your body go flying and smash into other people” harm, and get a little logo on your insurance card, and that logo would mean cops couldn’t ticket you for seat belt stuff.
That would be the same move of “opting-out of coercive paternalism while complying with coherent and valid demands to protect others from harms via negligence or accident”.
Are you sure nobody justifies the law based on that? There are laws about tying down payloads on pickup trucks for exactly this reason.
If you can find someone who wrote a coherent article whose central pro-seatbelt argument is based on how seatbelts protect third parties from being struck by the catapulting bodies of idiots who didn’t wear their seatbelt, I’m happy to change my mind.
How do you feel about mandating an annual physical?
I admire the question! It shows that you saw the larger point and found another example by which to test the general principles. If I’m wrong, I’d be happy to learn something.
In this case, I observed a direct instance of this with High School sports annual checkup requirement, and back then I started to dig in my heels, but my reaction produced a sensical (if abstractly saddening) explanation, roughly:
Accepting a dysfunctional tort system as irreparable… and being selfish… you pay the “government dysfunction tax” and move along? It costs little. It protects the school’s budget. Its designers are able to acknowledge reality on the down low… sure… why not play along.
That was back then. Covid radicalized me to some degree.
It now seems abti-social-enough-to-deserve-moral-chiding to silently tolerate obvious-to-me dysfunction in my democratically elected government, because sometimes it really matters.
It would be better to stop fucking over the poor in ways that rich smart people can tolerate.
It would be better to stop lying by default about public matters.
Maybe other people don’t want to hold themselves to this standard, but I personally want to be able to look in the mirror without flinching.
“I’m hurting you (by restricting your legal moves under threat of punishment) for your own good” is not a valid policy justification in government as far as I can tell. It is an incorrigible pattern.
Anyone who falls back to that justification for the coercive use of government power has essentially admitted (whether they realize it or not) that their subjectively assessed strongest argument is inadequate, and so they are probably wrong.
On corrigibility: individuals know more about their situation and are affected more by their own choices, and when the law is locally counter-productive, they can’t propagate the local information in their head, which serves them and their interests (and thus is likely to serve any thoughtful person in very similar local circumstances in a generally valid way), back into the overarching legal framework.
Thus every unusual circumstance becomes potentially quite painful in the presence of “paternalist” laws with no opt-out, that takes no feedback, and requires public discussion to change…
...and there are few mechanisms to shrink the scope and complexity of laws, which mostly grow over time, and so the default is for things to worsen over time.
This is where the “Self” character has various choices.
The lies have been revealed as lies in the text of the game… Now what?
When I project myself into that role, under a “radicalized by covid” frame that rejects stupid evil government not just as invalid, but as “morally praiseworthy to point out the problems of” then if I was the Self then I’d be tempted to “become the unit test case” and fight for my rights, until “the unit test that is me” turns green by me getting the thing that I think “helps me most”, rather than what the authoritarian thinks “helps me most”?
But I try to refrain from public self defense mostly (which is perhaps a higher standard than universalizes well).
The reason to refrain is a collection of obvious-to-me problems. What if I win but the victory doesn’t propagate up to the root cause and then back down to others, who are less powerful, in a helpful way? That isn’t morally praiseworthy… that would just advance my privileged legal status.
Also, I’d be very entangled, and it looks kind of selfish. So the signal isn’t very clear. Also, if I fail maybe it was because I was a bad test case and my flaws, in my case, might contaminate reasoning about the larger point (that I’m pretty sure is correct)?
So a cleaner thing, in terms of raising the civic sanity waterline, is to notice other people in the role of a self standing up to an evil and stupid government, and praise and defend them, while articulating the coherent principle, with the goal of propagating the general principle back into <any part of the system able to learn at all that remains hidden deep inside an otherwise sclerotic and dysfunctional and oligarchic disaster of the formerly good government of a nation I care about>.
An interesting rebuttal to my position might be this point from Zeynep.
So, I agree with the sociological point here. I am sort of “very online” I guess?
Also most unvaccinated people are dealing with real problems and deserve sympathy and sociological humanization and help. Maybe 3% of them would volunteer something like my critique, on their own?
