Sorry I failed to reach the quality of argument contained in your "nope". — Olivier5

I'm the one being accused of arguing in bad faith here. I deserve a little more than mud-slinging.

My problem is not with people who don't want to be vaccinated, in good faith. It is with people spreading disinformation and lies about the effectiveness or risks involved in vaccination. — Olivier5

Yes, which is exactly what this discussion is about. Very few of these people are spreading disinformation and lies. They're spreading what they think is good information and truth. You think it's disinformation and lies. They disagree.

It's pointless coming up with these virtue-signalling little aphorisms about how we all ought to argue in good faith. Who's going to dispute that?

The sticking point is always over people like you wanting to avoid any hard work by simply declaring your version to be self-evidently true and in no need of any debate. Once you remove the old thresholds of reasonableness, you open everybody up to the same claim.

As I said, this is a new development you're at the vanguard of where qualification and evidence no longer matter if your conclusions are not in agreement. I hope you're confident in the great New Dawn you see this process leading to, it sounds like hell to me.

LOL — Olivier5

Good argument.

Hahaha — Olivier5

I'm undone.

pretty much what everybody else is saying, including me. So where is this big disagreement now? — Olivier5

I'm not at high risk, so you'd agree there's no need for me to be vaccinated?

Didn't you harp forever about pharmaceuticals and politicians being all corrupt? — Olivier5

No.

Didn't you pretend to equate a finding about the presence of certain molecules in the blood stream of 38 individuals with the effective immunity of all of us against COVID? — Olivier5

Nope.

What are you proposing we do about COVID? — Olivier5

A combination of vaccinating those at highest risk, strict lockdowns, mask wearing, hygiene, investment in community health services, testing, open data publication, strict rules about global vaccine allocation...

That is incorrect, and I can prove it. — Olivier5

Ah, good, now we're getting somewhere. Let's have the proof then.

You know it does not apply to me, or rather, you know that I do not usually behave this way. — Olivier5

You know it does not apply to me either, or rather, you know that I do not usually behave this way.

Uh huh. So I think all those apply to you, you think all those apply to me. Now what?

I'd come across Hoffman before and thought it would be an interesting topic. — SophistiCat

Yeah, as you may know, the degree of inference in perception is a topic of interest to me and Hoffman is kind of the bogeyman of it. He's the place we're trying to avoid ending up when talking about active inference.

Isn't making good predictions (and thus minimizing surprise, i.e. failed predictions) the real test of correspondence? — SophistiCat

Well, yes and no. That's the difficulty which gives Hoffman the space in which he can introduce this theoretical 'veil' without abandoning all credibility. The problem is that the result of our prediction (the response of the hidden states) is just going to be another perception, the cause of which we have to infer. No if we use, as priors for this second inference, the model which produced the first inference (the one whose surprise reduction is being tested), then there's going to be a suppresive action against possible inferences which conflict with the first model. String enough of these together, says Hoffman, and you can accumulate sufficient small biases in favour of model 1, that the constraints set by the actual properties of the hidden causal states pale into insignificance behind the constraints set by model 1's assumptions.

The counter arguments are either that the constraints set by the hidden causal states are too narrow to allow for any significant diversity (Seth), or that there's never a sufficiently long chain of inference models without too much regression to means (which can only be mean values of hidden states). I subscribe to a combination of both.

Ha!

Seems I missed...

These people are simply liars. — Olivier5

The real issue is with people who are obviously, demonstrably wrong in their belief but will pretend to not even understand the counterfactuals or arguments of others, and to disbelieve or simply ignore their evidence en vrac. — Olivier5

No, that's exactly what the discussion is about. the identification of those people. Identifying a category doesn't constitute proof that any given entity is a member of it. That such people exist doesn't answer the question of which side in any discussion are behaving that way. Both sides will obviously accuse the other of such activities.

What's going wrong in all these threads is the assumption that only one side has the Solomonesque wisdom to 'step outside' of their role as proponent/opponent to judge the other side's evidence as if they were an impartial observer.

Everyone agrees that...

we have a responsibility to argue in good faith — Olivier5

Everyone agrees that...

