Right. And all I was saying is that it’s implausible that most experts (from trustworthy institutions that have no motivation to lie about this) saying that consciousness is not required for quantum wave collapse, are gaslighting us. This isn’t even a political issue. There is no reason to lie here. Do you agree with that much? — khaled

Yes, do even know this? Where's the data? And if so, what experiment allows us to distinguish between a "real expert" and not.

As for the subject matter, if someone talking about "science" doesn't have an experiment to backup their claim, it doesn't matter anyway. What you should say (even if you had the above data) is "most experts speculate consciousness is not needed for wave collapse".

But if it's just speculation, who cares?

History (which produces experts), if you bother to look at it, show us "experts" mostly agreeing on a lot of speculations at any given time. Most experts, until recently, nearly all "speculated" the expansion of the universe was slowing down, the question was just how much. Then someone (and it doesn't matter if they're an expert or not) provided evidence that the expansion is actually speeding up. Other groups then independently confirmed this ... maybe; more actual experiments, actually independent maybe needed to increase our confidence to certainty (there could be something seriously wrong with distance measurements, considering the conflict in measuring the Hubble constant may mean we're missing something profound). For now however, "experts" mostly speculate the universe is indeed accelerating in it's expansion.

Point is, what the experts mostly speculated before and what they mostly speculate now doesn't matter, what matters is experiment, independent verification, and the trust (based on feeling) that we place in such verifying experiments (that also extends to ourselves as part of this vaguely trustworthy humanity, as we can also do an experiment ourselves, but do it wrong).

Until recently a lot of "experts" speculated the LHC would give evidence of super-symmetry particles, like they did for previous accelerators; and with good reason, after a good run of discovering new particles with every bigger accelerator there wasn't good reason to assume it would stop. Point is, someone working on theories where the LHC doesn't discover anything more than the Higgs before the LHC results, was not "wrong" because many experts speculated otherwise. Speculation of experts doesn't resolve issues, otherwise no scientific breakthrough would ever happen (as they are almost always fringe ideas when they are first thought of, and would be discarded the moment they are thought of due to "contrary expert speculation").

But you have some confidence in them. Where does that come from? — khaled

I just told you: independent groups I have (for not experimental reasons) reason to believe are really independent and have run the same experiments and confirmed the same results; 2. interacting with technology that must be doing "something" and proposed explanations coherent with that and implausible that (again not due to experimental evidence by my feelings of humanity's trustworthiness) has been made up to gaslight me.

What the hell was that novella then? — khaled

One can always imagine some more complicated scheme fooling oneself in every way. It's an old philosophical exercise. Have you not heard of Descartes? I'm not suprised if you haven't; obviously he has nothing to do with your version of science.

Right, and what do you look at when you make your guesses? Does someone having a PhD or Doctorate improve your chances of trusting them in any way? That would be crazy! — khaled

You haven't bothered to reflect on anything I have said. I've made it clear that expert (to me) is the result of historical process and convention, and not a result of experiment. People get PhD as part of a historical process, not by getting in some box that verifies they are indeed made of "PhD substance" that is distinguishable from "layperson substance". Because I have this view, the credibility of PhD's is related to the political institutions that produce them, and I can doubt more an "expert" in China saying the CCP is like, the bestest or then an "expert" in Nazi Germany saying their race is superior to others. If, however, there's a political system I trust more that also produces experts, I trust those experts more.

Can you put two electrons next to each other yourself? I doubt it. — khaled

I'm not sure when science became just "trust us", but that just so happens to be the exact same epistemological framework of the Catholic church, which science fans are so proud of over throwing with "experiments you can do yourself to convince yourself of what the answer really is rather than just believe what the churchmen tell you".

Yes, things I haven't actually done, like put two electrons together, I have less confidence in than things I have done.

Now, for technology, it's only an argument that supports a "science" used to create it because you can run experiments on the technology yourself. I can run calculations on a computer that satisfy me of it's information processing power and information density.

There's a lot you can do yourself.

You're also forgetting the important step of independent groups confirming results, increasing our confidence we aren't being fooled (experiments "anyone can do" if they want and report to us confirmation or refutation; we can then evaluate their credibility as we wish, but there's no second experiment that actually tells us their credibility ... other than more groups we trust more doing the same experiment, or then ourselves if it means that much to us), rather than just believing experts.

What you can't do is propose an experiment that distinguishes between expert and non-expert.

Of course, maybe independent groups are secretly colluding to fool us. Ultimately, my trust in the reports of others is indistinguishable from my trust in humanity as a whole. Some level of scheming I find implausible, but not due to some experiment I've run but because I don't get "the feeling" the people around me are that duplicitous and I have "the feeling" humanity as a whole is similar. Of course, there's definitely schemes, based on the same feelings about people around me, I find completely plausible, like pretending "experts" backup the idea of selling people a lot of opioids. Essentially by definition I cannot actually verify by experiment exactly how trustworthy people are, I'm forced to make due with guessing and keeping an eye on things. Unless you have such an experiment, then the situation is that the purpose of an expert is that we trust them; it cannot be some experiment that tells us to or not and even less some expert of experts.

Sorry I didn't add the obvious implication of experimental evidence.

Experiments you can do yourself.

When someone tells you electrons are attracted to other electrons, how do you know they're wrong? — khaled

I'm pretty sure they're wrong.

Based on experiments I've actually seen.

Seeing the resume is experimental evidence.

And how do you think they got said features? If not by actually knowing what they're talking about (with maybe a few rare exceptions)? — khaled

Experimental evidence of what?

If I send you my resume with all known PhD diplomas that have ever existed, would you just accept the result of this experiment?

And how do we even know what PhD's diplomas exist you may wonder? Luckily I have a PhD in the history of PhD's on my resume, so you trust my expertise, question settled.

But then, being clever and insightful, you begin to wonder how I was able to accumulate over a million PhD diplomas. You scroll down and see "time travelling arts" and immediately jump to the only available conclusion based on the "experimental evidence" so far, which is I'm an immortal time travelling scholastic.

Still, you want to be sure and case may yet be closed. You see some of my PhD's have been issued recently, rather than centuries in the past or future as with most of them. So, being astute and careful, you call the institutions in question and ask around. What do you get? Pathetically useless anecdotes that don't prove anything at all. You demand experimental evidence to resolve your question! The dean of deans at the end of the line tells you to stop wasting their time and hangs up. You scream into phone that you're just trying to get at the experimental evidence that correctly distinguishes experts from non-experts in the same way we would expect to be satisfied in distinguishing electrons from protons, upon which the entire modern world is built, you mad person! But you hear only silence. You are forced to conclude that these institutions labeled "university" don't take knowledge seriously and can't be trusted.

You start pacing in your room. If there is no experimental evidence that can actually be carried out to distinguish between expert and layperson on a given subject, the whole epistemological foundation of global society may collapse. Bridges may collapse due to improper stressed concrete supervision, planes would fall out of the sky due to mad idiots making critical systems dependent on a single sensor, trump would be president! pandemics unleashed and place us all in lock downs and see the harrying day Westerners wear surgical masks in public like dirty Asians! The damages of an apocalypse of a world run by non-experts would have no realistic bounds; the icecaps could melt, species could go extinct at a rate not seen for tens of millions of years, we could even irrationally start killing the bees with chemicals they really don't like for all we could predict.

You pick up the phone, "give me the president of the United States of America". "President, smart and stable genius at that, speaking". You slam the phone down in horror: It's already begun. You turn on the TV to see the date; it's 2016, you've gone back in time, which doesn't surprise you as you have experimental evidence time travel exists, and you don't doubt the results of your experiments. Suddenly you see a shadowy figure in the corner holding some sort of exotic novelty cane. "It's you," you say. "Yes, it's me Khaled, Boethius from the forum -- which I'm sure you now realize is also the actual historical Boethius who discovered the secrets of time travel by taking a lot of drugs and talking with inter-dimensional muses -- and while you've been confident that experts have some real empirical experimental evidence establishing their expertise, rather than a historical social convention resulting in expertise labels without experiments available to confirm those labels really signify what we want them to signify, and have slept peacefully in your bed confident experts have organized everything in a reasonable way and you have no need to worry or even look our your window -- you need but focus on the extremely narrow area of expertise other experts have shoved your face into -- the world has actually not gone that way, and I've brought you back to 2016, to show you how it all began; the start of the destruction of your civilization because mad fools believed critical thinking could be delegated to experts and is not a collective social responsibility that succeeds or fails together, without any experiments available to convince us at any given time which is actually happening. "Now," I say seriously, "you have two choices: take the red pill, a massive complimentary dose of LSD, and I bring you back to ancient Greece and we do a bunch of orgies together, or take the blue pill, and I bring you back 2021, bring you up to speed on recent history, and you can try to work things out. Blue pill is also a complimentary dose of LSD; you want to do some LSD Khaled, cause that's why I'm here; most of my million PhD involve the psychedelic arts actually". You slam both pills into your mouth. After a long pause of appreciation, "so you're beginning to learn," I tell you.

You mean looking at their resumes? — khaled

You don't seem to be able to extricate yourself from your pseudoscientific beliefs about the world.

We can look at their resumes, I agree. Whether there is some difference between expert and layperson about our empirical world, relating to our state of knowledge as such and not features of society we are told about without experimental evidence, is what I disagree with.

No, it’s a definition. An expert is someone with a PhD or doctorate. We can confirm whether or not someone has this by looking at their resume. What’s so difficult here? — khaled

So much difficulty. See above.

You can't just define experts into existence in any meaningful sense.

Someone with a Phd or doctorate at least. — khaled

We can devise an experiment to resolve who likely has these socially constructed tittles, but to propose an "experiment" that bestows the claims to knowledge we desire, in our version our science today, means we need an experiment and it needs to be done multiple times and be peer-reviewed by existing experts ... but we don't know who's an expert yet, so the experiments cannot be done and pass into our version of science.

And it’s not the domain of science to define what “expert” means. So there is no scientific or pseudoscientific definition. But that’s what I have in mind when I say “expert”. — khaled

If it's a claimed fact about the world, then it's clearly psuedoscience. That proposed empirical facts about the world (we can observe this PhD degree on the wall of this university and agree this person is an expert) can be a state of knowledge neither scientific nor psuedoscientific is itself pseudoscience gobblediegook.

Put another way: There is probably a reason most quantum mechanics interpretations that bring in consciousness are dismissed as pseudoscience nowadays by most experts. — khaled

Ah, but do you have a non-pseudoscientific definition of expert.

Aie, there's the rub. But don't worry! I nominate myself to fill this power vacuum.

I think it's worth explaining the "stakes" in bell's inequality.

A fundamental rule of physics is locality, which just means information doesn't travel faster than the speed of light, which is another way of saying causes don't makes effects at faster than the speed of light. So "information travelling" is the same thing as "causes propagating" in these conversations.

Quantum correlations between distant events, such as a material, say a crystal, that produces pairs of particles going in different directions but when both are measured the pairs always have something correlated, such as opposite spin or polarization or what have you: measuring one particle allows a scientist at detector A predict with 100% certainty a measurement by another scientist at detector B, and A and B can be as far apart as the scientists can do.

