what makes you think democracy has some sort of privileged access to reason? — T Clark

I have a soft spot for this idea, and the companion conception of science. The idea is that "the scientific method" is not responsible for the success of science, broadly speaking, but the fact that it is communal and self-correcting. Once you've institutionalized such practices, you can even overcome failures like the replication crisis. The faith is that democracy can support similar incremental progress towards a just society, despite its failures.

Thanks!

The whole “burden on the healthcare system” has so far been a canard. We’ve been hearing it from the beginning, but even when field hospitals were implemented to offset this, they had to stand down, most of them without treating a single covid patient. — NOS4A2

If you cherry-pick, you invite those who disagree with you to do the same. If you believe you are countering a widely accepted narrative, I'm sure the temptation is even stronger.

It should be an empirical question. I'll only say that I remember hearing daily reports on the radio not just about infections and deaths, but remaining ICU beds in area hospitals. Those numbers were usually single digits.

And then how much of such evidence is enough to accept something as fact beyond a reasonable doubt? — Yohan

You can accept that induction can't establish facts in the way we might have wanted, but stop somewhere short of "anything goes" or something. There's still a lot of ground between here and there.

The Gould quote is nice because "perverse" captures some standard of rationality, which can be comfortably expressed in terms of confidence or subjective probability. Sometimes people talk about "surprise" this way, giving it a somewhat rigorous definition -- we're talking Bayes here -- so you could treat as a fact something you'd be really surprised to find out was not the case.

We all know facts of an ideal sort are out of reach, and we've known it since Hume, but then what?

if you are vaccinated, what is there to fear from the unvaccinated? — NOS4A2

Being vaccinated doesn't make you immune. It's not 100% effective.

The larger issues would be burden one the healthcare system, and simple concern for your fellow citizens and the effect their illness or death will have on others. I mean, if your child's teacher gets sick and dies, it wasn't you, and it wasn't your child, but you and your child and that teacher's family and friends will all feel it.

vaccination reduces the risk of infection — Michael

I was under the impression there's conflicting data, and obviously views, on this. That vaccination reduces the severity and duration of the illness, is well-supported though. I would think that indirectly reduces transmission, but I'm no expert.

But isn't that a bad way to use the word fact? — Yohan

It isn't obviously something you have a choice about. Right now, you and I both believe some things are Facts, with a capital F, that will turn out to have been facts, with a small F.

Just consider the insistence of neuroscientists that your memories are reconstructions, practically confabulations. There are things you believe about your own life, your own experiences, that are not true. You remember lending Banno a book he never returned, but it was actually me you lent it to. You remember your mom wearing a blue dress at your graduation, but it was green, you're thinking of the blue dress she bought for your brother's wedding. You don't know which of your own memories are facts. How many times have you gotten a quote from a book or a movie just slightly, or a lot more than slightly, wrong?

In that very paragraph, I use "true", "actually", "know" and even "was" to make the point. We have no other vocabulary for saying that we cannot know our beliefs to be true.

And no, we cannot use "It used to be a fact that ..." to mean "We all used to believe with high confidence that ..." (On the implicature accompanying "used to", there's Mitch Hedberg: "I used to do drugs. I still do but I used to too.")

There are a lot of quirks to "fact" and "fact that" I guess we could get into.

Facts cannot turn out the be false. — Banno

I get that this is a sort of dictionary meaning, but there is an alternative usage that's roughly "to the best of our knowledge and with very high confidence". It's what Samuel Arbesman writes about in The Half-Life of Facts.

For instance, humans have 46 chromosomes, but it used to be widely believed that we have 48. "Widely believed" is the way most of us would say it, I guess, but it doesn't quite convey how firmly established this belief was. It's what all the textbooks said. It was considered settled science. Researchers who found only 46, while doing something else, assumed without question that they had screwed up somewhere. Doubting that humans have 48 chromosomes was akin to doubting the periodic table.

Now of course we know there are 46, so now we say it's a fact that there are 46. But is it impossible that we're wrong? Honestly hard for me to say. I'd like to think so because now we know a mistake is possible in this area, so perhaps we upped our game in 1955 when we finally got it right. But the point remains that scientists before 1955 had a similar level of confidence about 48.

And it turns out you can measure the turnover of facts, as Arbesman has done, along the lines of how many years does it take for half of what's published in a field to be overturned? He's found some pretty stable patterns there, that out on the high end, with medicine, it may be less than 10 years, while on the low end, with fundamental physics, it might be more like 40 or 50.

His book, by the way, was only okay. Not philosophically sophisticated, but some pretty interesting case studies, and an interesting way of looking at progress in science.

Is the bed on casters?

