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Plans you're not supposed to talk about

dynomight.net

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Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#551

Post by imgabe »

Ensorceled wrote: post #541
imgabe wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people consider 91% to be “truly” protective. Nothing is 100%. The vaccine is more than effective enough to reduce the risk of Covid to the general background risk level of life in general (things like car accidents, slipping in the shower, eating red meat, contracting a flesh eating amoeba from swimming in a lake etc.)

Car crashes kill 30K people a year in the US. COVID has killed 400K in the US in 2021. It's literally 10x worse than cars and 30K from cars is horrific.

How many vaccinated people have been killed by Covid? I’m talking about the risk after you’re vaccinated.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#552

Post by UncleMeat »

ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #527
wolverine876 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable, which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy. The sane approach is to change society incrementally, see what happens, and adjust and learn as you go. > The educated reader may notice that 1+2 is pretty much the sane version of Conservatism. Incremental slow change sounds good if you are reasonably happy with the current situation. If you children are get…

> If you children are getting killed, beaten, and imprisoned by the legal system, and have no access to good education, you might want to move a little quicker. "People are suffering now" is not a good blanket argument for rapid change. First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition. To use your example, last summer many people were arguing for quickly defunding th…

> First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.

I'm not sure this is always true. Or at least, it is important to specify what confidence you demand here. If you demand an infinite regress of dissertations before taking any action, you can perform a denial of service attack on all progress. Almost any policy change can have chaotic and unpredictable effects and demanding flawless prediction of the outcome is demanding the impossible.

And further, "some bad outcome will come from this change" should not be sufficient to stop progress. You cannot make perfect be the enemy of good, and net progress can be achieved even if there are some things that regress with a new policy.

At almost every step of major social progress, agitators were told that they were unruly and moving too fast. In hindsight, can we really say that women's liberation or civil rights or gay rights movements actually moved too quickly? We can even have a historical example of aggression being more effective than respectability politics. Women's rights movements largely failed in the late 19th century and it wasn't until the "disrespectful" suffragette movement ("suffragette" was a derogatory term to contrast with the more respectful activists of the prior generation) that real progress was made.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#553

Post by UncleMeat »

pdonis wrote: post #421
vkou wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, most revolutions of the modern age has resulted in somewhat of a worse outcome for the citizenry. 'Most' revolutions of the modern age were anti-colonial revolutions, in places like India and Africa, in the aftermath of WWII. Life under colonial rule in those places was, as a rule of thumb, not great. We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s[1]. Would you also…

> We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s And the most salient fact about all of those is that they were hardly even revolutions. The Soviet Union stopped supporting its puppet governments in those countries, and the people of those countries, who had been more than ready to quit Soviet rule for quite some time, just did it. No fighting was necessary because practically…

That still sounds like a revolution to me.

If we get to simply exclude all of the successful and largely bloodless ones, then of course revolutions are messy and risky. It is that way by definition!

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#554

Post by BrazzVuvuzela »

ralfd wrote: post #522
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #242

This reminds me of CEO-speak. A CEO cannot speak their true mind or their true assessment of a situation. They can't say "wow we're in trouble here" because then people will jump ship and then the company will be even more in trouble (and the CEO would get sued for breaching Fiduciary Duty) What a CEO says is merely wishful thinking for a goal they want people to follow. They can never speak their true plan. (And of…

Which is one of the reasons I took a double take when Elon Musk cancelled the thanksgiving weekend for SpaceX and said the company has "quite frankly, a disaster" and a "a genuine risk of bankruptcy": https://spaceexplored.com/2021/11/29/spacex-raptor-crisis/ Of course the funny thing was that most shrugged it off as just "Elon being Elon" and discounted his statement as hyperbole.

The green flames coming out of those engines make me think there earnestly is serious trouble with their Raptor engines. It looked like they were burning copper; an engine burning itself up is the big challenge of a full-flow cycle and doesn't bode well for re-usability. If they can't get those engines to work properly, I think Starship is bust. And if Starship is bust, I think SpaceX probably is as well.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#555

Post by nefitty »

nikitaga wrote: post #498
baking wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you have a close relative (parent, sibling or child) that you love very much and don't want them to die or get very sick but they are refusing to get vaccinated. You could either keep pestering them about getting the shot, tell them they are stupid for not getting the shot, etc. Or you could sit down with them and listen carefully to their reasons and talk to them about why you decided to get the vaccinated.…

I don't need to imagine. You sit them down and you learn that they inhabit a completely different reality from your own. You try to describe your reality, and they dismiss it because it disagrees with their "reality". You try to anchor them in factual reality by pointing to people you both know who died of covid, but not before infecting others... who then also died of covid, etc., but they always have a way to dismi…

I had come to accept my brother's COVID denial after this loop played out a few times. Now it looks like the world is going for another spin, and sure enough, the arguments rev up again.

