I believe you have accused me of bad faith in every exchange we've had, but for the life of me I don't know why. — Srap Tasmaner

Well it’s impossible to know, but I’d expect the same comments from someone wearing a smirk as they typed.

Dividing 5 by 60. — Srap Tasmaner

That isn’t an 8% increase in mortality. It’s just 8% of 60,000,000.

I meant, why do you have to choose whether to sympathize with those who lost loved ones to the virus and those who lost something -- loved ones, livelihood, way of life -- to the response? — Srap Tasmaner

This isn’t what I said. I’ve recognised at this point that you’re a sneak.

You might want to look at this critique of Ionaddis...or not. — Janus

You missed out the link I assume you were supposed to include.

An 8% increase in the world's mortality rate strikes me as significant. — Srap Tasmaner

Source? From what I’ve seen the UK’s mortality rate has been within the normal range.

Why should you choose? — Srap Tasmaner

Because it appears by not choosing you harm everyone for no benefit.

The current case fatality raise is just over 2%, so based on that if we just let 'er rip and everyone were to contract the virus, we could expect a death toll from covid alone of 160,000,000. Add to that deaths from the medical facilities being overrun and economic collapse and it looks like a pretty grim scenario. — Janus

Also, this is tendentious. Infection fatality rate much lower than case fatality rate. Infections and deaths inevitable and spread out.

I don't share your confidence in those sources you mention — Janus

I don’t share your confidence in yours.

or in your ability to form a rationally justified opinion that contradicts the experts — Janus

My opinions don’t contradict the experts, only some of them.

and reading your posts has convinced me that arguing further would be wasting my time and effort, — Janus

I suspect this is because your position is too difficult to argue when you’re unfamiliar with mine.

You seriously beleive that this hasn't been improving as more and more people have been vaccinated? — Janus

I can accept that it protects those vulnerable to virus for a while. I don’t accept that it’s of overall benefit for others to roll the dice on the potential side-effects.

You believe two experts against how many others? On what basis? Because you like what they say more? — Janus

Because I can think, what they say makes sense, and no one has yet been able to argue adequately against what they say.

If your opinions are only "partly formed" by listening to those, then what else contributes to forming them? — Janus

Articles that refer to pertinent facts or observations such as this one: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-the-nhs-was-not-overrun-by-covid-during-lockdown/amp

Can you give any good reason for thinking that it is likely to be wrong? — Janus

The last three pages of this thread I think contain adequate reasons for doubting the official narrative.

What do you think would happen if we let it rip and didn't bother with vaccination or lockdowns ? — Janus

Temporary hospital crises no worse than what we’ve had.

Have you accepted yet that you might be wrong, and that you are in a much less qualified position to judge the likely outcomes than the experts? — Janus

My opinions are formed partly from listening to some experts over others. John Ioannidis and Sunetra Gupta being two good examples.

If this battle is lost the whole world loses. — Janus

Have you accepted yet that you might be wrong?

A remarkable display of compassion; well done! — Janus

My compassion is for those who have lost their livelihoods, their lives or the lives of their children to authoritarian measures implemented and advocated for by people too stupid to have done otherwise.

and the worldwide total is approaching 5 million. — Srap Tasmaner

This isn’t particularly alarming when you consider that worldwide about 60,000,000 people die each year. This virus principally affects those who are elderly and in poor health, i.e. those who would constitute a significant portion of that number anyway.

MAGA-capped cretin — Olivier5

I don’t know if this reference was arbitrary or meaningful. If the latter, I’m not American and I nevertheless still doubt the official narrative.

from that it does not follow that soldiers should start arguing against the strategy, refusing to follow orders or deserting, because the battle will be lost if enough soldiers were to follow this course. — Janus

You don’t think a side has ever fought a battle that for the world would be better lost?

Because the majority do think that, rightly or wrongly, and if the current strategy of vaccination were to fail it would have disastrous consequences for everyone, including you. — Janus

In my view those disastrous consequences will be effected by mistaken people incapable of admitting fault; people who will never truly accept that they might be wrong.

For my part the double standard and facile rationalizations make it not even worth responding to any more. — Janus

You’re only characterising it that way. For me what it comes down to is this: your house is not built on rock; accept that you might be wrong and leave people alone.

those folks who lose contact with reality... who start to doubt the official narrative — Olivier5

Olivier “I tend to distrust collective wisdom too” 5.

Hospital admittance was and is real. — Benkei

It certainly is. Do lockdowns help in this regard? You can’t say. How many of those admissions are people with other health conditions who go on to test positive for Covid, or whose Covid diagnosis is incidental? Is there an answer to that?

because infections just kept rising exponentially — Benkei

It’s also worth pointing out that infection numbers are a product how much testing you do. An alarming figure can be created out of thousands of people who test positive but who aren’t actually ill.

You don't accept it because you believe what? — Benkei

At a glance the studies you’ve shared are models/guesswork.

Here are some actual observations:

An interview with Sunetra Gupta where she speaks about the virus behaving in the same fashion regardless of differing lockdown conditions: https://unherd.com/2020/05/oxford-doubles-down-sunetra-gupta-interview/

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

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

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

I don't think I argued for ending the pandemic but ending lock downs. — Benkei

Can you prove the efficacy of lockdowns? If lockdowns aren’t necessary what happens to your view regarding the vaccine?

