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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, does this mean contemporary US conservatives are stupid?

Yes.

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

Wait - you think taxation is capitalist? — StreetlightX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistically, perhaps. — magritte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you mean by this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's very different and very new technology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If the gamble succeeds, great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AG BARR AUTHORIZES DOJ TO LOOK INTO VOTING IRREGULARITIES

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

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

Chip Roy Calls for Recount, Audit, and Full Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this case, the paper literally concludes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As of 3 minutes ago CNN reports:

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

So, they seem unaware if it's true.

As I said before I don't think that's exactly true since Trumpism is gonna stick around to terrorize us all, but if there's any time to dump Trump it would be immediately after an election where you have about 2 years to hope people forget about it. — Mr Bee

Yes, we're in agreement. One reason there's not yet a SCOTUS push is simply it's not clear yet what ruling in what state is required to hand Trump the election; where are the hanging chads of 2020 so to speak. If such a thing becomes clear, I would predict ranks closing around Trump and repeating whatever this "great scandal" is 24/7 for the reasons you state.

I kind of wonder if the GOP leadership would get behind jailing Trump if he gets convicted after leaving office. You know, just to ensure he doesn't continue to bash the party that abandoned him through Trump TV or run again in 2024. With the exception of pathetic asskissers like Graham, I bet alot of them personally despise him anyways. — Mr Bee

I doubt they personally despise him, he makes them rich. I think they doubted Trumpism could work, but the fact that it does brings them significant pleasure. They now have a base completely loyal, completely unquestioning, completely impervious to criticism from the "liberal media", and who can be counted on to shout one thing one day and the exact opposite thing the next -- indeed, even hour to hour, minute to minute.

So far, I only see republican's criticise Trump whom Trump threw under the bus and humiliated, so understandable but potentially pre-mature. They have nothing to lose anyway, so better take this one brief moment to once again shine in the sun and breath the fresh air before returning to their GOP dungeon once again.

I.e. despite the results showing that trying to win over GOP voters is a complete failure, these fucking morons reckon the way to go is to push even harder in this direction. — StreetlightX

It's like competing against coca-cola with something "almost like coke" that leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth and genuinely makes you feel ill afterwards, but it's slightly better for your health (as in not quite as bad) and the company has slightly better corporate social responsibility lingo than does coca-cola the company. Then, after failing to convert coca-cola drinkers and dominate market share, conclude the problem is that the logo isn't quite a shitty enough imitation, within the trademark limits, as the real coca-cola logo.

But with regards to your point about the SCOTUS, it looks like it's becoming increasingly unlikely since the GOP looks set to drop Trump like a rock so they may not think it worth it to keep him. — Mr Bee

I agree that this seems like the case. But we've seen the GOP posture to drop Trump before and then suddenly the ranks close and any remaining dissenters are sidelined.

So we could see a turn around on this due to leverage Trump has, or it's simply the right pretext hasn't been found yet. When it is found the base will rally around it and the GOP will go along for the reason you state.

It almost feels like the media and the states counting the votes are intentionally withholding their results because they know that if they were the ones who called the race then they will be the target of Trump and his violent supporters. — Mr Bee

This definitely could be a factor, but there could also be genuine voter fraud (probably mostly by Trump supporters operating under any number of available delusions) as well as old people with early phase Alzheimer's and literally forgot they mailed in a ballot and woke up on election day and said to themselves "oh, an election, better go vote". Or people just generally going crazy in 2020 and doing doing crazy stuff.

Cross checking and verifying double votes has to be crazy labour intensive.

And of course, saying they've found double ballets would trigger pandemonium, so if I was them I'd want to get rid of them as silently as possible.

Likewise, they could have people who just literally can't keep count and the numbers just don't add up and they need to redo things.

