I didn't realise you actually wanted answers! — Isaac


You're welcome not to answer my questions but I will keep asking them, if you don't mind too much. — Olivier5

Of course. I suspect I'm much more interested in your questions than you are in my answers.

So you've spoken to many of them antivaxxers and, apparently you trusted them. It didn't come to your mind that they could be dishonest. Which is strange given your general mistrust for folks and society. I can see that some people are worthy of your trust, still. — Olivier5

More of your jejune all-or-nothing analysis. Why must I either trust all of them or none of them? Is there not scope for me to trust some of them?

So what does your doctor say then? — Olivier5

I haven't a clue. I don't even know who my doctor is any more (my previous doctor having retired some five or six years ago and my not having visited since).

Anyone can question the motive of anyone else but it takes a huge sense of entitlement and some intellectual laziness to ask me to question my own motive for you, which is in essence what Tzeentch was asking... — Olivier5

I simply took it as an exhortation to be wary of glass-house stone throwing.

These questions remained unanswered BTW: — Olivier5

I didn't realise you actually wanted answers!

Because I've spoken to many of them, depends on who their doctor is, respectively.

It is normal behaviour and I don't deny this - it is, however, irrational. One important difference as well is that many of the choices you give as an example do not also entail increased risks to others. — Benkei

But they do by the same metric used with Covid. We've introduced a new 'using up a hospital bed' measure. All the things I mentioned have a small increased risk of using up a hospital bed and thus affecting others. But we could have simply listed driving, skiing, building work, any polluting activity, anything which releases CO2...all of which directly harm others, but if the risk is very small, they're usually tolerated. Which leads to the question of what you mean by "it is, however, irrational". Do you mean that it's irrational to allow preferences to override potential for risk reduction even when the risk is small? I'm not sure how you'd arrive at such a proposition...

the problem is that small personal risks and small risks to others add up. If 25 year olds only die once in 125,000 years, then 125,000 of them not getting a vaccine means , with an R0 of .9 (currently in NL) over 1 million other people will be infected by them. That results in about 100,000 hospital admissions, 30,000 ICU admissions and around 200 deaths. With only 1500 ICU beds available you can see the problem. — Benkei

I get what you're saying here. We need to include the full chain of those affected, and I agree, but the numbers you're using are averages, and we've been talking about the diversity of situations and the contextual nature of responses.

Here, for example, the study found that just 9% of the initial cases were responsible for over 80% of the second generation cases.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30287-5/fulltext

and here,

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32685698/

these situations are modelled by Akira Endo at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

that tidy population-level estimate — known as the basic reproduction number (R0) — hides immense variation at the individual level. In reality, most infections arise from just a handful of people. Around 10% of cases in countries outside China accounted for 80% of secondary infections up to the end of February.

My isolated hygienic Welsh hermit, for example, is unlikely to have an R0 value of anywhere near 0.9, not even remotely close. The R0 just becomes another figure like the personal risk, which is different depending on the circumstances and so multiplies the risk of harm by different, often insignificant, amounts. The actual data matters.

So yes, we would have to take into account the chain of consequences (again, only to a reasonable degree), but the R0 gives us an average. We already established that on average one should probably take the vaccine, distance, mask, and wash. What we're discussing here (or at least the point I'm trying to make) is that something which is good policy on average does not necessarily make it good policy for any given individual. A reasonably well-informed decision to act other than such a policy should be a perfectly normal part of any community's healthy diversity of opinions.

I would invite you to turn those attempts at psycho-analysis on yourself first. — Tzeentch

Did you not get the memo? It's only those opposed to universal vaccination whose motives have any occult psychology. Those promoting it are all completely rational human computers who only ever output the unadulterated facts and strategies dispassionately calculated using them. Is that not obvious from the calm, patient use of non-emotive arguments supported by direct citation of peer reviewed studies?

Oh no, wait...

This is the typical response (not in a bad way, just useful to summarise). The common themes are

1. It doesn't matter how little the risk is reduced, it makes sense to reduce any risk that one can.
2. It's not about you it's about
2a - the hospital bed you might take up putting pressure on the health service, and
2b - the vulnerable others you might infect if you remain unvaccinated, and
2c - the return to normal that's being postponed by lack of vaccine uptake.