You can't answer my question? — RogueAI

If you have one bucket that holds two gallons, and another bucket that holds five gallons, how many buckets do you have?

If you're lying in bed dreaming of crossing the street, where are you? — RogueAI

How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?

There's a philosophical question about what my mind is — Bartricks

I have an answer I'm satisfied with.

Cheers!

My sensible body - which if it is a material thing (that is, if idealism is false - which it isn't) - is in a study; but my mind is not 'in' any place, as it is not in the business of having a location. — Bartricks

Your body is in the study, but your mind isn't. And you are your mind. So you are not in the study but your body is. Then you have died. We'll miss you.

Thanks!

Stop trying to belittle everyone you speak to, unless you only want to talk to newbies who don't know that this is the level of discussion they can expect from you.

And yes, if the David is a large marble statue in Florence, then when you go to see the David, you are going to see a large marble statue in Florence. If you do in fact see the David, you have seen a large marble statue in Florence.

It's an interesting case though. "Going [in order] to see ..." is an intensional context, and that means substitution is not guaranteed to work. (You can look for the Pieta in Florence, mistakenly, without looking for a statue that's in the Vatican in Florence, which would be crazy, or at least confused about cities.) In this case, there's at least some ambiguity because we might take "a large marble statue in Florence" to mean any such statue, and that's not what we want. It's interesting. I'm glad you brought it up.

Now a question for you: if you're in what I presume is an oak-paneled study, sitting beside a roaring fire, as you write these posts, and if you are your mind, then your mind is in that oak-paneled study, sitting beside a roaring fire, as it (?) writes. But a mind is not spatial. How can it have a location? How can it sit? Or should I instead conclude that you, @Bartricks, do not have a location and cannot sit?

Crimes forfeit rights because of bad actions. — Gregory

But the fetus can be a threat to the mother just by living, not by doing anything. See how peculiar the situation of a pregnant woman and her unborn child is? You'd need a comic-book villain to come up with a scenario like that using only big walking-around people.

But from what I’ve seen, from an empirical perspective the argument against lockdowns is very strong — AJJ

Share some links if you have any handy.

You want a formal proof, there are plenty of examples online. — Banno

I wasn't critiquing your presentation.

That means "innocent of the offense of which you are accused", not that your life is innocent, whatever that could mean.

I, a person, am my mind — Bartricks

No need to repeat the entire argument. This was plenty.

What does it mean? Is it English?

If you are your mind, then I can substitute "Bartricks's mind" for "Bartricks", salva veritate.

"Bartricks's mind has just made another post in this thread."

I take it you believe that is a reasonable thing to say.

Of course we do — Gregory

No, a life is a life, in my book and the law's. In law, you're either guilty or not guilty of committing a particular act you are forbidden to. There is no concept of a life being innocent that I'm aware of.

Someone trying to kill you is not analogous to the situation with a fetus — Gregory

Nevertheless, a fetus can put a mother's life in danger. Don't think of it as murder, but more like manslaughter, not intentional. Of course in this case, the death of the mother could result not from an action of the fetus, but from it's living at all. Now what?

By the way,

Arbitrary means random — Gregory

It really doesn't. Get a better dictionary.

This is the question begging bit. — AJJ

Oh, I see. I thought it was the other thing. But, no, I was not trying to suggest that lockdowns were the reason the eventual death toll was lower. You seem certain that they weren't; I suspect they helped. It should be an empirical question, but it's a very difficult one, for me anyway.

I misunderstood what you said. But even so, I didn’t argue that. — AJJ

We're all good, I think. The only reason I made the point about how your point "might sound" -- and you're right, it's kinda none of my business -- is that I wanted to see questions about lockdowns discussed seriously, and that means keeping people who raise the issue from being dismissed as loonies.

You’re beginning to get upset — AJJ

Not at all. I was not accusing you of being cavalier, but suggesting that you could be taken that way if you weren't pretty careful about how you compared death tolls, and how you relied on different death tolls in arguing. (I didn't say you were Buck Turgidson, just that you don't want to sound like him.)

I was also not question-begging: by "countermeasures" I meant not only lockdowns, but masking, social distancing, plexi sneezeguards everywhere overnight, all that. I've read arguments that there was never much point to constantly sanitizing everything that could be sanitized, but that was done, here and there anyway, and maybe those arguments are wrong and even that helped. I don't know.

I don't know how much a contribution lockdown made, but I've dealt directly with a lot of people who refused to wear a face mask and I've seen a lot of people be pretty cavalier (here I am saying it) about social distancing. Having most places be less crowded is a pretty good fallback if you acknowledge that some people won't take the other precautions.