You haven't followed the mail-in vote saga have you? Trump encouraged his supporters to vote in person on election day, insinuating that he would declare mail-in votes as invalid. Biden supporters with respect for COVID distancing practices were more inclined toward mailing in. The result is a huge disproportion of Biden votes in mailed in votes, now being counted, especially evident in Pennsylvania. — Metaphysician Undercover

Although there's always the possibility for a late surprise, most election analysts are pretty good at forecasting votes from certain demographics based on the remaining vote. Alot of the remaining vote is from urban areas and are mail-in. Thus far in this election alone, they've been heavily democratic, — Mr Bee

All I am pointing out is "there's always the possibility for a late surprise". The theory that late counting heavily favours Biden makes sense for the reasons pointed out, and also is retrospectively true in the large catch-ups we're already seen. I am simply pointing out that we cannot therefore conclude this effect will put Biden over the line in places like Pennsylvanian or Goergia nor that it is true for all the late vote counting, such as Nevada. Late counting may favour Biden but there maybe some factor that makes late-late-late counting suddenly favour Trump; if that happens, every forecaster for Biden will simply say "oh, well, we didn't know about this factor, but it makes sense because x, y, z things peculiar to these states and counties and counting protocols and logistics, put a bunch of Trump votes at the very end". For instance, there could be a tranche of a bunch of oversees military votes that favour Trump right at the very end; if this happens, forecasters will just say "yep, makes sense". If that doesn't happen and Biden wins all the close counts with the mail in, we'll also say "yep, makes sense".

We simply don't have enough information about the current situation to say Biden will win with near certainty. But I think you both agree with that. I think we all agree it is close.

The situation is similar to concluding it will rain the next minute because it's raining now; probably true, but the longer the time span we consider the less this reasoning holds as each minute there is some probability it stops raining and this probability accumulates over time. Maybe votes have been raining for Biden recently, but the rain suddenly stops and we all say "yeah, that happens too".

But, as I have said, the numbers look good for Biden right now. I'm not arguing there's some counter-intuitive thing happening that makes Trump the favourite. I'd rather be in Biden's position in terms of the numbers, but I'd rather be in Trump's position in terms of the Supreme court, which I believe could hand the election to Trump if the GOP machinery got in full swing to make that happen. However, the GOP may not want to play the supreme court hand, since as @Baphomet eloquently puts it:

A barely won Biden win with the Dems otherwise in a nosedive and losing on every other front. Yet the GOP still has them there as the foil. — Baphomet

Which I have also concluded in my analysis is the best situation for the GOP. Best let Dem's try fix the mess of the pandemic with only band-aid solutions the GOP can ideologically rail against, while their base ups the cult-crazy levels, all while pointing to the the inevitable failure due to GOP undermining any effective policy and ensuring that failure definitely happens (and weak democrats pointing to crumbs the GOP tosses them as some sort of victory while refusing any real conflict with the GOP because their donors, who are the same people, rather peace and civility). Of course, I'm fairly certain Trump does have leverage against his frenemies, perhaps enough for the GOP spin machine to dig up / invent the needed pretexts and get some SCOTUS action underway. Time will tell. At the moment, the GOP seems to be hedging its bets and distancing with Trump, but that could change overnight if the right threats are delivered to the right people, and if those threats are credible enough. We have yet to see the last of Trump.

The beginning of "oh shit" for Democrats. It will be very close.

One interesting detail is that Libertarians in Nevada got 10 000 votes about, and the constitution party 2000 votes, and "others" got 10 000 votes (which I hope is Kanye). Biden is currently up by about 8000 votes. So it would be of personal pleasure to me, and I think a lot of us, if Biden wins and this becomes a wedge in the Republican-libertarian-Kanye trinity.

I think this really depends on what sort of ballots still need to be counted. If it's all absentee ballots then they are all in play still, with pretty good chances for Biden due to the blue shift. — Benkei

Yes, I agree that there could be a large bias towards Biden, and lot's of simple models can be made showing Biden likely will win.

But the problem with those simple models is that it's too easy to miss something in which case, it's "oh, yeah, well didn't think about that" or "well, didn't think these votes would lean Trump".

