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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   35363 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Why are Americans falling behind in “brain-y” competitions? Or, if we haven’t fallen behind, why have we always been bad at them?

League of Legends is holding their Worlds competition, and most of the North American region teams did not make it past the first stage. The performance of NA teams has been poor compared to Chinese and Korean teams. The one NA team that has done okay is mainly comprised of non-Americans. The NA region actually has more players than the Korean region, and there are serious incentives to get a high-performing team together.

I have also noticed that in the chess world, most of the top grandmasters are first or second generation Americans. Despite only comprising 25% of Americans, they make up 19 of the top 20 players (only Sam Shankland afaik is the exception). It is not as if the immigrant competitors are all from the former Soviet Union or another chess-heavy region, either, but you find Italy, the Philippines, Japan, and China represented too. (Possibly, because Hispanics are so much of 1st/2nd gen but not represented in chess world, it could be more like 5% make up 95%.)

What explains the loss of American high achievers in intellectual competitions? Google Code has similar results, as does Overwatch. Could there be an environmental cause?

Spoilers! I'm disappointed. Are there rules about this?

NA has been a laughingstock in league for years. 0-9 is a new low, but most of the NA teams are full of imports - there are only 3 actual 'north american' players among the 15 players on NA teams. The most likely explanation is that we just don't have as large a playerbase, and also nebulous criticisms of NA 'culture' where washed up euros and koreans come over to get big paychecks and not try that hard.

Do you have historical data to indicate America is "falling behind" and not placing at the same level it has in those competitions previously?

It is certainly possible we’ve been consistently far behind, but the question of the cause remains

There are different priors embedded in "we were once Xth place but now are X+Nth place" than "we have always been Xth place but should for reasons be Yth place". The latter embeds a lot of notions of value that are not necessarily shared. Even if there were a decline it would have to be evaluated if it was simply relative performance loss or raw performance loss. Performing to the same technical level but other countries improving themselves to a higher level is different than declining in raw ability. Lots of unstated shoulds that come with unaccounted cost that have not been balanced against other needs and desires.

There are plenty of other games where Americans play well or even dominate the competetive scene. Some are even in the same genre like Dota. Extrapolating anything from LoL performance is pretty silly.

It is silly to read my post as extrapolating from one domain. There are also very limited intelligence-based domains with which to do this sort of national comparison.

Americans don't dominate DOTA, EG isn't even made up of Americans and the only other decent NA team is TSM.

League of Legends does have strategic elements to it, and it takes more than fast reflexes to be a professional player. That said, I'm not sure that it's more strategic than any sport, I don't know much about soccer or basketball but I assume they have strategy involved in who to pass to and when to pass. It's definitely less brain-y competition than actual academic competitions.

LoL doesn't involve any physical exertion, nor does it rely on reaction time or fast twitch movements like many other competitive video games. There is 'micro' involved, but all the top players will have equivalent skills, meaning everything comes down to macro gameplay. Just because it is a childish game with a toxic reputation shouldn't blind you to the fact that being good at it requires mental skill more than anything else.

nor does it rely on reaction time or fast twitch movements like many other competitive video games.

False, just the Summoner Skill "Flash" alone is about reflexes. The opportunity windows in the game are generally in the realm of 1 second in length.

Yes, there are actually few other relevant meritocratic domains that measure intelligence. You have popular strategy games, chess, math competitions and programming competitions…. I can’t think of much else.

there's the PISA exams which are international standardized tests that resemble SAT/ACT college entrance exams and are given to a more or less random sampling of 15 year old school children by the numerous participant countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment

There are too many cultural differences in education for PISA to demonstrate aptitude. In middle school and high school. when I was administered state tests that weren’t graded, I didn’t care about doing well. This might be different in obedience-heavy China.

Real men play Heroes 3...

The NA region actually has more players than the Korean region, and there are serious incentives to get a high-performing team together.

Where are you getting this stat? It was never true during the Korean heydey a couple of years ago. Particularly when comparing ranked play.

America's computer game mediocrity is mostly attributable to console-culture (Japan also lags) and geography. The first means the American playerbase for most computer games is small compared to other countries, or is on the casual console version. The second means the average American has shit ping in online play. Back at launch, LOL's servers were in LA, which meant 80% of the US population was on over 70 ping.