The counter arguments have already been presented, but

1. Low risk reduction means that only small preferences are sufficient to outweigh it, like coffee, bacon, sugar, skipping gym... Just not trusting (or even not liking) the corporations who produce these medicines is clearly in the same category of minor preference as coffee, bacon and gym avoidance. If you do trust the vaccine, then I admit a jab in the arm might be too small a preference, but it depends how much you hate jabs in the arms, it's down to personal preferences at this point. Taking a small increased risk for personal preference is quite normal behaviour.

2a. The actual risk is relevant again here though, otherwise the same pressure would apply to a huge swathe of acceptable activities which increase your risk of needing a hospital bed. A moral imperative has to be at least vaguely consistent to have any normative force. Insisting that a very low risk of hospitalisation is reduced even further would apply to dozens of other activities normally considered acceptable. As with personal risk, a small increase in risk to others is still considered part of a normal social compromise made to allow a diversity of personal preferences, so the actual relative figures matter.

2b. The data on how vaccines might reduce transmission is limited and if they do reduce transmission it will vary by cohort. The transmission argument is often wheeled out alongside the symptom reduction argument as if to share in its authority - the two have very different degrees of confidence in their risk reduction. In any case, the person living in rural Wales with a small social group and good hygiene habits is extremely unlikely to have their rate of transmission reduced by any significant amount (and again, as above, there's no normative force behind the argument that all reduction in risk must be taken no matter how small, it's simply not a normal requirement).

Often ignored, but relevant to all these arguments is the fact that immunity drops over time after vaccination. The effects touted for the first 28 days can't be used to assume long-term risk reduction as we know for a fact they they drop off by four months and we don't have any robust data at all on how effective they are after that. Again, if you don't mind the vaccine, and trust the suppliers, then this is all irrelevant because you might as well reduce the risk if you can, but if you don't like the vaccine or don't trust the suppliers, then the risk reduction has to be considerably higher to outweigh the costs and we just don't have the data on that for the long term.

2c. Again, scientific opinion is now largely that vaccination will not bring about an end to the pandemic. The UK's chief adviser recently called the idea "a myth". The sole focus is on preventing the health services from being overwhelmed whilst the virus slowly becomes endemic.

To meet this effect, it's only necessary that people at real risk of hospitalisation (or at real risk of spreading the virus to such people) take the vaccine. That's a very large majority of the population, particularly in America, but it's not everyone. Public health mandates have never tried to account for a minority to whom they don't apply as it waters down the message to very little gain (see 'potatoes are not a vegetable', and 'every unit of alcohol increases your chances of heart disease' as examples - both false, both aimed at a majority who would have taken the truth out of context and missed the important message), so using to public health messages as evidence to contradict this is not appropriate. A public health message is a tool, not a statement of fact.

The public health message on this should be exactly as it is - take the vaccine, mask, distance, clean. But this is not a public health forum and we can afford a little more subtlety here, surely.

Based on the UK ONS numbers that's an infinitely higher risk than dying of a vaccination since exactly zero people, regardless of age and BMI, have died of a Covid vaccination. — Benkei

The two data sets can't be compared since they use different methods of classifying cause of death.

COVID deaths are recorded by mention on the death certificate (which is almost universal practice after a positive test) whereas ADR deaths are recorded by known cause, and expected deaths by normal 7 day death rate are deducted.

The MHRA recorded 1,143 deaths following vaccination (about 35 million doses at the time) so if these were recorded in a similar manner to COVID deaths the comparative figure would be much higher. Could even be as high as 1 in 350,000 if they all were added to the death certificate under assumption as COVID is.

Of course, the correct thing to do is to change how we record COVID deaths, not up how we record ADRs. Point is, you can't compare them meaningfully.

... not the fact that corporations can buy our politicians... — Xtrix

Not being coerced into taking a corporate product by those exact same politicians is taking a stand against the fact that corporations can buy our politicians.

Not a complete answer. We use this at work.

http://covid19-phenomics.org/PrototypeOurRiskCoV.html

This one is the only one I know of to include BMI

https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation

You might be interested.