The whole point of the election is we don't know how people will vote, and polls get more and more unreliable the more fine grained we look at things (i.e. individual counties can surprise, particular batches of mail in votes can surprise; maybe Biden voters voted very early but there was a surge of Trump mail in voters later to avoid Corona and/or they're older and it's convenient, and the mail-ins are counted sequentially -- even if the right wing spin machine is downplaying corona and claiming mail in votes are fraudulent, such cognitive dissidence may not be a problem; on top of polls being simply generally unreliable these days since land-lines are no longer a thing, and likely voters are much more erratic these days also). That votes lean one way during any range does not establish they will continue to lean that way for the next range. It's intuitively pleasing that if someone is "catching up" they will continue to close the gap and either make it or not make it over the line, but whatever is fueling the catch-up can dissipate at any point (and the point of the election is we don't have the data to make a solid prediction without the election actually happening).

In other words, a story can be told Biden is a heavy favourite at this point, but it's easy to come up with a counter story that also fits our current data, or then to just say "maybe we'll be surprised by these particular voters / these particular vote counting machines". Likewise, the data upon which such stories are based can simply be wrong; for instance: maybe a large amount of votes seem to be left to count from a heavily Biden leaning county, but it then turns out that was just some clerical mixup and the votes are almost all already counted or then there's some left but from a Trump leaning county.

My basic point though, is that it's not in a situation where Biden needs 1 more state to win and there are 6 states with 50% probability of going either way, which is what a first impression of some media may lead one to conclude. The situation is closer to being down to 1 state that will be close, than it is to 6 tossups in which Biden needs only 1 victory.

As an additional note Wisconsin is within 1%, with is conventionally within "recount range". Of course, a bunch of the states mentioned above where Trump is leading is within 1% to, but there maybe some far flung rational for recounting Wisconsin and eliminating some votes or somehow; just not applicable to the other states, maybe for the simple reason that the Democrats don't file a similar claim (as they know the SCOTUS would rule against them even if they use the same logic to bring victory for Trump). So, this is what a SCOTUS determined election could look like.

However, the Republican establishment may want Trump to lose, and so not pull the needed strings or then signal to the SCOTUS that they should actually use common sense this time.

Biden victory is not necessarily good for Democrats, as the pandemic situation essentially presents a no-win situation. Republican politicians and backers may very well be frothing at the mouth at the prospect of Biden needing to "curb civil liberties" instead of Trump being forced to do something when the medical system really is in state of collapse. Likewise, much better a Democrat push vaccines etc. than a Republican administration.

One thing keeping the lid on pure insanity on the Right is simply that Trump is in charge at the moment and it's impossible to blame absolutely everything on the Democrats and it's impossible for Trump to go too far in insane discourse because he has a power to act on what he says (it's crazy and contradictory, but it could be far worse). A Biden victory will bring out a birther type phenomenon multiplied by a thousand.

For progressives, a Biden victory will consolidate the right and move it further to the right, during which time Biden does nothing constructive and the state of disaster and dissatisfaction in 4 years will likely bring a much farther right wing president to power.

Whereas Trump victory will force Republicans to implement some of the basic left wing policies the pandemic situation will force, and the status quo democrats will simply no longer be relevant (and many simply too old), moving discourse to the left.

If you don't like American Empire, a Trump victory will likely continue the radical downward spiral of international credibility upon which most of the American empire is actually based, whereas a Biden victory will likely lead to an attempt to rehabilitate Imperial control where it is on the wane leading to wars. Paradoxically, Trump is so unstable that the US establishment cannot reach consensus around a new war since it's impossible to predict what Trump would do (whereas, Lybia and Syria were new wars the US establishment could consolidate around and convince allies, under Obama even if Obama was himself skeptical about them).

Likewise, as has been noted, Trump decredibilizes right wing ideology globally. He makes it very clear what viewing greed as good thing leads to, and also says all the quiet parts out loud.

