771–780 of 837 posts
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I’m not sure why you’re being down-voted; elements of the counter-cultural left has been skeptical of science for decades. The profit-motive is at odds with the nobler pursuit of science and companies like Monsanto, Exxon, Dow Jones are on the wrong side of history. Unfortunately, distrust of “big pharma” mutates into a suspicion of science in general – and the medical sector in particular. There also isn’t a catchy…
I'm curious: what percentage of the population tries to understand the complexities of reality, by your standard?
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perhaps i misheard it, but i literally heard the 95% for over-65s figure this morning on the radio, which seemed to be quoting the cdc (but again, it didn't have my full and undivided attention). the difference could also be first dose vs. 'fully vaccinated'.
At least this link says even for first dose it's only 91% and 87%, again, which could be off, yet seems as if it would be accurate. Again, I don't know. What I've learned this year is that statistics can be very unintuitive and I know so little about how they work, that in uncertain times like these, I almost feel reliant on choosing someone to trust who I think understands this stuff better than I.
and incidentally, that’s the shape of most arguments on most things, because we’re embedded in unbounded uncertainty. the most precision we can have about most things is ‘a little’, ‘some’, ‘a bunch’, ‘most’, etc., not something like 54.736%, despite how enticing precision like that can be. it’s mostly engineering where precision like that is practical, available, and useful.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine...
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My goodness, what a selfish take. God forbid 20 somethings miss out on some party time. Meanwhile, people who need medical care (many of them not elderly) can't get it because the hospitals are choked with covid patients.
Gen X and older don't have the moral high ground when it comes to selfishness. You know what's selfish? Selling the nation's economy to boost the stock market and pad your nest egg while collecting social security, then writing article after article ad nauseam about how spoiled Millennials are because they dared to eat an avocado with their breakfast. The lockdowns and mandates are just one more example of generation…
I wasn't talking about an entire generation, just what you wrote. I know plenty of younger folks who don't feel like they need to wish death upon boomers (and now Gen X) because they perceive that those earlier generations have somehow deliberately screwed them.
And if you aren't watching carefully, please note that millenials are quickly moving into the same every day choices that people before them made. This isn't a generational thing, there is no conspiracy.
The article is discussing the media and government being intentionally vague or even misinformative because they don't trust the public, but it backfires and causes more distrust. The flip side that wasn't discussed is the belittling and censoring of voices that were skeptical of the narratives, which engendered even more distrust. Their strategy of information control backfired, and they doubled down. Now we've got…
(1) there is always a huge swath of people that will “never” take a new vaccine. It has only gotten bigger since social media allowed the unwashed masses to bypass the old gatekeepers.
(2) the top health officials in the USA have all been threatened (death threats against their person and their families). This very likely clouds the lessons they could learn from the past / years.
(3) “Hard truths” are complicated and require an audience willing to understand nuance. We have a fractured media environment that frequently doesn’t carry the entire quote and media consumers that frequently don’t click beyond the clickbait headline. We have people en masse trusting their health decisions to superstition who join in chants to fire/arrest/kill health officials.
While the mask guidance of Feb 2020 could have been better communicated (it seems clear to me the calculus involved more than what was publicly stated), it also seems naïve to me that simply telling the truth would have solved any of these issues.
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this isn't about your grandma (may she live many more years), but the sanctimoniousness (and misguidedness) of your comments. your chance of death from covid is likely (much) less than 0.2%, an average that's disproportionately (and unfortunately) inflated by the elderly and unhealthy. the elderly and unhealthy are the folks who we should encourage (but not force) to get vaccinated because of the elevated risk. every…
It's crazy how you brush aside the elderly and "unhealthy" as people who can die without your consideration and you think their deaths only 'mess up' the numbers. They are treated like an undesirable population whose deaths shouldn't be taken into account. Shouldn't we vaccinate, wear masks and social distance if only to help the elderly and "unhealthy"?
you’re nakedly appealing to emotion here, and baiting for an inflexible, naïve answer. that’s a despicable kind of rhetorical move that doesn’t serve to push our collective understanding forward, but rather attempts to coerce and strives for conformity. it’s diametrically opposed to the point made by the linked nature article.
if the question was, “should we take measures to protect the elderly and unhealthy, who are at elevated risk?”, then ‘yes’ is an easy response (and embedded in my previous comment), because that both invites collaboration and admits a variety of potential measures, without ego or mediopolitical posturing. more importantly, it doesn’t presuppose that everyone must be coerced to vaccinate, to wear masks illogically, and to lock down randomly to achieve that objective.
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> The loss of national cohesion, It may be you have the causality backwards here.
Like pretty much everyone in this thread, who are at the very least failing to acknowledge the fact that this is a feedback loop. I'd be a lot more willing to acknowledge the notion that the media and government are so terrible if the alternatives that most people have chosen to trust instead weren't so laughably bad sources in comparison. This isn't people making an informed judgement about what sources to best trus…
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I bought them right around the time officials started admitting they were helpful. $120 for a box of ten N95 masks.
I'm baffled that anybody ever thought they weren't helpful. As if we haven't been using masks against airborne diseases for the past hundred years. But suddenly they would be useless against Covid. Then they point to one or two studies as if they support their argument, when there were at least as many at the same time showing the opposite. Also ignoring decades of evidence of the efficacy of masks. I thought I was t…
I don't like being lied to, but in this case I think I have some forgiveness because the end goal was justified (at least in my mind). It's such a weird feeling though, I'm very conflicted about it.
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exactly how you form opinions everyday without having deep knowledge of a given domain. perhaps also read up on the appeal to authority fallacy[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
> exactly how you form opinions everyday without having deep knowledge of a given domain Go out and talk to a lot of people. A decent chunk of the population form bad opinions about a lot of things and hold them until they die. Thinking is hard, learning/researching is exhausting, a lot of people will, amusingly, work very hard to avoid it :-)
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> ~95% of those 65 and older in the US are vaccinated My grandmother can't vaccinate for medical reasons and I have other specific health reasons, including past issues with the flu, breathing troubles, general poor health, and the fact that she's 100, all give me reason to believe that she has special risk factors. The place she is at has had Covid deaths and there are others of similar age with similar risk profile…
this isn't about your grandma (may she live many more years), but the sanctimoniousness (and misguidedness) of your comments. your chance of death from covid is likely (much) less than 0.2%, an average that's disproportionately (and unfortunately) inflated by the elderly and unhealthy. the elderly and unhealthy are the folks who we should encourage (but not force) to get vaccinated because of the elevated risk. every…
EDIT: I had to address this, too, but even if I assume that figure we get 15.6M dead people once the world is infected. I agree that I have a low personal risk, it's not making grandma die of not breathing--something we know painfully well because of how grandpa died grasping for every breath--that I'd like to avoid. Yeah, there's a DNR order, but I don't wish that misery on anyone.
> and therein lies the crux of my critique. you've outsourced your health decisions to politicians/bureaucrats more interested in their own skin than yours, and yet, make confident claims about the correctness of those decisions.
See, this is an unwarranted assumption on your part. I wear them as mandated because, well, it costs me nothing in general to wear a mask when unneeded. I already mentioned that I don't have to deal with, say, 12 hour factory shifts.
> if you're wearing masks as mandated, but not around friends and family
I do wear masks when it makes more scientific sense and I haven't been visiting friends & family in the first place. The few times we did, we did wear masks.
So your criticism is just really off base here. You don't know me, you don't know what I do, and you seem to be reaching to find any criticism despite not being in any position to know anything about me.
Why?