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

So it's disingenuous to present these as if they were live issues. I doubt you'll find a person on the planet to disagree with them. The issue is identifying when it is happening without simply declaring it of one's opponents as a cheap way of avoiding having to understand them. Or as Janus puts it...

Is there a reliable standard by means of which it could be judged that some conceptions of what constitutes evidence really don't add up? — Janus

What I've been lamenting in the Covid threads is that fact that I think there used to be a perfectly adequate standard (not perfect, by any means, but enough to filter out the crap). Matters regarding some field of expertise are discussed either by those experts or by reference to them. It's as simple as that. If you've met the threshold of epistemic responsibility to become an expert in some field, have no discoverable conflict of interest, no history of deep bias, then you have the right to be taken seriously and respectfully in any discussion within that field. Likewise laymen discussing that field are extended this right if they (in context) cite, or paraphrase the positions of these people who have met this standard.

I know I might sound like a typical old man, but this is how things used to be done (at least in my circles, which I admit are quite limited). The decay started before Covid but has been exaggerated massively during the crisis to the point we now find ourselves, where one's conclusions are all that matter, not the diligence with which one has arrived at them. Indeed, as here, one's conclusions are being used as a measure of the diligence one is assumed to have used arriving at them.

Indeed, it was going beyond the recognition of the iconic patterns that was thought important. — Banno

Yeah. Some of my wife's early work was with the development of children's writing recognition. A similar (I think) thing is found there. The recognition that this 'G' is a letter G no matter what font it is written in, is a skill that is a layer above the basic pattern recognition and into the more Bayesian modelling (though we didn't think of it in those terms then). It's as much about suppressing extraneous data as it is about processing relevant data. I think people (universalists?) too often think of this process as leaving behind some kind of platonic 'essence' of 'G', but it's not, the data discarded in some contexts overlaps with the data included in other contexts. It's about applying fast heuristic hypothesis testing, leaping forward in the word, bringing in context, sentence meaning, location in the word... My guess is that subitising is the same.

She had children who had to learn to read one font at a time...

But, you're right, we're very far off topic.

Yep. I'm offering 4:1 on 'genocide', 8:1 on 'Armageddon' and 10:1 on the zombie apocalypse outsider.

2:1 favourite is that opposing views are actually signs of mental illness (not even a joke, we've already had that one).

1000000:1 on opposing views being neurologically impossible (as, of course, we all know that would be a ridiculous thing to say because, duh, you haven't tested all views). No one would be that stupid.

How could you possibly know that? You've checked all the beliefs in all the world? — Olivier5

No, you're right. I've checked quite a few, and the brains doing the believing, but I've not checked every single example. I kind of work on the principle that if I check a reasonable sample I can infer the properties of the population that sample is drawn from. But if you've a better approach...

But doesn't the problem of induction show that we all believe things without proof? — frank

Yeah. Proof and evidence being two different things here. That the sun rose yesterday is evidence that it will rise tomorrow under certain modelling assumptions. The modelling assumptions might be hard-wired in some cases (ie not developed by evidence), but they don't themselves function without inputs (real time evidence). Beliefs are just too high level a structure to develop independant of inputs.

But it was flippant response to a stupid comment. Yours was all that was required really. No one deliberately decides to get it wrong. This whole thread is just @Xtrix having another stab a creating a version of epistemology in which it's impossible for him to be wrong. Last time we had that opposing views need not be engaged with, this time it's that opposing views are actually morally required to switch allegiance. I'm opening a book on what's next if you're interested in a wager...

I'm not sure I'm actually following the link the OP is trying to make between Hoffman and 'logic'. Hoffman's theory is all about the veridical break between perceptive features and the causes of them. What that's got to do with logic, I'm not sure.

As far as Hoffman's paper itself is concerned a good critique is here https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26452374/.

Basically Hoffman sets up so high a standard of correspondence that no modelling system could ever meet it without itself being the external world. I agree with his picture of pragmatism in model selection, but I don't agree that the models he uses (the 'winning' approaches in his game theoretical competition) are, in fact, non-vericidal. It's simply inherent in the modelling process that there will be a disconnect between the hidden cause and the perceptive feature. What Hoffman brings is the idea that this disconnect is not going to be random, it's going to be subject to selective pressure. I can see that, but the fundamental function of these models is surprise reduction and that is correspondence dependant (or at least there's no reason to assume it's not). We might gain some fitness advantage from one modelling assumption over another, but they're both still modelling something. Without a causal relationship between this something and the model, we're left with a kind of ghost in the machine - what causes the models and how, if not external causes and by physical interaction.

