Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.
> seems to work very well for a potentially lethal disease
not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
> not lethal for all age groups, we already knew it well before the vaccine was introduced. People may have short memories, the vaccine came almost a year after the disease was out, and we knew very well by then that it did not kill everyone, broadly.
And the vaccine wasn't trialed or rolled out initially for all age groups. One major reason was because double-blind trials were done first.
This one was was 18-59: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04582344 with two cohorts: "The first cohort will be healthcare workers in the high risk group (K-1) and the second cohort will be people at normal risk (K-2)"
If you look at case rates, hospitalization load, and death rates for summer/fall/winter 2020 pre-vaccine, and compare to the load on the system in summer-2021 and later when people were far more social and active, the economy was starting to recover, then the efficacy of the vaccine was pretty obvious in letting people get out of lockdown without killing hugely more people and overwhelming the healthcare system. And it was tested pre-rollout in double-blind fashion and rolled out in a phased way to the most needy groups first, with monitoring and study of those groups.
What, concretely, are you proposing should have been done differently?
Did you even follow the link provided? It leads directly to an informed consent page for the study, which was voluntary. You're probably thinking about what happened _after_ these studies found the vaccine to be safe and effective. If you're a doctor or a nurse, you work in a special environment, and if you are turning down a safe and effective vaccine, you are putting your patients at risk. It means that you are unqualified for your job, so yes, you should be fired.
In the US at least, most people are employed "at will" [1], which means that you can be fired for reasons far less egregious than actually putting your patients at risk. Most of the libertarian types here cheer firings for lots of reasons, but for some reason being fired for actually being a health risk is not one of those things. That just makes no sense.
Besides, homeopathy has been studied for ages with tons and tons of quality studies.
Did it get rid of all the homeopathic quackery?
They will always have an excuse. If all else fails it'll just be a vague generic "oh yeah, it's just something deeper your science can't measure yet" or something along those lines. The Queen was an amateur hand-waver in comparison.
Never mind it was never very likely to work in the first place, on account of defying basic logic on several levels: like cures like, the whole water memory business, the more you dilute the stronger it becomes – nothing about this makes any sense.
I miss the days when worry about the adverse effects of homeopathy was the top concern...
most of the critics of this particular vaccine are the ones that took it. either the people who got covid anyway or were injured by it.
it was incredibly destructive for trust in the medical establishment to oversell / mandate it and market aggressively as "safe and effective". while most vaccine risks are in the 10s per 100k or 1M, nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.
nearly everybody observed that you still get and spread covid anyway. that is disconnected from the aggressive messaging from the CDC and the fear and shame campaign from the last US administration.
criticism of a specific vaccine or policy does not make someone an anti-vaxxer that moves goalposts. the establishment is responsible for the skepticism it engendered against itself by its hubris
I took it in 2020, and have taken booster shots. I got COVID... This year. I felt like shit for two weeks, was fatigured for a month, and had a lingering cough for two.
Nobody's promised them that they won't get COVID after taking it. What is promised is that on the whole, they'd be less likely to get sick, get milder symptoms if they do get sick, and be less likely to require hospitalization or a mortician if those milder symptoms are still serious.
It was and is safe and effective. You're doing exactly what I'm talking about - moving the goalposts.
If you think they need to be moved some more, I'll point out that the vaccine didn't come with a free pony, either, and that airbags and seatbelts kill ~50 people/year, and that you might still get ran over by a bus even if you look both ways before crossing the street.
Perhaps any statement in that context should be assumed to be oversimplified; but I don't think I can fault someone for taking words to mean what they literally say. The COVID vaccines look great so far on balance, but they absolutely were oversold to the public. We'll pay the price in public confidence for at least a generation.
Could you give the whole paragraph, and not just the last sentence in it?
Ah, heck, I'll do the work of pasting it in.
