You may have meant this lightly, but it's a completely thorough analysis.
Coming at it from a reductionist viewpoint, the other end of what you're doing, it strikes me that this study and the use being made of it is simply pure projection. Good old-fashioned "no, you."
In the reasoning for your brevity, you've hit on something (I imagine there's a name for it, but I don't know what it is) that math-types intuit easily. Wittgenstein wrote "The world [the universe] is everything that is the case." An obvious tautology, but one that needs saying.
Any idiot or charlatan can make up anything about anything. What can be said that isn't true is literally an infinite set. And we unfortunately seem to spend an inordinate amount of time rebutting them. If these things were merely errors, it wouldn't be a big deal because we are all capable of errors. But I get the disconcerting feeling that a large quantity of these things aren't honest errors and seem designed to keep us spinning our wheels while bigger lies goes unobserved, or at least unrebutted.
Holly I'm an English major grad and I'm continually astounded that my gut-instinct keeps getting proven correct about a wide variety of Covidian policy and declarations. It should not be the case that my observations keep winning the coin toss against the CDC. I don't even know how to do the math to come up with how unlikely that should be.
But to me, it's obvious from everything I've read about important concepts in western medicine that you can't force interventions, and you can't give people interventions without informing them about the risks, and if you don't know the risks (because you didn't actually adequately study them) then giving an intervention is malpractice, EVEN if it turns out to be a medically justifiable intervention in retrospect.
We have a path for novel, experimental treatments, and part of those treatments is the information that efficacy and safety are unknown, this is a roll of the dice, etc.
I'm trying to think of a pithy, lighthearted way to say that you had me at paragraph one but i just can't muster the energy to read any more, without offending the effort that you probably put into this. I hope, guess, nay bet, that it wasn't _that_ much effort :)
Looking back on my decision to get vaccinated, I believe it was one of the most unnuanced, irrationally rigid decisions I've ever made. And that includes toddler-age choices like throwing a tantrum in public. I was so miserable wearing the goddamned mask everywhere (especially at work) that I would have done damn near anything to not have to wear it anymore. With nothing but hope, I took a novel medical treatment, with less understanding than I really should have had, for a disease I was at minimal risk for. The whole time just hoping my administrators would let me take off the fucking mask while I was teaching. They didn't. It was completely illogical to expect they would. I repeatedly look back on those choices and wish I would have more nuance in my thinking and clung a little less rigidly to the hope that things would go back to normal.
I really liked this one. And: Want to respond to "Meta-cognition (the ability to accurately think about your own thinking)" -- languages (and language-groups) don't necessarily map neatly one to another, and Semitic languages (Swahili, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) have an "intensive" form of something one not only does but causes oneself to do -- these verbs begin with the "M" consonant. (The honest self-examination of prayer. which is like checking oneself all over for ticks after camping, is one example; poetizing, with its intensive scrutiny of scrutiny itself, and what a person who does that is called, similarly is another). I don't see that in English, but now that you mention it, maybe in some cultures something like that is more of a thing. Is that what you had meant? I may be too much in that to be able to accurately know.
I bet if the stance had been one that the test-designers had liked and even admired, "rigid" would have been re-phrased as something like "strong" or "principled" or whatever they are calling much more irrational stances than that, these days.
Feb 28, 2023·edited Feb 28, 2023Liked by Holly MathNerd
I am vaccinated and once boosted. I got the shots mostly so I could make international trips that would otherwise be impossible but which I needed to do. I decided that it was almost completely certain that the vaccine would not harm me but that the financial impact to me of not travelling would harm me. As it turned out being vaccinated gave me a ton of additional financial incentives (here in Japan) which helped even more but that was mostly serendipitous
This choice had absolutely nothing to do with whether I thought the wuflu would harm me (I'm positive that it would not beyond perhaps a day of fever or so) nor whether I had had the wuflu or not (I'm pretty sure not).
However in general my opinion of the vax is like Holly's - if you are old and/or have comorbidities then you should take it and if neither then probably not. With a tweak that I think that if you definitely had the wuflu you should not have bothered with the vax.
My original view was that I wanted to have the Astra Zeneca vax because that (and the J&J) was based on science that I mostly understood and was an evolutionary approach to new vax genetech. For some reason the AZ people and/or regulators were also much more clear about side-effects of those vaccinated with it and therefore they lost mindshare to the mRNA vaccines where the side-effects were not so clearly reported. So far as I can tell the AZ side-effects are no worse than the Pfizer or Moderna ones but the reporting of vaccine issues with the mRNA vaccines has been so poor and now politicized that I cannot be sure.
The one thing that this has absolutely done is completely and utterly reduced my personal trust in "Big Pharma" and the various national regulators of it. Just like Holly said somewhere earlier about wanting an older white male doctor, I want older drugs. Short of some kind of otherwise untreatable fatal condition I will not take recent treatments because I no longer trust that their safety trials are actually valid
Yes I'm in favour of a Covid vaccine. When one is created, I'll consider it. The stuff peddled by Pfizer is not a vaccine. Followers of Bret and Heather will already know this and why it is so.