As a European, it makes me sad to say it, but a Biden victory will be immediately followed by European leaders bending the knee (with a sexual connotation if you like), whereas a Trump victory will likely consolidate an US independent European policy project.

Just so people know, Trump is currently leading in (according to CNN numbers):

- Georgia: by 0.5% with estimated 95% counted, 16 electoral votes
- North Carolina: by 0.5% estimated 95% counted, 15 electoral votes
- Pennsylvania: by 2.6% estimated 86% counted, 20 electoral votes
- Alaska: by 30% with estimated 47% counted, 3 electoral votes

These do not look probable to change, in terms of random deviations in a non-biased model, with the remaining votes in question (though it is possible).

Added to the 213 electoral votes he has, these states would put him at 267.

In Nevada Biden is leading by 0.4% with estimated 89% counted. So if this flipped in the next 11% (which is more probable due to random deviations than the above) then Trump would win at 273 electoral votes.

There's a theory that all late counting favours Biden, so if that's true then Biden has a significant advantage; however, in some places Trump has been gaining late on Biden, so it's clearly not a certain theory, and may only be applicable in a general sense and does not happen to apply to whatever votes are actually remaining (a lot of factors affect when votes get counted and reported, so factors favouring Trump may happen to dominate now even if factors favouring Biden dominated the last X %).

So, it's definitely extremely close. If anyone was wondering, especially non-Americans here, if Biden standing at 253 right now was so close as to be "almost a sure thing", it is not.

I would intuit that Biden does have the advantage based purely on the current numbers, but I am still predicting a Trump win due to the supreme court advantage. Bush vs Gore was equally ridiculous, bad faith, anti-democratic, with lot's of outrage about it, as a SCOTUS determined election this time would be, didn't stop them then and there's even more crazy people on the SCOTUS now. Although I agree the reasoning pretext that would be used doesn't seem clear right now, the Republicans have a habit of inventing preposterous pretexts overnight and ramming them through (cause the democrats are week cowards and there's no actual credible threat that Republicans would actually deal with the precedent they lay down against themselves).

There is no way to enforce democracy by power politics. — Echarmion

Democracy is brought to you by revolutionary wars, or then the threat of revolutionary war.

Democracy can only be maintained by a pure power politics of the majority committed to maintain democracy as something worthwhile and worth fighting for, and willing to pay a real cost: for instance, threaten the system with revolutionary war when obviously anti-democratic and nominally illegal things emerge such as gerrymandering and followup with threatening to overthrow the judiciary if it obviously participates in maintaining such crimes by absurdly (and obviously corruptly) declaring gerrymandering a political issue that can only be resolved through voting in gerrymandered elections.

Your idea that when a minority criminal cabal breaks laws, abuses established customs, entrenches anti-democratic policies by passing anti-democratic laws or appointing anti-democratic judges, and does whatever it takes to gain and maintain power, that the only thing that can and should be done about it is "be nice", has no basis in reason nor history. It is the wishful thinking of cowards.

This is why the left sucks monkey balls at playing the game. — Benkei

You beat me to it.

Just listened to Trump's speech, where he claims he's "frankly, already won" and going to the supreme court to stop counting ballet's "found at 4 o'clock in the morning".

With the supreme court solidly "crazy" I predict Trump will come out on top after all this. It will of course trigger complete chaos.

As a European, Trump is likely the best result (for us). It's better to have a incompetent clown in charge of the mafia (which the US government should be classified as, at this stage) than a seasoned professional, even if an older model. Like, if you could vote for your local Mafia boss, I think Trump has a lot of favourable characteristics for this position.

I also predict actual mathematical analysis of "voting machine" results and other disenfranchising tactics results will show highly likely fraud in favour of Republicans, as in 2016. Somehow the "liberal establishment", so convinced the levels of corruption are totally fine and normal (as they benefit from it too), falls for the Republican trick of first accusing the Democrats of cheating, then Democrats (feeling confidence of the polls) fall over themselves to claim the election process is totally fair and no cheating or fraud is happening (which is largely true about isolated individual voter fraud the Republicans cry fowl about) and is not a problem and the result must be respected with a "good sportsmen" attitude, and then Republicans use every single trick they can logistically accomplish, all illegal just with varying degrees of the public being aware of such tricks and accustomed to such tactics as "of course the Republicans can do it", and then Republicans "declare victory" and that "the vote must be respected, just like the Democrats have been saying".

