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Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

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Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#721

Post by native_samples »

Jensson wrote: post #342
hackingforfun wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I understand, the one thing about flip flopping on masks cost them to lose faith in all medical experts? Doesn't that seem a little unreasonable? I agree we shouldn't have flip flopped on masks, but I don't think making a whole narrative out of that makes sense.

> Just so I understand, the one thing about flip flopping on masks cost them to lose faith in all medical experts? Doesn't that seem a little unreasonable? Have you never heard of racism, bias etc? Yes, when a representative for a group does something then that will affect peoples views of that entire group and not just that person. Humans are irrational like that.

Generalization from experience isn't irrational or specific to humans. It's a basic part of any cognitive process. Animals are great at generalizing from experience.

The reason there are social taboos against very specific kinds of generalization is because in the past powerful and evil governments have implemented horrible policies on the basis of such generalizations. But that's an argument against letting governments pass such laws, not an argument against any form of generalization about groups of people.

In this case, public health professionals have been observed behaving as a group in very specific and abnormal ways over a long period of time. It is not merely reasonable to generalize about public health at this point, it would actually be irrational not to do so.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#722

Post by native_samples »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #493
18pfsmt wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One only need look at Sweden and their results. They took minimal action, allowed the youngest to remain in school w/o masks, and only canceled large events. We are now starting to see the all-cause mortality stats and they are proving Sweden's approach minimized the most harm.

Do you have a source that Sweden minimized the most harm (and the definition of harm in this case)? I’m not saying this is wrong I just haven’t heard of this fact before and I’m interested in reading the study for myself. Thanks!

E.g. their COVID deaths per capita stats place them at, I think, about position 50. The UK with much harsher restrictions sits at position 25.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#723

Post by concordDance »

kcplate wrote: post #559
hackingforfun wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I understand, the one thing about flip flopping on masks cost them to lose faith in all medical experts? Doesn't that seem a little unreasonable? I agree we shouldn't have flip flopped on masks, but I don't think making a whole narrative out of that makes sense.

Closing borders is racist. Two weeks to flatten the curve. Don’t mask. Mask. Stay Inside. Trump didn’t close the borders fast enough! Double mask. Protest crowds are not superspreaders. Trump Rallies are superspreaders. School is dangerous, distance learning is good. Go outside, inside is bad. Dems-don’t trust Trump Vaccines. Biden/Pelosi - we can’t mandate vaccination. Dems-you must trust our vaccines, they are effe…

Most of these can be blamed on the awful pile of dung that is the modern news media, not actual institutions like the CDC.

Admittedly, very few people go direct to source here, instead only learning about things through the news media.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#724

Post by concordDance »

thedrbrian wrote: post #507
hackingforfun wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I understand, the one thing about flip flopping on masks cost them to lose faith in all medical experts? Doesn't that seem a little unreasonable? I agree we shouldn't have flip flopped on masks, but I don't think making a whole narrative out of that makes sense.

Not just that. In the UK the government are claiming that the virus effects everyone equally and yet everyday the deaths are concentrated in the 60+ brackets. Their latest program has them claiming all pregnant women need the vaccine because it's putting them at massive risk of the worst ventilator and yet the figures show just 20 pregnant women in the last 4 months needed the machine and the other 100 people were fu…

> In the UK the government are claiming that the virus effects everyone equally

No they aren't. Some disreputable news sites may imply that, but government representatives have not said this.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#725

Post by alkonaut »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #684
alkonaut wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would they initially tell us to not wear masks? Because hard data was scarce and authorities are reluctant to impose anything as mere precaution. Or rather, whether authorities would do that kind of thing as a precaution before there is solid evidence varies from country to country (unsurprisingly).

> Because hard data was scarce and authorities are reluctant to impose anything as mere precaution No, no. I didn't say why did they not impose mask mandates. They said "DO NOT WEAR a mask, because wearing masks is inherently dangerous".

This obviously varies between different countries but one way of expressing that was (correctly) that when the benefits and drawbacks are not known, it’s also not known whether it could be net negative.

No authorities anywhere said literally (I hope) what you are quoting

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#726

Post by native_samples »

djrogers wrote: post #76
rob_c wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just US, I would say there's a large number of very well educated people even in well off countries who have a large amount of hesitation toward this mainly due to information handling and lack of transparency. (Yes there is a very vocal anti-vax nut job crowd, but frankly that will always be there, and is always different to those who object to policy decisions on moral grounds of their failings and the deaths t…

I don't think it's an issue of seeing illness as a personal failing - that's just dismissive and an unhelpful characterization. People I know that choose to not get vaccinated yet are largely resistant to the 'do it for others' push because we've been told that the vaccine is so effective that the 'others' should be safe anyway, unless they've chosen not to get the vaccine too. That leaves these people with a risk as…

Well, it's worse than that.

The "for the good of society" messaging has been very unstable, even moreso than normal for public health messaging. It's been a mix of: the elderly will take the vaccines because they're at high risk and then life can go back to normal. Then it became all adults need to take it to build herd immunity (the concept that in 2020 was supposedly some sort of a-scientific conspiracy theory), then it became life won't go back to normal even with high vaccination rates, then passes were introduced that have an exception for testing i.e. they look like an attempt to stop spread of the virus, but then it became clear that vaccines don't stop the spread yet the passes remained the same or even had the testing exemption removed. Then it became something about hospital capacity but they started firing healthcare workers en-masse, then it became all teenagers need to take it to stop schools closing and/or to protect their mental health (UK justification), but schools closing is itself a government/union policy, now Pfizer is trialling vaccines for babies. So who knows what the justification for that will be. But, we can be sure they'll find one.