What works and what constitutes an argument are two different things. Persuasion obviously isn't all about arguments. — Benkei

I was just being facetious.

people seem to also forget the technique has been around for 30 years. It started with treatment against cancer. So 30 years of testing available for mRNA drugs already exists. — Benkei

Of possible interest...

https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-once-dismissed-idea-became-a-leading-technology-in-the-covid-vaccine-race/

The problem, she knew, was that synthetic RNA was notoriously vulnerable to the body’s natural defenses, meaning it would likely be destroyed before reaching its target cells. And, worse, the resulting biological havoc might stir up an immune response that could make the therapy a health risk for some patients.

behind the scenes the company’s scientists were running into a familiar problem. In animal studies, the ideal dose of their leading mRNA therapy was triggering dangerous immune reactions — the kind for which Karikó had improvised a major workaround under some conditions — but a lower dose had proved too weak to show any benefits.

mRNA is a tricky technology. Several major pharmaceutical companies have tried and abandoned the idea, struggling to get mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.

The indefinite delay on the Crigler-Najjar project signals persistent and troubling safety concerns for any mRNA treatment that needs to be delivered in multiple doses — https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/

The technology is so old because no one could get it to work without triggering nasty immune responses. The exact type of response some experts are concerned about now, particularly with multiple booster doses.

What I am not fine with is antisocial behavior, i.e. behavior that will risk the lives of many for no good reason. If you don't care that your neighbors might die because of you, if you are going to systematically ignore the needs of others with whom you share a society, then you are not fit to live in that society. — Olivier5

That just doesn't make any sense. Unless you have access to the raw data then the extent to which such actions affect others is exactly the matter about which the government's information is not trusted.

It's not like people are agreeing that these measures are necessary to avoid the net cost of millions of lives but then saying "fuck it, I don't care". They don't believe these measures are necessary to avoid the net cost of millions of lives.

They don't believe it because their governments have told them it and their governments routinely lie.

They don't believe it because it's a solution that enriches corporations and corporations routinely lie in favour of their further enrichment.

You've never heard of the boy who cried 'wolf'?

If I just repeat the heuristic rule "trust the scientific consensus" then it doesn't have any argumentative force. — Benkei

Well...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022537177800121

It's certainly a popular approach.

That's not true, (he says getting out his big stick and beating Issac mercilessly.) Rather, I have no stick, and the truth is not a sword either. — unenlightened

Well, maybe I ought to have said "As often..." rather than "As ever...".

Someone who does not have that commitment becomes part of the uncommunicative world, not an enemy - like a lion, maybe, or a virus or an advert. — unenlightened

Yep. That's basically what I'm saying, but once we've completed that elimination, there's far less to be gained by continuing to sort the remaining cohort by "commitment to truth". Other factors are far more likely to be responsible for the variance now, since you've eliminated the outliers on the 'commitment to truth' axis.

What makes it worse is that most of the interaction takes place in a text medium, black on white, so there is no danger of mishearing or misremembering something.

The text is there for one to carefully read it and reference it. — baker

Yeah, but one can always claim to have missed it.

The thing about social media personas is that you've nothing real tying them down, so people can create of them their own little arch-villains to heroically tear down, they don't have to deal with anything as troublesome as the racist grandmother who nonetheless helps the homeless, or the anti-trans feminist struggling for women's education rights in Iran.

The whole of humanity can simply be grouped into pro and con on any issue and all treated with the same clichés that have already been field-tested for back-patting popularity. No risk, all to gain.

There is a striking similarity between zealous religious preachers and the vocal pro-vaccers. — baker

Yes, it's driven by the polemicism of social media I think. People didn't use to be able to identify an enemy quite so clearly and find such unbridled support so easily. It drives people to extremes because the badges for these groups are so singular and clear that people have the confidence to push further.

It's like every group is as simple as stamp collectors. It's easy to know what to do to get rewarded in such a group - get more stamps. There's no complexity so people just push for more and more stamps confident that at no time will any of their peers turn round and say "that's way too many stamps, what are you doing!".

Perfect!

A few more of those and you'll soon have that pesky Us-versus-Them narrative firmly put to bed. Keep up the good fight.

starting out with or campaigning distrust and Us-versus-Them narratives can be degenerative. — jorndoe

That's hilarious. Do you have anything for an encore?

I'm not at all clear what you are saying. — unenlightened

Seems contagious.

I am saying that we are inescapably social and interdependent - we have to trust or die alone. Therefore we have to have a moral commitment to the truth, or die alone. I am saying that if we continue to valorise "rational self-interest" we will all die alone. — unenlightened

Yeah, but we also want to be able to not trust, no? We don't want to have to just swallow whatever we're told, charitable to the very end, we need to be able to distrust those deserving of such distrust.