Which in my ignorant head harmonises with the Wittgensteinian rejection of concepts as pieces of furniture in minds. If we are to look to use instead of meaning, we would not expect to find a "spot" in the brain for each number, but instead to see something reflecting the range of stuff we can do with numbers. — Banno

Yes, that's it. The prescience of some of Wittgenstein's ideas still surprises me.

Interesting then that Subitising seems, according to the study I mentioned, to use the same networks as counting - is that the same as numerosity? — Banno

Not quite. As the authors say "we show that left-lateralized parietal activation is modulated by numerosity and is not involved in subitizing 1– 4 dots". The controversy of the paper is over the involvement of the right-lateralized parietal area, which is involved in this granular magnitude estimation I referred to earlier, but had not been postulated to be active in previous studies like this. I should be clear though, that this area is involved in a lot of fine-grained attentional shifting activities, of which counting is only one.

The study seems really interesting and raises some serious questions about previous models. My gut feeling is that we're seeing the involvement of multiple related processes because of the experimental set-up, a set of three dots 'means' 3, which, when observed is going to have triggering effects in the parietal areas anyway, and possibly some backward acting suppression on whatever pattern recognition was being employed - imagine someone shows you symbolic picture of a train, you might trigger linguistic areas ("train") and little else, but a train enthusiast might engage regions involved in more detailed edge-discernment, simply because they're expecting to see some feature you and I wouldn't even know ought to be there. In this sense, we're all number-enthusiasts.

It makes it difficult to study. we want to see what parts of the brain recognise three dots and our brains, like enthusiastic five-year-olds are excitedly telling us everything we know about 'three'. I'd love to see such a study done on people who are innumerate, like very young children, who would be less likely to have enumeration priors for such an experimental setup.

No one gets up in the morning and says, "I think I'll just be wrong as hell today."

Because being wrong is not a choice, it can't be immoral. — frank

Exactly.

Believing in something without evidence is a choice, — Xtrix

It is neurologically impossible to believe something without evidence.

But how can you have such good reasons for selecting or dismissing evidence, if you're not actually an expert in the field? — baker

Here I'm thinking of 'good' reasons as being those experience has taught us tend toward satisfactory results. Habits of thinking. If a person saying that tobacco is safe is paid by the tobacco industry, I don't need to be an expert in lung physiology to make a 'good' decision to take what he's saying with a pinch of salt. It's a habit of thinking I've developed to assess the possible conflicts of interest in those presenting me with evidence.

Evidence of previous bias (always coming down on one side of an ambiguous dichotomy), ideological commitments (politics, academic allegiances), publication biases (shock value, issue-of-the-day)...all of these can be used heuristically to weight evidence, or reject it entirely, without needing any expertise in the field at all.

The more one assesses evidence, the greater a bank of habits one develops. That's not to say that these habits are all right by any objective measure, only that they've proven themselves useful. The layman might rely on those things listed above, someone more versed in statistical techniques might additionally recognise signs of p-hacking or a suspiciously selected stratification - but still, none of these require expertise in the field being evaluated.

It's not only that; it's the vested interest of the average person in their accustomed prosperity, convenience and lifestyle, which means they won't vote for any government that presents plans to ameliorate global warming, if those plans involve any lessening of personal prosperity and comfort (like extra taxes or rising costs, etc).. — Janus

I think that's self-evidently true to an extent, but then again people regularly make significant sacrifices for the sake of their children's comfort (going without to pay for education, for example), so it would be quite hard to reconcile that with a purely selfish greed outweighing a known risk to one's children's future. People are not inherently greedy and selfish to the point that they'd sacrifice their children's well-being for a flashier car. These behaviours are played upon by advertisers, corporartions and media influences to get the desired outcome.

