tivelen

Karma: 42

tivelen 6 Jan 2022 16:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: cistrane’s comment on: Omicron Post #12
A vaccination requirement could result in lower apparent effectiveness; so could risk compensation. In order to determine how much risk compensation occurred, we have to determine how much the vaccination requirement lowered the effectiveness. Without that analysis, concluding that risk compensation has a big enough effect to cause or contribute significantly to negative effectiveness is premature.

I am otherwise unsure of what you are trying to get at. The unvaccinated were prevented from doing a risky activity, and the vaccinated were allowed to do the activity (with a lower risk due to their status), yes.

tivelen 6 Jan 2022 15:56 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: What are sane reasons that Covid data is treated as reliable?
I have a hypothesis that seems to fit the data. These numbers are not given out for the purpose of collecting data on vaccine side effects (that’s what VAERS is for). They are intended to provide specialized medical care directed at those who have recently gotten vaccines.

Evidence:
One commenter reported calling a Walgreens number. If this is representative, these are local pharmacy/medical practice numbers that people are calling, not some national reporting service.

Reassurance is one of the jobs of a anyone providing medical care. “Even though you aren’t feeling well after the treatment, you have nothing to worry about, the treatment is safe.” is exactly what I would want someone to say if there was nothing either of us could do to help matters, especially if I was worried enough to call. You are especially likely to do so if you personally believe the vaccine is save (which is very likely for someone responding to such a number). If I was simply recording side effects, I wouldn’t bother with that. Y
If you already believe the side effect is caused by the vaccine and think it’s a very big deal, and then during the call they try to give the reassurance, you will instead distrust them, and also want to report their untrustworthiness to friends.

If you never call the number because you are not worried, or you do trust them, you have nothing notable to report. This would explain why every report looks like a reassurance that fell flat. Your sample is biased strongly towards looking exactly that way, regardless of how common side effects or the “there are no side effects” line actually is.

And all that assumes that this game of telephone, chaining between the medical establishment, the people taking the calls, your friends reporting the call, and then your fuzzy recollection, didn’t distort any of the data.

Currently, this “explains” your data for me. As in, I am no longer confused about your reports about your friends. I understand what happened, I think. There is no data collection rejection involved, at least not related to these calls.

Do you doubt this hypothesis? If so, what evidence could you provide against it? What evidence would we need to collect to figure out whether the hypothesis is true?

I would expect that if one called such a number, one could confirm that the other person is doing no data collection about the likelihood of side effects, that the line in context is intended for reassurance if it comes up, and the entire call will otherwise be completely in line with providing post-vaccine medical care. Averaging across multiple calls, of course.

If I’m wrong, I would expect that getting a full description of an entire call would show that the line in question is used as a shutdown, side effects are not being recorded (but they are supposed to be recorded every time according to the rules of the job), there is no reasonable medical triage going on, and the numbers in question are intended purely to advocate for vaccine safety. Also averaging across multiple calls.

tivelen 5 Jan 2022 16:21 UTC
2 points
in reply to: NormanPerlmutter’s comment on: Omicron Post #12
Suppose 50% of vaccinated people would attend this event, and so would 50% of unvaccinated people, after considering the risks (ergo, there is no risk compensation). However, only vaccinated people are allowed to go to the event. Then the vaccinated people could have increased rates of Covid compared to unvaccinated people because of being more likely to attend superspreader events, even though they did not increase their level of risk compared to the unvaccinated population.

Whether this is the actual reason for the apparent negative effectiveness would depend on the actual percentages, and how common/dangerous superspreader events really are.

tivelen 2 Jan 2022 1:52 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: What are sane reasons that Covid data is treated as reliable?
I searched the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and there are 474 reported cases of abnormal blood pressure following COVID-19 vaccination. Looking further in the Google search, I found a study (n = 113) which indicated increased risk of high blood pressure after vaccination, especially after previous infection.