Okay, I had Covid, I'm "vaccinated" more than the non-vaccines they are fixated on. Getting Covid is functionally the same as getting vaccinated or pfizerjabbed. Come at me with questions like this stupid "study" and I'll game you for England.
I've seen better designed studies done by 1st Semester freshmen!
When this reared its ugly and the powers-that- be and the sheeple started losing it, I'd already gone back to the 'flu pandemics of 1918 and 1957 to scope the possible range of threat and concluded if you didn't lose it and panic, there wasn't one.
Not one that was going to do anything like the End of the World levels of damage the loonies were hawking.
We were a century and fifty years on in medicine from the last two dangerous outbreaks of respiratory disease and SARS-CoV-1 had turned out to be a nothing-burger when met sensibly. It was that dangerous no one ever got off their arse to create a vaccine for it in eighteen years. The loonies had been screaming about the sky falling all my life and sod-all came of their daft prophecies. See 'Scared to Death' for a prolonged bout of shaking of the head.
We already knew viruses had a hard-time with sunshine and it quickly proved this one was no different; in fact it was peculiarly eight times more fragile. The liner Lusitania, built pre-WW1 could exchange all the air in the ship NINE TIMES OVER in an hour. The country with the most air-conditioning in the world and situated in sunlit latitudes was going ape-shit bonkers about something the sun fixed outdoors and we'd had a technological fix for indoors for over a century?
"White riot, we wanna riot, we wanna riot of our own" seemed to be a cast-iron prophylactic - no sunlight; all packed together marching; and still no super-spreaders, see?
I was watching a doc following the deployment straddling this time of the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth last Sunday. This is in the middle of the ocean and is fully NBC equipped. The sailors are running round in cloth masks! FFS!!!
I simply don't know why anyone fell for the Faucist garbage in the first place. Even if it was what they said it was; as lethal as 1918 even; there was no need to go deep-end bonkers about it. Our grandparents took '57 in stride. I bet this is the first most of you have heard of that 'flu. It was dangerous; it was about on a par with this in lethality; and no one has even heard of it!
I haven't read the piece I just wanted to re-iterate that I love your small-font but bold-face disclaimers. Obviously we're different individuals but I think I understand exactly why you do them, particularly the low-key frustration that seems to inform some of them :D
Nailed it... from a fellow non-vaccinated and knowing what I know.. extremely grateful for that.
You may have meant this lightly, but it's a completely thorough analysis.
Coming at it from a reductionist viewpoint, the other end of what you're doing, it strikes me that this study and the use being made of it is simply pure projection. Good old-fashioned "no, you."
In the reasoning for your brevity, you've hit on something (I imagine there's a name for it, but I don't know what it is) that math-types intuit easily. Wittgenstein wrote "The world [the universe] is everything that is the case." An obvious tautology, but one that needs saying.
Any idiot or charlatan can make up anything about anything. What can be said that isn't true is literally an infinite set. And we unfortunately seem to spend an inordinate amount of time rebutting them. If these things were merely errors, it wouldn't be a big deal because we are all capable of errors. But I get the disconcerting feeling that a large quantity of these things aren't honest errors and seem designed to keep us spinning our wheels while bigger lies goes unobserved, or at least unrebutted.
Holly I'm an English major grad and I'm continually astounded that my gut-instinct keeps getting proven correct about a wide variety of Covidian policy and declarations. It should not be the case that my observations keep winning the coin toss against the CDC. I don't even know how to do the math to come up with how unlikely that should be.
But to me, it's obvious from everything I've read about important concepts in western medicine that you can't force interventions, and you can't give people interventions without informing them about the risks, and if you don't know the risks (because you didn't actually adequately study them) then giving an intervention is malpractice, EVEN if it turns out to be a medically justifiable intervention in retrospect.
We have a path for novel, experimental treatments, and part of those treatments is the information that efficacy and safety are unknown, this is a roll of the dice, etc.
I'm trying to think of a pithy, lighthearted way to say that you had me at paragraph one but i just can't muster the energy to read any more, without offending the effort that you probably put into this. I hope, guess, nay bet, that it wasn't _that_ much effort :)
Looking back on my decision to get vaccinated, I believe it was one of the most unnuanced, irrationally rigid decisions I've ever made. And that includes toddler-age choices like throwing a tantrum in public. I was so miserable wearing the goddamned mask everywhere (especially at work) that I would have done damn near anything to not have to wear it anymore. With nothing but hope, I took a novel medical treatment, with less understanding than I really should have had, for a disease I was at minimal risk for. The whole time just hoping my administrators would let me take off the fucking mask while I was teaching. They didn't. It was completely illogical to expect they would. I repeatedly look back on those choices and wish I would have more nuance in my thinking and clung a little less rigidly to the hope that things would go back to normal.