So, we "know" something instantaneously about B from observations at A, which on first viewing seems to say information has traveled faster than light. Of course, if we inspect closer we don't "really know" anything about B because we're making the assumption that scientist at B makes a measurement, the device still works, a whole bunch of other assumptions. Rather, we're just predicting something at B based on our knowledge of A; but this isn't unusual. We predict things about other places and times regularly; that we predict the sun rises tomorrow does not mean information has traveled from tomorrow to today to allow us to make that predictions. So, already, with this more careful viewing, we're just predicting and not "exchanging information"; and these sorts of experiments can never be setup in such a way to allow the scientists to communicate faster than light. So locality isn't in trouble.

However, we are still left to wonder if the thing about particles at A and B is determined when the first scientists measures or whether it was "really set" at the crystal or whatever creating the particle pair. It's much simpler to imagine the incoming particle responsible for the key event, hits the crystal and two particles emerged with the correlated features and travel to scientists at A and B already with these values of interest. This intuitive way of looking at it is thus called "hidden variables", as the values we're interested in are there, just hidden from us until we measure them and so know about them.

Quantum mechanics is highly wound up in measurement uncertainty and the logical implications of this; however, for a while one could still wonder if the things being measured really become "definite" when they are measured or are already definite and we then just measure them to know something about this pre-existing definiteness. Just as on our normal human scale we measure a door to find out what it already is, not somehow to make nature take on some value at the same instant we measure it.

If the door is "already a meter" wide before we measure it, then there's some variable of definite value that is hidden from us but revealed to us when we measure it. For doors, this makes sense. However, for particles, quantum mechanics strongly suggests things really are uncertain until measured, that nature only takes on the definite value we are trying uncover in our act of uncovering it, but, if so, then correlated events must somehow "talk" to each other instantaneously; since particle at B cannot know ahead of time what scientist at A will measure and so prepare itself to be measured in the expected way; it is equally uncertain as perhaps scientist B will measure it first and so making B a clear value then forces A to take on the corresponding value when it's measured. Quantum mechanics (for a while) only "suggested" this instantaneous resolution of values at faster than light travel, because the "hidden variables" weren't needed to do quantum mechanics, so if they can be thrown out anyway and quantum mechanics is already quite bizarre, then, once you're "in it", it becomes intuitive to just not care about locality in this case (as it can't be used to communicate anyways, so who cares).

But people did care!

However, for a while, how to resolve the debate of whether there are hidden variables -- which seems question setup to be something in principle that can't be resolved by experiment, similar to resolving if there are ghosts we can't see or ever detect ever around or not by experiment -- had no experimental resolution.

Bells inequality is a proposed way to resolve the debate with experiment and prove the quantum entanglement realm is non-local and correlations are "made to exist" instantaneously without the cause needed for the correlation to happen travelling at slower than the speed of light (as opposed to if the values of the particle are set when the particles are created in an entangled state, then the information travels with them, since they already have the values to be discovered later, slower than light, to the detectors and so our usual visualization of cause remains local). Of course, we can change our intuition of cause to basically exclude these correlations, because scientist A is not able to use this effect to cause anything different to happen at B faster than the speed of light; so if cause is effecting events, then cause remains local and we just don't think about it more than this (the "shutup and calculate" view of physics).

I say "proposed way" because the experiments can involve crazy loopholes if not setup super carefully, and it get crazy complicated, and I'm not sure if there's consensus about what all the loopholes even are and if experiments have closed them all. Generally, new bell inequality experiments aim to close one loophole. If there's a proof about whether all the loopholes are for sure known about, I'm not aware of it. It's not like we're doing something like math and proofs in physics, obviously not: that would be crazy talk.

? — ssu

I say process. We could imagine the Swiss / Nordic experiment as some point in a process towards "withering away of the state".

Living in one Nordic country and knowing all my life the local Social Democracy, I'd say this is not true. — ssu

I too live in a Nordic country, and if I compare to life in the 19th century, there is simply no way to get around the fact a large part of the demands of "socialist agitation" of the 19th century is realized in these countries.

Worker protections, minimum wage, wellfare, healthcare, free day-care, primary, secondary and advance education, subsidized public infrastructure etc.

If you went back to the 19th century and said to people working in mines 80 hours a week, that they could have all these things but it wouldn't be "socialism", that you were advocating these things but not "socialism", they would say you had lost your mind. Capitalist or even just state agents sent to stop your "socialism but not" agitation would not at all care about whatever distinctions you are trying to make.

Living in one Nordic country and knowing all my life the local Social Democracy, I'd say this is not true.

The central government might transfer authority to local communities, but that hardly takes away the role of public authorities, likely it simply increases it on another level. Great, you don't have to ask permission from a central ministry, but your local communal authorities. — ssu

There is nominal power and there is real and effective power. Power is not simply administrative process, power is the ability to effectuate desired change in the real world. In real effective democracies, people effectuate power not only through administrative process and votes, but also through public opinion, strikes, and agitation of all sorts.

If the prime-minister of Finland started using state power in the way Louis 16 understood and used it, two things would happen: first, the immediate realization that there's no way to actually do that, and second, the removal from office nearly immediately. Xi wields effective state power today; the prime minister of Finland is an effective representative of the people on such a scale.

The effective power and who has it in Finland is simply in no way similar to the absolute monarchies of the 18th and 19th century, which is the centralization of authority Marx was critiquing (and then taken over and wielded by the bourgeoisie in much the same way kings did; to protect their property and keep the "little people" in line).

Well, you have no choice but to agree given that the statements are there, black on white. I would recommend you read the articles I suggested because the authors make some very interesting and very strong, in fact irrefutable arguments, in support of their findings. — Apollodorus

Yes, I'll look into them.

To be clear, I would not call myself "a Marxist", and I wouldn't say Marx develops what we would here call "a philosophy" at all, as he never really addresses the question of "why get involved in politics" in the first place.

However, what happens when the thinker doesn't address the issue anywhere else or when the major published works do not support any alternative conclusion? — Apollodorus

I don't think this criticism is fair. Marx has zero clue about the Soviet Union and Pol Pot and co. and is focused on what he thinks is relevant, which is almost entirely critiquing the bourgeoisie. They have the power and he's trying to reveal how that power really works.

As for it "not mattering much", I beg to differ. These are concepts that are central to Marxist theory. — Apollodorus

Depends which Marxist theory. If we're talking about Marx's theory according to Marx, then if he doesn't talk about an issue it's clearly not important to him. Perhaps he should have talked about it, but it clearly doesn't play an important role in his actual theory and writings.

How can you advocate revolution and write thousands of pages justifying it and "forget" to clarify what the actual goal of the revolution consists of, apart from vague statements about "freedom", "equality" and the like? And even these are controversial because on closer scrutiny there are some glaring inconsistencies. — Apollodorus

Though I understand it doesn't "look good" and perhaps the criticism is fair. However, in defense of Marx, if one is advocating "people power", then one doesn't really know what the people are going to do once they have the power. Marx believes people can take a much larger role in determining how their lives are governed, and once that happens he trusts people will make society better (as they live in society); it can be argued as both the apex of foolishness or the summation of wisdom to stay silent about what will actually happen once people "administer their own affairs".

One could say Marx is only showing the door, but that people will need to walk through it.

However, I will need to look into things more carefully. You are asking, to your merit, a more scholarly rebuttal, and so may require not only reading the material you reference but also reading and citing Marx in context, which may take some time.

However, according to some analysts like Andrzej Walicki (Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom) both Marx and his successors like Lenin often use concepts inconsistently and the authors I quoted above, Adamiack and Bender, are of the same opinion. Have you read any of them? — Apollodorus

I don't have time to look into it now, but I will do so.

However, on this topic, I completely agree concepts are used inconsistently. If we want to critique from a modern perspective, Marx's concept of science is fairly rudimentary, but that's common to the intellectual period. And to be fair to Marx, he has a far better conception of science than other important "scientific discipline founders" such as Freud, who has basically no conception remotely in common with modern science and is just basically riffing it.

If we're critiquing a sense of "what mistakes could Marx have avoided", then this is a more historical question.

For example, it is said that “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the state dies (or withers) away" (Anti-Dühring).

But the state can't wither away if is assumes an administrative role, can it? — Apollodorus

For this, I think it's easy to defend Marx. The concept of the state they are working with is the apparatus of the absolute monarchy, the bourgeois start overthrowing the monarch but they keep the state (as, just like the kings they depose, they too are terrified of the "little people" taking their property, and they need the state to protect them).

The state is by definition repressive, because those are the only states that exist.

Our modern definition of the state is inclusive of more-or-less socialist paradises by the standards of the 19th century, but it is anachronistic to put in Marx's conception of the state something like Norway or Switzerland. Norway and Switzerland are far advanced on this road of the state becoming an administrative body genuinely working on behalf of working people.

Another related key concept is the "dictatorship of the proletariat". — Apollodorus

This question I have looked into. For me it's clear "dictatorship of the proletariat" simply means "majority rule" to Marx.

However, when a thinker writes thousands of pages and a phrase only appears once, I think it's also safe to say it doesn't matter much and shouldn't be used to come to any conclusions that are not obviously supported by the major published works. If Marx had Leninist "vanguard" ideas and desire to capture the state and mold people into socialists using state power, I think it's fair to assume he would have wrote about that idea.

Now, both the soviets and their foe the US wanted to attach Marx to statism, so it's an easy phrase to use as pretext and neither side is going to argue with it, but, for me anyways, that Marx provides clear analysis and approval of the Paris commune, the first direct democracy experiment and first "proletariat administrating their own affairs", is pretty clear indication Marx is not a statist.

The problem with Marx for people who don't like Marx, is that he's just extremely tame. He spends most of his time deconstructing (from his point of view) the delusions of the bourgeoisie, in extremely poignant and cutting prose, and very little time planning revolutionary forest squatting.

However, for non-statist Marxists, anarchists and socialists writ large, the state is simply not the main focus of political analysis. Rather, the real arena of politics is the ideas people have: change those ideas and society changes and the state changes. Get the idea into people's heads enough that they are not in anyway "subjects" of the kings of old or the states of new, and the power of the state fades away (just not in the delusional libertarian sense, which is just bourgeois hallucination; any society requires rules and organization etc. and the "bottom up" administrative control called "direct democracy" today is more-or-less "administration" as used by Marx; the people have the power, but they nevertheless need to administer things with administrative councils of some sort nominally similar to state apparatus, but without the oppression which is the essential nature of the state as understood by Marx).

In other words, the sate is centralized power, somehow made possible by "the people" but without any effective influence on this centralized power and in every way their lived dictated from this center. This is in stark contrast to real "people power" who then might nevertheless elect some central authority over certain appropriate tasks. We would call both "a state" in modern political theory, but the second kind simply didn't exist in the remotest sense of the words and to explain that government was possible without oppression nor chaos without rules, the term "administration" as apposed to the state gives a glimpse of this meaning. Otherwise, if what you are talking about has never been seen to exist, it is easy to make the criticism that "we can't function without a state" and everyone having a clear idea of what a state "is", as there's only one kind of example. A similar example is that we might want to stop calling the country the "kingdom" if we aim to not have any kings.

Though I touch on it in the above post, I think it's worth expanding what is meant by "revolutionary" in Marx's writing.