> But again, one last thing. I — we don’t talk enough to you about this, I don’t think. One last thing that’s really important is: We’re not in a position where we think that any virus — including the Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more deadly in terms of non — unvaccinated people — the vi- — the various shots that people are getting now cover that. They’re — you’re okay. You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations. -Biden
I'm not sure why out of all that Trump-lite-contradictory rambling (and the massive amounts of other words and ink spilled by both the 2020[1] and the 2021 administrations on this subject), that sentence is the singular, unqualified, pinky-swear blood-pact promise that you think the medical community made to the public regarding the vaccine.
---
As for Walensky:
> Three days later, on April 1, a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments, telling The New York Times “Dr. Walensky spoke broadly during this interview” adding that “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get Covid-19. The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others. We are continuing to evaluate the evidence.”
If you're only going to listen to the first thing that's said on a subject, and ignore everything that follows, I don't think that sort of approach will serve you very well. For one thing, it'll probably mean that you'll think that people who correct themselves are idiots.
---
[1] Which, if I may remind you, developed, recommended, and rolled out the vaccine and had nothing to do with Biden.
I'm not sure what the rest of the paragraph adds here? Nothing in that qualifies or contradicts the absolute that I quoted. Are you just saying that the statement was so generally inarticulate that any reasonable person should have ignored it completely? That was true here, but that's not great for public confidence either.
I'm aware that the scientific literature told a more nuanced and accurate story, but only a tiny fraction of the population have the skills and time to study that. I don't think you can fault people for trusting their elected leaders; and if you do, then who are you expecting them to trust next time?
> a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments
So after widespread criticism by actual scientists, she didn't even correct herself in her own voice, instead sending an unnamed spokesperson to smooth it over without explicitly acknowledging error. I can't believe you don't see how the damage is done.
In a March 29 2021, MSNBC interview, Rochelle Walensky stated publicly that CDC data suggested "vaccinated people do not carry the virus" and "don't get sick". a knowingly false statement at the time and at best an inexcusable error from the head of that agency.
I also had covid this year, zero boosters, had a mild fever and sniffle for two days. not sure what you are demonstrating with this anecdote. or what goalposts you think I moved. the "milder symptom" stuff all came long after it was obvious that the covid shots were not doing what had been promised. that is what I would call moving the goalposts
“nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.”
This is a straight up lie - because “adverse reaction” does not mean “I felt achy for a couple days and maybe had a little fever,” it’s actually a VERY specific term.
But you are trying to peddle falsehoods.
Most people know nobody who “had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots”
respectfully it is not a lie, and more than a half a dozen people I know personally lost function of their hands, legs, were hospitalized with myocarditis, had local paralysis/palsy. I personally lost the use of my hand for two months and it took two more years to recover.
and when people like me say things like this, inevitably someone like you comes along to tell them they are dangerous for saying it out loud. In fact, the government was actively censoring people from being able to express this on social media.
I did read the book, and the takeaway is that causal disentaglement is hard and a high bar, with even the causal link between cigarette smoking an cancer hard to "prove" until recently
The case fatality ratio for measles infected children in high-income countries is also low. Nonetheless, we vaccinate children for this infectious disease because morbidity is also bad.
The Covid deaths were measured in thousands before they could find a single individual under 18 yrs old who died from it. The only reason to vaccinate kids was to try to prevent them from spreading it to adults. Right from the beginning (eg. With the cruise ship that was infected), it was extremely obvious that the main factor in survivability was age. The younger you were, the safer it was. Weight was also very important but we learned that later
Considering there have been over 7 million deaths directly from covid, saying "covid deaths measured in the thousands before X" is another way of saying "X happened right at the beginning of covid".
Plus, there's a big difference between "young people tend to have less risk of death" and "young people have a 0% chance of death" like the person I replied to claimed.
No, we also vaccinate children to prevent non-fatal illness, which is a reasonable choice to make if adverse effects of the vaccine are very small (they are). People get flu shots annually for this same reason.
Edit: I would also add that parents regularly make choices for their children that involve larger amounts of risk.
It’s also weird to think that if there is extraterrestrial contact, it will most definitely happen in the specific land mass known as the United States and only the US government will be collecting said technology and hiding it. Out of the entire planet, contact is possible only in the USA.
