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).
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).