On the other side of the coin, we don't want to measure every idea only by it's utility to our 'passionate pursuit of the truth'. That becomes pointless because of underdetermination, we virtually never have the data we need to measure everything that way and other heuristics have to come into play.

The stats just shows why.

As ever...

we have to have a moral commitment to the truth, — unenlightened

...just becomes nothing more than a stick to beat one's enemies with - "see, it's they who are not committed to the truth,
not like us, who care for nothing more..."

and @unenlightened, if you're at all interested.

This is what I was arguing on the other thread, but the stats clearly did not go down well. Nonetheless, I think stats can help us here.

When you stratify a sample over a variable, that variable loses some of its relative influence over the variance within the stratification cohort.

So we might stratify our community over some variable like 'reasonableness', into classes - {completely unreasonable}, {perfectly reasonable}, {very reasonable}. We could use 'degree of reasonableness' to eliminate one group from our trust, but once we've done that, 'degree of reasonableness' loses some of its power to explain the variance, so we needn't then continue to apply it within that cohort - we can afford a bit more 'live and let live'.

We've not sacrificed a passion for truth because we used it thoroughly to eliminate the classes within our stratified population, but once that's done, it's served its purpose, it's no longer particularly useful within the remaining classes, and other, more personal factors can take over.

I consider mandatory vaccinations for specific services/industries a curious hill to want to die on. — Benkei

Really? Putting aside for now your judgement about the facts of the case right now, can you really not see a problem with creating a system whereby a government and/or a private corporation can inject the entire population of their country with a chemical which is only intermittently batch tested?

The thing is, we already know the answer (at least for the left) because when utilities were privatised we were up in arms. The idea of letting a private, profit-making company clean and distribute our water was an abomination. Same with health, same with housing, same with every basic human need... except prophylactic medicine, apparently, where the left are not only happy to hand over control to a private corporation, but then spend the majority of their time doing their fucking advertising for them.

These corporations are criminals. Actually convicted of criminal acts. They spend four times more on lobbying than any other industry. They lie, cheat, pay off government oversight, and show callous disregard for human life (you should read some of the emails in the opioid cases). And they're now in charge of a medical procedure you'd campaign to have extended to whole world.

I struggle to think of a more important hill to die on than keeping the well-being of the entire population of the world out of the hands of a criminal profiteering enterprise.

Some incorrigibility among anti-vaxxers has been seen. Whether or not a vaccine is produced in this or that factory may not make much difference to those people. — jorndoe

Ha! That's brilliant. You're citing a study showing how radicals refuse to believe in the possibility of error as evidence that we should accept what our governments tell us without question.

Yes. Many people who hold strong views do so because they have trouble seeing alternative possible worlds in which they might be wrong.

So, here I am arguing that alternative viewpoints to the government narrative are often perfectly valid, even if they're unpopular, so long as they meet the threshold of expert approval and peer review. I'm met with a wall of infantile simplicity, fixated on the utter truth of a single narrative.

Who exactly do you think is suffering from the metacognative failure?

Time to take some time out again.

personal judgements — Isaac


Checking double standards. — jorndoe

Seems rather uncharitable. Why would you do that?

They're not. Twas you that painted pharma with a single brush. — James Riley

One factor. Distrust of pharmaceutical companies.

Another factor. Having diabetes and no other choice than to take the product of a pharmaceutical company.

Any understanding of how this works breaking through yet?

Yes, some people might distrust some pharmaceutical companies and not others. I'm not one of those people. I distrust all pharmaceutical companies, but I have other factors which weigh in when deciding whether to use one of their products.

Gods, I can't believe I'm having to actually write this out to explain...

let's remember the original claim: vaccinated people are just as likely to spread the virus as unvaccinated people — Xtrix

I never made that claim.

the data so far suggest a much, much better efficacy rate for nasal infection as well, compared to the unvaccinated — Xtrix

Your data?

So this diversion still doesn't support the original claim. — Xtrix

Why would it. I didn't make the 'original claim'.

the vaccines are safe, effective, and slow the spread of the virus by lowering both infection (internal and mucosal) -- whether one contracts the virus at all -- and severity of symptoms in breakthrough cases (hence far less hospitalizations and deaths among the vaccinated who contract the virus). Breakthrough cases remain very rare indeed, as per the CDC -- and for those without reading comprehension issues. — Xtrix

Is all the opinion of some scientists based on a handful of low powered studies suffering from the same limitations as most biosciences (which is why they can barely even manage a 50% replicability rate).