On the other hand, the US does quite well in International Mathematical Olympiad, never coming up lower than 4th since 2009. Also 0 female competitors since 2008, which combined with mostly Asians being on the teams, shows that AA isn't yet enforced there.

This is why mediocre national test scores are not that big of a deal. What matters is the top .01% or so of talent, and that is where the US seems to excel in terms of absolute and total talent. America's schools and universities attract the best talent from all over the world even if most students are unexceptional, or wokeness not withstanding.

This is why mediocre national test scores are not that big of a deal. What matters is the top .01% or so of talent

Everyone gets one vote. I think a low-intelligence median voter is a BFD. It takes actually quite a lot of sophistication in the scheme of things to understand that, e.g., raising the minimum wage to $50/hr won't make everyone rich.

That’s remarkable that in 2021, Ukraine was not too far from America’s ranking.

https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2021

It’s also strange that Russia can beat America with their own population, eg no Koreans /Chinese

Why would it be strange?

Because Russia has half the population of America, and is poorer. “Why do native-born Americans not perform as well as either newer immigrants or Russians?” is the strange phenomena.

It's mostly legacy of the communist era educational system. In every big city the gifted kids were funneled into dedicated stem schools and the creme de la creme in regional and national ones.

As a graduate of one of those - the stuff there was hardcore and we were weaklingas compared to the people that were there before the commmunism fall.

Being poorer is an asset, not a drawback, at competing in things which most wealthy people dont find worth doing. It drives down your opportunity cost.

This is a just-so story. Most poor nations do not perform very well. India, Malaysia, Bangladesh. And in America the poor do not perform well. Korea and China are not particularly poor, if we’re looking at math Olympiads. The greatest chess players right now (Carlsen, Nakamura) all had wealthy families and opportunity.

The implied point is that given same IQ, poverty is advantage for math contests.

Math is low, very low status.

America-born individuals very much prefer going into positions where they can exploit value of labor by foreign-born high IQ individuals. They don't need math.

Because both Chess and LoL are far far down in popularity in the US?

I mean, does the US not doing well in Soccer mean that it isn't athletic?

The original comment suggests that the US playerbase for LoL is higher than other nations. I would imagine that Chess also has the largest number of players coming from the US compared to other nations. Both are different from football, in which the US playerbase is dwarfed by other nations

Chess, LOL, and Soccer are all examples of competitions the US is bad at for, IMO almost the exact same reason: They require very high investment from children and teens, and have almost no benefit to you if you don't make it.

Other countries have less high of an upside for a smart and talented people going a conventional direction (and obviously less of a downside of failure because of more generous welfare states and less college enrollment, which means white collar women can't turn their noses up at plumbers and truckers like they do in the US), like investment banking or tech. American football and Basketball are nowhere near the skill expression of soccer and tennis, demonstrated by the many many pros who picked up the sport at something like age 16, so they are much easier for the dumb, but athletic to get into at any age.

So yeah, I don't think these things matter much on the big stage.

American football and Basketball are nowhere near the skill expression of soccer and tennis, demonstrated by the many many pros who picked up the sport at something like age 16, so they are much easier for the dumb, but athletic to get into at any age.

Dexterity and coordination required to be skilled in these sports is not all that much related to intelligence iirc, but fast processing speed is a skill rewarded by team sports that is well correlated with intelligence.

True, but if you go by the Wunderlic which the NFL famously used to administer to all incoming rookies, the average NFL player is slightly above the American average, ~105 IQ. But there are several position groups like running back and cornerback where the average IQ is far below 100.

NA has a larger player pool than Korea in League, and it is the most popular American e-Sport. If popularity dictated chess GMs, I do not think we would see an Italian, Norwegian, Chinese, and Dutchman among top players.

I’d blame incentives. The market for entertaining English-speaking LOL streamers outcompetes the LCS ecosystem so high-ELO NA games have lower stakes than scenes where all the money comes from getting a spot on a team. Also, on the margin, the median IQ of Korea and China are meaningfully higher than the US, so maybe the peak ELO is just higher over there despite the smaller player base.

I have a good number of friends who had pretty good results in programming competitions like Google Code Jam (think, top 5 scorers). They come from an Eastern European country, and, most probably, they are more intelligent than basically anyone you have ever personally met. Among them, they boast dozens of IOI/IMO/ICPC medals etc. Top tiers of sheer brainpower, by quote objective standards.