I really liked this one. And: Want to respond to "Meta-cognition (the ability to accurately think about your own thinking)" -- languages (and language-groups) don't necessarily map neatly one to another, and Semitic languages (Swahili, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) have an "intensive" form of something one not only does but causes oneself to do -- these verbs begin with the "M" consonant. (The honest self-examination of prayer. which is like checking oneself all over for ticks after camping, is one example; poetizing, with its intensive scrutiny of scrutiny itself, and what a person who does that is called, similarly is another). I don't see that in English, but now that you mention it, maybe in some cultures something like that is more of a thing. Is that what you had meant? I may be too much in that to be able to accurately know.
I bet if the stance had been one that the test-designers had liked and even admired, "rigid" would have been re-phrased as something like "strong" or "principled" or whatever they are calling much more irrational stances than that, these days.
I am vaccinated and once boosted. I got the shots mostly so I could make international trips that would otherwise be impossible but which I needed to do. I decided that it was almost completely certain that the vaccine would not harm me but that the financial impact to me of not travelling would harm me. As it turned out being vaccinated gave me a ton of additional financial incentives (here in Japan) which helped even more but that was mostly serendipitous
This choice had absolutely nothing to do with whether I thought the wuflu would harm me (I'm positive that it would not beyond perhaps a day of fever or so) nor whether I had had the wuflu or not (I'm pretty sure not).
However in general my opinion of the vax is like Holly's - if you are old and/or have comorbidities then you should take it and if neither then probably not. With a tweak that I think that if you definitely had the wuflu you should not have bothered with the vax.
My original view was that I wanted to have the Astra Zeneca vax because that (and the J&J) was based on science that I mostly understood and was an evolutionary approach to new vax genetech. For some reason the AZ people and/or regulators were also much more clear about side-effects of those vaccinated with it and therefore they lost mindshare to the mRNA vaccines where the side-effects were not so clearly reported. So far as I can tell the AZ side-effects are no worse than the Pfizer or Moderna ones but the reporting of vaccine issues with the mRNA vaccines has been so poor and now politicized that I cannot be sure.
The one thing that this has absolutely done is completely and utterly reduced my personal trust in "Big Pharma" and the various national regulators of it. Just like Holly said somewhere earlier about wanting an older white male doctor, I want older drugs. Short of some kind of otherwise untreatable fatal condition I will not take recent treatments because I no longer trust that their safety trials are actually valid
Socio-Cognitive Polarization, SCP?
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/
If I could hit the "like" button a thousand times, I would! *Standing ovation!* *APPLAUSE!!* I'll be dying on this hill with you my friend!
I'm just a hillbilly 😉
Yes I'm in favour of a Covid vaccine. When one is created, I'll consider it. The stuff peddled by Pfizer is not a vaccine. Followers of Bret and Heather will already know this and why it is so.
Okay, I had Covid, I'm "vaccinated" more than the non-vaccines they are fixated on. Getting Covid is functionally the same as getting vaccinated or pfizerjabbed. Come at me with questions like this stupid "study" and I'll game you for England.
I've seen better designed studies done by 1st Semester freshmen!
When this reared its ugly and the powers-that- be and the sheeple started losing it, I'd already gone back to the 'flu pandemics of 1918 and 1957 to scope the possible range of threat and concluded if you didn't lose it and panic, there wasn't one.
Not one that was going to do anything like the End of the World levels of damage the loonies were hawking.
We were a century and fifty years on in medicine from the last two dangerous outbreaks of respiratory disease and SARS-CoV-1 had turned out to be a nothing-burger when met sensibly. It was that dangerous no one ever got off their arse to create a vaccine for it in eighteen years. The loonies had been screaming about the sky falling all my life and sod-all came of their daft prophecies. See 'Scared to Death' for a prolonged bout of shaking of the head.
We already knew viruses had a hard-time with sunshine and it quickly proved this one was no different; in fact it was peculiarly eight times more fragile. The liner Lusitania, built pre-WW1 could exchange all the air in the ship NINE TIMES OVER in an hour. The country with the most air-conditioning in the world and situated in sunlit latitudes was going ape-shit bonkers about something the sun fixed outdoors and we'd had a technological fix for indoors for over a century?
"White riot, we wanna riot, we wanna riot of our own" seemed to be a cast-iron prophylactic - no sunlight; all packed together marching; and still no super-spreaders, see?
I was watching a doc following the deployment straddling this time of the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth last Sunday. This is in the middle of the ocean and is fully NBC equipped. The sailors are running round in cloth masks! FFS!!!
I simply don't know why anyone fell for the Faucist garbage in the first place. Even if it was what they said it was; as lethal as 1918 even; there was no need to go deep-end bonkers about it. Our grandparents took '57 in stride. I bet this is the first most of you have heard of that 'flu. It was dangerous; it was about on a par with this in lethality; and no one has even heard of it!
Please accept my humble and awed applause.
I haven't read the piece I just wanted to re-iterate that I love your small-font but bold-face disclaimers. Obviously we're different individuals but I think I understand exactly why you do them, particularly the low-key frustration that seems to inform some of them :D