Sure, and we should give the violist our kidneys for 9 months and the woman should under those circumstances *not* abort the baby.

That's condoning and even sanctioning killing, some might take that as murder. — TheMadFool

So is leaving the violinist to their fate. So is allowing the abortion to take place. Some might take *those* as murder.

Unfrotunately or not, the violinist's sad condition is not my doing just like a woman who conceives from rape is not responsible for her pregnancy. — TheMadFool

The vulnerability to illness that some have is not your doing either, which is what makes the analogy work.

Good article here which describes that sort of thing: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/pandemic-science

The same apolitical scientist could be attacked by left-wing commentators in one place and by alt-right commentators in another. Many excellent scientists have had to silence themselves in this chaos. Their self-censorship has been a major loss for scientific investigation and the public health effort. My heroes are the many well-intentioned scientists who were abused, smeared, and threatened during the pandemic. I respect all of them and suffer for what they went through, regardless of whether their scientific positions agreed or disagreed with mine. I suffer for and cherish even more those whose positions disagreed with mine.

One has more of a right to the sole use of one's kidneys than to go to a restaurant or nightclub, and the burden of sharing one's kidneys with another is far higher than not being able to eat out or dance in a crowded room. — Michael

As if lockdowns mean little more than being deprived of restaurants and nightclubs.

It strikes me that the “cost-benefit analysis” is precisely what is *not* made by those who advocate for lockdowns.

So you misread what I wrote and I’m a “sneak” because you haven’t followed the death cases which are posted almost everywhere one gets news. — Xtrix

I’m not American, I don’t read that news.

And to be fair, given the whole “affect” and “effect” thing and not understanding what “begging the question” means while insisting others had it wrong, you might just be an egg.

As hospitals are overrun in Idaho and Texas and ~3000 die every two days. — Xtrix

So like a sneak you’ve written this is a way that suggests those deaths are occurring in Texas and Idaho, when it’s really across all of the US.

Around 8,000 people die per day in the US of all causes. I’ve already said why this consideration is meaningful.

People who argue well don’t just say things and oblige their opponents to support both cases.

Covid deaths: 1800 a day, two day average over 3,000. That’s a 9/11 every two days. Idaho and Texas hospitals pushed to the max, and now southern hospitals: — Xtrix

I asked where you’re getting these figures from. They aren’t found on the Worldometers website. You posted an article about ICU beds that does not contain those figures.

Yeah, it’s a mess.

Oh, and you thought “to beg the question” in this context meant to *raise* a question, didn’t you?

Perhaps 400 Covid deaths per day still seems like a lot, but Texas has a population of 29 million. England has a population of 56 million and around 1,600 people die per day of all causes. Given that most people who die from/with Covid are at the ends of their lives anyway you can expect natural deaths and Covid deaths to significantly overlap.

As hospitals are overrun in Idaho and Texas and ~3000 die every two days. Keep minimizing it -- you're doing great work. — Xtrix

Where are you getting those figures from? The Worldometers website has 3 day averages of around 400 and 40 daily Covid deaths for Texas and Idaho respectively.

The final summary at the end of the Discussion section seems plain enough; but there’s always the problem of being unable to evaluate these studies without the know-how. Still, the explanation intuitively makes sense and there must be some mechanism behind the reduced transmission.

I agree with this.

and how sick you are has nothing to do with how sick someone you infect gets. Is that your understanding as well? — Srap Tasmaner

No, my understanding is this (https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-few-vaccines-prevent-infection-heres-why-thats-not-a-problem-152204):

Asymptomatically infected people typically produce virus at lower levels. Though there is not a perfect relationship, usually more virus equals more disease. Therefore, vaccinated people are less likely to transmit enough virus to cause severe disease.

I haven’t seen any reason why this doesn’t also apply to unvaccinated people with mild or asymptomatic cases.

Regarding transmission, I think people can take care of themselves
— AJJ

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. — Srap Tasmaner

I think the above understanding, plus staying home when very ill, plus people managing their own exposure to the risk would be a better approach than mandating vaccinations.

I have criteria for arguing well and I consider someone stupid when they fall far short of it. I think I often overstate the extent to which people do though.

I get the impression that many peoples’ definition of stupid is “person who thinks enough opposite things to what I think”.

Regarding transmission, I think people can take care of themselves. It’s always been so that the number of cases hasn’t reflected the amount of illness because they’ve included of all of the very mild and asymptomatic cases. The transmission of more severe cases is troubling, but how many people are inclined to go clubbing when they have, say, the flu? How likely is it that a mild case will transmit and become a severe case in a vaccinated person? How much risk should we be eliminating from our society? Driving a car is somewhat risky, we could ban them and eliminate that risk; for various reasons we don’t do this. Is even the elimination of the risk Covid-19 poses worth mandated medical treatments? Perhaps one day a medical treatment will be mandated that you wish to refuse—on that day would you regret that its precedent had been made?