Marx writes well before the Soviet Union and a proliferation of communist insurgencies that bring to mind the idea of the "communist revolutionary" who lives in the forest, wears a beret, and dabbles in post-modernist critique on the side.

The meaning of revolution by Marx is more similar to how we use it today in that pretty much anything can be "revolutionary" in the sense of profound change.

This is made clear in Marx calling capitalism revolutionary and continuously revolutionizing itself with new technology and social changes; what we would call "innovation".

For Marx, real large scale revolutions start well before any political conception of them, in the material changes to the economy. The only reason our capitalist economists don't draw our attention to the material nature of our real economies, but rather stay focused on abstract representation of potential economies that may or may not exists is because A. they are profoundly and willfully stupid as it's their job to be that utterly, relentlessly and irredeemably stupid and B. it would be a segue into discussing whether Marx meant the same thing by materialism (aka. our modern understanding of science as dealing with objective phenomena in the material world).

Once these material changes get underway, it disrupts the old political structures (which could be more-or-less stable for a thousand years and all conception of an alternative basically doesn't exist) because the material interests of people to keep doing what their doing changes and this is impossible to go unnoticed indefinitely. Changes in material processes lead to changes in effective access to power. With new technology, comes new trade, large scale and stable trade that makes the need for "tight nit" and autonomous local political units (aka. fiefs) less needed for survival, and an ascendance of a trading merchant class that, with new found wealth and power and a profound (aka. revolutionary) changes to the real economy, find themselves at odds with aristocratic privilege which is now (for them) standing in the way of further revolutionary changes they are the leaders and masters of. For Marx, humanism and secularism is caused by these material changes in the economy and real wealth and power structures that call for a justifying philosophical framework once this ascending class of merchants and bourgeois factory owners and the like become conscious of their common interest to overthrow the old political order (what Marx calls the superstructure).

There is not really any reason to assume Marx believes there is any shortcuts to this process of the material changes of the economy under bourgeois capitalism in turn creating an ascending class of proletariat that, in a similar way to the bourgeois ascension to power, become conscious of their power and overthrow the superstructure with it. Signs of this ascension to power would be things like literacy.

The analysis always seems quaint because we don't say "bourgeois" or "proletariat", but there's not really any reason to not use Marx's words when discussing his though. However, you can basically read "bourgeois" to mean "investor" and "proletariat" to mean "working class". There are nuances that these substitutions don't pickup (the "bourgeois" have their own distinct culture that, according to Marx, they export everywhere and when the whole world wears blue jeans and suits and watches Hollywood films of damsels in distress in their cute little mansions ... it's a pretty accurate prediction).

So, if we read Marx as meaning processes that could play out over centuries -- just as it took centuries for bourgeois ascendance and consolidation of power in the first-past-the-post representational secular state (free from church and aristocratic interference, in which the working class is easily cajoled into following, if not the right, at least not the wrong, popular politician, be it Obama or Hitler) -- then the "withering away of the state" is perhaps a good way to describe Marx's idea (but of course that would give credit to Proudhon, which Marx would never do, so we may never know).

It seems that the state acquires a prominent position in the socialist phase, but it isn't clear what function it has or what happens to it in the communist phase. — Apollodorus

This is more of a Leninist idea and of course critical to Soviet understanding of Marxism (obviously, Soviet Union believed in an important role of the state).

However, Marx had good things to say about the Paris commune, which was what we'd call direct democracy and what Marx called the proletariat managing their own affairs.

Marx had a fierce dispute with Bakunin, who was essentially the Castro of his time advocating daring revolutionary acts to overthrow states. Marx satirizes Bakunin's idea he needs only 100 revolutionaries to bring about socialism, which, to be clear Bakunin actually says

There need not be a great number of these men. One hundred revolutionaries, strongly and earnestly allied, would suffice for the international organization of all of Europe. Two or three hundred revolutionaries will be enough for the organization of the largest country. — Bakunin, The Program of the International Brotherhood, 1869

So, Marx's view is much more nuanced than just daring acts of what we'd call "communist revolutionaries" in the 20th century, which of course brings up the matter of your OP.

Can anyone explain what is meant by concepts like the “withering away of the state” in Marxist theory? — Apollodorus

This is concept more associated with Proudhon, which Marx doesn't like to credit with anything, so (possibly due to intellectual arrogance) he never makes it abundantly clear he believes the same thing.

But the basic idea as expressed by Proudhon, is that what matters is the beliefs of the people and awareness of the working class of their ability to organize.

The communist manifesto repeats this theme in the idea that the communist is always a friend of the working class and always helping the working class in their struggles of the moment; so, this is very clear incrementalism. At the same time, the communist manifesto makes very bold assertions and talks about revolution a lot, and makes clear that's the goal, so we could interpret this as a call to violent revolution right now or a more mundane "social revolution" as we'd understand our social activists of today (Bernie Sanders sense of "revolution"; profound change but not necessarily immediate or super violent).

Of course, our mundane social activists of today following Bernie Sanders, for example, are only mundane because democracy does actually exist (even in US democratic change is easier than violent revolutionary change, as the Bolshevik style storming of Capital Hill shows us). If we contextualize to Marx's time, politics was of Europe was simply more violent as a matter of fact. So, though we expect from our intellectuals today to condemn violence, it was more just a mundane fact of political life, which Marx, as a political realist, accepts as an unfortunate part of political life and doesn't really advocate against but doesn't really advocate for more of either, as his opposition to Bakunin makes clear.

We can easily interpret the "withering away of the state" as the social democratic process of Europe. Individual citizens in Switzerland and Nordic countries for instance, can genuinely be argued to be free from state oppression and managing their own affairs through fair, or then fair enough, political process. As local awareness increases and local political entities take more active rolls of government management, the "state" becomes less and less relevant to political life; Switzerland's complicated power sharing and power nesting of cities and cantons with direct democratic initiatives possible at every level, that really are effective democratic power, make the Swiss "State" extremely limited in its power and (if you go to Switzerland) no Swiss citizen talks about being repressed by state power.

Of course, Switzerland is wealthy and does have a market, and therefore advanced as a "de facto capitalist success", but this is assuming state capitalist policies maintaining capital's dominance (in opposition to real democratic participation) is the source of Switzerland's wealth in the first place. The counter argument is that real effective democracy brings political stability, little interest in costly wars, good management decisions by the people of "their own affairs" which creates conditions for the accumulation of wealth and an easy time for working class people to, through democracy, ensure decent access to wealth in the form of free education, free health care, good public infrastructure everyone can enjoy, and excellent worker rights to protect against oppression on the job.

If we carry this social experiment of Switzerland, the Nordic's, New Zealand, forward, it is possible to imagine "the State" becoming less and less important, until it is, maybe nominally there as an administrative body of regional issues, but does not and essentially cannot exercise any real oppressive political power. Contrast this, of even the state of affairs of these countries today if you prefer not to speculate about the future, with the French Monarchy, the Tzars, "Communist" China, Nazi Germany, or the Roman Empire for that matter, and it gives a pretty good idea of what "the State" can be in terms of both centralization of power and capacity to oppress. Compared to these states: Nordic countries, Switzerland, and the like essentially don't have states with power over the working class noticeable on any non-logarithmic scale.

Just hmm. Taking these words as expressing what of your thoughts you thought worth presenting, a practice at once necessary, obligatory, correct, and no doubt unjust, it seems to me that if you do not have a whole raft of qualifying thoughts that you might have added, your whole enterprise goes into question. I am going to assume you actually have those qualifying thoughts and just didn't at that moment think them worth including. — tim wood

I think this is very well said and summarizes my own basic question of what the foundational ethical theory is used or implied to justify the transhumanism project.

If there's a framework taken for granted -- such as one of the "big tents" like utilitarianism or kantianism or even Nietzscheism or a variation on post-modernism (none of which, insofar as the label is concerned, might give a clear idea, but it would point in a general direction and terminology) -- it would give some context to the underlying moral or ethical purpose transhumanism is addressing.

Of course, I'd also have no issue with the idea of researching the subject as a technological tool without any moral judgements about its proper use, if any (i.e. just doing the objective scientific investigation), just as a nuclear physicist may say their research does not imply they are making the judgement nuclear bombs or even nuclear reactors should be built, and if so in what context (that the moral and political questions are complex and "science" doesn't take a position on them), but in reading parts of the conversation it definitely seems there is an underlying moral and political project and in clear opposition to specific philosophies (such as the evangelical Christians) "standing in the way of progress". In other words, it's clear what the "others" are that this project is against , but it does not seem clear what this project is really "for".

Not that I am defending the evangelical or otherwise conservative Christians (I criticize them harshly all the time), but if one takes specific and clear issue with one world view, it is my disposition, that one has oneself a clear and specific position from which one makes clear and specific criticisms (if one's criticism are used to justify one's own project, and not just critical thinking for the sake of it without pointing to an alternative "better" position).

As with other posters, the answers to "why is it good?" seem vague.

I listened to one podcast of his where he talks with a physicist if I recall, and he goes into it a bit.

As others have said, nothing has been presented that would be viewed as "a theory" in physics, just some ideas.

From what I understood, his main concern was going back to basics of rulers and protractors to make measurements ... that's pretty much the only thing I understood about his idea. Now, he maybe correct in that popular theories, especially of the time he studied, like string theory aren't "doing it", and some "going back to basics" is a good start.

However, "how to measure things" is already a pretty central part of what physicists do.

Furthermore, nearly all mathematics (especially found in physics) has geometric representation or analogue. Phase-space is simply extending 3 dimensions to 6 dimensions to record both position and momentum of particles, and can be understood in simple geometric terms of vectors in 6 dimensions.

A dimension for time can be added to dimensions of space to represent changes through time as simple geometry. A parabola can represent a literal parabola in space we build, or the arch of an object through space and time. General relativity goes much further than this simple geometric representation of time, and is extremely concerned with measuring geometry locally and how that may change with time and distance if space-time itself is not completely flat but can change, and that, crucially, space and time cannot be completely separated in a fundamental sense at all.

Point being, "geometric unity" can easily be referring to what is already found in physics: lots of geometry analogues and lot's of "measuring things" with protractors and rulers, and that solving the math problems between quantum mechanics and general relativity may involve geometry in some sense.

Not to say these aren't useful intuitions to reflect on, but I think any physicist (of which I am not) will say there's a massive, gargantuan distance to traverse to turn these intuitions into a coherent new physics theory; even more work to do to demonstrate it's really new and not simply equivalent to a theory we already have.

The underlying issue, I would suggest, is that fundamental theoretical physics has been stuck since pretty early days of quantum mechanics and general relativity, and all the promising theories have simply not worked in making new predictions. So, there's clearly something missing, and in the meantime learning the theories that don't work is all that there is to do and publish papers on; but it's not a sort of conspiracy by physicists, they seem to be generally aware that they are clearly missing something and likely "new physics" (new experimental evidence not predicted by either the standard model or general relativity) is the only thing likely to "unstick" the situation (if it is unstickable; some physicists are fine with the idea we just are stuck here more-or-less; we have a theory of small things and a theory of big things, and we'll never be able to unite them into one coherent theory; there is no "reason" our physics must be fully "mathematically coherent"; the universe could present to us a fundamentally "hodgepodge" view of "real reality" of which we can never understand the real functioning fully, and which does
not even correspond to a coherent mathematics we are able to invent at all; i.e. there is no a priori logical reason preventing "god" from making the universe such that our current quantum-general-relativity dichotomy is the absolute best we can ever do; which is, ironically, an obvious possibility to most pure mathematicians, but most physicists insist there is "something" they'll find in pure mathematics that will make everything empirical make sense; but, pure mathematics simply makes no guarantee of describing the world at all, any successes at all in describing the world with mathematics have no pure mathematics reason that they need to be there at all, and are purely coincidence as far as pure mathematics is concerned).

