91–100 of 378 posts
> Doing it for ourselves doesn’t capture all the benefits - lots of fun stuff is still closed/cancelled - but it’s enough to go out, socialize, and generally enjoy life without worrying about COVID. Yes, I look forward to having random people skirt the social distancing rules because they sniffed their own homemade vaccine over the weekend.
Without any evidence of efficacy, this article doesn't strike me as much different from "I went into the woods and gathered up some herbs and made myself an elixir that cures covid". I guess it's neat that you did all that stuff, but unless it actually helps, who cares? Doing it with science-y ingredients instead of herbs and ordered them online instead of harvesting them from plants doesn't magically mean it actuall…
The difference however is that this article is based on the scientific method, and the go into the woods and gather herbs is based on mythology. Now the reasonableness of experimenting on yourself, even in a scientifically "valid" way, is certainly arguable. But the elements are all there; Theory of the Immune system, Hypothesis that it can be trained in this way, experiment that trains immune system in a known with…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally know very intelligent and highly educated people who went to top universities who are convinced vaccines caused mental retardation in their children. They may be wrong, but I would not call them nutjobs.
Being smart and being crazy are not mutually exclusive
Even if no one dies from this, he and the contrarian happy clappers on lesswrong deserve a special recognition for ingenuity at the Darwin Awards. The field is crowded for 2020, what with HCQ and ivermectin truthers, statistical frauds, denialists and blind optimists, but there is a chance they'll dominate the anti-vaxxers in 2021.
> contrarian happy clappers on lesswrong I don't understand why, but that insult apparently smells correct to a guard dog in my brain. Do you have an ELI5 for what the insult means?
ELI5: a cult that believes that they know the secrets of the world and everyone else is dumb.
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[Deleted. I didn't fully read the parents post, and responded emotionally. That was wrong of me and I apologize]
If you think carefully, you may realize that what you said is actually entirely unrelated to what I said. Perhaps you are not one of the people running on the unexamined assumption. I still say it's clearly operative in many people. I call it "unexamined" precisely because once pulled up the conscious level, it is obviously false. Nevertheless, pulling such things up to the conscious level is not easy and usually tak…
If i can quibble though, i think "all" can be a bit of a loaded word in this context, because people often use it to mean, all well known ones or something along those lines and not all potential ones including random stuff people make in their backyards.
If there is one thing I certainly wouldn't just play around with it's the immune system. It's incredibly dangerous and easily capable of causing all kinds of harm to yourself up to killing you outright. A vaccine is designed to produce an immune response of the right magnitude. Too low and it doesn't work, too high and it'll cause damage. At least one of the vaccine candidates in development was put back to the drawi…
Can you provide more information about how vaccines can cause damage?
That's not even getting into the issues that may arise from skipping all the GMP/GLP guidelines. They can be tedious but exist for a reason.
TLDR: I attempted to make a COVID vaccine. It was cheap. I have no proof that it worked. Other risks are unknown. The story reminds me of Barry Marshall, but with less science behind it. https://jamesclear.com/barry-marshall
Honestly i'd be pretty shocked if this actually worked.
In many cases, the hard part isn't so much making a working vaccine, as proving it works, scaling manufacturing, etc.
I know some people object to biohacking like this, but I'm not convinced that we should be concerned. In general I believe that, in a free society, people should be allowed to do as they please as long as their actions don't endanger or harm others. There's a lot of nuance and caveats there, though. Perhaps this is one? I guess I don't see an inherent problem with vaccine hacking. I'm reminded of the person who bioha…
But as a starting point, I've thought the same in the past and I don't think it's bad. Just that crossing a red light, even if no one was harmed that particular instance, may still be judged to be reckless and fineable, and even if it's only about your own dead body (let's say you didn't run in front of a cyclist), that's still an impact in the way described above. Nevertheless, if you use "don't bother others" as a general rule for what should probably be legal and then define exceptions for particular situations and reasons, or even if you just look for those side effects, it might be useful.
> Doing it for ourselves doesn’t capture all the benefits - lots of fun stuff is still closed/cancelled - but it’s enough to go out, socialize, and generally enjoy life without worrying about COVID. Yes, I look forward to having random people skirt the social distancing rules because they sniffed their own homemade vaccine over the weekend.
They spent a thousand bucks on this and many weeks and blood tests. I agree with your general point but do give them some credit.
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Being smart and being crazy are not mutually exclusive
I think it’s more accurate to say that intelligence is not adequate defense against trusting the wrong sources of information, and people are extremely resistant to changing their minds once they’ve placed a stake in the ground.
However, as the saying goes, science advances one funeral at a time.