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What I Heard from Trump Supporters

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: What I Heard from Trump Supporters

#881

Post by apr »

intended wrote: post #498
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gets my goat is the kind of shouting down I get whenever I take any contrarian stance on non-GMO foods, or God forbid, vaccination. I know that vaccines are critical and that there is nothing wrong with them. But to not even admit the possibility that there might be a link between vaccines and some health problems is, to me, very anti-science. My understanding for science has always been to question all assumpti…

What is there to debate on vaccines? The mechanism are known, I've studied it in basic biology classes, and all doctors have studied it in detail - you can too. The process by which our body deals with a vaccine is based on the same processes it uses to deal with any invader (and then building a repository of responses to handle such cases in future). If you don't have the time to look into it yourself, you can consi…

Saying that the mechanisms are known is a major case of hubris. For example, it is still not known exactly how aluminum salts, used as adjuvants in vaccines, work. Many vaccines were developed empirically, and researchers struggle to replicate the success for other diseases. If the mechanisms, as you say, were fully known, we would already have conquered cancer.

Here is an interesting example. In the 60s a vaccine against chlamydia was developed and then tested in one of "developing" countries. Vaccinated people showed high titers of antibodies in their blood (this is, by the way, how efficacy of vaccines is judged, not by the actual clinical studies, read the inserts, you'd be surprised). Despite the high titers vaccinated people were much more likely to get the disease and the course of the disease was more severe. The vaccine was pulled, and the reason for the failure was not known at the time.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews-science/why-1960s-ch...

If you follow the links in that article you will see how the process of how the body deals with a vaccine is not necessarily the same as the process of dealing with the disease directly.

Human immune system is complicated and is not fully understood. Infant immune system differs from the one of the adults, which further complicates the matters. Saying that the science there is settled is just not true.

Re: What I Heard from Trump Supporters

#882

Post by dpark »

apr wrote: post #880
dpark wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Understanding infectious diseases and taking proper personal hygiene measures along with having clean drinking water and plumbing/sewage had much more to do with the decline in infectious diseases than vaccines ever did. The effectiveness of vaccines is highly overstated. Clean water keeps you from getting bacterial dysentery. It doesn't do much to stop you from getting polio. Vaccination and herd immunity are what…

Polio is transmitted fecal to mouth, so proper hygiene is absolutely going to prevent you from getting polio. As for the effectiveness, it is absolutely must be questioned, and here is a case in point: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lawrence-solomon/merck-whistleb...

> Polio is transmitted fecal to mouth, so proper hygiene is absolutely going to prevent you from getting polio.

Fair enough, but "In the U.S, following a mass immunization campaign promoted by the March of Dimes, the annual number of polio cases fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957. By 1961 only 161 cases were recorded in the United States."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Jonas_Salk

This isn't a result of a major hygiene change. So far as I know, hygiene in the US did not drastically change in this time period, while polio cases dropped by orders of magnitude. This is the result of consistent and systematic vaccination.

> As for the effectiveness, it is absolutely must be questioned, and here is a case in point

This is very interesting and very relevant to whether specific vaccines are effective. It does not in any way dispute that in general vaccines can be extremely effective.

For the record, I'm totally in favor anyone putting forth evidence that certain vaccines are ineffective, or dangerous, or even cause autism. So long as there's actual evidence to discuss and debate.

Re: What I Heard from Trump Supporters

#883

Post by apr »

dpark wrote: post #882
apr wrote: post #880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polio is transmitted fecal to mouth, so proper hygiene is absolutely going to prevent you from getting polio. As for the effectiveness, it is absolutely must be questioned, and here is a case in point: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lawrence-solomon/merck-whistleb...

> Polio is transmitted fecal to mouth, so proper hygiene is absolutely going to prevent you from getting polio. Fair enough, but "In the U.S, following a mass immunization campaign promoted by the March of Dimes, the annual number of polio cases fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957. By 1961 only 161 cases were recorded in the United States." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Jonas_Salk This isn't a res…

The history of eradicating polio was clouded by redefinition of what was considered a polio case not once but twice. Early in the day any case of acute flaccid myelitis was considered polio. You have to realize that poliovirus is just one of a few dozen of enteroviruses that can cause similar effects.