It has to do with the fact that they shout in public people who wear masks, have pride in not being vaccinated, risk others by not taking them into account (if you don't want to get vaccinated, fine, but keep to you and yours and leave other people alone), harass parents kids for wearing masks or being vaccinated, and on and on. — Manuel

Makes sense. It's difficult with hypothetical threats. Like with terrorism - more people are killed by fridges falling on them, but the existential threat is different so create a different response. You'll do more damage to the health system by being overweight than you will by not being vaccinated, but being overweight doesn't lead anywhere - people are nervous about what the virus might do next and so I suppose, like terrorism and fridges, have different reactions to what they see as riskier strategies.

But, as you imply, there are other reasons and other parts of the population who don't get vaccinated for other reasons. And not every reason given is silly or not rational. It has become an overtly political topic. — Manuel

I appreciate that. It doesn't seem like a very popular view here though.

The debate is still going on I'm afraid. I've not kept up with this thread, but as I understand it, the debate is about automaticity of number recognition, yes? The conflict between various stroop-like experiments manipulating visuo-spatial indicators of magnitude with actual numerical representations (a big number '7' vs a tiny number '9' - that sort of thing). Cohen Kadosh pretty much put that to bed in 2008, so papers from before then would have to be viewed in the light of a then open debate which is now considered less so. As any follower of developments in neuroscience will have come to expect, the matter turns out to be much more complex. Elements of visuo-spatial signals (size, pattern) are taken into account alongside priors expectations from things like ordinal and magnitude judgements in context. In fact Cohen Kadosh found that the specific instructions by the experimenters lead to different patterns of activation. Ultimately there's a significant degree of non-abstract numerical representation - numbers are represented in the brain not as the concept 'three' but as a combination of patterns, language, magnitude, numerosity, and even more synaesthetic relations. We know from something as simple as digit recognition that the inferotemporal layer can make 'best guesses' with ambiguous signals from the v4 regions (higher order perceptual features like overall shape, texture etc). It's likely that the final behaviour (assigning a number word, performing a calculation, weighing magnitudes...) is both dependant on, and influences (by backward acting suppression) the balance of collected 'evidence' in the v4 region.

Basically, a range of evidence is gathered and which evidence takes priority is dependant on the task at hand. (don't know why I didn't just say that at the beginning, still...it's written now.)

What I would add though, is that the often touted studies on infant number recognition are being misused to support mathematical realism. Infant studies done thus far just about all support the prevailing magnitude-estimation hypothesis, they are not about infants recognising 'the eternal number three' or any such. Magnitude estimation and numerosity are two different processing streams and shouldn't be confused. One can estimate the relative magnitude of two pages full of dots without having to, or even being able to, count them. Fine-scale magnitude recognition is both granular (ie based on individuating objects) and scalar. It's this granular magnitude recognition that's often misquoted as support for innate number recognition, but experiments such as this one https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11814309/ (and other subsequently) demonstrate that it is granular magnitude-recognition that underlies these infant abilities.

the ones I mentioned reach a lot of people, so they have broad reach, especially Fox, now that Trump can't use social media anymore. These people are the type of people who should cause most concern, in my view. — Manuel

Why do you think they should cause any particular concern?

On the other hand: Of course we can trust Trump he's anti establishment (even though he is not), of course let's trust alternative medicine (because these people aren't making a killing), of course let's trust Tucker Carlson (because he isn't an elite who hasn't gotten vaccinated), of course we can trust the internet (because that did not come from the Pentagon). — Manuel

Do you really see those as the only voices opposing vaccines?

You for instance think that the risk you are taking by not being vaccinated is quite small -- perhaps you don't mix up with others a lot; perhaps you are in good health and not overweight -- and that giving money to pharmaceuticals is a much larger risk. You would rather catch COVID and get sick for a week than use the protection of a vaccine, because you see the latter involving the risk of profiting an evil pharmaceutical company.

I wouldn't call it rational, but it's not totally stupid either. You just hate big pharma enough for it to tip the risk calculation. — Olivier5

That's it.

No, if you continue reading I give plenty of reasons why. — Xtrix

I read your whole post, you don't even mention the matter again, let alone give reasons why restricting the choice of preventative measure is 'legitimate'.