Any sequence of numbers can be described as a sequence of a polynomial function. Not only by one precise, exact and fitting polynomial function, but actually an infinite number of them. — god must be atheist

This isn't prediction though, only retrospectively the numbers in the series so far can fit an infinite number of polynomial functions. If the numbers are generated by a random oracle, then picking the right polynomial function that predicts all next number in the series is simply 1 out of the infinite available; i.e. impossible to predict.

Though, otherwise, I don't really know what this thread is about.

If you want "pure" random numbers (as far as we know) you use radioactive decay. Radioactive elements have some probability of decaying in some span of time, but exactly when is completely random as far as we know and this (and a bit of math) can be used to create random numbers of reasonable certainty.

To give a simplified example, if we have a series of atoms and convert each one in turn to some radioactive element, it will have some half life time. For a single radioactive element the half life is simply when it has 50% chance of decaying already. For each atom, if it decays before the half-life we can mark a 0 and if survives half-life we can mark a 1. You then get a random binary string by repeating the process. Of course, there are weakness in this simple process as maybe the experiment isn't setup perfectly and there's slightly more 1's than 0's or vice-versa, but gets the basic point across. How atoms actually play half-life is a complicated quantum process I can't explain here.

In my view, Marx is best best viewed as a "philosopher-scientist" with strong parallels to the founders of other sciences in the same period, for instance Newton, Darwin and Freud.

Of course, these science founders did not do there work in a vacuum. There's a lot of pieces and concepts floating around, such as various observations and physics formula in the case of Newton, existing theories of evolution in the case of Darwin, and many theories of mind in the case of Freud. What makes these the "founder reference" of their respective fields is they are the first to provide a systemic theory.

Likewise, Marx is aware science requires predictions but lacks, as with all the philosopher-scientists, a clear distinction between metaphysics, retrospective explanation, unfalsefiable-prediction, and falsefiable prediction. We can of course debate if Marx is closer to Newton trying to focus on prediction and ignore the metaphysical questions this brings up (if we ignore the alchemy), or then closer to Darwin whom we can criticize as still mostly doing retrospective explanation lacking a mechanism of evolution (as cell function and reproduction is entirely unknown to him, and so there's no predictive evidence the principle of natural selection is correct compared to competing theories of evolution such as Lamarck, it just rather turns out to be the right one), or then Freud who is mostly doing retrospective explanation as well as unverifiable predictions.

This brings up the question of what science Marx founded. Marx essentially founded social science in a general sense that encompasses what we consider today the separate fields economics, social sciences, and political science.

What makes Marx a founder is in moving from "explanatory theories", found in all precursors to science, to predictive theory of which we understand science to require, or indeed "to be" today.

To give an example of this difference, Smith explains the separate rolls of nail making in a nail making workshop; e.i. specialization. However, Smith provides no theory upon which to predict where we will find specialization in the world, the degree of specialization nor the the social consequence. Specialization is an important concept and explanation for many things we see, but in itself it is not a predictive theory. As the principle appears in Smith, our application of it would simply be "specialization is efficient ... until it isn't". For instance, when my shoes get tied to go outside, I do not observe a specialist tying my shoes; if specialization was more efficient then I should be able to predict that shoe-tying specialists would make our economy more efficient and would be a thing by now, and if not now then certainly will emerge at some point. Obviously, this is not a good prediction and some things are good to specialize and others not, the principle of specialization is efficient in itself is not predictive; it is only sensible as a tautology of being efficient unless it isn't efficient. A predictive theory requires more development.

Marx is the first to bring these principles into some semblance of a predictive theory, relating specialization to technological and social structures that bring it about and predictions of what consequence it has in different configurations. There is of course the physical technological prerequisites that make specialization possible, and of course Smith and other economists of the time are aware of. However, Marx goes much further into this phenomenon, drawing attention to critical aspects of human psychology, that humans are not tools and machines completely compliant in being specialized; that a hammer has no problem being a hammer, whereas a "hammerist" who only hammers all day may develop an aversion to this activity. The phenomena is much more complex than the engineering point of view. So we may draw analogy to Newton's analysis of gravity that brings together many different aspects of the same phenomenon into the first systemic analysis, that Marx is the first to provide a "sufficient enough" systemic analysis of the phenomenon of specialization; that not only are there physical prerequisites, but also prerequisites in social structure and furthermore specialization has complex interactions with human psychology and thus sociological and political phenomena. There is clearly an important element of motivation that needs consideration, the hammerist is motivated by what or for what to hammer, will he or she keep hammering or are there other motivations that result in different observable behaviour: i.e. labour agitation, strike and revolution? Marx also develops the theory further to distinguish different kinds of specialization, that specialization for commodity production organized by stock corporations under capitalism is very different than the specialization of craftsmen organized in guilds under feudalism; resulting in very different "knock-on" social relations.

Of course, we can doubt Marx's predictions (in what exactly the predictions are and whether they happen) or point out they are incomplete in addressing social phenomenon (they predict some observations but not others, just as Newtonian physics predict some physical observations but not others and Newton himself takes the theory to far and makes many bad predictions, for instance in understanding light), and, as with the other "philosopher-scientists" we can point to lot's of concepts that are not, under more careful consideration, predictive science (for instance, Newton's work on Alchemy; which in his defense, likely could not have been systematized into chemistry at the time). We can also go further and make parallels with Freud who is basically not doing science, yet nevertheless provides a systemic enough theory to be a founder of psychology (in analogy with Newton and Darwin), which we can hope is now doing actual science today (I have my doubts). The point here is simply that Marx does provide a systemic analysis of the phenomena and does provide predictions from a "coherent enough" theoretical description.

Of note, Marx predicts Marx won't be mainstream under capitalism, as the elites of a society always promote theories that justify their elitism and power. Therefore, the development of "economics" as we know it today as essentially an apology for capitalism with very little predictive power and essentially denying the moral lives of human capital inputs to productive processes, that those processes are efficient regardless of the human or environmental cost insofar as they are productive according to the standards of efficiency set by the managers of and investors in those processes (i.e. a corporation increasing in value on the stock market is doing something efficient, winning a competition, and therefore the implication is that it is justified, regardless of its impact on society and the environment and whether that impact is a justifiable goal any individual and society as whole does or should have); in other words, the development of economists as an intellectually isolated field from sociology, politics and moral philosophy, that somehow manages to justify capitalism without considering related sociological, political and moral philosophical questions that capitalism, or any organizational system, clearly relates to and cannot possibly be evaluated without; or then, to put it more bluntly, that the modern economists is essentially detached from reality, possessing almost no analytical skills that we can identify as having any worth, and is essentially a source of endless conceptual garbage just as monks and priests prattling on about the divine rights of kings and popes under feudalism and near endless subtle analysis of society based on such a principle of which we have essentially no use of today.

Therefore, if you reject Marx off-hand as not worth your time to study, you maybe correct even without bothering to study the question nor possibly having any adequate analysis, or you maybe a data point in Marx's prediction above and so just another tool. Although this is an aside to the question of how we might classify Marx. Marx also has political agenda, a political bias in his work, but insofar as he takes his moral perspective for granted and conceives of himself as doing objective science ("predicting" communism will come about, rather than admitting his intention is to help bring communism about through his writing about predicting it; a goal we may or may not agree with), then it is best to consider his non-predictive philosophical concepts as part of his scientific effort.

As per the OP, US style conservatism committed to anti-intellectualism starting with Reagan and the "southern strategy".

It's so far down the anti-intellectual path that conservative pundits need to say things like "it isn't true, literally, but it feels true and it's an important truth that's being felt here that speaks to conservatives".

Due to false balance in the media, there's built up the expectation that "there must be just as good arguments for my side as the other side on this issue", but this isn't true, and the expectation that an anti-intellectual movement would create good arguments is just stupid.

Now, does this mean contemporary US conservatives are stupid?

Yes.

What we have witnessed with Bush the Second and a more extreme repeat with Trump is the terminal phase of an anti-intellectual movement in which the leaders of the movement are no longer real intellectuals simply manipulating a bunch of fools to increase their power and wealth, but fully buy the propaganda and can simply no longer manage in a strategically competent way, as they truly do not understand how reality works. That fools follow them despite making zero sense is seen as strength and legitimization of positions that are known to make no sense. One that can repeat a lie and make decisions without justification without consequences is by definition more powerful than one who can't, indeed it's the only proof of real power and the sweetest cocaine of the power hungry. However, reality cannot be managed from a position of effectively arbitrary decisions for any extended period of time.

Wait - you think taxation is capitalist? — StreetlightX

Yes, it's just the free market of ideas that taxing the rich to pay for social programs in Nordic countries that have free health-care and free higher education proves capitalism works. If they have a high quality of life in Nordic countries it's capitalism succeeding, because capitalism is about success, and all success must be due in some vague way to capitalism. That's pretty obvious I think.

This video goes a little deeper into ... basically that we don't know much at this point.

No doubt, mathematical models are projections built upon other numbers, data which originally had reasonable connection to the real world at the time these were collected. But things can change. — magritte

That's what statistics is about: drawing conclusions from available data, which become projections that can change with new data.

I'm not sure you even bothered to read my posts your replying to, as I go to some length in my response to Benkei to explain that a new viral strain becoming dominant in a single region can indeed be due to random variation.

However, if that strain spreads and dominates in every region then it's extremely conclusive that it's more contagious; that's basically the definition of "more contagious": it does better.

Exactly when between dominating in one region and "world domination" we have enough data to calculate the difference in contagiousness is a complicated statistical problem.

Bayesian statistics deals with our limited knowledge about the real world (as opposed to classical statistics which analyse outcome of random processes in which the context is specified and the unknown variables clearly understood). The best way to understand this difference is that the probability of drawing certain hands in poker requires only classical statistics to calculate, but the probability of one being cheated by a sophisticated criminal (who doesn't blatantly violate classical statistics outcomes, such as drawing 5 aces in a hand) requires Bayesian statistical approach. To catch a sophisticated cheat we must have a model of what we expect in a fair game and unfair game, including betting patterns and other behaviour and what we know about the other players, and with every new event we update our model. Of note, there is no solution to this problem with a "sophisticated enough" player who has exactly the same model and simply ensures victory without ever supporting a conclusion of unfair play.

For the subject at hand, what we expect from a more contagious virus strain is that it displaces less contagious virus strains, that's what being more contagious means. Everyday now the events we would expect under the "more contagious" model seem very much to be happening: appearing in new regions and growing faster than existing strains. Numerical models of processes involving the entire globe are extremely crude, so there is not, and cannot be, one agreed methodology, but when different methodologies start supporting the same conclusions we tend to increase our confidence (even if there is "heard bias" of modelers tweaking their models to reflect the same conclusions as existing models as that basically "feels better"; the scientific community could easily solve this issue, but chooses not to; because scientists are mostly pretty stupid people without critical thinking skills; they claim to have critical thinking skills, but don't bother to review this claim critically, resulting in the worst possible and easily identifiable idiots). And the results speak for themselves: the scientific community has failed humanity (the pandemic being one of many examples), and yet they believe it is the other way around. Pure insanity.