However, I’m pretty sure they would “get it” almost instantly, and see me as a reasonably honest ally, and see that what I’m trying to fight for is each of them having a voice in their own goddamn medical treatment or else the right to opt out of an incoherent authoritarian socio-medical regime.
I have not acquired my position from anyone else that I’m aware of…
Except in the broad cultural sense that I am thoughtful, and reasonably well informed, and can do math, and have some leisure time, and am culturally downstream of Locke and Hobbes and Jefferson and Condorcet and the rest.
From my perspective, Zeynep is the one who is “really online”. I’ve tweeted 1481 times in 10 years. Zeynep has tweeted ~109,500 times over 12 years.
The thing I’m articulating is not a “talking point”. No one handed me media briefer just before I showed up on CNN or Fox or whatever other propaganda outlet people-who-watch-TV pay attention to lately.
I’m not in favor of polarization. I’m in favor of its opposite, subject to constraints of fairness, justice, and actual rationality (not the US government’s current official standard of rationality, which is abysmal because it is mostly used to justify obvious corruption).
I’m just trying to say something I think true and important for America (focusing on clean and clear political test cases that are currently failing for people other than me) and that I think America needs to remember if America is to have any hope of remaining a virtuous and free people engaged in virtuous self rule.
If Zeynep has heard other people say the same thing as me, and wants to propose that we are in a conspiracy with each other...
...my counter-proposal is that great minds think alike, and our conspiracy communicates with each other in public, across centuries, about abstract ideals with coherently rigorous applications to the details of good governance, in general.
I could be wrong. I’m imperfect in many ways, and thinking perfectly is literally computationally intractable… so… if you see clearly articulable flaws in my current set of heuristics and hunches and cherished attachments, it would be nice to update to something that feels less “austerely demanding” :-/
Sorry, I should have emphasized that I’m actually in favor of mandating annual physical exams at some point in the future, as an alternative to vaccine mandates, because it would add a certain amount of flexibility. The government could just ask “Did this person get their physical exam?” and medical professionals could assess whether a person is “OK”, where the definition of “OK” might vary depending on current knowledge and individual circumstances.
I’m confident that we’ll start acquiring a lot more knowledge that will allow us to make assessments of how immune people are, without having to measure antibody levels every time - age, weight, sex, prior infection, whether they’re taking immunosuppressive medications, etc. At the same time, that starts to get into some deeply personal health information. So having that information “siloed” in a physical exam (a “black box” from the government’s perspective) ought to be more agreeable to those of us who want something that “feels” more normal but doesn’t disregard the lessons of the past 20 months.
Did you actually see the statistical summaries of vaccine side-effects?
I’ve seen so many statistical summaries. Can you be more specific?
Something like this with all the side effects and their frequencies enumerated.
Or this from the manufacturer.
I assume you mean this table?
Speaking to the table above: I don’t see numbers in the table or a methods section in the document.
This appears to be a legal compliance document, or maybe technical marketing, but it doesn’t seem like science or like an example rigorously adequate quality engineering.
From a legal perspective, all those “Not known” cells look like wiggle room for a legal defense to me in case things go sideways and lots of people get one of those side effects?
This does not bother me exactly.
My general model of the vaccines is that they are experimental medicine that is more likely to help than to hurt. All medical treatments are a gamble. FDA safety pronouncements in general don’t actually mean something is fully and generically safe for specific patients with specific issues. This is not a binary question, so the binary pronouncement is pretty silly, causing individual inefficiencies EITHER way the decision goes...
The eventual default for humans is death. As this gets predictably nearer, crazy bets to stave off death are more and more justified at an individual level. The early covid vaccines for “at risk groups” were a very large N experiment that I’ve updated on… mostly in the direction that “the vaccines are safe enough to be helpful enough for many people”.
In general, my advice for most people is to take the current vaccines. This advice is calibrated from a lot of data sources, including and especially macroscale efficacy hints from live clinical operations, which are experiments that produce observational data, even if people don’t want to admit that normal clinical practice is always at least partly “an experiment that is probably worth it”. Israel tends to go fast, and its government is likely to be benevolent to its own citizens, so I look to that market pretty often...