I see no cited evidence. Whatever you've posted before, I have no idea. — Xtrix

Then follow the conversation. I'm not going to conduct six different conversations all saying the same thing to six different people. The beauty of a forum is that we can have multiple-way conversations, if you're going to just ignore anything else being said then I'm afraid you're just going to miss out on half the conversation.

the overwhelming evidence that determines what to do, not votes or popularity contests. — Xtrix

How does evidence determine what do to do? Evidence, to me, is a stack of studies with statistically significant correlations between variables. How can they be either overwhelming or prescriptive? Scientists develop theories and determine whether those studies support or contradict those theories. So again, if eight scientists, having read all the studies, think theory X is valid and two think theory Y is valid, then how is it anything other than a popularity contest to say X is the only valid theory because it has most votes? Evidence doesn't tell you stuff on its own. We have to have a theory, which has to make testable predictions, which then either are confirmed or not by the statistical outcome of the study. If there are competing theories, it's either because different scientists have different theories and neither are dis-confirmed, or because different scientists have different opinions about whether a study dis-confirms a theory or not. This idea you have that overwhelming evidence just speaks to us somehow, is nonsense.

They all claim exactly what you're claiming. They also cite "bone fide experts," etc. — Xtrix

They absolutely do not, hence my request that you back up this assertion with evidence. Your consistent failure to do so just incriminates you further. Cite the bone fide expert with no history of bias or discoverable conflict of interest who claims the holocaust never happened or that the earth is flat. If you can't cite one then you're clearly just making this up.

I've seen no evidence so far to suggest that vaccines aren't safe or effective, and I believe you even conceded that beforehand. So once again, are you arguing against this or not? Because if you're not, then your stance about vaccine mandates are completely absurd -- and it was precisely this that was being discussed when you once again interjected. — Xtrix

Safe and effective are not binomial states. Things are safe enough, effective enough, depending on that which they are pitted against. The vaccine is safe and effective enough to be used in those at medium-high risk, it is not safe and effective enough to be used on those at very low risk. This is not even a particularly controversial view, it's the opinion of the UK's vaccine advisors, for example who have withheld support for child vaccinations for exactly that reason. In addition, I also believe that the proven track record of deceit on the part of the pharmaceutical companies shifts that balance further toward the higher risk groups only. A universal vaccine mandate is therefore completely unjustified.

As for the rest, I'm not going round in these ridiculous circles. The Covid threads are several hundred pages long, I've written hundreds of posts and I'd wager every fouth or fifth one contains a citation. If you're not interested enough to follow the whole thread then I've certainly no incentive to have the entire conversation with you personally, just follow the conversation as whole.

Not frantically, no. It's just a question I am playing with. Qui bono? — Olivier5

So with pro-vaccine sentiment it's a sign of mental illness to ask who benefits, with vaccine hesitancy it's just a sensible question.

What if you can't find any? Does that change anything? It seems like such a disingenuous enquiry. If you find something you'll say "there, told you so, that's why they're doing it", if you don't you'll just be left muttering "they'll be something I'm sure... somewhere....". You've already made up your mind that it's impossible for anyone to be vaccine hesitant as a result of having intelligently weighed the evidence and just reaching a different conclusion to you. So what's the point of all this faux 'investigation' charade? Do you really think anyone's fooled by it?

You becoming clinically insane is one topic which I won't touch anymore as it is personal. — Olivier5

I appreciate that. As I'm sure you'll understand, the revelations about my descent into madness are still quite raw for me, I'm welling up just thinking about it...we're all very upset here...

the question I am asking now is: Who profits or hopes to profit from vaccine hesitancy, and are they behind some of the misinformation currently being spread about vaccines? — Olivier5

That's hilarious. There's an existing industry who've netted more than $72bn (£52bn) in sales for this year alone, in deals for supplying follow-up shots and also the initial two doses for those being inoculated for the first time in less wealthy countries and you're frantically searching around for who might profit from vaccine hesitancy?

No doubt it's some clandestine organisation with secret ties to Trump. I'm thinking the lizardmen must be in on it. Now if only there were anyone who might profit from vaccine enthusiasm that would complete the picture...but no, no one comes to mind...