I've never claimed anything of the sort you've bizarrely attributed to me. My 'claim' is limited to showing that matters you present as certain, settled facts believed by virtually all experts are nothing of the sort. The kind of detail that matters is a wide open field with most studies still running, virtually none have been replicated, most have contrary studies opposing.

Institutions, consequently urge caution and seek confirmatiin an further data. It's only ideology flag-waivers who pretend this is all very simple and any difference of opinion is only political.

If it were, then people would not take pharmaceuticals. — James Riley

Ah, the binomial thinking is contagious. Why, in your bizarre hypothetical, are people robbed of their ability to use more than one factor in their judgements?

In France for example...

Until the start of the 2000s around 90% of French people were pro-vaccine, but then scandals involving drug companies shook public confidence. A turning point came in 2009 when the French government ordered huge quantities of vaccine against the swine flu epidemic. Less than 10% of people took up the offer to get the vaccine amid fears of side-effects. The government was seen as having massively over-ordered with public funds, raising questions about financial interests.

“In our recent history, the H1N1 [swine flu] was the moment when doubt settled into the general population. It went beyond the small circles of anti-vaccine campaigners,” Vignaud said.

Already, earlier scandals had taken a toll. In the mid-1980s haemophilia patients were given HIV-tainted blood transfusions, and questions were raised as to how much the state had known. Then came a row over hepatitis B vaccinations: between 1994 and 1998 almost two-thirds of the French population and almost all newborn babies were vaccinated against hepatitis B, but the programme was suspended after concerns arose about possible side-effects.

I have. So ...

I don't trust the pharmaceutical industry — Isaac


... wasn't a blanket statement? (Far from it, perhaps?) — jorndoe

No, that one was pretty much a blanket statement.

Explicit examples have been given. — jorndoe

I can't think why you'd want to know about my personal judgements in that much detail, but (answers in bold)...

how distrusting would you be if you caught meningitis not very and/or syphilis no idea and/or rabies not very ? And a kid (of yours) depends on the pathogen? (Consulting immediately with the family doctor generally not immediately, no / whoever...

Your point is...?

You sure they're converging on a genetic fallacy? You think they'd be happier with witchdoctors brewing things out in the woods? — jorndoe

I think they'd be happier with a system guided more around the public good and less around private profiteering.

Are you really so bromidic that you can't think of any other option than the system we have or witch doctors?

Eli Lilly and Company, Novo Nordisk A/S, Sanofi S.A. = pharmaceutical industry, kind of big too. — jorndoe

Distrusting pharmaceutical companies != not taking any of their products under any circumstances.

You've heard of nuance!

Say, how distrusting would you be if you caught meningitis and/or syphilis and/or rabies? And a kid (of yours)? (Consulting immediately with the family doctor / whoever at a local hospital, is realistic in our case, pharmaceuticals/vaccinations :gasp: might be involved.) — jorndoe

Depends entirely on the circumstances, the severity of the disease in question, the urgency of the situation.

Why are you deliberately acting dumb, as if you couldn't possibly understand anything except all or nothing principles?

You cannot transmit the virus if you don’t have the virus. — Xtrix

The vaccines reduce the virus in the blood, the virus that you transmit is in the nasal mucosa.

systemic respiratory vaccines generally provide limited protection against viral replication and shedding within the airway, as this requires a local mucosal secretory IgA response

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33320052/

That the two are linked is a theoretical assumption that you've done nothing to even address, let alone confirm.

the standard note about limitations, of which you’ll find in nearly every study. — Xtrix

Yes, that's right. The indicators of the exact humility, concern for accuracy and acceptance of complexity which you consistently lack in your sophomoric understanding of the science.

I didn’t cite just one physician, I cited two large studies which demolished your ignorant claims about infections and transmission. — Xtrix

The other studies aren't about transmission, they're about infection. Infection and transmission are not the same thing. The virus is transmitted mainly by the nasal mucosa, the vaccine reduces infection, which is measured by viral load in the blood. Two different places. That reducing the load in one place will also reduce it in another is a theoretical assumption. One which the studies you cite do not provide any new data on.

from the NEJM September 2021

Given that vaccination reduces asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2,2,3 it is plausible that vaccination reduces transmission; however, data from clinical trials and observational studies are lacking.