Plainly, not everyone in the healthcare system is on the same page about side effects. I’d err on the side of the Walgreens person you talked to being more accurate, given that high blood pressure is a known side effect. Not known by that Nebraska Medicine doctor, apparently.

tivelen 1 Jan 2022 23:14 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: What are sane reasons that Covid data is treated as reliable?
Who exactly told you that?

tivelen 1 Jan 2022 21:56 UTC
2 points
on: What are sane reasons that Covid data is treated as reliable?
I’m wondering what the details of your friends reporting attempts are. Who exactly did they talk to? VAERS is the official U.S. reporting system, what were their experiences with that? If there is an underreporting problem, we need as many specifics as we can get to combat it. Given that some vaccines do have well-known side effects among certain demographics, lots of people have been able to report their side effects successfully. We would need to figure out why your friend group has been far less successful to correct the issue.

Without an explicit probability calculation, how exactly are we supposed to determine what the levels of side effects in reality are, vs what the medical data that has been collected and reported suggests, vs what the average person thinks is true? Perhaps all are biased and/or untrustworthy. I’m not sure where we can go from there. Has personal testimony from our own social groups become the best we can do?

tivelen 30 Dec 2021 23:37 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Heighn’s comment on: A Defense of Functional Decision Theory
What does it mean to Left-box, exactly? As in, under what specific scenarios are you making a choice between boxes, and choosing the Left box?

tivelen 29 Dec 2021 22:28 UTC
3 points
in reply to: cistrane’s comment on: COVID Skepticism Isn’t About Science
If you compare deaths to harms, you can end up scared of vaccines or Covid, depending on which you compare. If no one died of a vaccine in your group but one or two people were hurt by Covid, you will be scared of Covid. The question is, where does the framing come from? If no one died of Covid or a vaccine in your group (which seems to be the most likely case for a given group), which do you become scared of, and why?

tivelen 26 Dec 2021 14:44 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Ege Erdil’s comment on: What is a probabilistic physical theory?
Perhaps such probabilities are based on intuition, and happen to be roughly accurate because the intuition has formed as a causal result of factors influencing the event? In order to be explicitly justified, one would need an explicit justification of intuition, or at least intuition within the field of knowledge in question.
I would say that such intuitions in many fields are too error-prone to justify any kind of accurate probability assessment. My personal answer then would be to discard probability assessments that cannot be justified, unless you have sufficient trust in your intuition about the statement in question.

What is your thinking on this prong of the dilemma (retracting your assessment of reasonableness on these probability assessments for which you have no justification)?

tivelen 26 Dec 2021 3:34 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Ege Erdil’s comment on: What is a probabilistic physical theory?
My approach was not helpful at all, which I can clearly see now. I’ll take another stab at your question.

You think it is reasonable to assign probabilities, but you also cannot explain how you do so or justify it. You are looking for such an explanation or justification, so that your assessment of reasonableness is backed by actual reason.

Are you unable to justify any probability assessments at all? Or is there some specific subset that you’re having trouble with? Or have I failed to understand your question properly?

tivelen 25 Dec 2021 20:01 UTC
−1 points
on: What is a probabilistic physical theory?
Suppose an answer appeared here, and when you read it, you were completely satisfied by it. It answered your question perfectly. How would this world differ from one in which no answer remotely satisfied you? Would you expect yourself to have more accurate beliefs or help you achieve your goals?
If not, to the best of your knowledge, why have you decided to ask the question in the first place?

tivelen 17 Dec 2021 23:04 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Richard Lucas’s comment on: Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from?
After 1960 upper classes retained most of them, but the working classes experienced major declines. These were societal in extent; no blame assigned, it is simply what happened.
Why that happened seems to be the key to reversing it, though. If the four virtues are needed to get things back together, but they can fade from society for reasons unknown, trying to get them back is like bailing water from a sinking ship.

tivelen 16 Dec 2021 22:49 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: tivelen’s Shortform
Human sib-testing seems like it would be useful, for one thing. There was a post here about cloning great people from the past. We will be able to do that in the future if most moderately-well-off people keep pre-emptive copies.
In theory, this would have the same use cases as typical cloning, with an upfront cost and time delay. The main benefit it has over current cloning tech is that it avoids the health issues for the clones, which currently make it unviable.
We could clone people successfully with no further advances in science, or unusual costs. The ethical issues with cloning are no longer theoretical, if true. This seems like a big deal, but maybe cloning really isn’t much of an ethical issue at all, and few people will be interested.