It was on a different topic. — Olivier5

Yeah, right. A completely different topic, me thinking the pharmaceutical companies are untrustworthy to a story about how people thought a foriegn company's new technology was untrustworthy. Like chalk and cheese, I'm amazed you even managed the segue. Have you considered a job in news anchoring?

This is my last word on the topic. — Olivier5

And yet...

Cue long spiel hopelessly trying to smear distrust of pharmaceutical companies with the taint of antisemitism

...whilst thinking about pro-vaccine posts here I'm reminded of a story about the Nazis...

if you cannot understand what people tell you on this thread about the dangers of paranoia, then you will most certainly lose your mind. — Olivier5

Really? The people on this thread are all experts on paranoia? Who'd have thought it. There was me thinking they were just random people on the internet so utterly unable to conceive of the idea they might be wrong that their only recourse in the face of opposition is to assume some psychological damage on the part of their interlocutors.

But no. Turns out they're all highly qualified psychologists capable of diagnosing paranoia. And to think I nearly missed it...phew!

If you start down this line of argument, without any evidence for it presented, then you can justify anything -- climate denial, creationism, holocaust denial, a flat earth...anything. — Xtrix

OK, so provide some evidence to support this assertion.

My 'line' is...

1. I can support my view with citations from bone fide experts in the appropriate field who have no discoverable conflict of interest or evidence of previous bias.

and

2. I have indubitable evidence of corruption in the pharmaceutical industry (criminal convictions), evidence of their influence over the FDA and academia, which casts doubt over the strength of evidence contrary to my view.

Now prove your point by doing the same for the view that climate change isn't real, or that the earth was made by God 6000 years ago, or that the holocaust didn't happen, or that the earth is flat...

Find suitably qualified bone fide experts in their field with no discoverable conflicts of interest or previous bias supporting the view and indubitable evidence of corruption and lobbying influence in those opposing it.

Otherwise, your argument is just hot air. You can't just sling mud and hope something sticks, we expect a higher standard than than here. If my view is just like those others, you should be able to prove it.

It's not by vote. It's by overwhelming evidence. — Xtrix

That's the same thing.

Eight studies concluding one thing, two studies concluding another. All ten studies meeting the minimum threshold for acceptable science.

My claim is that all ten are equally legitimate because they've all met the threshold for acceptable science.

Your claim is that the two are unacceptable because fewer people support them. A popularity contest.

The test takes 15-30 mins. I stated that if employees were willing to show up early and take the test before work then it would be a way around the issue for those who feel that taking the vaccine isn't in their best interest. — I like sushi

I was more thinking along the lines of if they failed the test (as many would) they'd have to go home - and so not be available for work at all. With the vaccine, everyone's back to work, infected or not, because employers have been given the 'get of of jail free' card that "hey, they were vaccinated, not our problem".

Never mind the fact that the evidence for lack of transmission among the vaccinated is significantly weaker than the evidence for lack of symptomatic infection. That would be an inconvenient block to continued productivity, hence the whitewash over that. Repeat a claim often enough along side other indubitable claims some of that confidence simply rubs off.

What would be much better would be the option of antibody tests for previous infection. No one who's already had Covid should be forced to take the vaccine as well, that's just a totally unreasonable imposition. If anything shows their hand it's this.

I'm still perplexed about the distinction between someone not wishing to take the vaccine and someone with religious reasons for not taking the vaccine. If we're applying reason and rationality in this case how do we allow one rule for religious persons and another for non-religious persons. — I like sushi

Yes, something I doubt the most fervent pro-vaccine enthusiast would want to stick their neck out on. I had an argument with @Hanover earlier about this where he claimed some sort of categorical objectivity over what was and what wasn't a legitimate 'lifestyle choice'. apparently religion is, not taking prophylactic medicine isn't - and that's that.

What's odd is that all the risks proponents like to take seem to fall into the category of 'lifestyle choices' and anything that's outside of their personal experience seems to fall outside of that category. But I suppose that's just an astounding coincidence.