Since the arguments against much of what you say have already been summarised above I’ll just add:

And these small risks, if a lot of people make the irrational choice, add up to significant risks for wider society. — Benkei

The histrionics surrounding and inspiring these measures have had their own consequences for peoples’ freedom, happiness, livelihoods and by extension their health. On this basis I don’t accept the choice not to participate in the parade is irrational.

Without that, we'd still be in lock down. So, if enough people are anti vaxxers... then you cannot normalise social rules because too many people will get sick. — Benkei

I also don’t accept that lockdowns are necessary; I believe we could have had normalised social rules (that included hand washing and taking care around the vulnerable) from the beginning without the consequences suspect characters like Neil Ferguson convinced so many of.

He dies once every 125,000 years.
He is hospitalised once every 3,086 years.
He is posed a still unquantified risk by the vaccine. By declining it he is “inconsiderate”.

exactly zero people, regardless of age and BMI, have died of a Covid vaccination. — Benkei

Not true. One example to show it: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-58330796.amp

And then there's the important other considerations like avoiding having to go to the hospital and take up healthcare resources others need — Benkei

From the same calculator and inputs the 25 year old’s chance of a Covid associated hospital admission within a 90 day period is 1 in 12,346.

If we make him an eternal 25 year old we can expect him to be hospitalised by Covid an average of once every 3,086 years.

Do you think he requires a vaccine?

https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation

According to this calculator the risk that the 25 year old catches and dies from Covid within a 90 day period is 1 in 500,000.

If we make him an eternal 25 year old we can expect him to catch and die from Covid an average of once every 125,000 years.

Do you think he requires a vaccine?

this stupefying situation — Xtrix

It certainly has been that.

Thanks. The second one is what I’d already used to get the risk estimate for my example. My guess is that many people will be inclined to massively overstate the risk compared to the estimate that calculator provides.

Verdict reached. You’ve been rebutted already and have expressed incredulity at the idea that your opposition simply disagree with you about the degree of risk involved in all this.

What has been argued is that the risks of the vaccine outweigh the risk of contracting the virus. And even if vaccinations have caused deaths or severe injuries then that still doesn't tell us how those risks compare to the risks of contracting the virus. — Benkei

Let’s take the example of a 25 year old male with a healthy BMI and no health conditions. Would you be willing to give your own estimate of the risk such a person has of catching and dying from Covid within a 90 day period?

I haven't said it's safe because doctors say so. I've said it's safe based on my understanding of the mechanism of mRNA. — Benkei

You said it was safe based on a claim some doctors had made. But on that basis I’m not willing to dismiss or downplay the accounts of injuries and deaths so easily.

It seems obvious to say that it doesn’t matter whether or not it decomposes quickly if the damage is done before it does so. According to my understanding this damage is done when a cell takes up the vaccine and begins producing the spike protein of the virus; the immune system, perceiving those cells now as threats, attacks them. This is why side-effects have been reported as being more severe in the young whose immune systems are stronger.

“I tend to distrust collective wisdom too — [except when I immerse myself in it so completely that I can no longer see beyond it].”

mRNA vaccines are, as I understood from an explanation from doctors in the Netherlands, inherently safer than previous vaccines because the injected substance quickly decomposes in the body. — Benkei

Does it decompose quickly in the body? Would that necessarily make it safer? Have you not essentially made an appeal to a scientific consensus here?

Then you may have just used that saying inappropriately.

You used the saying (I assume), “The road to hell [is paved with good intentions]” in reference to a gentler approach that you said could be perceived as domineering. Seems critical to me.

What you may deem a kind of gentle exposure to critical thought I may view as domineering. “The road to hell …”. I think forcing someone to do something for their own good is something people will, and even should, do in their lives. — I like sushi

You seem here to have criticised an approach for being potentially domineering before advocating for being as domineering as possible.

So the test itself is not representative of what we, humans, would call adequate measure of human intelligence or consciousness. — Caldwell

This appears to highlight a problem with claiming that two things are the same if they aren’t discernible: whether they’re discernible or not is subject to the type of examination you’re able to make; it doesn’t seem right to say that two things are the same simply because someone hasn’t under certain conditions been able to tell otherwise.

it seems logically possible for an AI to be indiscernible from a human — AJJ

This might be wrong then, since limitations in the AI’s programming would be unavoidable.

Turin didn't think a human could be fooled. — Gary M Washburn

This is interesting. I’m not sure either that a human would necessarily be fooled—it seems logically possible for an AI to be indiscernible from a human, but in reality a person could discern the two if they understood the limitations in the AI’s programming and exploited them to discover it.

It will reach a point where it's obvious to everyone that there's some kind of intelligence at work, even if it's artificial. — RogueAI

This is true, but an AI will always be an extension of the intelligences that programmed it; it won’t have its own mind.

Seatbelts don’t have side-effects.

You’re not making sense.

Yes, I wear a seatbelt.

The virus poses me no greater risk than driving my car does (I expect it’s even less). If I bought into the war analogy it would be easy to feel brave against such a meagre threat.

If you like I’ll at least consider that my characterisation of you is wrong if you do me the same favour.