It's been less than a year and that's not even all the changes in vaccination messaging, just the ones related to why everyone has to take it even if they don't personally want to. I'm honestly not sure I even got them all. That's been combined with very strong messaging that anyone who doubts the perfect omniscient competence of the public health establishment are crazy loons who need to be purged from society, with some of the nastiest and most aggressive tactics deployed by western governments against their own peoples for a long time.

Really don't see a way to recover trust in vaccination after the rollercoaster messaging over this year. There's no consistency anywhere which strongly implies the collectivist goal is chosen, then scientific-sounding justifications are invented to justify it. By next week this comment will be out of date and more stuff will need to be added to the list.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#727

Post by rob_c »

notahacker wrote: post #448
rob_c wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. The nonsense here is how herd immunity is estimated/measured. There is no/little consensus on how this is defined and given how polarised this is it probably never will be. The reality is that the UK adult population is heading to 90% vaccinated. If you want to measure immunity to death from the disease as immunity we're at about 90%. Please don't ever pretend that's not enough. I cannot fathom a model even a…

Please. If you're going to make an argument that lockdowns shouldn't have happened based on herd immunity, arguing that herd immunity measures are nonsensical doesn't really help your case... Yes, we are considerably closer to immunity from death from disease now that vaccinations are in place. That also doesn't make your argument we needed more people to catch the disease when it was relatively deadly any stronger.…

I'm not making a statement that the lockdowns should not all have happened. That is what you're inferring from what I've said.

I'm just stating as to whether they had the intended effect or not. In both cases they did not have the exactly intended effect because people mis-handled the situation.

The first lockdown can be justified from numerous perspectives. Economically, Healthcare, Socially the first lockdown at least in the UK allowed for the government to get control back on a difficult situation which we ended up spending at least £1T and bringing in the army for so any reason why we failed to get control falls on deaf ears given how much clearly has/had to be spent on this.

The statement that more people needed to catch varient-OmegaEpsilon over variant-X to reach immunity is just daft and an argument for the sake of it.

I say rocket science because there are no higher-order derivations required to explain the behaviours in this case the modelling is much, much simpler and just requires understanding what's going on. (I've worked with both sets of simulation systems, the code for rocket science is often much better and more complex but viral modelling is typically done very, very, very badly still in 2021)

The big clue here is LOCKDOWN1 != LOCKDOWN2 there are different reasons why they may have happened, how successful they were or should/could have been and that they both failed in different ways.

Making a statement that LOCKDOWN1 == LOCKDOWN2 is making a statement that every day of the year is exactly like Chirstmas. If you're not following this then you've misunderstood what I'm saying and I would advise you re-read some epidemiological texts, some texts on numerical modelling and some texts on statistical analysis.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#728

Post by sokoloff »

swader999 wrote: post #630
sokoloff wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you rely on reliable public health authorities for pandemic-related advice, you're in the clear, logically speaking. If you rely on unreliable public health authorities, you might feel OK about your choice, but you're not in the clear, logically.

How did you get informed enough to decide which public health authorities were the right ones to trust?

I don’t think any of them are reliable enough to cite, on their name alone, as the foundation for a logical argument where “because X said so” is treated as absolute ground truth. That’s the essence of the “appeal to authority” logical fallacy.

Are they trustworthy enough to modify behavior in ways that appear proportionate to the risk when they make an recommendation and show their reasoning and whatever data they have? Yes, of course, but that’s no longer based on their name/reputation alone and, because it’s only a temporary behavior change, it has a much lower standard of proof.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#729

Post by nuerow »

roenxi wrote: post #715
nuerow wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The alternative is a world where a ~66% majority (if that) can override the remainder on their medical decisions - which is about as personal as decisions can get. I'm sure that those who repeat the "rights and freedom" mantra are also aware that there is a tradeoff between individual freedom and the ability to live in a free society, which requires tradeoffs between your own personal freedom and the individual fre…

> Your argument is actually not about freedom at all, but about exceptionalism, entitlements, and excluding yourself from any responsibility or duty towards ensuring that the priviledges you enjoy are also made available to others. The technical term I prefer is "basic human rights". Like right to work, right to freedom of movement, right to associate, etc, etc. That might be a bit entitled I suppose.

> The technical term I prefer is "basic human rights".

If that's what you're going with, please keep in mind that basic human rights include right to health, and your refusal to comply with basic health and safety precautions violates "basic human rights" of everyone around you.

So, your argument isn't really about "freedom" but this false sense of entitlement where no rules or obligations should apply to you while the whole world should be forced to accommodate your whims.

Re: Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

#730

Post by CaptainMarvel »

thedrbrian wrote: post #507
hackingforfun wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I understand, the one thing about flip flopping on masks cost them to lose faith in all medical experts? Doesn't that seem a little unreasonable? I agree we shouldn't have flip flopped on masks, but I don't think making a whole narrative out of that makes sense.

Not just that. In the UK the government are claiming that the virus effects everyone equally and yet everyday the deaths are concentrated in the 60+ brackets. Their latest program has them claiming all pregnant women need the vaccine because it's putting them at massive risk of the worst ventilator and yet the figures show just 20 pregnant women in the last 4 months needed the machine and the other 100 people were fu…

I’m going to call bullshit on everything you just said.

> the UK the government are claiming that the virus effects everyone equally

I haven’t heard anyone from the government say that.

> claiming all pregnant women need the vaccine because it's putting them at massive risk of the worst ventilator and yet the figures show just 20 pregnant women in the last 4 months needed the machine and the other 100 people were fully vaxxed.

Here is literally an article from a few days ago that shows 1-in-6 are pregnant women and that the vast majority have NOT had the vaccine.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/11/one-in-...

You know what, forgot it. If this doesn’t prompt you to reconsider your sources, refuting every single point you made won’t either.

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