But in pursuit of smoking cessation, public health workers have to use whatever persuasive levers are available -- and passive smoke has become a pretty good lever. I suspect that very light exposure to passive smoke is probably a pretty small risk, even if people hate the smell. Especially, when you consider all the other indoor / outdoor polluting chemicals people are exposed to. — Bitter Crank

Yes. I've made the point in other posts on the covid crisis. Public health policy is a very blunt instrument and has frequently simplified and on occasion outright lied in order to get a message which is simple and universally applicable. I don't think it's even necessarily wrong that they do. What's wrong is then taking this tool and mistaking it for a statement about scientific theory.

Wow. The idea that you might be wrong isn't even on the agenda is it? It's not even an addendum to a footnote in 'Any Other Business'.

Your dogmatic self assurance is astounding. You genuinely do believe that you only need to think something for it to actually be the case. It's really disconcerting arguing with you, I keep expecting a counter argument, or some supporting evidence, or some sign of engagement with an alternative viewpoint and yet, nothing. You just repeat the thing you said at first, as if the only possible explanation for why I disagree with you must be that I didn't read you correctly the first time, or that I'm insane... After all, what other possible explanation could there be for someone disagreeing with you?

I argued that the choosing of vaccines was not legitimate because other options existed to achieve the same ends which were not made available your response...?

even if they exclusively chose vaccinations -- it's still legitimate — Xtrix

Just a repeat of the original claim. No counter argument, no contrary evidence, nothing. You claim it's legitimate, I give reasons why it's not, you just repeat that it's legitimate. Why? Well, because you said so. What more reason could possibly be required than that, eh?

And here...

I raise the idea that evidence is not overwhelming but appears so because of a bias in study design, funding, media reporting and government influence - all backed up previously with actual cited evidence of these things taking place - and your response...?

No, the overwhelming evidence is available for all of us to see and learn about — Xtrix

No counter argument, no contrary evidence, just restating that same assertion you opened with. "No, the evidence is overwhelming because I said it is".

Astounding.

If one closes oneself off to any person or argument that challenges their beliefs, this is simply dogmatism. This seems to be what you're talking about, exclusively. — Xtrix

The 'closing off' is irrelevant. I could refuse to read anything from the New York Times, or I could read everything from the New York Times and declare it all to be biased 'fake news'. What makes a difference to any kind of epistemic responsibility is having good reasons to select or dismiss evidence before weighing what is left in the 'accepted' pile, those reasons being other than that it's saying something you disagree with.

To them, no, assuming you are referring here to people who died while denying they had Covid. They can "obviously" say that the evidence is "propaganda" or caused by Bill Gates or whatever. So, what to do? — Manuel

If they can 'obviously' say that, then dismissing them as 'insane' is exactly the hand-waiving you complained of. That's the point I'm making. Very few people are actually insane, if they believe something to be the case, even at the risk of their own health (and that of their loved ones) there's usually a very good reason why they do.

We live in a world which is on a path to mutually assured destruction (via climate change) and yet the vested interests of the super rich mean we do nothing about that. We live in a world where children are starving to death by the million and yet the vested interests of the super rich have us do nothing about that either. And yet you want to claim that a theory that the world's richest man can (and would) influence the current state of affairs, is so utterly inconceivable that the only possible explanation for anyone believing it is insanity? Look around you. Do the world's super rich appear to have a disproportionate amount of influence over the state of affairs or not?

What to do is exactly what's not being done here. Acknowledge that our institutions are flawed, that these people have perfectly normal (if not particularly good) reasons to disbelieve what they're being told, that we do in fact live in a world where the super rich have so much influence that their shaping affairs like like this is actually conceivable (again, although unlikely)... The more doubling down we do the more we make our 'side' seem completely ridiculous.

Of course we can't trust the pharmaceuticals - they're organisations with criminal convictions for lying. Of course we can't trust the FDA - they have a well known revolving door with the companies they're supposed to check, their former head is now at Pfizer, for God's sake. Of course we can't trust our governments - that politicians lie is such a truism it's a standing joke. And of course we can't trust our academic institutions - most are funded if not directly employed by industry and the replication rate in the medical sciences is less than half.

So to say to the Bill Gatesian conspiracy theorist that he's mad because the evidence from the pharmaceuticals, FDA, governments and academia is contradicts him is just as ridiculously dogmatic in the face of evidence to the contrary as he's being.