tivelen 16 Dec 2021 22:20 UTC
1 point
on: Housing Markets, Satisficers, and One-Track Goodhart
To me the question is this: given that people like communities and presumably would be happy to pay money for them, why isn’t this currently a factor in the housing market?
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. Could you describe how the housing market would be different if this was currently a factor?

tivelen 16 Dec 2021 21:18 UTC
1 point
on: tivelen’s Shortform
As of now, we cannot unfreeze people who have been cryogenically frozen and successfully revive them. However, we can freeze 5-day-old fertilized eggs and revive them successfully years later. When exactly does an embryo become unrevivable?
Identical twins split at around one week after fertilization, so if it were possible to revive past then, we could freeze one twin and let the other gestate, and effectively clone the gestated twin whenever desired. Since we can artificially induce twinning, then we could give every newly born person the ability to be cloned, seemingly with none of the downsides of current methods of cloning, although with the overhead of IVF treatment, which is substantial.
Is this currently possible under current scientific understanding? Is it more ethical than other methods of cloning? What ethical issues remain? Would anyone even want to do this if it were legally available?

tivelen 7 Dec 2021 3:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: LVSN’s comment on: Privacy and Manipulation
In what way does this post do those bad things you mentioned? There is no mention of breaking innocent secrets, or secrets that would cause unjust ostracization, only patterns of actually harmful behavior.
If this post was made in confidence to you, would you tell others of it anyway?

tivelen 25 Nov 2021 2:51 UTC
1 point
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: The superabundance of knowledge and its subsequent division—Some remarks
Any pattern identified by induction either continues to hold, in which case it is fine to believe it, or it stops holding, in which case it must be adjusted. A generalization is a form of induction, and so acts the same. Could you provide an example of induction leading down a garden path?

tivelen 22 Nov 2021 22:59 UTC
1 point
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: The superabundance of knowledge and its subsequent division—Some remarks
Knowing that the sun will come up in the morning is knowledge, and a success of induction. You do not even need to know that the Earth orbits the sun to have that knowledge. There is more to know about the sun, but that is yet more success of induction, and does not erase the previous success as if it were worse than knowing nothing.

An observed pattern in reality works so long as reality is observed to obey the pattern. If the pattern breaks, the previous inductive hypothesis is adjusted. “The sun will rise in the morning” is an excellent inductive prediction that holds to this day, and allows people to live successfully.

Tomorrow the sun could simply not rise in the morning, and we’d find some new pattern about the sun. That wouldn’t mean our old pattern was a hunch or pretended knowledge.

Studying neutrinos improves predictions, as does studying the growth cycles of plants. But there is no “global framework”, only more data and the abstractions on the data. If it was hunches and pretended knowledge back then, it still is now, and if you are worried about this, I don’t know any solution. I don’t even see a problem. We will continue learning more, forever, or until we run out of new data, whichever comes first.

tivelen 22 Nov 2021 2:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: eugene_black’s comment on: What Would You Do Without Morality?
This is something I’ve thought about recently. Even if you cannot identify your goals, you still have to make choices. The difficult part is in determining the distribution of possible M. In the end, I think the best I’ve been able to do is to follow convergent instrumental goals that will maximize the probability of fulfilling any goal, regardless of the actual distribution of goals. It is necessary to let go of any ego as well, since you cannot care about yourself more than another person if you don’t care about anything, now can you?

tivelen 22 Nov 2021 2:11 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)’s comment on: Competence/Confidence
Interesting, that was something I considered, but didn’t think was included in the idea of confidence. I have experienced that before. The stakes of a situation also seems like an objective fact, like competence. Perhaps the subjective evaluation of stakes and competence are entangled into the feeling of confidence. Maybe it has something to do with low variance of outcomes? If you have done something a lot, or if it doesn’t really matter, then there isn’t anything to worry about, because nothing that matters is up for grabs in the situation.