Mutations are random and all viable versions of the virus will continue to spread into the foreseeable future. — magritte

This is also a great example of the scientific community failing to both understand and, the ones that do, bother to communicate it to other scientists and society.

The mutation rate you're talking about is an "apples to apples" comparison given equal context, such as the chance of a single infection creating a new strain; a variable that is needed for further analysis. However, change the context, such as far more concomitant infections of one over the other and this changes the mutation rate of what is happening in the real world. In other words, each infection has a certain chance to result in a new strain, but to complete the equation we need the total number of infections. If there are far more Covid infections than that of the flue, the capacity for adaptation can easily surpass the flu. The flu has animal reservoirs critical for it's adaptation success ... but Covid has also passed into animal reservoirs.

From this basic overview, the analysis can go even further. For instance, a high mutation rate in itself does not actually mean a higher capacity for adaptation, there are advantages for a more stable genome in that "what works" is better remembered and transmitted to the next generation.

Indeed, the emergence and domination of DNA based organisms is because the previous RNA based organisms had too high a mutation rate. The disadvantage of too high mutation rate is that the "good new things" are easily lost in early replication chains and, of course, since the vast majority of mutations are a disadvantage this is a large energy cost. The best way to visualize this is that an organism mutates an advantage but then too quickly offspring mutate disadvantages and die out, so the new thing never integrates into the genetic base. Therefore, we cannot assume simply because Covid has a lower mutation rate that it has a lower adaptation rate. If we compare to other coronaviruses, such as cause the common cold, they have been with us a long time demonstrating a good capacity for adaptation (perhaps better than the flu, but just not as lethal so we have been unconcerned about it).

From here, we could analyse the particularities of Covid and the flu and maybe have some reasons to believe Covid cannot, even with larger numbers and some advantages of lower mutation rate, compete with the flu in adaptation.

If one mutation spreads faster then it will become statistically 'dominant' but the others are still around. — magritte

I've already explained that any new strain that has a similar replication rate as the dominant strain, will still grow in number, at the same rate, just not to anywhere close in absolute terms. Both a 1 thousand Euro investment and a 1 billion could both be in the same fund and get the same return in terms of rate of growth, but the 1 thousand investment will be and stay far smaller than the 1 billion Euro investment. The new strain simply continuing to exist and replicate is not in itself evidence it is more contagious; it must start to displace the existing strains if it indeed has a competitive advantage.

However, at some point actual success in the real world we must conclude is due to more successful characteristics. If Player A consistently beats Player B, at some point excuses and whining and irrelevant pedantic analysis and hypothetical considerations no longer form any plausible basis to assume Player B is as good as Player A, no matter how much Player B wants it to be true.

Statistically, perhaps. — magritte

If by "statistically perhaps" you mean "yes I agree" then we agree.

Your bird analogy is dissimilar in some critical regards, as the birds are not growing exponentially, birds are a sexual species, and your only observing your local bird population and not globally.

(And though perhaps you won't make this objection, for the benefit of those that are itching to, all mathematical curves are only followed by natural phenomenon to some approximation over some finite time; nothing "grows exponentially" but nothing grows "linearly", or "logistically" either, other than to some descriptively useful approximation for the time period of interest; all data only follows some curve "for now ... sort of ... enough to make a useful prediction".)

That the strain is not particularly more infectious but mostly the result of lax lock down rules in the UK. — Benkei

The evidence the strain is more infectious is that it displaces the previously dominant strain.

Due to the network-effect, the dominant strain in an area is highly likely to remain the dominant strain with respect to equally infectious strains. I.e. that google displaced yahoo was evidence google had a strong competitive edge over yahoo.

That being said, this is only "likely the case" and so on the scale of the whole world we can expect by pure chance novel yet not-more-infectious strains to take the lead in some regions (if this is 1 in a thousand chance ... well maybe there's a thousand regions we're looking at).

So, if a new stain displaces the dominant strain in many regions and ultimately the world, only then that's conclusive evidence it's more infectious.

Right now, from what I can tell the new strain is appearing in many regions, but it's not yet clear if it's really displacing the dominant in these regions.

It's also expected that new strains still spread and are very unlikely to just fizzle out (once sufficiently large for the law of large numbers to be in play). If they are the same infectiousness as the dominant strain it still means that they should grow just as the dominant strain does (there's just less "principal" to grow, so stays much smaller in absolute terms even if growing at the same rate; and indeed, that a new strain needs to catch up to the dominant strain means it's not only more infectious but much more infectious if it does so rapidly).

So simply detecting the new strain all over the place fits both hypothesises. It's not yet clear if it's really headed towards world domination. The recent spike is adequately explained by cold-season > Christmas shopping season > actual Christmas vacations starting.

However, the new strain is still bad news even if it's not more infectious as it provides a more diverse genetic base to get to something more infectious or then that can defeat the vaccines (which, to be clear, there's currently no evidence the current vaccines will actually reduce the harm of the pandemic, but rather, not even mentioning side-effects and the money and credibility invested, data so far is compatible with zero-reduction in transmission and zero-reduction in hospitalizations and death; vaccines could even increase these though vaccinated--super-spreaders, which have yet to be ruled out, as well as the socio-political effect of the media basically declaring victory way ahead of time, which may have both lead to policy makers believing the vaccines would "solve the issue" and no other policy responses were needed as well as regular people losing the anxiety edge required for effective compliance as "it will all be over soon").

As for the increase in cases generally speaking, I agree with your point it's just stupid people, although I would put the stupid label on the policy makers and not the general public (other than voting for the stupid people in charge). The countries that have contained the virus did so with better policy and not more spontaneous individual efforts.

My money is still on human stupidity but I'm not so sure anymore. — Benkei

What do you mean by this?

Yes, for problems with no immediate symptoms, it can be any number. Literally everyone who gets the vaccine could get cancer and we'd have no way of knowing at this point. If the Gaussian curve of cancer diagnosis is around 10 years from now, the small forward tale would be so small in the next year that it would be impossible to differentiate such cancers with other causes of cancer, but the signal will be unmistakable in 10 years.

I picked 1 in a 1000 simply because it's around the estimated IFR rate, and that even if there are symptoms, unless they are obvious, the signal could easily go unnoticed. It's assumed by many commentators on the internet that whatever risks remain are certainly lower than the risk of Covid as they must be below 1 in 40 000, I am pointing out that assumption is false and explaining how it could be false without us knowing yet.

If it is not reasonable to exchange the health of the young against the health of the old, then many age and risk profiles have far lower risk than the general IFR, the basic problems I'm pointing become even harder and harder to detect and so to prove the policy is morally sound (assuming my moral supposition here).

However, I mean not to do any calculations here, just to outline a framework in thinking that we currently have no data upon which to make a robust conclusion (we have no calculations to make that would resolve the issues, we have only hope upon which the rebellion of the upperclass is based: that, whatever happens, we will do nothing to hold them accountable). The framework of thinking is simply why, before these vaccines, all our medical interventions are supposed to pass fairly long phase 3 and even longer phase 4 trials before we'd consider giving something to hundreds of millions, much less billions of people, and that we haven't magically come up with a substitute for numbers and time simply because our leaders wish it to be true.

The pharmaceutical companies have been racing to oblige, but there is a clear subtext to everything they actually say, which is: we have no idea what will happen but give us the money.

Yeah, you'd think so if you have no idea what you're talking about.

In the case of problems that happen beyond the time frame of the trial it doesn't matter what number of people you get to, you have no signal. Cancer the typical example.

In the case of problems that have no clear symptoms, it's very difficult to detect 1 in 1000 events within a sample of 40 000, because there's no test setup to catch those events. If you don't know what you're looking for, you are unlikely to find 1 in 1000 events in any short time-frame (it takes a lot of work to find what you don't know you're looking for). These 40 people may not self report because they themselves can't explain the symptoms and minimize it as caused by something else and assume will go away, those that do maybe ignored as it seems psychosomatic or assumed will go away, and questionnaires and followup etc. don't suspect this kind of problem and so collect no data on it. And even the doctors that do notice "something" may not have a diagnosis to report because it's totally new, so they'll wait and see and certainly won't ring any alarm bells considering how important the vaccine is to get out to people. 40 cases could easily be missed. With a 1000 cases it's much more likely to be an unmissable pattern.

But the basic hypothesis driving the policy is that long-term effects hopefully aren't there, but if they are they will be spread out over a long period of time so a worthwhile exchange to solve the pandemic. However, this is not necessarily a morally sound position if we are exchanging the health of the young against the health of the old.

The other problem with this policy is there's no reason to believe the vaccine will decrease transmission or hospitalization. If we want to learn from history, most medical interventions based on an unproven assumption fail. At each step of development and testing more interventions fail than succeed. It's not the case that "once you pass phase 1, it's easy riding from there" for people who develop medical interventions of any sort. Therefore, extrapolating from history, the reasonable position is these vaccines will fail phase 4 trials once enough data is collected for a robust phase 4 analysis.

Of course, in the wishful thinking framework that has gotten the world into the current crisis: what happened in China can't happen in the west for reasons, what happened in Italy won't be so bad elsewhere for reasons, there's 100 times more undetected infections and so the IFR is super low and we're almost at heard immunity, treatments are getting better and if there's a second wave (... which probably there won't be guys) the death rate won't go up ... like super probably ... well, the logical extension of this pattern is "vaccines with no evidence they will end the pandemic and do more good than harm are like, for sure dude, going to end the pandemic, it's just common sense bro".

When looking for side effects in a drug trial, they are looking for "weird" consequences, they are not expecting people to be dying. I think that by the time they are using 40,000 people they are pretty sure that people are not going to be dying. — Metaphysician Undercover

It was just to contrast signal strength. A person dying is a strong signal.

Many long term side-effects have only "I feel weird" as a signal in the short term, and more severe consequences much later or maybe you just feel weird for the rest of your life.

Many long term side-effects have no symptoms, potentially for decades.

Proper experimental design, previous to these vaccines, was no question for anyone in the scientific community a combination of numbers and time. The idea that this standard, based on a long history of painful lessons, is actually not really needed, is just stupid.

I agree the trials established strong bad signals don't happen, like many people dying right away, and this is definitely a positive thing. But it is far from the end of the story when it comes to side-effects.

If my math is correct, 1 in 1000 over 40,000 results in 40 cases. — Metaphysician Undercover

40 cases in 40 000 that aren't clear what they are is a weak signal. You can only find what you're looking for. Obviously we're looking for people dying right away, so 40 people dying right away would be a strong signal and we're looking for that.

Now, if there was 4000 people with unclear but the same symptoms, that would be a clear signal. But 40 people who report feeling "weird" is not going to be easy to detect and differentiate with people feeling weird for other reasons or short-term weirdness (from the immune response that's supposed to happen for instance), and certainly not in a short time period. For longer term things with no short-term symptoms it doesn't matter how many people are in the trial if the consequences are far beyond the time frame of the trial (cancer, pregnancy, smaller but significant long-term symptoms that people themselves assume will go away or are caused by life events, and need to persist for some time for people to notice etc.).