It is perfectly possible to make a case against the idea that vaccines contain 5G transmitters, or that Bill Gates manufactured it, without having to do so by falling back on the equally ludicrous idea that our institutions are simply so noble and incorruptible that such a set of events need not even be considered and everything they say can be treated as gospel truth.

At this point, we begin handwaving something about "this is just a fact" or "your insane", "read a book", etc.

So, difficult. — Manuel

And yet...

One is at a loss for words. Like what can you even say when it gets to these levels? It's way beyond insane when it gets to these levels. — Manuel

So easy, no?

isn't it irresponsible to believe in things that lead to harmful actions? Shouldn't we be more careful about what we believe in? — Xtrix

Of course. So who do we trust to tell us whether the thing we're believing in is going to lead to harmful actions?

As I said in the other thread, you can't use the evidence from an institution someone doesn't trust to prove that their not trusting them is harmful. They don't trust them. So they're not going to believe that evidence either are they?

We obviously have a responsibility to ensure our actions are not causing an unreasonable risk of harm to others. When we're not sufficiently expert ourselves, that responsibility is executed by deciding who to trust. But no real-time data can inform that decision because the decision about which data sources to trust obviously has to precede the use of any data from them.

This is the covid issue in a nutshell. The fanatics say "you must believe X because look at what's at stake", but the evidence for what's at stake invariably comes from aforementioned X, so it's a nonsense argument. Just begging the question of their trustworthiness.

...oh and also what said...

It's not possible to meaningfully and without hostility address this while thinking in the above-mentioned polarized terms. — baker

...but then you never intended to meaningfully address this did you? Just another crowd-pleaser of a thread.

I suppose, in capitalism, supply and demand type mechanisms + profit-maximization drive what corporations do. As noted somewhere, GlaxoSmithKline got busted and paid substantially. — jorndoe

Coffee money compared to the profits they made.

maybe government-run research + production would do? Just established universities? Well, no, we still get into Us-versus-Them narratives, or at least that's what it seems like. (Even though "They" aren't quite Kafkaesque, ghostly entities.) — jorndoe

It used to work reasonably well. Governments might not be too much better than corporations, but it's an improvement.

How many (and what sort of) offenses to render blanket distrust/dismantling and what would a realistic solution look like anyway? — jorndoe

The rap sheet of the pharmaceuticals is way beyond any reasonable threshold of "oh, it was only a few rare cases", but yeah, interesting question in general. I don't see why we shouldn't have a very high standard indeed. It's not as if they accidentally marketed suicide-inducing medication to children. I don't think not doing so should be too much to ask.

As to the ethical dimension, a project to cultivate and nurture moral awareness? — jorndoe

Or a guillotine.

It's as sound as banning smoking from the workplace. That's legitimate. — Xtrix

Not in the least. The aim of the smoking ban was to prevent illness from passive smoking, there was only one way to do that (cut down on smoke). Hence the ban.

If the aim here is to reduce covid infection there are several ways that can be done - regular testing, distance working, hygiene practices, antibody tests for natural immunity...

They've chosen vaccination. The one option that aligns with the agenda of the most powerful industry in the world. There's an absolute need to mandate something. There's no reason at all why that something has to be the product of a private corporation.

the issue is, for you, is that you don't trust the enterprise of science. — Xtrix

Well then I would have chosen an extremely self-defeating career path wouldn't I?

No, I have no problem with the enterprise of science. I don't agree that it's conducted by vote, that's all. We don't take a poll of who thinks what, and whatever comes out top is 'the truth'. It doesn't work like that. There are standards for entry into the canon of scientific theories. If yours meets those criteria it's just as valid as any other. Science is a methodology, not a popularity contest.

when the evidence is overwhelming, and there's vast consensus, and one persists in taking the "skeptical" position nonetheless, we have to start questioning the motives — Xtrix

If the 'overwhelmingness' of the evidence for anything is a function of the corporate influence on academia you can't very well hold it up as evidence that there is no such influence can you? Just hypothetically imagine that corporations did indeed have academic establishments under their thrall, how would overwhelming evidence within those establishments be evidence of anything except the corporate agenda?

The issue, at heart, is belief and truth. Or to put it more accurately: epistemic responsibility. — Xtrix

Well, we agree on something.