I'm not sure if you're jabbing at the concept of American supremacy, or Hinton's idea, or my position. I don't live in the USA right now, but I am happy to participate in conversation. That's why I am here.
Well function composition f(g(x)) is not the same as g(f(x)) and when you represent f and g as matrices relative to some suitable set of basis functions then obviously AB and BA should be different. If the multiplication was defined any different, that wouldn’t work.
The way that I used to put this was, "If I put on my shoes before my socks, I'll get a different result than if it I put on my socks before my shoes. Order of operations matters."
There were similar such comments during Covid where people were saddened that people were still debating whether it was a lab-leak or not. Dogmatism, on which ever side, unless maybe in a field like mathematics which is entirely deductive, is not good.
Tell me you've never used Statsig without telling me you've never used Statsig. It's an online controlled experiment platform. You know like when you want to figure out if a blue button gets more clicks than a red button or a green button, and you want to avoid the situation of some tech-bro calculating the average clicks on all 3 groups and going "this one is higher, so it must be better" because they have zero background in statistics and don't know how to correct for multiple comparisons or what power analysis is, etc.
Yes yes, but all you've done is rephrase what he said, added some additional reality to it on top, but underneath at the core the true reality is the same OP.
You can't determine someone's IQ based on their race, you need to give them an IQ test to do that, thus the suggestion that we prejudge people based on their race is seen as racist.
You might feel that the racism is scientifically justified, but that belief is controversial.
All the controversy I have seen come from people, who think that even talking about possible differences between groups of people is racist, sexist, whathaveyou.
Is it really? I'm sure those people exist, but obviously that's not the case in this thread, so I don't know what to tell you. It's also true that genuine racists and sexists are definitionally motivated by prejudice based on group differences, so a discussion without paying nuance to that reality is begging for controversy.
I read the book Bell Curve years ago, but I remember the analysis being that the found statistically significant differences between race and IQ. The authors argued that individual differences in IQ within a population are strongly influenced by genetics (heritability estimates around 40–80%). They emphasized that this doesn’t mean IQ is fixed, but that genes play a large role in explaining why individuals differ. Their ultimate policy argument was less about race per se, and more about what society can realistically do. They argued that large-scale social programs (e.g., Head Start, income redistribution, affirmative action) had limited power to reduce cognitive inequality or close gaps, because much of IQ variation was resistant to environmental manipulation. On the genetic vs. environmental debate about group differences, their ultimate claim was: we don’t know, but genetics might contribute, and pretending otherwise could be harmful to honest policy discussion.
But really, if you can't go about doing more studies on race and IQ, we'll never really know. It's a valid and legitimate scientific question
This is an extremely studied question, and The Bell Curve operates in the phlogiston era of this science. The idea that this is a forbidden topic only whispered about in the academy is an Internet myth.
Most of the reason you don't hear about current research into behavioral genetics is that a, uh, very particular excitable subset of Internet commenters are actually interested in this research, and the research results aren't coming out the way they want them to.
(You can get an isomorphic answer substituting psychometrics for behavioral genetics; this is the "twin studies" line of research that Richard Herrnstein relied on in the book, and it too is actively studied, but not talked about because the answers don't come out the way --- let's call them "Herrnstein fans" --- want them to).
The wokeistic science-denying has taken some steps back lately, but I am basing my observation on 20+ years of unbased and delusional attacks I have been witnessing. If you are interested you can take a deep dive into the articles/opinions/statements that were made against those books/authors immediately after books were released and for decades after. If you want, I can give you a few helpful/analytical youtube videos about the subject.
I use Python 90% of my day and I can't say I like it or hate it or care about it at all. I use it because it has all the libraries I need, and LLMs seem to know it pretty well too. It's a great language for people that don't actually care about programming languages and just want to get stuff done.
But this just gives the definition of the distribution. No intuition about where it might have come from, it just appears magically out of thin air and shows some properties it has in the limit.
reply