Phase 3 trials are normally quite long, and phase 4 longer still to get confidence difficult to detect things aren't missed. If you asked previous to this vaccine why bother with phase 3 and phase 4 trials a doctor would easily list off all sorts of cases in the past where really unexpected things happened and only detected with a lot of time, sometimes event after phase 4.

So, to pretend now that we can have anywhere near the same level of confidence with short phase 3 and no phase 4 trials, is just absurd.

Maybe it will work great, maybe it will be a Chernobyl scale fuckup.

Do the common complaints about vaccine testing, where it concerns "killed" viruses or replicated viral proteine, apply to mRNA vaccines though? Are, based on how they work, certain worries about safety still relevant here? — Benkei

It's very different and very new technology.

Any new pharmaceutical can have totally unexpected consequences. It's possible we discover entirely new pathways to mess-up the human body over the long term that no current expert could even dream of today, thanks to this vaccine. Experts may say the risk is small, but the consequence distributed over hundreds of millions of people is extremely big. As mentioned previously, "side-effects" can only be detected in the short term if they have clear symptoms and correspond to something we understand. The purpose of phase-4 trials is to catch the things no one thought was in any way likely or even possible. There can be many 1 in 1000 terrible long term side-effects that no one currently understands and therefore no one currently can check, and that will not appear as a discernible signal in current statistics. 40 000 seems like a lot of people, but if there are lot's of weird 1 in 1000 consequences it's far from sufficient quantity to find these things, even if there are symptoms (doctors will not be able to make a causal inference to the vaccine, and many 1 in 1000 events will simply not appear anyways, just from statistics, not to mention the populations not even represented, or not in any statistically significant way, within the 40 000).

Keep in mind there are many long term problems that have no short term symptoms. If the vaccines cause cancer for instance, it could literally be a decade before that's clear independent of how many people we vaccinate. Likewise impacts on fertility.

Keep in mind also, impacts may not be acute to certain individuals but spread out, and widely distributed affects (not acute in any one patient) are even harder to detect but may have greater consequence.

Of course, western leaders and with no doubt pharmaceutical companies are completely willing to exchange future cancers no matter how many there may end up being against ending the pandemic and fixing the economy. However, this is because they are evil people; there is no rational basis to take such a risk. Not to say some proxy experiments have been made to be more than less confident the vaccines don't cause cancer, but every pharmaceutical that ends up causing cancer had similar evidence (and these kinds of proxy experiments can only be accelerated to a point, keep in mind).

The chance of dying of coronavirus along with developing "long Covid" is on the order of 1 in 1000 or greater for most people (i.e. IFR estimates are in the 0.1 - 0.2 range, including vulnerable populations, so for the healthy populations it can go all the way to 1 in 100 000 risk for young healthy profiles).

Therefore, giving healthy people the vaccine is an extremely big experiment without any assurance that it is smaller risk than actual Covid for the healthy population.

This can just be a catastrophe, leading to more demand on the health system and not less to deal with these problems while the vaccine program may not stop transmission anyways, so the Covid situation maybe unchanged.

@Isaac has good comments on why real effectiveness (at stopping the pandemic) is not proven; to summarize, the phase 3 trials didn't even attempt to prove the vaccines will decrease transmission or decrease hospitalizations. The vaccines may end up increasing both. That governments and the media insist we assume and promote the idea the vaccines are effecting at ending the pandemic is completely absurd as no scientist involved in the trials is even making such a claim (they sometimes explicitly state they basically have no idea if transmission or hospitalizations will end; censorship has officially started of criticizing the vaccines, which would include simply repeating the actual claims of the creators of the vaccines).

The effectiveness numbers are at reducing symptoms, mainly in the healthy population that is at minimum risk anyways. People on reddit like to claim that reducing symptoms reduces transmission, but this is an unverified hypothesis; the vaccine could result in a small number of people having no symptoms but being infectious for extended periods of time (a sort of shingles type situation where the immune system manages but never gets rid of the virus nor stops the virus being infectious; there is currently nothing that would exclude such a possibility). For the vulnerable that are likely to end up in hospitals we may discover the vaccine actually makes their cases worse and not better, causing sever immune reactions (cytosine storms). And of course, not to mention mutations, both present and future, which may not simply defeat the vaccine but outcomes maybe worse for vulnerable vaccinated people and even healthy people; there's an assumption that "oh, well, it maybe like the flu and we must vaccinate each year"; terrible assumption considering vaccinating against the flu doesn't stop the flu, vaccines for the flu are based on historic patterns that don't exist for coronavirus (we have no basis on which to predict the dominant coronavirus strain or strains next season), and coronavirus is nothing like the flu so maybe that strategy wouldn't even work even if it was possible.

Keep in mind (lot's to keep in mind), that without the vaccine statistics makes the dominant strains likely to remain the dominant strain through the network effect. However, put pressure on the dominant strain and other strains that already exist may flourish if they have a mutation that defeats the vaccine. Competent scientists would have collected as many strains as possible to then actually test at least in laboratory (rather than just say there's no reason to assume a new strain will defeat the vaccine and so we shouldn't worry ... yet .. I guess?) while distributing the trials over as wide a range geographically as possible, to at least have some basic tests.

In other words, not only may these vaccines not work they could make the situation worse while collapsing all trust in health authorities and the "gov'ment".

Of course, if we really go deep into the biology we may decide the risks are small (I am not offering any calculations of the risks I'm talking about, just pointing out there are many of them, no evidence they don't happen and therefore it's a big gamble) and so, though even if we conclude risks are small they would remain possible and perhaps still unreasonable when multiplied by hundreds of millions of people and the governing and social consequences if things go wrong, nevertheless unlikely.

In which case, the likely situation is still not "good". The current vaccine programs are too little and too late to affect this winter season; coronavirus has demonstrated strong seasonal tendency and so will anyways go down in the spring and it will be difficult to know if the vaccine is working or not, and if we will be hit by a third wave next season anyways, whether due to the vaccines not working or new strains defeating the vaccine.

The virus is now well mixed in the population and so social distancing no longer really matters. Full isolation would be needed now to significantly reduce cases which was reasonable to do as part of containment strategy (which I advocated for in the spring) but is no longer possible once containment is irrelevant (no where to "contain" the virus to).

The alternative is of course to let the strong do what they will and the weak to suffer what they must (i.e. what is happening now because there is no longer any other alternative). Although it may seem at first reasonable to take a massive risk on the long term health and fertility of the young and healthy population, very quickly it is of uncertain ethical foundation; of course, this is now the policy so we'll see what happens. In any case, getting to the morally wrenching point is due to a large criminal negligence of our leadership. Therefore, whatever happens, Nuremberg type trials should be held and our western leadership hanged.

Abandoning containment was in essence undertaking a genocide against the poor either out of neglect or to protect the stock-market (which has done very well indeed, so the policy has succeeded). If we are better than the Nazi's we will employ the same legal standards and consequences for those responsible.

If we do not, we are no better than the Nazi's, merely their heirs.

I think I can clear this up; he's replying to what he wants your comment to be like, and he does what he wants, so it makes perfect sense really.

Well, looking at just my country, I don't really feel that they have been disastrously idiotic and corrupt when the country is among the least effected countries in the EU. If you want to paint every leadership in such gloom, that's your problem. I don't know then were you draw the line of what then would be an adequate, OK response to a pandemic. — ssu

I qualified my statement with "in the places rushing to be first to deploy the vaccine". Finland is not such a country. I contrasted incompetent management with the countries that have managed competently and kept cases low through containment (which, at the start of this thread in March, I was advocating for and pointing out the disaster that abandoning containment would create, which is did).

Incompetent governments abandoned containment because "waaa, it's so hard .. and aviation stocks!" and are now the ones trying to fix things with vaccines that do not have sufficient evidence to conclude they will work to end the pandemic.

The competent governments with low cases have no need to rush to deploy the vaccine and get to see how it plays out in other countries, which is what they are doing as it's the competent thing to do. Rollout plans in countries with low cases are also much slower.

Keep in mind that many side-effects cannot be detected without time, in particular any impact on fertility. So just giving the vaccine to a million people in a month doesn't suddenly prove it's safe.

Likewise, since it's a novel pharmaceutical technology it could create disorders that have simply not existed before, which again simply takes time to notice and for doctors to understand. Side-effects are only found quickly if they correspond to a known pathology with clear symptoms and tests. Lot's of side-effects can simply have no symptoms on a short time scale; if the vaccines induce these sorts of pathologies there is simply no way to know at this point (hence phase-4 trials on a limited amount of the population to see what comes up in a usual safety evaluation program).

The assumption that the number of unfortunate side-effects will be "one in a million" is simply an assumption based on nothing. Extrapolating from other vaccines in the market, as people on reddit like to do, has not technical basis as these vaccines are new technology and is all the more absurd because those vaccines passed phase 4 trials.

One must also consider that the disease disproportionately harms the old, but side-effects could be life-long lasting on the young. It is not necessarily reasonable to sacrifice the quality of life of a young person to save the life of someone over 80. Such an analysis is required and simply requires time to have the required data upon which to make a conclusion.

Since this is a philosophy forum, we can also note that (in countries with catastrophic health crisis at the moment) the pandemic is, to a large extent, a self-inflicted harm by the elderly upon themselves, by creating a society designed to spread a pandemic as quickly as possible and tolerating a government incapable of an effective response for so long. Not only must we take age and quality of life into consideration in evaluating the cost-benefit of the vaccines, but there is little moral motivation for the young to take any risk at all to help the elderly in such societies; the old dying of coronavirus are lying in the bed they have made.

Therefore, the young should not be content to know the vaccine is safer than getting covid in a general sense, but should insist it is proven to be safer for their particular risk profile and with enough data to make such a conclusion (which requires even more time and data, as the risk of Covid to healthy young people is very low, so proving the vaccine is even lower is much more difficult statistically).

I'd also like to point out that many people on reddit like to describe the vaccine in an hyper oversimplified 3 lines and then say "so you see, couldn't possibly do anything bad", then they pat each other on the back for a while. These vaccines are extremely complex in their design, manufacturing, deployment and interaction with both human cells and other organisms in the human body, not to mention the coronavirus and existing and yet to come mutations. Some of these mRNA particles will go to places they aren't "supposed to go" within the body (maybe it doesn't matter, maybe it does), the other compounds in these vaccines may have completely unexpected consequences and interactions with other drugs people are taking or other pathogens some people have, human cells don't usually reverse transcribe mRNA but other organism may (maybe it doesn't matter, maybe it does), there will be manufacturing errors and deployment mishaps (to little or greater effect), etc. etc. To make a long story short, there are unknowns we know we don't know, as well as the unknown unknowns we don't know we know, but what we can know is we're about to find out. The FDA approval was not "yep, totally safe" to summarize a summary went along the lines of "a lot we don't know, but whatever, let's do it". Like a gambler putting up the deed to his house to double up and pay some loan sharks, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but what we can be sure of is anyone in such a position is an idiot regardless of the outcome; disaster is simply poetic justice and success we are safe to assume a short lived high before the next catastrophe.