How do you square...

even if that weren’t the comparison, they’re still rare: — Xtrix

...with

It’s hard to get an exact count since many vaccinated people don’t show symptoms, and therefore, don’t get tested.

I know your grasp of statistics is shockingly poor, but if we don't know the population size we can know the frequency of the observations. Primary school level - we divide the number of observations by the size of the population. The second part of that equation is missing.

It is dangerous to spread the myth that vaccines reduce transmission in all but a few 'rare' cases. — Isaac


And yet these studies say exactly that. Odd. — Xtrix

So the WHO are wrong then when they say

While a COVID-19 vaccine will prevent serious illness and death, we still don’t know the extent to which it keeps you from being infected and passing the virus on to others. — https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/covid-19-vaccines/advice

...those damn overwhelming consensus of scientists, eh?

The studies don't address transmission, as I mentioned above. They don't address viral loads in the nasal mucosa, they don't address viral load in asymptomatic cases, they don't address behavioural changes in vaccinated people, they don't address different responses in the full range of cohorts. That is the reason the WHO still appeals to people to continue with their hygiene measures, despite vaccination. But that doesn't work quite so well as an advertisement for the vaccine, so of no interest to you.

It's not clear to me, and it seems it's not clear to others, so your idea needs more work. — Sam26

I think that's a very charitable summary. I hadn't intended it to be 'idea' at all really, just trying to see how my knowledge from my specialist field fits in with my understanding of Wittgenstein (which is far from my specialist field!). The answer may well be "nowhere". Wittgenstein talks a fair bit about things which appear to have a strong overlap, belief and certainty - two aspects of the human psyche I've spent most of my career studying. I understand belief in terms of active inference models (little bits of hierarchical neural networks which output 'tendencies to act as if...') and certainty in terms of Bayesian probability. I know Ramsey (the only philosopher I would dare to claim I knew quite well) dealt a lot with the latter, but obviously no one has particularly dealt with the former because its quite new to cognitive science.

At it stands, all I was really trying to do was interrogate some of the positions people talk about here in the light of the cognitive sciences. That's been most instructive.

As to my 'idea' I'll see if I can formulate it any more clearly with fewer contradictions.

Still doesn't change the healthcare problem, now does it? — Benkei

No, but it makes a massive difference to understanding the variance in support for different solutions.

Mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry and government scientists is among the top reasons for vaccine hesitancy. Denying that such mistrust is justified is therefore among the top activities of the pro-vaccine lobby.

The matter of the degree to which government sponsored schemes were responsible for the origin of the virus, and more importantly, the extent to which they tried later to smother any such suggestion, even banning the very discussion of it, is absolutely critical to the choice of management strategy.

Surely you can see that a theory banned from discussion on various social media, which later is accepted as equally likely with no change in evidence (just a change in attitude), makes all appeals to "the scientists all say..." toothless. And it's not about the 'science constantly updates as new data comes in' tagline - no new data came in.

A dozen scientists were flat out paid off or otherwise persuaded to put their names to a letter which relegated a perfectly valid theory to the status of a banned conspiracy, written by the person who would be directly responsible if the theory were true.

So when someone like Dr Robert 'this-is-all-a-bioterrorism-plot' McCullough state their 'theory', a few dozen doctors come along to say it's nothing but wild conspiracy and all discussion of it is banned on Facebook - what do you expect people to think? Do you still think they'll see such treatment as good mark of a theory that's got no merits?

We can't keep sweeping the medical establishment's biases and the government's involvement in them, under the rug as if it were a non-issue. It's the issue. This is all about the extent to which we can trust governments and medical institutions to provide advice which is in the public interest over and above advice which is in the corporate interests. The treatment of the lab escape theory doesn't speak too well of the former side, sweeping it aside each time it's raised does even less.

By now, denial seems a bit lame. — jorndoe

Denial of what?

If there's a war and they are asked to take shots of lead for the nation, what are they gona do? — Olivier5

Presumably they'd decide whether or not they thought it was the right thing to do and act accordingly. Or would you rather we just suspend all moral judgement in favour of doing whatever the government tells us? 'Cause that's always gone so well...