The only solution is to purge the Democrat leadership of politicians that "just want a little bit of the corruption" and who view a Trump victory better than someone arguably not corrupt like them. So maybe a Trump victory would lead to that, but I think simply the collapse of civil society in the US is likely to happen before that.

Of course, Trump victory comes at the risk of literal nuclear war, but life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.

I feel as though the most defining victim of this infamous pandemic, aside from its egregious death toll, has been the socioeconomic mobility developing economies were characterized by prior to it emerging. Incomes have been either erased or diminished, and will not be recouped in entirety for several agrarian and industrial sectors around the world for at least 5 to 6 years. — Aryamoy Mitra

This was discussed a few months back in the context of "it's ethical to sacrifice people in rich countries by letting the pandemic run rampant, because the economic costs of lockdowns and social distancing will kill more people in poorer countries."

I completely agree that far more people in poorer countries will suffer and die due to the economic consequences of the pandemic than the disease itself globally, but it's a false dichotomy.

These are not victims of the pandemic, but of a global economic system that kept them poor before and will do little to nothing to help them now.

The solution to wanting to help poor people in poor countries is doing things that effectively help poor people in poor countries, pandemic or not; and, more importantly than that, stop doing things that keep them poor and under corrupt management, such as the full spectrum of neoliberal "market access" policies, debt peonage, as well as simply overthrowing or assassinating any leader that might nationalize resources or repudiate debts accumulated under previous corrupt client regimes put in place and propped up by external money, external intelligence information, external cloak and dagger operations, and external military training of domestic terrorist organizations (aka, the military and police, trained by western military and intelligence to carry out genocides of people with the "wrong political ideas", throw people off planes into the ocean and the like).

I'm not sure if you are or would make such an argument (economy over protecting people from Covid, because poor people suffer from a bad economy), but I feel it useful to paraphrase what has been already discussed on this particular topic, and of course I welcome your thoughts on the above or then continued analysis of simply the socio-economic consequences as such (given that we do live in a neoliberal world policy framework that will do little to help poor people).

This is just like 100% wrong. — frank

Lot of that going around. Do they have a vaccine for it?? — Hippyhead

These comments are so low quality and from people of such low analytical abilities -- and I would wager worth as human beings as well -- that they do not merit my attention; a general theme of the forum as of late.

However, for fun, and when I have the time of course, I'll post in my next comment a few jewels of Covid denialism these lowly-esteemed contributors made in the past, so further contrast the irony that they are now on the side of "science".

However, if others of better faith, sharper whit, more honorable character, to paraphrase my argument: it's simply fact now that vaccine technology did not stop Covid before major damage, and the idea pandemics can simply be ignored in a calculus of public health investments is absurd; given the disruption to society that pandemics engender they should be weighted not only in deaths but the cost of social disruption particular to them; already the pandemic has cost trillions; trillions that could have been invested before the pandemic in things that would actually prevent, stop, or significantly reduce the severity of said pandemic. Other policies could have prevented the pandemic or limited it's severity: vector control, outbreak protocols and general public health.

This does not say that vaccines would have no place in an optimum public health strategy, only that investments in vector control, outbreak protocols and public health as a primary defense against infectious disease would, by definition, displace funds for vaccines, but more significantly, reduce the chances and severity of not only pandemics but existing endemic infectious diseases, thus affecting the cost-effectiveness calculation for any particular vaccine (i.e. if a primary investment already deals with a problem, there is less reason to invest in other solutions to the same problem).

Also notable, I seem to be in very close agreement with on this issue, who brings up some good points I also agree with, and I am glad to see we share common ground on the foundational issues of public health and only disagree on some details as it turns out; the forum never ceases to surprise.