How should people use those statistics to inform the choices they must make? — Srap Tasmaner

I don’t know how they *should* use them. I’m arguing that they *can* be used to inform a decision to decline the vaccine. I keep bringing up young children and the JCVI judgement because it provides a helpful extreme—it shows there are cases where the trade-off *might* make it not worth getting vaccinated or where the decision is negligible, at least from a personal perspective. Are such cases found in the somewhat older population? I don’t see why not. If this is right then vaccine mandates lose this justification.

Ah. Well it was not intended as a trick, but only to demonstrate that children are not immune. — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe it wasn’t intended that way but it is tendentious, just as speaking solely of the vaccine’s potential harms is, and so suggests your view is not balanced (not assuming that mine conversely is).

Is there an easy-to-find breakdown of case-fatality rates broken down by vaccination status? That would be worth seeing. — Srap Tasmaner

Presumably the JCVI had information of that sort and concluded the risk to the very young was marginal enough to warrant a precautionary approach to vaccinating them all.

What I don't understand is what use you're making of case-fatality rate. Are you telling parents they shouldn't care if their kids get sick because they're less than ten times as likely to die from covid than they are from the flu? — Srap Tasmaner

No. Questions such as this are a slippery way of defaming someone.

I mean, yeah, it's not Ebola, but you and your family ought to get vaccinated. Right? It's a risk that can be dramatically reduced. — Srap Tasmaner

What is the risk of a young, healthy person dying from Covid-19? According to research such as Ioannidis’s, tiny. What is the risk of a person being injured by one of the vaccines? We don’t really know, but it exists. So where does this dramatic reduction in risk you claim actually come from?

Young children, and teenagers, may indeed be at lower risk of becoming infected, and at lower risk of becoming seriously ill, but they're certainly not immune. I have a friend who teaches in a public high school that, within the first month of the new school year, had three children sick enough to be hospitalized and many more sick enough to miss school. — Srap Tasmaner

This is more of what I’m referring to as fear masquerading as reason. Here’s John Ioannidis, a highly respected researcher in epidemiology, saying that according to his research (in places such as Germany) the absolute risk of an under-65 dying from Covid-19 is about the same as driving your car to work: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T-saAuXaPok (at about 1:20)

To speak of young children being hospitalised with Covid-19 has the the same fearful effect as speaking of all the anecdotal reports of horrific vaccine injuries. Do you dismiss the latter as being unverified and unrepresentative? If so it seems worth considering that you may be employing the same trick.

Since there are people who cannot get vaccinated, people with certain allergies and medical conditions, the very young, and for now teenagers (though that may be changing), everyone is a potential threat to them, and it seems the unvaccinated are probably a somewhat bigger potential threat. — Srap Tasmaner

It isn’t correct to lump teenagers and the very young in with people with medical conditions when you say this.

This is from the JCVI’s recent judgment on the universal vaccination of 12-15 year olds:

Given the very low risk of serious COVID-19 disease in otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year olds, considerations on the potential harms and benefits of vaccination are very finely balanced and a precautionary approach was agreed.

It seems there’s a lot of fear within this debate, on both sides, that gets masqueraded as reason.

Affect and effect are overlapping. — Xtrix

Affect and effect are often used interchangeably. There's a subtle difference, but both convey the same basic information to English speakers. — Xtrix

Yes, affect and effect are different. One is a verb, one is a noun. — Xtrix

A wonderful example of a reluctant evolution in understanding.

A few quotes from an interesting article: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/pandemic-science

“John P.A. Ioannidis is Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, as well as Professor (by courtesy) of Biomedical Science and Statistics, at Stanford University.”

Most people...had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method.

The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.

In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for.

As these spurious experts multiplied, evidence-based approaches—like randomized trials and collection of more accurate, unbiased data—were frequently dismissed as inappropriate, too slow, and harmful.

Anyone who was not an epidemiologist or health policy specialist could suddenly be cited as an epidemiologist or health policy specialist by reporters who often knew little about those fields but knew immediately which opinions were true.

Conversely, some of the best epidemiologists & health policy specialists in America were smeared as clueless &dangerous by people who believed themselves fit to summarily arbitrate differences of scientific opinion without understanding the methodology or data at issue.

A small number of people have a legitimate reason to decline the vaccine — say, those with an allergy. Others, particularly racial minorities, are mistrustful because of their personal experiences with the health care system, or because the vaccines are relatively new. Still others have struggled to get time off work or have worried (mistakenly) about the cost.