To further support what @Isaac is saying here, and as I've mentioned before, the vaccine data so far does not exclude simply re-distributing harms rather than reducing harms overall.

The phase 3 trials do demonstrate people don't usually drop dead after getting the vaccine, so this is a good thing. But the reasoning offered by the corporations, government and media that "we'll start to see the end of the pandemic due vaccine roll out" is simply an unsound conclusion based on the available evidence.

It might be true, hopefully it is, but the idea it is certain or has passed standards of scientific validity is simply false. It is a gamble, a really, really, big gamble. It was a gamble to formulate a policy to basically do nothing to contain or mitigate the pandemic in hard hit countries due to mismanagement (compared to the countries that demonstrated competent policies) but rather wait for a vaccine to "solve the issue in the proper corporate friendly way". And it's a gamble now to roll out the vaccine with insufficient evidence that it will actually work to end the pandemic.

There are lot's of ludicrously stupid comments on reddit that claim "yes, there's insufficient evidence of effectiveness and unknown side effects beyond two months of trial data and lot's of population subgroups not represented in the trials, but the vaccine is for sure better than actually getting covid; in otherwords, we can know the risk of the vaccine is less than the risk of Covid".

Obviously, evidence is required to make such a conclusion, and premising any argument on a lack of evidence is the sign of a completely incompetent mind, which we can expect of reddit but hopefully can arrive at a clearer understanding on this forum.

Now, the experts developing and approving the vaccine certainly have reasons to believe their gamble will pay off. And maybe it will, but it is a mistake to believe there isn't a very large gamble being played and that the public has been properly informed about it.

If the gamble succeeds, great.

If it doesn't, there are innumerable potential reasons (due to the complexity and diversity of human biology including our biomes), but it's easy to list a few in addition to what @Isaac has already mentioned, that the experiments simply did not test for reducing transmission or reducing severe disease; some additional ones are:

- Statistical analysis did not include the fact many projects were trying to do the same thing at once and so some projects are expected to simply get lucky. I.e. no one conducted a proper Bayesian analysis of the vaccine development effort as a whole because the people involved are simply corrupt.
- The side-effects of the vaccine changed behaviour (for instance tiredness and lethargy) that was long lasting due to the long tail of degradation of the mRNA (many half life cycles are needed to be completely degraded and even one strand can activate an immune response, as one mRNA can fabricate many spike proteins). Lethargy reduces social interaction and chances of getting the disease compared to the control of placebo or another vaccine with shorter lived side-effects.
- Mutations (that may already exist but are currently suppressed by the dominant strains) can defeat the vaccine and not only spread easily between vaccinated people but the chance of severe disease is actually greater due to having the vaccine. The range of immune response of vaccinated individuals to a different strain is completely unexpected, because mRNA vaccine is new and there's lot's of things that no one thought of. I.e. the assumption that the shear number of virus particles in existence right now isn't an evolutionary advantage that more than compensates the usually slow mutation of this Coronavirus, turns out to be wrong.
- The effects of the vaccine program are benign, not making anything better but not making things overall worse (it simply redistributes the same level of harm rather than reduce it overall), but, other than the wasted money, trust in public health authorities completely collapses due to the failed gamble making it nearly impossible to formulate any new effective policy.
- Significant corners needed to be cut to scale-up production and quality control at scale turns out to be essentially impossible with current technology, and the assumption that "bad mRNAs" resulting from the stochastic processes would have zero effect turns out to be wrong.

Please note, these are not predictions, but a few, of a great many things, that could go wrong that professors for decades will solemnly explain to their classes as an example of the "reasoning mistakes even experts can make even though it's a classic example of X, Y, Z that was well understood already not to do but is now the new poster child of stupid in this category".

Other than the critical policy mistakes of abandoning containment in the early stages of the pandemic (which every country that made a competent effort succeeded in doing), if things do go wrong with the vaccine, we can note the further policy disaster of allowing vaccine developers to issue press releases on their data and work with their media sycophants to create such a hype train that governments basically had to approve the vaccines (not only because they too are sycophants but, in addition, due to the overwhelming pressure and belief created in the media that "over 90% effective and the pandemic will soon be over with these vaccines!! woweee").

Governments should have designed and mandated new trial protocols appropriate for the situation (much larger with much better experimental design and carried out by third parties), and corporations should have been gag-ordered to provide zero information to the press so that review and approval processes were not affected by public opinion and media hype. Simply accelerating the old normal process was not a reasonable policy because phase 3 is not usually followed by massive deployment of a new pharmaceutical, but there is phase 4 of post market surveillance, that is usually many years of "seeing what happens" and only a small percentage of the population gets the intervention every year (i.e. the risk of something being missed isn't so great because few people get the new intervention for many years). A competent medical professional would want a new trial design that would seek to get some of the same insights as phase 4 in an accelerated time line, which (if it is statistically impossible to do) then want direct challenge experiments (exposing trial participants to the virus deliberately, including known mutations) would be the only reasonable course of action; the benefit obviously outweighs the harm in this pandemic situation, and the only reason direct challenge experiments weren't used to get much, much more certainty about efficacy and side-effects in humans is because policy makers and their corporate donors preferred not to know, but to rather roll out a multi billion dollar gamble in a statistical haze.

The die is cast now though, so we'll see what happens.

And if you think policy makers aren't disastrously idiotic and corrupt, just look at the pandemic up until this point in the places rushing to be first to deploy the vaccine. Although past stupidity and corruption doesn't guarantee future stupidity and corruption, I wouldn't personally bet against it.

"Liberals" seem to believe that the right has lost and therefore learned something and have collectively come back to (the "liberal") reality, and yet nothing could be farther from the truth. It's so painful to watch.

I have been checking Fox and Breitbart in the past days. It looks like the large GOP donors have decided to let this one go, and not take up the opportunity. — Echarmion

I see this a bit in Fox (though they still provide a platform for the fraud narrative, just hedge their bets both ways).

But Breitbart as of right now has the following front page headlines:

"""
CNN’S JAKE TAPPER WROTE BOOK CLAIMING BUSH PLOTTED TO ‘STEAL THE PRESIDENCY’ IN 2000

POLL: 70% OF REPUBLICANS SAY 2020 ELECTION WAS NEITHER FREE, NOR FAIR

AG BARR AUTHORIZES DOJ TO LOOK INTO VOTING IRREGULARITIES

RICHARD PILGER, LINKED TO IRS SCANDAL, RESIGNS DOJ POST OVER VOTER FRAUD MEMO
JOEL B. POLLAK

MOST OF BIDEN’S NET GAIN IN GA FROM 3 ZUCKERBERG FUNDED COUNTIES

Chip Roy Calls for Recount, Audit, and Full Review

‘Fewer than 100,000 Votes’ Separate Key Swing States

Ex-Michigan Dept AG Alleges Detroit Counters Assigned Fraudulent Ballots to Non-Voters

Graham to Urge McConnell to Probe Mail-In Voting
"""

Although it seems no one in the Trump team came up with the correct legal strategy that went along with their rhetoric of the last months: which would be to prepare filing motions to "stop mail-in vote counting" pending the Supreme court ruling on the legality of same-day mail-in ballots (which the SCOTUS had teased is "probably not ok" but they would only rule if it became relevant). The argument to go along with this is that it's "unfair to a candidate" to have votes counted that might not qualify. Had the vote counting been paused when Trump was still ahead, it would have fully mobilized his base and lent an "air of inevitability" to the SCOTUS handing him the election.

Apparently they simply never prepared this legal strategy even though an aid did understand it and tried to explain to Trump that calling for the vote to simply stop being counted would guarantee losing the election, whereas focusing on fraud and illegal votes and the count must be stopped pending making sure all votes counted are legal would have an actual chance.

It seems one consequence of anti-intellectualism is that your team (and yourself) are a fumbling bunch of complete morons. I imagine Trump saw on Foxnews that his administration had a "legal strategy and lawyers ready to go" and said to himself "great, I have a legal strategy and lawyers ready to go, that's taken care of, I'm amazing".

Be that as it may, the narrative that the election was stolen from Trump is essential to maintain "tribe unity" and for the base to come out with a vengeance in the next mid-terms.

It can't be stressed enough that Biden only looks good compared to Trump, once Trump is in the background all the Biden legitimate as well as insane delusional based criticism will ramp up to a thousand. The Hunter Biden stuff will return, and it definitely isn't something you want your leader to have as a weakness. If Fauci was running some sort of conspiracy working for Trump, how much more of a conspiracy will he be running working for Biden.

One can also note that corporate censorship has been fully normalized in this election cycle and will continue. However, in opposition the right will adapt to this and built their networks outside corporate control, whereas the average Democrat will happily be lulled back to sleep by the "liberal media" and not worry too much if "extreme" progressive voices have been suppressed in algorithms fighting "fake news".

The "liberal media" has, overnight, returned to what politicians are wearing as big news worthy of analysis. European leaders are lining up to bend the knee as predicted and "European influence" will return to being largely just about smiling and shaking hands with the US president.

From a progressive point of view, I would say the election is a disaster, the victory of the center this time will fuel even farther right victories down the road.

There is a chance that Democrats take the senate and then are essentially forced to pass progressive legislation to manage the pandemic, so maybe this happens; but it seems more likely Republicans will maintain the senate and ensure failure of weak centrist policies that aim for a "republican compromise" and then are negotiated down from there.

Likewise, the dominant Republican SCOTUS will thwart, in any case, any progressive legislation that passes or executive actions, if they threaten one dollar of corporate bottom lines. Biden's talk of appointing more SCOTUS judges is of course just talk and a GOP senate won't let that happen anyways, and even a Dem senate would likely "restore norms" and be completely beholden to the filibuster

Of course, Trump would have been a complete and unmitigated disaster for US citizens (as he has already been), but the collapse of US influence abroad may have breathed fresh air into global politics, in particular European. It's possible Trump has done "enough damage" for this momentum to continue, but I have my doubts. A Biden administration will bring back a somewhat coherent militarism, completely entrench large corporate gains of the pandemic, continue the US climate policy of pretending to negotiate to ensure no one else comes up with an effective and binding policy with a cost on non-signatories in the form of carbon tariffs, and so on.

In short, this election has strengthened the far right ideological bubble, while completely arresting the momentum of the progressive movement, and will bring back a tepid and meaningless policy framework that will be ineffective in solving any actual problems within the US or that we face globally. Biden will take the blame for the un-going crisis of the pandemic, and the next crisis in the pipes, be it financial, environmental, a novel Covid that restarts the pandemic, or otherwise. If a "competent Trump" arises (one who proposes a coherent ideology, inspires a truly loyal cadre of close bureaucrats at the top and brown shirts at the bottom, and has a grasp of the cogs of government), such a figure will easily defeat Biden, older and even less coherent and with all the same weaknesses as today, in 4 years time.

So we hand them whatever corporate strategy they want on a silver platter because the right-wing don't care and the left-wing have voluntarily gagged themselves in frenzy of partisanship. — Isaac

To add to this, we are already reaching health-care saturation in many places and with "lock-down fatigue", the exponential growth (over the time frame of next months) has already locked in disaster in many places. So, it should be clear that even if the vaccine does work, it hasn't "saved us from disaster" of the first wave nor the second wave, whereas countries, such as New Zealand and communist Vietnam, have proven other policies can prevent disasters unfolding.