I don't trust the pharmaceutical industry — Isaac


Bit hasty there? Distrusting diabetics die. — jorndoe

Do they. I though only diabetics who don't take their meds die. I didn't realise a mental sate was so deadly.

how could most of the vulnerable be already dead? — Janus

If the vulnerable constituted 3% of the population, of course. Is there something you're having trouble with in that equation?

You're ignoring the emergency status of the situation. — Janus

Emergencies don't change the risk profile, that's derived from the state of affairs as they are so includes any state of affairs that might justify the classification as an emergency.

In any case lifestyle choices are motivated by desires and aversions, pleasures and addictions; things which are of ongoing significance to one's life. Getting vaccinated, given that the vaccines are more than safe enough, is nothing more than a minor inconvenience. — Janus

Not in your lifestyle, no. But other people (here's the shocker) have different opinions on the matter. For other people, it is a massive inconvenience. For other people it's a huge change to their lifestyle. Are we getting into judging whether certain lifestyles allow one to risk harm more than others now? Do you really want to go there?

the habit of holding the best interests of your community uppermost in your mind. — Janus

Which part of...

I don't agree that giving vaccines to healthy people who have little chance of contracting the severe disease is a good use of limited resources. — Isaac

...fails to hold the best interests of my community uppermost?

You disagree with my assessment of the situation. It's just unnecessarily antagonistic to assume I'm lying and then start casting aspersions about my motives.

The talk about "a normal acceptable threshold of risk" is a red herring: you are more likely, however minimally, to infect another person, or become critically infected, and need ICU treatment and deny someone else that treatment or other emergency treatment if you don't get vaccinated. — Janus

No, that's exactly the subject of the 'threshold of risk'. We are never required to take every effort, no matter how minimal an effect it has on the reduction of risk. Were that the case you'd not be allowed to drive.

Would you be prepared to sign a waiver to the effect that you will refuse medical treatment if you catch covid even if your condition becomes critical? That would be at least a step towards common decency. — Janus

Yes. Would you be prepared to sign a similar waiver for every Big Mac, every extra glass of wine, every day you don't bother going to the gym, every argument, every cigarette, every speed limit infraction, every skiing holiday, every ladder you don't have footed, every heavy item you don't lift with bended knees...

while the doctor calmly says "You are not in pain, because you are not exhibiting the correct neural signals to be in pain".

Who is to have authority here, in our new language game? — Banno

I'm not referring though to the third-person's assessment. I'm referring to our own. We (in our modelling relationship) make a decision about whether to follow the pathway of responses which include the use of the expression "I'm in pain". We could later (milliseconds later, even) decide that was the wrong pathway to follow when we have updated physiological signals.

The doctor, of course, could predict this change of model if he had access to the external cause of those signals, but that's not the same as giving him authority over the 'correct' response. Being able to predict it isn't the same as being able to proscribe it.

July 22, 2021 -- Clinical trials of mRNA vaccines have consistently demonstrated high effectiveness against COVID-19, but now a large, real-world study confirms that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are more than 95% effective in preventing confirmed infection.


Emphasis mine, to help your reading comprehension. — Xtrix

Limitations:Predominantly male population; lack of data on disease severity, mortality, and effectiveness by SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern; and short-term follow-up.

Emphasis mine, to help your reading comprehension.

It's a complex matter involving the degree to which the vaccines effect viral populations in the nasal mucosa, the extent to which such effects wear off, how this rate differentially affects the mucosal population relative to the vascular population, the extent to which symptoms exacerbate viral shedding, the extent to which behavioural changes affect opportunities for transmission, the effect of missing the very severe cohort (usually hospitalised and so removed from real-world transmissability studies)...

Basically, not anywhere near your naive attempt at a condescension.

I wonder if this means anti-vaxxers and their enablers will now stop saying the vaccinated and unvaccinated both spread the virus equally? — Xtrix

Here's an article by a practising physician...

Rapid and efficient memory-type immune responses occur reliably in virtually all unvaccinated individuals who are exposed to SARS-CoV-2. The effectiveness of further boosting the immune response through vaccination is therefore highly doubtful. Vaccination may instead aggravate disease through antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). — Professsor Sucharit Bhakdi MD, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology and Immunology

I wonder if that means pro-vaxxers will stop saying the vaccines are safe and effective...oh no wait, it won't...because it's just the opinion of one fucking physician and no one in their right mind would change their entire belief system on that basis...

