Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

lore.kernel.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 649 posts

Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

#371

Post by waterhouse »

theiafan wrote: post #307
young_unixer wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you know for certain that someone is an anti-vaxxer, disregarding their opinion/question by accusing them of sealioning is a fallacy. Someone is not a "bad-faith" actor for asking precisely the questions that are hard to answer, even if they're using those questions to support a wrong idea. If you don't have time to answer their questions, don't answer them. If you do have time, you have a good opportunity to…

> Even if you know for certain that someone is an anti-vaxxer, disregarding their opinion/question by accusing them of sealioning is a fallacy. 1. Labeling someone a "sealion" doesn't even hinge on their opinion. You seem to have missed the entire concept, and instead interpreted it as a generic dismissive. 2. Uh, you don't get to just call something a "fallacy" because you don't like it (though many others are doing…

My evaluation is that the original usage of the "sealioning" accusation was indeed as a generic dismissive, and its application was dishonest as well; I don't accept the term as a well-founded descriptor of troll behavior in the first place.

If you look at the original comic[1], the sea lion follows the couple around in public, into their house, and even into their bedroom, without permission; that is what makes the sea lion's behavior bad (criminal, in fact). However, "sealioning" in practice refers to people responding to public internet comments with other public internet comments. To treat the latter like the former is dishonest.

Furthermore, the sea lion is objecting to unsubstantiated criticism of his species, which is a form of bigotry. Imagine people searching Twitter for criticism of, say, their race or religion and arguing back at it. I suspect that 90+% of those who complain about "sealioning" would consider that behavior permissible and probably downright virtuous (and would add that the arguing-back need not be scrupulously polite). I'm frankly surprised that "social justice"-associated people managed to decide that objecting to speciesism was worthy of mockery. I think they just really wanted some term of disparagement for their opponents, and happily accepted this one when it appeared without analyzing it too closely.

[1] http://wondermark.com/c/2014-09-19-1062sea.png

Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

#372

Post by Izikiel43 »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #237
pciexpgpu wrote: post #18

This is good. Now states are combating such hesitancy by drawing lottery for vaccinated folks. Like, having this magic, absolutely mind boggling potion that prevents serious illness and death *isn't* already the lottery win of our lifetime?? People in India and elsewhere are dying because of lack of vaccines and here we have educated, first world countries struggle to get their citizens vaccinated. Unfortunately sham…

The "magic" from vaccinations comes from vaccinating most of the population so that the epidemic fizzles out. In that scenario it doesn't matter that much whether you personally are vaccinated or not. An unvaccinated person benefits from herd immunity like a vaccinated person does. From the viewpoint of a healthy young person, the risk/reward ratio of taking a vaccine is bad.

>> From the viewpoint of a healthy young person, the risk/reward ratio of taking a vaccine is bad.

You are right, all those children 60 years ago shouldn't have gotten the polio vaccine, look at them now, being disabled and whatnot, that vaccine was super risky /s

Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

#373

Post by [deleted] »

azinman2 wrote: post #293
dnautics wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we have analogs and precedents we can use. You gotta be careful. Biology is not always "linearly interpolable" like that. > "if someone majority were to go wrong it would go wrong in the first few months, and not 5+ years later". You REALLY can't say that. There are plenty of medical conditions that will not manifest at all until years later.

> You REALLY can't say that. There are plenty of medical conditions that will not manifest at all until years later. But is that true for vaccines? We've had a hundred years of precedent.

[deleted]

Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

#374

Post by kaba0 »

losvedir wrote: post #55

I'm vaccinated but I think it's hindsight bias to say the mRNA vaccines are obviously safe. We had to wait for clinical trials to show that. There has been a great deal of research and development on the delivery of the mRNA, what kind of molecule to wrap it in, for example. Additionally, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but with e.g. the Spanish Flu, the morbidity was not from the flu, per se, but the immune res…

> the Spanish Flu, the morbidity was not from the flu, per se, but the immune response to it

Sorry for being pedantic, but it’s the same as “you don’t die from being shot, but from the resulting blood loss”.

Also, we did absolutely have clinical trials — only some aspect of it was allowed to begin sooner than it otherwise would have due to the urgency. Also, the mRNA tech was in development for a decade now.

Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

#375

Post by [deleted] »

azangru wrote: post #370
DoreenMichele wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been downvote-happy since, roughly, the beginning of the pandemic. And I saw multiple reddits gain a lot of new members during lock down. I haven't seen numbers for HN, but I assume there has been an influx of new people here as well because, wow, is the Eternal September especially bad of late. You are probably asking questions to which we don't have answers. Someone with medical credentials once told me…

> You are probably asking questions to which we don't have answers. I've been pleasantly surprised by the qualifications of people who post on Hacker News. Who knows; perhaps there's a stray immunologist among the visitors. What depresses me quite a bit is that discussions in public forums regarding vaccines never seem to move past a high-school science lesson in physiology and cell biology. Which tends to leave peop…

[deleted]

Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

#376

Post by krastanov »

hashkb wrote: post #345
krastanov wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, really!? In a discussion about how trolls use "I am just asking", you decided that doing the same is a good idea. I am not op, but I have been accused of sealioning in the exact opposite direction: I was defending some curriculum based on ideas from critical race theory. Edit: Well, as the comment below alluded to, I probably missed a pretty obvious piece of sarcasm... This is certainly funny in hindsight.

Sorry it wasn't clear. I tried to be as extreme as possible to avoid being taken seriously. (Although I guess these days that works the other way.)

You are all good! I feel like such a fool :D

Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

#377

Post by iptpus »

carbocation wrote: post #107
swader999 wrote: post #70

Ivermectin and HCQ sure got shut down hard even though recent studies are giving them some credit. If they had been a valid option, emergency use authorisation wouldn't have been granted. I honestly don't know what to think about all of this. I've seen a lot of censorship and stifling of speech. Reading Fauci's emails also makes me hesitate. I think trust in the experts will really take a hit going forward. I did get…

Will you share your sources re: "recent studies giving [HCQ and ivermectin] credit"? I haven't seen anything positive about those drugs in COVID-19 in human patients. For example, the RECOVERY trial showed no benefit (and non-significant numerical harm) for HCQ: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2022926

Regarding ivermectin, this twitter thread does a good job summarizing other studies and links to them all.

https://twitter.com/AbdenurFlavio/status/1398717229366235141

Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

#378

Post by dnautics »

azinman2 wrote: post #293
dnautics wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we have analogs and precedents we can use. You gotta be careful. Biology is not always "linearly interpolable" like that. > "if someone majority were to go wrong it would go wrong in the first few months, and not 5+ years later". You REALLY can't say that. There are plenty of medical conditions that will not manifest at all until years later.

> You REALLY can't say that. There are plenty of medical conditions that will not manifest at all until years later. But is that true for vaccines? We've had a hundred years of precedent.

every molecule has different effects. Change the wrong amino acid residue in insulin and you get something that hyperactivates IGF-1 pathway and causes cancer, which you won't see in the short term. You can't be sure that any given vaccine won't accidentally activate an oncogene, until you do the study, and such a study would necessarily take years, or decades.

Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

#379

Post by kaba0 »

jfkgktjjj wrote: post #213
outworlder wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that's the case, could the proteins coded by the mRNA potentially have kicked off such a response? Why would they? And more specifically, why would they cause lung issues? Because that's the main problem with COVID. The virus like to bind to cells that have a specific receptors, with the vast majority contained in lung tissue. You would expect to see major damage near the injection site if your cytokine storm th…

> If there is a mechanism that will cause side effects on mRNA vaccines, then such mechanism will also be presented in the virus. You're forgetting about the lipids the vaccine mRNA is put into. One big reason it took so long to create mRNA vaccines was finding a suitable lipid mix. They need to have a specific property, they need to be electrically charged in a certain way, and pretty much all lipids with that prope…

While medicine doesn’t work like this, but what is the proposed mechanism from any sort of side effect from the minuscule amount of lipids, probably largely derived from already known substances?

Re: Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines

#380

Post by User23 »

Why is this anymore relevant than Banksy’s opinion on Rust in the Linux kernel?

It’s really annoying how many people think that because they are competent at a limited subset of discrete mathematics that people should care what they think about subjects where they are basically ignorant.

Post reply on HN