Again, that's very broad strokes. I don't know what the real evidence about lockdowns is, in part because some of the most infamous super-spreader events involve people following none of the standard public health recommendations. Is it possible that, with social distancing and masking, you could have a huge wedding and be fine? I honestly don't know. Early on we thought it was spread through droplets only, not aerosols, but that was probably wrong. So just being with a lot of people at once starts to look pretty sketchy unless you have really kick-ass ventilation. Limits on the number of people in one place at a time are, in effect, partial lockdowns.

Anyway, I'm absolutely open to your argument and I think we all want to be because this is not the last time. It will happen again and next time we need to know what worked this time and what, conceivably, did more harm than good.

We should never recognize the right of one person to take the innocent life of another. — Gregory

So the key word there is "innocent" right?

I don't think we classify lives as "innocent" and "not innocent" in our legal system, so I'm not sure how to proceed. Come to think of it, I don't think I personally classify lives this way, but I guess I can see why you might. Are "not innocent" lives forfeit in general? Or only in specific circumstances?

If you look at the self-defense exception though, we regularly have troublesome cases where someone genuinely believed they were in danger from someone else, or at least convincingly claims they had such a fear, even though the now dead person turns out not to have been carrying a weapon, not to be a known criminal, in short likely not to have been threatening the killer at all. Is that an innocent life that was taken, or a normal life innocent of the offense of threatening the person who killed them? Should we condone such a killing? Or should we require someone to know for certain the other person means them harm? Which option are you absolutely certain is the fair one?

Keep in mind that self-defense is not just an analogy here, but a common exception recognized in abortion laws. An unborn child can threaten a mother's life without having an intention to.

You just have to find a way to say that without sounding like this:

Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks. — General Buck Turgidson

You can argue that lockdowns were a mistake because they don't work. But I wouldn't try arguing that we didn't need to do lockdowns because far fewer people have died than in some of the early speculative projections. That "smaller" number was is still horrifying.

Oh, and that number was with various countermeasures taken.

Why would rights be different because of dependency? Do you have an argument for this? No rights of the mother are violated by the anti-abortion stance. I am saying she doesn't have an addition right over someone else, dependent in body or in need to be raised as with post-born children — Gregory

Rights might be different because the situation is unique. You do not have a general right to take another's life, or even a lesser right to harm them, attempt to harm them, or even menace them. Unless they are threatening to harm you or take your life, or you even believe they are; then, and only then, and only while you are in fear for your life or your person, we grant you a right of self-defense. Things you are otherwise forbidden to do, even waving a gun at someone else, are suddenly your right. (But it is limited; you cannot escape, go home and get your gun, and then go back and get the bastard.)

So I think it is not inconceivable that we would recognize that a pregnant woman is in a unique situation and grant her a unique right. If you do not recognize that right, of course you don't see it being infringed upon. As to whether any other right of the mother is infringed upon, it seems clear that you have taken her liberty, that you have asserted the authority to have some control over her actions for the furtherance of the state's interest in the life of her child. I'm not here to have that argument.

I am only asking why the mother does or does not have such a matria potestas over her unborn children, and whether that right, if it exists, might be limited. I don't have an argument either way. The idea only just occurred to me a little while ago. Do you have an argument for why we should not recognize such a right? An argument, mind you, not just astonishment at the idea.

I haven’t kept up to date with things, but the last time I was there hadn’t been any cogent demonstrations of the effectiveness of lockdowns. — AJJ

Well it's not like you can do controlled trials; we'll only ever have so-called "natural experiments". I don't know what the overall evidence is either, though I recall the general opinion that the absolute lockdown that was possible in Wuhan (because totalitarianism) was widely considered effective.

On the other hand, I think epidemiologists warned from the beginning, as they did with border closings, that lockdowns are inherently leaky. They just buy you time, time that we in the US famously squandered.

It's no answer to a pandemic. It has to be part of a larger strategy and it has to be well executed and over quickly because it is not something the modern world is designed for. Where I work, we ended up laying off good people, some of whom had been with us for more than a decade. That was not a good outcome, and not what anyone -- management consultants aside -- wanted.

Because you are juxtaposing the right to life of one being with the "right" to kill it on the other. There is no symmetry there — Gregory

That is correct. Perhaps the mother of an unborn child does indeed have a unique right to kill that child, even supposing that what is inside her is a person. Roman law recognized such an authority of a father over his children (and theirs), and separately -- I had forgotten these were different -- the power of a husband over his wife (the manus). It is not inconceivable that we could recognize the mother of an unborn child to have such a right. Since the other person (again, granting that something inside her counts as another person) is actually inside her and entirely dependent on her, it would seem she has a stronger case for having such a right than either of the privileges recognized in Roman law.