Here is something to understand about them: based on their individual background, those international competitions were some of the best options to gain success and status available to them at the time. After these competitions, they went on to become grad students at Harvard, Columbia, CMU and the like, and/or got a job at top FAANGs, making $500k today (roughly a decade after their competition successes). These options simply weren’t open (or even, for that matter, conceivable) to many of them when they were honing their competition skills way back in high school, or freshmen years at university, purely because your options are much more limited in second or third tier countries.

Now compare this to the options available to a highly intelligent and driven American young adult. Is try-harding at these objective merit-based competitions worth it? Not really: you will be competing against literally billions of people across the world, and your inborn advantage of being born in US, the land of many opportunities, will help you very little.

The more typical way of succeeding in current day America, which is getting to an elite college, are in fact conflicting with tryharding at competitions: practicing for those will take a lot of your time, which could be more effectively spent on honing items that will look better on your college applications. Quite simply, foundational Americans have better ways of enjoying success and status than these competition.

This is even better seen in those gaming competitions, which are dominated by lower class people from poor countries, as for them, spending 12+ hours a day playing video games have lowest opportunity cost. I would never allow my son to even try to get into that “career”.

This is also why Soviet science was such high quality: for the top people, there was little way to achieve success “in the industry”, and so the position of university professor was relatively really good compared to potential earnings and responsibilities you’d have at a high level position in some state owned enterprise. The wage and status differential was not huge. Compare this to today’s enormous differential between what you can make in US academia, vs the industry, and note also the incentives of US immigration system on foreign researchers (I can expand on this at some other occasion).

note also the incentives of US immigration system on foreign researchers (I can expand on this at some other occasion).

I'd appreciate reading this if you do end up writing it. I presume you're in math/CS?

I am working in tech industry, and don't have much personal experience in US academia, so this will be mostly based on experiences of my friends and family, and my knowledge of intricacies of US immigration system (the legal one, that is).

The typical wage of US postdoc researcher (and these are the ones who do most of the actual work) is something like $50-60k. Entry level positions are often in low-to-mid $40k, and salaries below that are not unheard of. These are all people with PhDs, not necessarily extremely smart (like my friends I mention above), but nevertheless significantly more intelligent than an average person earning six figures, and at least as driven and conscientious. How is that possible?

The answer is quite simple: these position are filled with mostly foreign researchers. They come here on J1 or H1B visas (occasionally on O1, but that's less common among junior researchers), and are tied to their PI and their lab to a very high degree. On J1, they literally cannot change they job, and on H1B, they can only switch to another research job, they cannot leave and go writing ad targeting code for FAANG. Even if they want to switch lab, that's usually not very easy. The job market is much smaller, based on recommendations, so their PI can completely torpedo their career if they so choose, making them beholden to their whims. And I haven't even mentioned the two body problem, affecting the scientists very acutely.

This means that the foreign researchers are, to a large degree, indentured servants of the labs they work for. This is not to say that they are exploited: no, they are typically rather fine with the arrangement, given that they can always go back to their home country, but nevertheless chose it, being mostly aware of its realities, and stay here. This is rather similar to the original indentured servants back in the day. The point is that the realities of what awaits them back home, along with the incentives that the immigration temporary work authorization system (H1B and most other employment visas were not meant result in immigration, indeed, before the invention of the legal fiction of "dual intent" policy, applying for a green card while on H1B resulted in not being to return to US if you leave it before you obtain the GC) highly reduce the pool of options available to them once they're here, and make foreign researchers being highly attractive, captive workforce for the research organizations.

Is this a falsifiable hypothesis?

those international competitions were some of the best options to gain success and status available to them at the time

Korotkevich from Belarus dominates programming competitions — ostensibly he has already attained maximum status and opportunity many times over as he has been the winner for years for Google Code. This is weak evidence against the motivational theory, because he seems to just want to dominate the competition. And indeed, chess players too generally just like dominating the competition, as a reward in its own fight. The second and third math Olympiad winners are Chinese and immigrant Canadian, so they’re in the top 2% of world opportunity. If “desiring opportunity” were the motivator we would see more winners from India, Malaysia, Bangladesh. The only non-Asian American winner, Reid Barton, came from a wealthy well-connected family.