Here is a recent case that could have been labeled polio just a few decades ago: http://abc7chicago.com/health/6-year-old-boys-death-linked-t...

I cannot find stats right now but I saw numbers of AFM in India where true polio cases keep going down YoY but the overall numbers of AFM have recently skyrocketed.

Also let's keep things in perspective. The absolute number of people getting infected by polio or other enteroviruses do not actually show any symptoms. It is quite rare for the virus to invade the nervous system which leads to the symptoms we all fear.

Re: What I Heard from Trump Supporters

#884

Post by dpark »

apr wrote: post #883
dpark wrote: post #882

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Polio is transmitted fecal to mouth, so proper hygiene is absolutely going to prevent you from getting polio. Fair enough, but "In the U.S, following a mass immunization campaign promoted by the March of Dimes, the annual number of polio cases fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957. By 1961 only 161 cases were recorded in the United States." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Jonas_Salk This isn't a res…

The history of eradicating polio was clouded by redefinition of what was considered a polio case not once but twice. Early in the day any case of acute flaccid myelitis was considered polio. You have to realize that poliovirus is just one of a few dozen of enteroviruses that can cause similar effects. Here is a recent case that could have been labeled polio just a few decades ago: http://abc7chicago.com/health/6-year…

Are you simultaneously arguing that the percentage of people who get the "worst scenario" polio is very low and that the number of miscategorized "worst scenario" polio cases is drastically skewing the numbers? It cannot be both. If the percentage of polio infections that cause the "worst case" is low (and it is) then miscategorizing similar "worst cases" from other diseases will not significantly skew the number of total detected polio cases.

Re: What I Heard from Trump Supporters

#885

Post by tjalfi »

tylerwhipple wrote: post #199
austenallred wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved to San Francisco from a rural town, and I would feel 10x more comfortable sharing my liberal viewpoints in a small, deeply-red town than I would insinuating something anything less than 100% left-leaning at work here. People disagree in small town Utah, and it would be uncomfortable. In San Francisco you're ostracized. It even makes me nervous to leave my name attached to a comment like this, knowing that my…

I went from Salt Lake City to San Francisco as well. I have always been quite liberal on issues and it had never been a problem, but when discussing issues in SF I felt I had to be very careful with what I supported. I always felt my friendships/employment was threatened if I disagreed. I had a good friend/startup founder once say anyone who supported Trump deserved to be fired and blacklisted.

Your friend should bear in mind that political affiliation is a protected class in California (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employment...).

Re: What I Heard from Trump Supporters

#886

Post by apr »

dpark wrote: post #884
apr wrote: post #883

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of eradicating polio was clouded by redefinition of what was considered a polio case not once but twice. Early in the day any case of acute flaccid myelitis was considered polio. You have to realize that poliovirus is just one of a few dozen of enteroviruses that can cause similar effects. Here is a recent case that could have been labeled polio just a few decades ago: http://abc7chicago.com/health/6-year…

Are you simultaneously arguing that the percentage of people who get the "worst scenario" polio is very low and that the number of miscategorized "worst scenario" polio cases is drastically skewing the numbers? It cannot be both. If the percentage of polio infections that cause the "worst case" is low (and it is) then miscategorizing similar "worst cases" from other diseases will not significantly skew the number of…

Why it cannot be both? I agree that me bringing in the argument that the number of "worst case" cases is low compared to the number of people that contract the virus was outside the topic of the discussion. I just obliquely wanted to address the issue that polio is often brought up as an absolutely devastating and dangerous disease, and yet generally speaking it is not so.

Here is a curious link to an article from 1961 with memories still fresh from the polio outbreaks of the middle of the 20th century and shortly after the polio vaccines were introduced.

Note the reserved tone which is so at odds with the current day thinking about the success of the polio vaccine. The whole article is worth a read, I will just provide a quote here that is pertinent to our discussion.

"Evaluating the true effectiveness of the Salk vaccine and the new oral vaccines has been difficult for several reasons. Polio is a relatovely rare disease in the United States. Because so few persons get it in its paralyzing form, success of an immunizing agent is hard to determine. The definition of polio also has changed in the last six or seven years. Several diseases which were often diagnosed as polio are now classified as aseptic meningitis or illnesses caused by one of the Coxsackie or Echo viruses. The number of polio cases in 1961 cannot accurately be compared with those in, say 1952, because the criteria for diagnoses have changed."