Beyond these, it’s hard to understand any arguments against getting the shot.

It’s interesting that the writer of this NY Times article seems to accept what I believe are most peoples’ reasons for not getting the vaccine and decries just one (appeals to freedom.).

I suppose “noumena” could cover it as well. But in that case I think there would have to remain things that can only be experienced indirectly by any being—otherwise you’d be inviting back in an infinite consciousness you’d have to term “God”. So perhaps collectively we already experience reality as much as is actually possible.

And on each view I expect there’d remain things we can only experience indirectly, like electrons.

I think either there’s an entity which is conscious of everything, which we’d call God (and we in principle could experience “extra” things too); or there are things which no being is conscious of, in which case those things may as well not exist, even if they do.

I hadn’t heard of Stove’s Gem, but at a glance what I referred to isn’t that argument. Hart isn’t saying we can only know things within a limited framework; he’s pointing out that if it’s not possible to be conscious of a thing then that thing may as well not exist.

Maybe, but then you’d have to ask if there are things not available to the alien’s consciousness. If there are, in what meaningful way do these things exist unless there is some other being conscious of them? If there is you meet the same question again. I’m actually agnostic about the existence of God, but questions of consciousness do seem to point in such a direction even if you don’t intend them to.

I suppose on an atheist view any things that we or any other being can’t be even indirectly conscious of may as well not exist, so they don’t matter.

The writer/philosopher David Bentley Hart has written a bit about consciousness being fundamental to reality, i.e. God’s consciousness. He points out that for anything meaningfully to exist it must be possible to be conscious of it, and describes us as participating finitely in the consciousness of God. With that in mind I think the question is this: why would anything that is in God’s consciousness be off limits to ours?

And so I’m not going to deny that we were always going to experience hospital crises. But in the UK we now have another one in the form of massive waiting lists caused by lockdowns (that have never even been shown to be effective compared simply to asking people to take care). It seems to me the same people responsible for a deficient healthcare system implemented and advocated for a foolish policy to “protect” it when it experienced trouble.

The greatest thing about Twitter (and other online media) is that it can show you how dreadful an “expert” can be at thinking. Once you truly witness this you’re free—you don’t have to listen to selected authorities, you can find others and listen to them instead. Sometimes you can even think or experience your own way around the junk these selected authorities are perfectly capable of coming out with. You learn that you don’t need a heap of credentials to be *smart*. It’s actually quite beautiful.

Hospital overflow fears were driven by the unreliable death estimates made by Imperial College, whose model - according to Johan Giesecke (one of Sweden’s prior state epidemiologists) - did not take into account that hospital capacity could be increased, which happened in the UK.

This event is far more comparable to the 1968 flu pandemic, for which no measures of this sort were implemented. Going by newspaper headlines health/hospital crises happen quite regularly. This one, though troubling, appears to have been overblown to the extent that the world is now in far worse shape that it perhaps would have been if we’d done nothing at all.

I don’t find it too egregious. I’ve encountered lots of people, some of whom have the same opinion as me and they too have encountered lots of people. I see no reason why a sample this large couldn’t be fairly representative of people in at least the Western world.

To be honest, I don’t even know that rhetoric isn’t used in academic writing. The rhetorical expression “almost everyone” means “of those who I have encountered, directly or indirectly, many/most/the vast majority are/do/are like this...”

Here’s the interview with Sunetra Gupta I referred to: https://unherd.com/2020/05/oxford-doubles-down-sunetra-gupta-interview/

Here’s an article referring among other things to the UK death rate falling too soon for lockdown to be the cause: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-the-nhs-was-not-overrun-by-covid-during-lockdow

Here’s the initial Imperial College/Neil Ferguson report (I think the final paragraph is worth drawing your attention to): https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

And here’s an article listing Neil Ferguson’s past predictions: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/six-questions-that-neil-ferguson-should-be-asked

Since we’re not writing for academic journals I consider it fine to use rhetoric in argument.

Expressions like “virtually everyone” and “almost everyone” are rhetorical, not technical.

You seem certain that they weren't; I suspect they helped. It should be an empirical question, but it's a very difficult one, for me anyway. — Srap Tasmaner

Not certain, no. But from what I’ve seen, from an empirical perspective the argument against lockdowns is very strong: known to be incredibly destructive with little to show they work.

The only reason I made the point about how your point "might sound" -- and you're right, it's kinda none of my business -- is that I wanted to see questions about lockdowns discussed seriously, and that means keeping people who raise the issue from being dismissed as loonies. — Srap Tasmaner

Fair enough. But then those who are inclined to dismiss their opposition as “loonies” like to do so regardless.