...but also my models assumed no major sources of data censorship in the reporting processes for vaccine side effects.
If that assumption in systematically wrong for some sources of data, then maybe my advice is miscalibrated? I haven’t reviewed things very much lately and have wide error bars here, and “anecdotes about censored data” would be relevant to the meta-question about how much my current object level impression was formed properly or not.
Could you be more specific about what you’ve observed, or what you think the observations justify in terms of newer (and presumably still tentative) conclusions? Do you know specifically that there’s no data censorship in various areas that you’ve used to form a similar “pro-vaccine” position to my own? Or are you similar to me in being “pro-covid-vaccine” in a way that could hypothetically shift if you found out some of the evidence you’ve seen was adversarially manipulated with a conscious intent to cause people like us to have the posterior that we both probably still have?
Rogan offered evidence of data censorship. I’m just curious how much to update on it.
If there is significant systematic data censorship than we are all reduced to Rogan’s level of data, namely, observation of people in our immediate circle and their immediate contacts, so one degree of separation. This is 17th century science. It is not likely to give us a strong enough signal to update in any direction.
VAERS data used to be sufficient to ascertain vaccine safety in the past. Can you trust VAERS data for covid vaccines? When it comes to death reports closely following vaccination it gives a signal which is 200 times stronger than for flu vaccines. Can this signal be explained by FDA urging medical professionals to report literally every death occurring after vaccines? If VAERS is broken, what other sources can we use to estimate just how and in what direction VAERS is broken?
For example, can we compare the number of anaphylactic allergic reactions compiled by sources other than VAERS and the number of these reactions reported in VAERS?
I think this will be my last response. I can see VAERS and hypothetically I could download it and do some datascience on it, perhaps?
However, until just now I didn’t know that that system existed… and then I had to search for it (not follow a helpful link from you) and probably someone else has done datascience on that already...
So since you know about such things, why aren’t you teaching me? Why aren’t you linking to helpful stuff to tell me exactly how and why vaccines are safe making a positive case from these data sources you know about and trust? Or tracking down such research conducted by someone with government funding, but also where you actually respect the researchers personally and personally vouch for their work?
Hey, they invented calculus, the slide rule, and the first human powered submarine, and they discovered carbon, phosphorus, and bacteria.… on essentially zero budget. Don’t knock it till you try it, maybe?
Part of my overarching thesis is that the entire “system system” is trash until proven to be non-trash. Covid has shown me, over and over and over and over again that every time I make an assumption about the diligent benevolent systematic competence of the US government I am surprised in a negative way shortly thereafter.
I don’t think this applies to all of society, just the parts that have protectionist guarantees from the government, including the protectionist guarantees offered by parts of the government to other parts of the government.
As articulated by Richard Smith (for many years the chair of the Cochrane Library Oversight Committee, member of the board of the UK Research Integrity Office, and cofounder of the Committee on Medical Ethics (COPE)):
I don’t think this actually means we’ve lost 4 centuries of scientific capacity, myself… you’re the one who said that if data censorship was common then it would be that bad. I
I think we’ve only fallen back to maybe the 1870s or or perhaps to just before WW1 or so… the problems we’re having are translating things that wikipedia already knows, and can explain in small words into the actual practices of powerful people, like hospital administrators, pension planners, presidents, bond raters, tenured sociologists, and so on.
All I’m claiming is that there might be a LOT of people who should be fired (but who won’t be fired (and that’s most of why they’re doing a shitty job))… who are currently getting paid by the US tax payers in exchange for essentially injecting noise into processes that care for the US tax payers, and thus harming the US tax payers.
I am certain of nothing, and I want to test everything in proportion to my doubt and the thing’s importance. That is all.
When people start doing their own data science on VAERS database, the result sometimes looks like this document. Do you want to explain why covid vaccines appear to be 100 times less safe than flu vaccines?
It seems like you’re talking as if your goal is to score point in a debate with an opponent; your comments are only minimally useful from the standpoint of helping an honest interlocutor gain understanding. Yet it seems to me that JenniferRM shows all possible signs of being such an honest interlocutor (and indeed you are far more likely to find the latter on Less Wrong than the former).