Sure, some indeed actually dedicate their lives to these kind of competitions, but this is not big fraction of the people partaking, and even their career is not that long. They usually move on from there to more typical places of status. I also think it's not instructive to focus on the actual winners, instead consider people in top 10, or even top 50.

What explains the loss of American high achievers in intellectual competitions?

Does video/computer games count as an intellectual competition? I think cultural differences may explain this. Competitive computer games are very popular in Asia.

Call of Duty and CounterStrike, no IMO. But MOBAs require quick, intelligent application of pattern-matching.

Who would win, a team of 20 APM guys who know what all the abilities do or a team of 200APM former starcraft players that have never played a moba before? Similarly, is a clock win in bullet chess a good measure of chess skill? Kinda right? But in both cases being quick is more effective than being smart for the majority of the bell curve.

Intelligence can be measured separately from processing speed, but they are strongly correlated - processing speed explains 80% of the variation in intelligence. So to a first approximation the faster team is smarter. Edit: added link.

the way i see it for bullet chess at least, there's a skill/intelligence floor you have to clear so that you can see valid non disaster moves. Beyond that literally just moving the pieces faster is more valuable until you get to an Elo where people are actually trying to mate. Your point is true but mechanical speed seems like a distinct quality.

Is general intelligence little more than the speed of higher-order processing?

Here we show in a sample of 122 participants, who completed a battery of RT tasks at 2 laboratory sessions while an EEG was recorded, that more intelligent individuals have a higher speed of higher-order information processing that explains about 80% of the variance in general intelligence.

Note that this is "speed of higher-order information processing" which is not the same as reaction time.

20 APM is a bit low, but at 50 APM (reasonable for average players) the people who know the game would win 99% of the time if the 200APM people had literally never played a MOBA before (talking about DOTA here). We even have empirical proof of this because pros sometimes play on far away servers with 150ms+ ping and they still destroy average players.

If you want a real life example recently Grubby (a former WC3 pro) with excellent micro skills picked up DOTA and despite extensive coaching when he calibrated for ranked matchmaking he was put into Herald 5, roughly at the 10th percentile, and this was with hundreds of hours of play too, not "just picked the game up" noob level.

Fair, i did pick a ridiculously low APM to make my argument sound better. Going off of what coffee said upstream though, all of the gamesense/pattern matching stuff matters in CSGO as well, its just that the mechanical floor for when it starts mattering thats different.

I’m not sure what you mean. League is not a game of fast reflexes or spamming abilities. What separates good from bad players is prediction and calculation based on memorized patterns, similar to chess. In chess, all of the top players under 30 are also fantastic at bullet and blitz. Some of the top players in league have taken reaction time tests and aim tests, and they’re not an extreme outlier or anything.

That's just what AIs are good at right now, don't confuse it with intelligence.

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If you'd like to add more, let me know, but otherwise I'm removing this post.

A thousand pardons! I'm new here. Won't make same mistake twice.

All good! Thanks for understanding :)

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm thinking about the trans rights debate.

How is asking women to give up their spaces for trans women different to how we asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to people of color back in the day?

  • -17

Did you mean "white people and black people more likely"?

I accidentally posted the comment before finishing typing it, meant to delete it and start over, but apparently deleting it didn't take. Silly me

How is asking women to give up their spaces for trans women different to how we asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to people of color back in the day?

Because black women can have children and transwomen can't.

Race expression is mostly immaterial compared to sex expression, which is more than self-identification at the end of the day. If you want to extend a test to transwomen beyond self-identification, you've a pretty minority opinion among Trans-Rights-Activists.

Your analogy does not really work at all. Racial segregation was not about providing white people with their own space; it was about excluding black people from otherwise public spaces, often because they were seen as polluting or unworthy in some way. Note also that early Jim Crow laws "classified Asian Americans, Native Americans, and all other people who were not Black—either explicitly or by default—as members of the 'white race.'"

In contrast, the purpose of women only "spaces" -- be they bathrooms or sports teams -- is to provide women with their own spaces. it is not about excluding a group deemed unworthy.

That makes more sense. Thanks.

YW

is to provide women with their own spaces. it is not about excluding a group deemed unworthy.

What is the difference between "Whites Only", and "Non-whites not welcome"? Or is there another distiction you are making here?