Why would rights of anyone be diminished because it is inside someone else? — Gregory

That was not my question. My question was whether a mother might indeed have something like the patria potestas, absolute authority including the power of life and death, (never mind, @Ciceronianus, I looked it up) over her unborn child. If the mother has no such right, we have to deal with the mess I indicated above. If she does, we need only think of the unborn child's rights negatively, as a limit or the absence of a limit on the mother's unique right as the mother of an unborn child, and this is simpler. And my real question was how shall we determine whether a woman has such a "matria potestas"?

You are not talking about a right to life of the mother but the "right" of her to take the rights of the unborn — Gregory

That is correct. She may, or may not, have exactly such a right and it may, or may not, be limited. Pregnant women are unique in a way we cannot pretend not to notice, just as the people -- granting your claim that a fertilized egg is a person, for the moment -- inside them are in a unique position.

The best way I can put it is that the situation co-produces the constraints along with the new sense. Put differently, the past is changed by what occurs into it. — Joshs

Oh that's much less abstract!

Anyhow, I'll leave you to it. I like Wittgenstein, but I've never enjoyed Wittgenstein exegesis, so this is not the right party for me.

it's specialness doesn't grant women rights to stop the life of their unborn — Gregory

That's plausible, but you're forgetting that the situation is unique. Maybe it does grant a unique right. Maybe not. But now at least it's clear that if the state wishes to protect or infringe upon some right, this would be the one, if it exists.

What I mean is, this is the clearer option, so we don't have to deal with the conundrum of the rights of a person only accessible to state action literally through another person. Under this approach, the rights of a person inside another and dependent upon them only come into it insofar as the outer person may, or may not, have the power of life and death over them. (What's that called in Roman law, @Ciceronianus?) Only as a limit, or the absence of a limit, on the behavior of a person who has a person living inside them and dependent on them.

And then that's what we'd have to decide, whether the outer person has such a right, and whether it is limited. How do we go about that?

Correctness would not be conformity to a categorical essense, but the fresh generating of a resemblance that produces agreement. — Joshs

That's quite appealing, but terribly abstract. There are constraints on or expectations about what sorts of resemblance you generate, and the generating itself, and the agreement. The trick is never landing on a magic formula that someone will take as foundational, right? (I'm thinking of the way people fetishize a phrase like "form of life".)

I suppose what I'm thinking is that LW's approach is well suited to the undoing work, but can it produce a positive account? Is it a mistake to want a positive account? Did he warn us off all sorts of positive account or only off some popular ones he thought mistaken?

I didn't say that it does. I only said that it is an unusual situation. I cannot protect or infringe upon the rights of the person inside without protecting or infringing upon the rights of the person outside. I know of no other situation like this and no way around it.

But you do recognize that this situation is unusual, don't you? Pregnancy is the only situation in which one person's body is entirely contained within another's and for some time entirely dependent upon that "outer" person to remain alive. If the State wants to protect or even to destroy that "inner" person, it can only do so by going through the "outer" person.

There is no other situation like this, and it is not impossible that our usual rules for dealing with persons are not quite up to the task here.

Those policies are largely the result of the refusal of disrespectful, inconsiderate and selfish people to distance, mask, wash and vax. Had they played ball from day one, the policies would be gone months ago and we'd be back to where we were. — James Riley

Lockdown is a complicated issue. On balance, I expect you're right that the duration of the lockdowns was at least partially due to how we half-assed all the other measures, and to the degree that some people, some elected people that come to mind, were responsible for that half-assery, then those people are responsible for the duration of the lockdowns. And to the degree that the truly tragic effects of the lockdowns are a function of their duration, then those people are responsible for that too.

But I think people on the "right side" of pandemic polemics have too often minimized the negative effects of the lockdowns, and we shouldn't do that. Lives were lost and businesses shuttered forever not because of the pandemic itself, but because of bungled attempts to deal with it.

Still, it is deeply annoying that the supposedly pro-business political party in the United States was so consistently anti-lockdown when the overwhelming consensus of economists was to shut down almost everything and get it over with, instead of dragging it out until as many small businesses as possible had failed. The GOP prioritized "muh liberty" over the real (that is, more than a couple news cycles out) economic interests of their constituents. Hell, the government has been paying farmers not to produce (in targeted ways) for generations. Just do a whole lot more of that. Just for a few months. Shut down and start cutting checks. The surest way to drive barber shops and hair salons out of business was to hold up covid relief and then insist, in front of every camera you could find, that the dumbasses who voted for you have a constitutional right to get a haircut. ("Dumbasses" because either they believed you when you claimed to be pro-business -- you're not, you just want to fight the culture war -- or they knew you just wanted to fight the culture war and thought that qualifies you for public office.)