Vaccinated people can transmit the virus, when they're infected. Those are called breakthrough cases. Whether those who are vaccinated and get infected spread the virus as readily as those who are infected and unvaccinated is undetermined at this time. But that entirely misses the issue, because breakthrough cases are rare compared to cases in the unvaccinated — Xtrix

The number of COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections reported to CDC are an undercount of all SARS-CoV-2 infections among fully vaccinated persons, especially of asymptomatic or mild infections. — CDC

@frank is right. If you continue to spread this idea that vaccines generally make you unable to spread the virus (apart from a few 'rare' breakthrough cases) you'll worsen the problem. Recorded breakthrough cases are rare but that is a function of the recording system (people need to actually bother getting tested which is unlikely in asymptomatic cases) We have no idea what the viral load is in people who have been vaccinated longer than four month, but we do know that it will be significantly higher than that of a person vaccinated yesterday (in the case of exposure to the virus). We also have no idea of the effect of either on the viral population in the nasal mucosa which is the main site for transmission. It is dangerous to spread the myth that vaccines reduce transmission in all but a few 'rare' cases.

Predictably, you’ll find a way to ignore all this. I post it for others’ benefit, however, not yours.

What if they do materialise? — Luke

Then we'll have been 'right' to assume such.

How does a sensation differ from an interocepted physiological state? — Luke

A sensation is a single category, the interocepted physiological state signals are manifold and form a non-exclusive set.

And if it does have the intended effect on those states, then we're right to reach for it. — Luke

Yes. Although, we could later revise that in the light of other goals, we have more than one objective that these outputs form part of the subsequent model for.

It sounds like there are also appropriate times that 'I'm in pain' gets used. — Luke

Yes. I think that's undeniable, the expression wouldn't exist otherwise.

What I'm saying is not that we can't treat "I'm in pain" as a simple functional expression, and therefore not amenable to being right or wrong, we can. — Isaac


Then it's not about the use of the word "pain", as you've been claiming. — Luke

Not sure what you're getting at here...

Also, what counts as "right" and "wrong" here? Because it sounds very much as though what is counted as 'right' is if there follows a sensation (or an interocepted physiological signal) of pain. — Luke

No because a sensation of pain is not the same as an interocepted physiological signal. There is no physiological signal for 'pain' there's only a non-exclusive set of signals, some portion of which get modelled in such as way as to lead to a tendency to use the word 'pain'. Much like Wittgenstein's 'props' when he talks about using the name 'Moses'.

You said that if we hit our thumb with a hammer, then we expect a painful sensation to follow but we may find that it does not follow. I would not call that "deciding" whether to be in pain or not. Wittgenstein is only talking about those cases where the pain does follow and we find that we are in pain. — Luke

Again 'pain' does not 'follow', it's not a physiological state, it's a modelling relationship and we make decisions about those.

my supposition is that he would find its representationalism problematic. — Joshs

He may have done if he overstated the degree to which it's representationalist. I think we've talked about this before. I get what you're saying about representationalist approaches, I just don't agree with you that active inference need necessarily be interpreted that way. But the extent to which active inference and enactivism differ is way out side the scope of this thread (which is already a little off topic), lets not make matters worse.

This difference i reading has to do with what to make of rules, grammar, concepts , criteria. Do they have any existence outside of actual, contextual situations? This question would seem to apply equally to terms like model and representation as they are utilized in free energy approaches. — Joshs

Yes, I think 'existence' here causes unnecessary confusion, rather we should ask about the consequences of our decision. If I say "sensations don't exist" (as I have been wont to do), what is it that I intend such a declaration to do? I'm not interested in whether it's got the 'right' label, because there's no external measure of that anyway - we can say these rules 'exist' or we can say they don't, what matters is the consequence of that exercise. What does it do if we say they exist or not? This is a question which doesn't have a single answer, it depends on what the person is trying to do by asking the question (or challenging the proposition) in the first place. I sometimes respond to these types of posts (bearing this last matter in mind) because I suspect reification where the effect of such is to undermine progress in understanding of pain function. That riles me (only a little) so I resist. Were I to suspect that the object of insisting the sensation of pain exists were merely to allow for a convenient façon de parler, then I'd be less inclined to care, but then who's seriously concerned that the result of this investigation might be to ban the use of the word 'pain'?