Particularly, Rogan interviewing the quack Peter McCullough set my brother off again. I sent him info on McCullough's membership in AAPS[1][2], which seems to be made up of fringe pseudoscience-enamored doctors. That only changed the goalpost, "It's not about him dude, x and y and z and blah blah".

I find it suspect when my views align with abhorrent people, at the very least giving me a signal to reconsider my conclusions.

I'm sorry for the anecdotal tangent, but your comment fit perfectly with what I'm going through. I am doubly frustrated that I can't seem to muster the intellectual power to figure out how to get him to at least reconsider his viewpoints. I WANT TO FIGURE THIS PROBLEM OUT!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_A._McCullough [2] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic...

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#556

Post by imgabe »

adrianN wrote: post #544
imgabe wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t know what happened in the alternate universe where there were no seatbelt laws. Maybe there are people here who died because they stubbornly refused to ever wear a seatbelt because they had taken a public stance against seatbelts and made not wearing a seatbelt into a noble fight against tyranny. Maybe in the other universe they’re still alive because they were able to come around and change their mind witho…

Are you seriously arguing that without seatbelt laws more people would've been saved by seatbelts?

Have you never heard of the saying “you catch more flies with honey”?

Is the law really the driving force behind why most people wear seatbelts? I don’t think so.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#557

Post by raxxorrax »

noisy_boy wrote: post #548
raxxorrax wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enough ICU (too late when you get there anyway) is a political problem. In my country they reduced it with state funding (you got money for reducing beds, active monetary incentives) and now they ponder about vaccination mandates. This is infantile blaming of others in my opinion. Worse, you don't even hold those that are really responsible to account. So my sympathy if you fail to get an ICU is limited.

It is not practical to have hospitals to cater to extreme spikes - it takes trained doctors, nurses, infrastructure to run all which is in limited supply. Further, even if that can be managed, during normal periods, all that excess capacity wouldn't maintain itself. You need a balance of additional capacity and responsible behaviour supported by science/medicine/evidence. Ignoring that is infantile.

True, but that was a policy in the last summer and now non-vaccinated people are blamed. This does not match.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#558

Post by Veelox »

willob33 wrote: post #80
tshaddox wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that causing 1% of the group's population to die might not weaken the group and in fact might make the group stronger.

He’s effectively describing Trump’s leaked plan to let covid ravage blue urban areas before the election, but here framing it as a liberal plot as a narrative device Maybe he’s a Republican astroturfer Someone just learned the root language of real human economics taught to us as abstractions through story and pie chart.

>Trump's leaked plan

Can I get a source?

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#559

Post by throwaway0a5e »

candiodari wrote: post #537
GhettoComputers wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pigs make lots of manure, lbs of it.

If you think pigs are bad with the environment, watch until you see the environmental damage that goats do. They literally graze everything to the ground. They fatally wound most trees. They leave behind desert.

Pigs (especially older breeds) do basically the same thing and will also go through the extra step of finding and eating roots.

There's a reason a pen containing goats is typically thought of as a pasture whereas a pen containing pigs is generally thought of as a mud pit.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#560

Post by jvanderbot »

UnFleshedOne wrote: post #51
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

The underlying issue, and one that bugs the hell out of me, is Policy vs Truth. You can say true things all day, and convince nobody. You can enact policy based completely on Truth (e.g., Trust the Science), and completely fail. People don't care about Truth, they care about what changes they need to make, and who is asking them to make them. Good policy is only partially based on truth, it's more based on easy imple…

While practical and maybe inevitable, this approach will alienate exactly the kind of people you want on your side if you want to _actually_ reach your goal and course correct when needed. Instead you will attract people who will happily pretend to be on the right path and will keep performing rain dances on titanic. What you propose can work if it is a technocratic conspiracy where people who know what's going on ma…

It's not all or nothing. Good policy accomplishes the goal and attracts masses.

For whatever quality metric you assign to a voter, you can't get the majority without including some of those below the median.

In large populations, for example, 'knowledgeable' implies you need to convince people who know less than average as well as the most knowledgeable. And the average is real, real low on specific knowledge about complicated issues.

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