You think those billions now poured into various vaccine programs by major countries won't have an effect? — ssu

Maybe, but there is currently no evidence that they will. In my version of science I believe things when there is evidence to believe it. The experimental design of the current covid related vaccine trials, do not seek to answer the question of whether the pandemic will be significantly curtailed in one way or another, and the scientists running these trials do not make such a claim.

For instance, if the virus simply evolves to defeat the vaccine (how evolution works) the scientist will simply point out that their experimental design did not seek to provide any insight on this issue.

The reason I mention evolution is that in an exponentially expanding new virus there are many evolutionary paths available and with 7 billion people there are many hosts available in which those evolutionary events can take place. There are already now a diversity of strains of the virus, a vaccine developed against a certain strain may already not be effective against strains that already exist, which will of course then come to dominate once the conditions are such that they have an advantage. The virus has simple maths on its side. The long amount of time it usually takes to make an effective vaccine, for good reasons, means simple math is not on its side.

But my main point seems to be lost on you, which is that obviously vaccine technology cannot possibly be relied on to intervene to prevent major harms from infectious disease ... because those major harms have already occurred in the case of Covid, for basically the reasons you state.

Vaccine technology is simply not a reliable basis for protecting public health from infectious disease generally speaking and the disastrous consequences of a pandemic. You may say "But of course! Vaccines take time and aren't meant to intervene to strop a pandemic before there is already major health harms and economic disruptions! dum dum", but, of course, my response is simply to repeat, that for exactly that reason, "Vaccine technology is simply not a reliable basis for protecting public health from infectious disease generally speaking and the disastrous consequences of a pandemic". There do exist other policies that can have a much bigger consequence.

Other policy measures do not have this problem, and in the case of public health in terms of "healthiness", actually pay for itself. Therefore, focus should be first investing in policies that both intervene at all stages of a pandemic such as we are experiencing and moreover pay for themselves. Ultimately, relying on vaccine technology to control infectious disease was lazy thinking by the medical community. Does that make them idiots? I'm sure you are already confident my answer is yes, yes it does make them idiots. However, it was not a consensus; many experts predicted exactly this scenario and pointed out more effective investment strategies to protect global health against the inevitable "high impact" event we are seeing.

Also the speed that we will get a vaccine will likely be impressive. — ssu

There isn't really a basis for this belief. No vaccine trial, vis-a-vis covid, is designed to prove actual effectiveness at changing the course of the pandemic. Different experimental design would be needed for that and very likely different targets of efficacy.

Generally, there is healthy skepticism in the evolutionary biologist community whether a vaccine that cannot irradiate the disease is a good investment, as the obvious prediction based on science is the disease will simply evolve to defeat the vaccine. Vaccines of this kind also have the potential to simply shift harm profiles around without reducing total harm, which is difficult to capture in trials which may easily a confuse looking at a shift at one part of the harm profile and conclude a general reduction of harm can be inferred when there is no basis for such a conclusion (vaccines that reduce disease severity for most people, may increase transmission while significantly increasing the severity for a sub population; for instance, that a sub population has severe over-reaction of the immune system). So, we will find out, but there is no reason to have higher confidence than a skilled gambler down on his luck on this particular issue.

However, considering the harm the pandemic has already had on the global community, we can already conclude that vaccine technology does not protect public health from negative infectious disease outcomes, and investments in vector control, better outbreak protocols, treatment capacity, but most importantly simply public health in a general sense (preventing preventable diabetes, obesity, lung harm from bad air etc.) are more effective investments. In particular, investments in public health in the sense of healthy people is not even a cost but pays for itself many times over.

And yet, public health policy of the last decades has been based on under-investing in healthy foods, healthy city design, healthy habits, and healthy air -- which turns out to benefit fossil and food corporations -- and over-investing in medical technologies that "fix problems post-fact" -- which turns out to benefit pharmaceutical and other medical corporations. Certainly only coincidence and these policy failings will be swiftly corrected going forward.

