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Making Vaccine

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Re: Making Vaccine

#281

Post by chillee »

rwallace wrote: post #262
chillee wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-... > When [an outsider] asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he's optimizing for - being right. > When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does.

The second statement is unfortunately true. But be careful of taking the first one at face value. The outsider might be optimizing for being right. He might also be optimizing for looking good in his social circle, confirming some self-image in his own mind, establishing himself as a prudent person who holds sensible beliefs, or establishing himself as a daring person who holds antiestablishment beliefs. The process…

In the article, he was mentioning one specific outsider (Zvi Mowshowitz) that he trusts. I changed it to "[an outsider]" more generally since it didn't make sense without context.

Re: Making Vaccine

#282

Post by d0mine »

zamfi wrote: post #240
hardwaregeek wrote: post #231

This is an impressive amount of hubris. Does the author assume that all the certifications and testing stages were for show? I don't hold the highest view of LessWrong and the whole rationalist shtick. This post exemplifies why. Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make…

> Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make a vaccine I didn't get this from the post at all -- they didn't invent the vaccine, they're just trying a protocol put together by some other biologists they seem to trust. The certifications and testing is not for show, and n…

There are no safety/effectiveness guarantees for the vaccine https://radvac.org/faq/

Re: Making Vaccine

#283

Post by dmichulke »

wimagguc wrote: post #256

If the goal is immunity to Covid-19, isn't it simpler to just: catch it? To be on the safe side, they could have lowered the risks of a bad outcome by things like (1) catching a smaller viral load (2) actually prepare for it and catch it at a convenient time etc. (Someone who's actually interested would research this longer.) Surely it's safer than the home cooked vaccine, and surely the favorable option on a risk vs…

I believe the unstated secondary objective is staying alive (or at least optimizing the probabilities).

Not the author though, so take it with a grain of salt ;-)

Re: Making Vaccine

#284

Post by d0mine »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #231

This is an impressive amount of hubris. Does the author assume that all the certifications and testing stages were for show? I don't hold the highest view of LessWrong and the whole rationalist shtick. This post exemplifies why. Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make…

You don't need to be an expert to assemble your own furniture. That is all he did here: just followed instructions from https://radvac.org/white-paper/ https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/.

Re: Making Vaccine

#285

Post by notahacker »

1996 wrote: post #273
ascorbic wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would feeling happy reduce the correctness of the decision? Isn't happiness the only utility that matters?

Many reasons - mostly that it makes you incorrectly discount the negatives, incorrectly assert some possibility, neglect some second or third order consequences etc. Check out what I think is called the depression correctness hypothesis (at least IIRC): clinically depressed people cast more accurate judgements and evaluations. I want to use the full power of that by taking decision that have the potential to increase…

But even if you are a unique human whose utility is entirely unrelated to the sum of warm fuzzy feelings they feel, arbitrarily avoiding stuff which makes you happy is an irrational cognitive bias which will often if not even usually (since warm fuzzy feelings evolved from preference for certain types of collaboration improving survival odds) lead to worse material outcomes.

The Depression Correctness Hypothesis experiments, incidentally, said nothing about depressed people's ability to achieve better outcomes; they simply concluded that in experiments where humans were asked to estimate their level of control over the outcome, depressed people were more likely to correctly reason they didn't have [much] control. cf predictions for future utility in studies of cooperative behaviour, reciprocal altruism etc...

Re: Making Vaccine

#286

Post by tim333 »

ascorbic wrote: post #270
tim333 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was that easy to get in. There are usually only a few thousand in early stage trials and millions who would be up for it.

Have you tried? There were still single-arm, paid stage 2 trials recruiting in the UK in December (I can't remember which vaccine). I would've signed-up, but I'm already on the (placebo-controlled, unpaid) J&J stage 3 trial so can't take part in another. A stage 2/3 trial is still more likely to be effective than the homebrew approach, even after accounting for the 50% chance you've been given a placebo. As for how I…

Sort of but not really. I'm an odd case as I had covid in April. I put my name with the NHS anyway in case they still want to try stuff on us survivors.

Re: Making Vaccine

#287

Post by concordDance »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #231

This is an impressive amount of hubris. Does the author assume that all the certifications and testing stages were for show? I don't hold the highest view of LessWrong and the whole rationalist shtick. This post exemplifies why. Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make…

Um... are you reading the same post as the rest of us?

He's just trying out something an actual expert has made to see if it works when he tries to do it. So far it hasn't worked, as he admits, but it certainly could. Sure, it's probably with greater cost, higher risk and less effectiveness than the mass produced vaccines I expect (and the author would likely agree). But it's certainly not the case thay a layman can never do what an expert can do, particularly if they are following expert instructions, they just shouldn't expect to do it as reliably or well as an expert (for example, with a bit of reading up you can wire your house and it'll probably be ok, but the expert is far less likely to electrocute himself and has a much lower chance of doing something that will lead to your house burning down).

Are you so offended by someone spending $1000 and a few hours on a hobby that may have some useful results that you must assume bad things about them?

Re: Making Vaccine

#288

Post by willyt »

It’s interesting that you can order custom made DNS sequences so easily, I didn’t know that. But, vaccination is something we have to do as a society. It’s fundamentally a social action taken across a population. He says that after taking the vaccine, he will be able to go out and socialise again, but the vaccines only make you immune from severe disease, not the people around you. So if you are vaccinated you can still catch Covid again and spread it to your grandparents, or the overweight person working on the supermarket checkout, or your neighbour’s sickly child. If your homemade vaccine has worked you’ll be ok, but they wont. This is why we have to vaccinate as a society and we all have to wait until there’s enough people vaccinated to ensure herd immunity. It’s also why you can’t take any risk at all that the vaccine that you give to the whole population could be harmful because if people lose trust in the vaccine or vaccines in general then as a society we will lose access to this tool for protecting us from disease, and the death toll from that would be far higher than a few more months of Covid.

Re: Making Vaccine

#289

Post by concordDance »

bawolff wrote: post #235
michaelterryio wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like that advice would have been good for Ben Franklin too. And Marie Curie. Some people want to survive and some people want to be heroes.

Those people tested their theories, did experiments. They didn't just stick something up their nose and assumed it worked with no further investigation.

> They didn't just stick something up their nose and assumed it worked with no further investigation.

Good thing that's not what the article author has done, ey?

Re: Making Vaccine

#290

Post by neelnanda »

dragontamer wrote: post #50
nostromo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the testers would be directly exposed as part of the trial, which is why they'd be compensated -- as opposed to waiting around for 9 months for some percent of people to be exposed.

And the control / placebo group? You're really going to force testers to potentially pick up the placebo, and then inject them with COVID19 forcefully? I mean yeah, it'd work, but its generally considered immoral under today's philosophy of science.

[1 Day Sooner](https://www.1daysooner.org/) is an organisation pushing for these trials, that's found 38,000 informed volunteers who would be willing to do these trials. Force is completely unnecessary, there are enough altruistic people who are willing to do trials like this
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