So, on the one hand, lockdowns lasted longer than they had to, not because libs get off on taking away people's freedom but because we half-assed it. Businesses failed because of the lockdowns and people under long lockdowns suffered. (One restaurant owner in my town, who I believe struggled with depression, committed suicide when she saw her life's work slipping away.) On the other hand, a lot of us were never under lockdown at all. I worked right through the pandemic, even though the store I work at was closed to the public for a couple months. But I had the luxury of pretty safe working conditions. Ask America's essential workers what they thought about the lockdowns and they'll say, "What lockdown?"

(I just hope I never again have to listen to upper-middle-class media professionals whining, a little bittersweetly perhaps, about how much it sucked spending so much time with their children.)

If having COVID is inevitable then I'd rather have it after being vaccinated than without being vaccinated — Michael

What do you say to this, @Isaac?

I looked, and when we were discussing Andrew Pollard's contention that "anyone who's still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus. We don't have anything that will stop transmission", you never indicated how you would respond to the simple argument @Michael gives here, and that Paul Hunter presented at the same meeting: you will get infected; being vaccinated when you get infected substantially lessens the severity and duration of the ensuing illness, and therefore substantially lessens the risk of a poor outcome.

This argument alone should carry the day. If it does not, it must be because you perceive the cost of getting vaccinated -- which you can be certain you will incur -- as higher than your expected benefit, the sum of the possible outcomes weighted by their likelihood.

An equivalent analysis would be to subtract the cost, a fixed value, from each possible benefit, and then weight the net benefits by likelihood, factoring in the vaccine's effectiveness here; doing it this way gives you a clearer sense of the range from worst case to best case, and you can compare them to a similar range of worst case to best case for the option of not getting vaccinated. It's not hard to see that by getting vaccinated you will miss out on the very best case -- incurring no cost and having a very mild illness, a cold. The entire range of possible outcomes is shifted ("downward") by the fixed cost of the vaccination. The very worst case is even worse now, because of this additional cost. But the likelihoods associated with each outcome are also shifted, raising the likelihood of the better outcomes and reducing the likelihood of worse ones. The very worst vaccinated case is substantially less likely than the unvaccinated worst case. If you flip your axes and check what outcome is associated with each likelihood for the vaccinated and unvaccinated cases, you will find a uniform improvement in outcome on the vaccinated side. (I'm not sure what happens at the very bottom of the likelihood scale -- whether vaccinated-worst is a lower probability than anything on the unvaccinated scale, for instance, or how it compares to unvaccinated-best. For that I'd have to have actual data and do actual math. This is just a math-like or math-ish or math-adjacent argument.)

A person thinks. Not a brain.

I've never seen a brain think, or reflect or cognize. But people, on the other hand, do all these things. — Manuel

This is clearly the right starting point. (I don't agree that it answers the question, but I'm not sure the question is a good one.)

Minds causally interact with the sensible world. That much seems clear to everyone. — Bartricks

No it does not.

I, a person who has a mind, causally interact with the sensible world. You, another person with a mind, causally interact with the sensible world. @Manuel has this right. We can do so because we also have bodies, each a particular body that is ours and no one else's. But "my mind" and "my body" are me considered only in certain aspects -- that is, they are abstractions. I, a person, am the concrete particular. A body without a mind is not a person; a mind without a body is at best an hypothesis, at worst a superstition.

@NOS4A2

Are you in fact okay with house arrest for the infected? — Srap Tasmaner

And if so, how is the State to determine who is infected? Does your right to bodily autonomy, ahem, immunize you against being tested by an agent of the State? Or must I turn over my blood to the authorities upon demand?

nowhere does it state that we have to — NOS4A2

Sure. But it's not about "have to"; your claim was that the State has no right, no authority to do such a thing. (Sorry, but the curiosity is killing me: what is this "it" that keeps not stating things somewhere?)

I don’t see how it is reasonable to discriminate against the unvaccinated, especially when natural immunity can offer better protection than some vaccines, and the vaccinated are not immune from spreading the disease. It seems more reasonable and justifiable to discriminate against those infected with the virus, the only people capable of spreading the disease. — NOS4A2

And you may be right about all of this. Then why not just say this instead of suggesting (?) that government is always and only some group of people illegitimately imposing its will on others? Right here, you acknowledge that it's at least more reasonable -- but maybe still not reasonable enough for your tastes -- for the government to deprive the infected of their liberty.

Are you in fact okay with house arrest for the infected?