When you say the class system is not sustainable - do you mean morally, politically, economically? — Judaka

In this context I mean ecological sustainability.

When we look at Amazon, we see a company utterly destroying local businesses that cannot compete and this has been happening since the industrial revolution. If mass production could be competed with by "local living" then why has this happened and what's going to happen differently? — Judaka

The usual answer is that the industrial revolution depended on the enclosure movement of kicking peasants off the land. Bourgeois economic theory both condemns Feudal definitions of ownership (serfs and estates etc.) but takes for granted the good Lords had a right to kick everyone off the land.

Likewise, bourgeois economic theory takes for granted that "urban culture" is superior to "rural culture" and the movement to the cities is just a natural cultural evolution to a better place. However, if we look closely, most people that have emigrated to cities over in the industrial revolution went to slums and horrifying working conditions and were clearly better off as peasants.

A peasant is not compatible with the capitalist mode of production, as peasants can produce food for themselves by gardening, build their own houses, make their own chairs and baskets etc. (of course, by "rural living" here I do not mean agribusiness that turns the land into a substrate for maximum commodity production, such "farms" and the illegal immigrants that work on them is not an example of peasant life and organization, of course with many terms and conditions on the "Lords" land, that existed in feudal times).

Therefore, we come to the question of efficiency for what? Efficient at living? or efficient at producing as many commodities as possible? Way more commodities than anyone needs.

In other words, in a narrow perspective, large industrial production seems efficient as it has massive throughput, but in a wider perspective it is inefficient in terms sustainable use of raw materials as well as inefficient in terms of producing "what people need" (rather than simply "producing as much as possible"; the dreaded overproduction).

We have seen since the industrial revolution how overproduction is absorbed: war, planned obsolescence, growing the population (at first a happy side-affect of medicine, and later by a policy of immigration), manipulative marketing and debt.

Bourgeois economics assumes people need to consume commodities all the time, that this is a natural thing to happen, but if we look closely at peasants of the past (as well as people who happen or choose to be in similar circumstances today - of course they don't call themselves peasants, but "homesteaders") such peasant economics naturally invites capital investment. Rural dwellers buy tools to do things for themselves; it's simply cheaper and quicker to learn basic maintenance and fabrication skills than hire someone for every task. Any food grown locally is far cheaper than food that needs to be picked, stored, transported (to multiple locations); any food waste is composted (without the re-centralization transport problem) simply because that's the easiest thing to do and the benefits are obvious. The idea of regular consumption has obvious immediate negatives since shops are not just down the road, and if one needs to (pay) to go someone regularly to get stuff, the question naturally arises whether there's some investment that can replace this commodity (i.e. planting some apple trees and making one's own apple juice).

Why this doesn't happen (in the West) is not an economic question, but the "who owns the land" question. In the West today if we talk about "gardening" and "fishing" the assumption is that we're talking about wealthy people that garden and fish for fun, not to save money; likewise, if we talk about "skiing" we assume we're talking about wealthy people skiing for fun, not a convenient rural transport winter technology. So, the question arises that if the wealthy are constantly playing at being peasants for fun, shouldn't we just organize society so that everyone can do these things both to have fun and save money: that we make our rural landscapes like the idyllic beautiful places where the rich go for vacation, just that people happen to also live there?

So, much more can be said why such a "return to the land" is more efficient in terms of resource allocation: that it's easy to garden in bio-diversity based way that's good for nature whereas it's hard to produce commodities with the same methods ("things" aren't produced in sufficient quantities at the same place to warrant the capital investments in sorting, packaging, storing and transport technology; such food is only fit to be picked and eaten, or stored in jars; totally useless to the capitalist system), that with more people living in such a way a network effect of trade occurs making it even more efficient (local artisan production displaces imported commodities), that lowering transport of commodities and commuting means both lowering the cost of living but also lowering the cost of transport infrastructure (which can still there, but with radically less throughput, it is much less costly and less environmentally damaging), and new means of production (3D printing, CNC machining etc.) constantly reduce the scale in which precision manufacturing is economically possible (further reducing the need of importing commodities), and also that communication technology would still allow lot's of existing jobs today to be done at-distance and further increase foreign exchange of the community.