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1961/03/05/page/62/articl...

Re: What I Heard from Trump Supporters

#887

Post by Arizhel »

macintux wrote: post #871
Arizhel wrote: post #869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a proud day for our country back in November when we had these two "fine" people running against each other for the highest office in the land. Honestly, if Hillary was the best we could do for an opposing candidate, then maybe we deserve Trump, if not someone much worse.

The rest of the world didn't deserve Trump.

The rest of the world doesn't have Trump; only Americans do. The rest of the world is free to dis-entangle their economies from America's if they wish. Honestly, I feel the rest of the industrialized world has been too complacent for too long, letting America take the lead on everything from military defense (against the likes of Russia) to medical research to space exploration, and then whining when America doesn't do as well as they think it should. Instead of whining about how America does a terrible job with manned space exploration and hasn't been back to the Moon in decades, why don't they pool their resources and send their own manned missions there and build a Moon base or something? (Asteroid capture and mining would be a great idea with actual commercial potential.) The EU alone has over 500M people, and all of Europe has 743M according to a quick Google search. Japan has 127M people. The US only has 310M. So Europe+Japan combined have almost 3x as many people as the US. Toss Canada and Australia/NZ in there and the US is a clear minority. Instead of whining about the US's failings, everyone else needs to work harder on cooperating with each other and surpassing the US, instead of growing increasingly irrelevant in comparison to Russia and China.

Re: What I Heard from Trump Supporters

#888

Post by gambiting »

leesalminen wrote: post #420
cr0sh wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deportation probably wouldn't be such a problem if they weren't also deporting legal residents along with the "illegal" ones. Yes - this happens. We still don't know how many Sherriff Joe and other officials in Arizona deported. It was basically a program here of "if you're brown enough, don't speak enough english, and can't produce any docs on the spot" you had a good chance of being rounded up, sent to an ICE facil…

Serious question: why would an American citizen choose to not learn the national language? Doesn't that disadvantage you severely in life?

For the same reason why you have legitimate Canadian citizens who don't speak any English. If they grew up in part of the country that speaks mostly French, they will only speak French and no English. US has huge pockets of people speaking only Spanish and other languages, so it's not surprising that you have people who don't speak English.

Re: What I Heard from Trump Supporters

#889

Post by spinlock »

SnowFace wrote: post #862
spinlock wrote: post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Trump said the judge was not qualified because of his race not affiliations. This is ex-post-facto reasoning and it's intellectually dishonest. 2. It's also fake news: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/06/... I see comments like yours and want to give up on dialogue. Why should I play into your game?

1. Trump defended is statements in follow-ups. It's not post-facto reasoning. The media jumped immediately to racism though, just like the other day when they claimed Trump lied about a supposed Sweden terrorist attack, when he was talking about a TV segment. Real journalists would state the facts instead of narrativizing and follow-up to ask what he means. 2. I strongly encourage you question your own beliefs a litt…

I'll believe Trump is brining back coal mining jobs before I believe the he is the victim in this Trump University embarrassment.

Re: What I Heard from Trump Supporters

#890

Post by eli_gottlieb »

sgift wrote: post #804
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because it's trying to equate San Francisco liberals venting about Trump supporters, with the legal oppression of women and minorities with the full backing of the state. A level of false equivalency that is terrifying for people who are slowly realising that a large number of Trump supporters have lost all touch with reality. "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities" --…

> Trump actually said on television that Obama actively helped the Orlando shooting. And people in this thread are like "well, I like his tax policies" and "people are so rude to supporters of Fascism, that's the real fascism!". The question I ask myself is where does being "rude" end and oppression of your opposition start. I'm thinking about this in the broader context of multiple elections happening here in Europe…

>The question I ask myself is where does being "rude" end and oppression of your opposition start.

With state power and ownership of material resources, duh. Being a dick to someone isn't oppression. Making them homeless is oppression. Rounding them up and putting them into a camp is oppression. Shooting them is oppression.

Do people not realize that these things happen today?

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