To connect with the previous discussion about vaccine efficacy, these phase 3 results do not establish immunity against existing or novel strains of Covid that the trials didn't address (by definition), such as the Mink strain (which may or may not be a truly novel strain). It seems the Mink strain has been contained (I don't have a problem believing that, the response was consequential) but what this event demonstrates is that Covid can jump into an animal reservoir and back to humans in a relatively short turn around (the same thing that drives novel flue strains), and so the same thing that happened with Danish minks could be happening in other much worse conditions where there isn't testing for new strains; such as US pig farms where many industrial pig agro-corporate-managers may not even believe in Covid and so may not sound any alarms even if they obverse respiratory disease in their pigs.

I think it is reasonable to assume there has never in the history of humanity been this many individuals carrying a dangerous novel pathogen at the same time (and if that's not the case now then I think it's fairly certain to arrive in a few more doubling times), due to there simply being more people than ever as well as plane travel spreading the virus efficiently around the globe, and so there is no real precedent to evaluate evolutionary potential of such a pathogen, numerically positioned in this way.

The purpose of such an analysis is to first avoid wishful thinking around the policy of vaccine reliance (when presented in a way that displaces policies known to work and proven in many different countries), as well as simply underline the disastrous consequences of abandoning containment in the early stages of the pandemic and the incompetence of our institutions and leaders and the neo-liberal governing ideology. The short term cost of effective containment (which, again, many countries proved was possible), no matter how "relatively uncompetitive" over a short term for places with an outbreak, is nearly an insignificant global cost compared to the costs of the generalized pandemic that was left to unfold (out of fear of bringing down airline, Airbus, and Boeing stocks by a few points; of course, that ultimately the pandemic increased the stock price of our major corporations as a whole means policy has been extremely effective from the neo-liberal governing point of view), and even higher potential costs of letting a pathogen increase to the numbers we are currently seeing (and have already locked in many doubling times of even higher numbers); a very new global experiment in biology.

In short, even if the vaccine works it is not a "successful policy" for managing the pandemic considering the harms already experienced, and the vaccines may not even work due to things such as novel strains dominating once a vaccine puts pressure on the current dominant strains, or then too many "freak harms" happen due to the vaccine, as UK minister puts it, resulting in populations avoiding the vaccine even more than would anyway (either due to unscientific beliefs or then the entirely scientifically justified, assuming economics is a science, decision to free-ride on other people taking the vaccine since free-riding maximizes economic self-benefit whenever it is possible to do). Likewise, long term side effects require long term studies to evaluate, so confidence on this issue can only be, by definition, entirely theoretical at this point without any "scientific evidence" (in the sense of running experiments to confirm hypothesis, which is becoming a "fringe" definition of science nowadays in favour of the "expert consensus" of academic state-agent definition of science) to support such a belief (of course, hopefully it's true and there are no long term side effects of; but hope is not reality as has been already verified).

I'd like to take a moment to comment on Benford's law as applied to the election. Of the proposed evidence circulating to indicate election fraud this "seems to be" the best, if true, in that it is not anecdotal.

I should note, that in a large dataset it it's easy to cherry pick lot's of patterns and seem to "prove" something. Absent an actual statistician doing a proper analysis of the whole dataset, with criticism from other statisticians, one should not put any stock in random graphs on the internet. That is to say, it's completely uncertain if there even is any statistical evidence of this kind at the moment. I.e. such graphs seem like good evidence but maybe nothing.

However, even if there are deviations from Benford's law, it's good "evidence" only in these that it's relevant to look at, it is not evidence in the sense of offering definitive proof. A real statistical analysis may conclude the particular conditions of this particular election should not be expected to conform to Brenfords law.

Elections have lot's of variation in voter distribution and how votes are counted, and it is easy to contrive election models that won't follow Brenford's law. For instance, you could run an election by dividing people into groups of 2, and if they report a 0 if they vote differently, a 1 for both voting candidate A and a 2 for both voting candidate B, then these are all collected into a single list. Obviously, the numbers in this list would not follow a Brenford distribution from 1 to 9, as the list will only include 0, 1, and 3. Now, we may assume it will at least follow something analogous such as there being more 0's than 1's and 2's, more ties than consensus for one candidate, but this is also obviously easy to contrive a situation where this wouldn't hold, such as the election being a landslide for one candidate or then, even in a close nearly 50-50 race that supporters are extremely regional and paired regionally, in which case we expect very little ties and to mostly see 1 and 2 in our list.

We may think from this that "well, we can at least know what kind of distribution of digits to expect form what kind of election result", but this doesn't work because we don't know the election result ahead of time! The whole point of the election is that we need to run the election know what the result of an election is going to be. Therefore, we cannot simply compare the statistical distributions of digits or other data that appear in the election and compare it to our expected election result, because that's what we don't know! No mathematical theorem is possible along these lines. The best that can be done is to make an estimate based on polling, but this is far from some sort of mathematical proof. Furthermore, polling methods are calibrated against actual election results and so fraud over time will simply calibrate polling methods to take into account the fraud and therefore simply confirm a fraudulent election rather than provide a tool of election fraud.

To make matters worse, there is also no theorem that if a numerical statistical expectation actually does hold for one candidate in one election that it therefore must, whatever it is, hold for other candidates. If there was such a theorem, then it would be helpful in the event that one candidate deviated in statistical distribution of counts from the other candidates. The obvious such model difference relevant to the 2020 elections is a large quantity of mail-in ballots for one candidate than another. If the post office groups these ballots into the same or similar quantities (i.e. they are grouped into stacks and boxes of exact or similar quantity of ballots) and delivers them with some pattern (1 or 5 or 10 boxes at a time), this can radically change the numerical distribution of digits and other statistical effects. Obviously, do not read this to mean the post office does such a thing, only that there's potential for significant differences with statistics of in-person voting.

For completeness, we can easily generate a theorem that even if we prove some epxected numerical statistical distribution of an election given how votes are counted, it is trivial that it is possible to commit election fraud while respecting this distribution. Simply inverting all of the votes of Candidate A with candidate B will have the exact same statistical result. Of course, there maybe other significant problems with such a fraud strategy in that it will completely invert regions strongly supporting one candidate with astronomically high implausibility, even with all the limitations of polling science, nevertheless we know there can exist no theorem that reliably identifies election fraud based on digit distribution in itself.

Unfortunately, simply being able to contrive situations that violate some intuitive statistical expectation, doesn't mean the US election is such a situation that would deviate from Brenford's law or some analogous numerical pattern. It just means a lot of analytical work would be required to evaluate either way.

Bringing us to this terrible paper, "Benford’s Law and the Detection of Election Fraud", published in Cambridge Political Analysis, claiming Benford type analysis can simply be ignored in the case of elections; that this is a valid "inference" in their language.

On first reading I was completely shocked real mathematician's that actually exist could actually write such a paper, but as far as I can tell the authors are not mathematicians of any kind but social scientists, which the mathematical community has already prove are mathematically illiterate and nearly a majority of their statistical claims are erroneous (there's actually a paper about this). So, all is as it should be.

The mistakes the paper makes is first of all confounding the power of Brenfords law to detect election fraud if it exist with the the appearance of a Brenford law violation indicating election fraud. That competent fraudsters can potentially defeat Brenford's law is not the same as incompetent fraudsters being revealed by Brenford law violations.

Their "simulation" is simply a joke, which I can explain in more detail if that's the case.

What's great about shitty paper's is that they often conclude with "this paper is complete garbage and we haven't proven anyways anyways" since to get into academics one often either has enough competence to hedge one's bets and have the intuition that it's a good idea to, following a series of strong statements, admit maybe one has established absolutely nothing so that if one's called out by a comptetent analysis one can say "yep, that's why I said more research and analysis is needed at the end of the paper", or then is so weak intellectually that, even if the authors are convinced by their conclusion, that some advisor forces them to put in reasonable language that indicates they've accomplished nothing.

These passages are often comically obtuse, presumably due to an attempt to maintain some level of self-respect and hold the double belief of doing both good work and completely meaningless work at the same time.

In this case, the paper literally concludes:

Thus, even if there are those who reject the inference drawn from our analysis—that Benford’s Law is irrelevant to assessing an election’s conformity with good democratic practice and that effort should be directed elsewhere in the search for forensic indicators—we cannot escape the conclusion that any future development of that Law’s application to elections must necessarily identify likely intervening variables with their impact on digit distributions adjusted in a theoretically proscribed way. — shitty paper

So does work, but that doesn't mean you necessarily love it. Remember, Trump disrespected John McCain's military service, insulted Ted Cruz's wife, and destroyed Session's (the first GOP congressman to actually endorse him in 2016) political career for doing his job. I'm pretty sure all of them would shed as many tears for his death as Trump would for Herman Cain. — Mr Bee

I honestly don't think the majority of GOP politicians care about any of that. Trump won against all these people, so is just "making the world in his image" as Ayn Rand preached. Trump got the tax cuts passed, military budget increased, and the areas worst affected by the pandemic increased their loyalty and support.

The liberal media makes a big thing about any GOP politician slightly criticizing Trump or announcing principles in obvious contradiction to Trump, but this is a small quantity and all those politicians bend the knee to Trump in the end, or then basically disappear. All GOP senators bent the knee and voted to acquit Trump.

Not if they're trying to distance themselves from Trump. In that case, they just turned a huge chunk of their party against them. — Mr Bee

Yes, but who? Romney, Christy: they were already outcasts. Everything else I've seen is just hedgy weasel words from people far down the chain who aren't sure what way the wind is blowing, such as Shapiro's "brave tweet" about counting votes; if the wind turns in Trump's favour Shapiro will be first to explain why the votes in question aren't "real votes; votes on election day; that, yes, you need to count votes that are real, but the president was actually talking about fake votes, maybe he didn't use the right words but he felt what was going on, and we'll know they're fake votes because the SCOTUS decides what's a real or a fake vote, because we live in a country of laws and the definition of a fake vote is whatever the SCOTUS decides, just common sense; let's be clear, let's be totally clear, what we're talking about here is people who saw Trump was winning in the count and mailed in, or then we don't know if they did or not and that's a tainted vote that can't count to respect the law, after the polls closed and by democrats who thought Biden was for sure going to win then seeing how strong Trump actually is, then panicking and mailing in their ballet, that these liberal weed smokers were just too lazy to do before the election, after the polls closed -- which, I remind you again, the SCOTUS hasn't even completely ruled whether mail in ballets for people who don't need them is even a legal thing in this country -- and that's wrong, that's being a sore loser and trying to change the election after the election, Trump is just defending himself" etc., etc., etc., or whatever the hanging chad issue happens to be.

↪Mr Bee
Link? CNN is still 463 in favour of Trump. 180proof, thank you for your vote. :-P — Benkei

As of 3 minutes ago CNN reports:

Race tightens in Georgia: In Georgia, another state that Trump cannot afford to lose with its 16 electoral votes, Biden's mail-in ballot advantage has pulled him to within 500 votes of the President, as results came in from Fulton County around Atlanta with 99% of the state vote count reported. — CNN

So, they seem unaware if it's true.