The problem is of course land ownership. Since the industrial revolution to now, land consolidation to remove communities living on the land to turn land from living spaces to substrate for commodity production, has been a violent affair (first through enclosures, second through arranging to financially ruin small farm and other peasant-like people, and third through letting natural disasters, like drought, and economic disasters do the dirty business without anyone needing to pay attention, as well as constantly flooding rural places with subsidized commodities, whether as the go-to market entry tactic or as well as state subsidy of capitalism in general, to ruin the local economies and increase commodity reliance), we don't see this much in the West anymore, as the process is largely complete.

Technologically speaking, it's easy to go out into the country-side, look at agribusiness desserts and draw up a technical plan to make small houses, forest gardens and permaculture, water management systems or rain capture and contouring, renewable energy systems, etc. Worse, it's easy to go to the suburbs and conclude that the same resources could support much more people and vibrant communities.

Why this doesn't happen is buying this land is expensive and the people who's life would improve don't have that kind of money. Indeed, not only do they not have that kind of money, but they are in debt and the kind of idyllic living described above assumes one does not need to maximize commodity production to keep up with debt repayments (that everyone one does in this sort of decentralized community living arrangements is not just to save money, but for fun, for community team building, as exercise of the body and mind; it saves money too, but does not maximize the kind of commodity production that is needed to payoff debts; only wage labour provides those circumstances for most people, and barely so as it may still take decades of full tilt, at the the psychological limits of commodity production to maybe payoff a few debts for most people).

Of course, society could simply cancel all debts, take the land from agribusiness and setup homesteaders with the tools and materials to live in an obviously ecologically superior way that is good for everyone, and can still produce more food for the whole of society (forest gardens and other forms of permacutlure are more productive than mono-culture fields, even on agribusiness own terms of pound per acre, but the comparison almost can't even be made if water and fossil inputs and nutrients per acre as output is used, not to mention biodiversity and regional ecological resilience tree transpiration and roots provides is included in the analysis).

Society does not even need an excuse to take agribusiness land (could just say "we don't give a shit about investor complaints; other people can win the "battle of ideas" if they put in the effort, there's no metaphysical basis to put some ideas of limits for the winning") but if it wanted and excuse it could say "the promise that privately owned land by profit maximizing capital would preserve the land for everyone must now be a promise kept; we will analyse everyone's land, and anyone that did not accomplish this preservation of the value on the land of biodiversity and soil nutrients forfeits their land as part of a retroactive social contract based on the same precedence that our precious bankers retroactively pardon themselves for financial crimes now and again" or then just use imminent domain and pay the land-owners in a currency in the process of collapse (imminent domain laws do not preclude ecological necessity as a basis for land appropriation; maybe they will in the near future, but society could simply choose to not give a shit about that anyways).

This isn't happening anytime soon, in the West, but there are places in the world where people aren't currently trapped in commodity production maximizing infrastructure, often still own their land as a community, and so everything I describe above is simply an immediate improvement of their tool-set, quality of life, foreign exchange, and local environment that they still feel intuitively and obviously dependent on, and improving the means of this kind of peasant production is relatively easily advanced through cooperation between those communities and western hippies who have a bit of capital, a "proper" education required for systems analysis to be sure things are actually better and not worse, and a fevered dream (that's from the malaria though, also a solvable problem).

As climate change, resource depletion, moves in the "great game", disrupt our global industrial commodity throughput device, more and more places will essentially drop out of capitalism regardless of whether the propaganda people jealously guard tells them it's a good thing or not, and what I describe above will become the only game in town. Of course, people may choose to play the game of raiding other towns down the dusty road of entitlement instead; time will tell us who wins.