I didn't actually say that there is a difference between "Whites Only", and "Non-whites not welcome". But since you asked, historically they meant the same thing, obviously: They meant "non-whites not welcome." But, logically they don't have to be the same [edit: i.e, ethnically the same. I take OP as having made an ethical claim], if the purpose of the two rules are different. Because I thought it was pretty clear that the distinction was in regard to the intent behind the laws/rules/whatevers in the OP's analogy. That's why I said that Jim Crow "was about excluding black people from otherwise public spaces, often because they were seen as polluting or unworthy in some way" and that in contrast, giving women their own spaces "is not about excluding a group deemed unworthy."

So, a current rule that said, "whites only allowed in this room" because for some reason only whites need the services provided in that room is not the same as a rule that said "non-whites not welcome" because nonwhites are deemed and inferior.

I think the idea meant to be is that women are inherently weaker and/or in some way less safe around men in a way that whites aren't comparatively to blacks. That the segregation is done for protection rather than... aesthetic? reasoning.

Liken it to boxing weight tiers, if you like. Segregate the heavyweights so they don't accidentally kill the featherweights.

A lot of people are picking at your analogy in ways in which the two situations you described are different. And their answers are correct for there are some differences depending on along which axis you want to find the differences in.

However here's a different point of view. They are not different at all. And them being the same or different doesn't really matter. In other words, conflict theory is a much better predictor of the CW than mistake theory. (I don't assert one ought to be better than the other, merely that one is)

Its a conflict between the people that want a separation and those who don't. They will fight with words and memes and legislation. Both sides will tell you why it ought to be their way, but they are fighting for what is.

Yeah, that's where I couldn't square it in my head.

If course the two groups are different.

But the ask is similar: one group has to give something up so the other group can have something.

That's what I couldn't square off in my head.

And them being the same or different doesn't really matter.

That's another asymmetrical measure.

Whether the differences matter affects whether the attack is justified, and this is actually important.

I'm not a moral relativist so you are not going to get an argument out of me on that. I agree broadly that there are principally consistent ways around which to structure culture/institutions. And some of those ways are better than others, especially if they are self consistent. But in the vibes based world we live in right now,

Day by day I am more attracted to the the really dumb heuristic of "side A finds side B's ideas icky and wants side B to fuck off and die because the TV said as much" really attractive. You will still be left with a really good model that predicts much of the CW.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm thinking about the trans rights debate.

This is an almost perfect example of the sort of trollish "Hi I'm new here, Just Asking Questions" first-time-ever post that @HlynkaCG would say we should summarily drop a banhammer on. But you know what, we're not on reddit anymore, so sure, @TheGuy, I'll approve this post and, as yassine recently described, see if TheMotte takes your question seriously enough to produce quality responses.

FWIW, if you're really just some random newbie who's genuinely not sure if this is "the right place to ask" and just wants to share his shower thoughts (probability 2%), in the future please go to the effort of fleshing them out a bit, rather than just dropping a hot take that looks like someone "farming drama" (probability 98%).

I mean, I'll answer your question in a strictly political sense. Women are a protected class in a way that white people are not.

I think that's the long and the short of it. That's the core of the conflict, I think, and why this sort of thing is so nasty. We've set an expectation that asking women to give up their spaces is an anti-social thing to do. And people are fighting for that expectation to be met. But at the same time, we've also set an expectation that marginalized groups should be able to gain access to those sorts of things.

Essentially, what you're seeing is the Progressive Stack being actualized, and how it creates conflicts.

Now, I think it's more complicated than that, and there's a lot of moving parts (I strongly believe "The Movement" as they're calling it, or at least is my understanding I.E. the Gender Criticals, played a huge role over the last few decades in normalizing the Progressive Stack to the benefit of women. This alone makes things REALLY complicated I think)

I could go on a long discussion about what I personally believe...but I think it's irrelevant (something something eliminating protected classes and replacing them with a liberal focus on maximizing individual liberty and happiness). But understanding the underlying politics...that this is essentially people who model the world, on both sides, in strict oppressor/oppressed frames, and believe that the latter should gain absolute privilege over the former.

Note: This isn't all feminists or all trans people. I think this is the view of a relatively narrow slice of activists and influencers, for whom complexity over power dynamics in our society reveals some undesirable light onto the way we/they live.

Interesting.

So you're sort of saying (that people who believe this are saying), women are oppressed so to make up for that or fight it, they have been afforded certain things, like women only spaces or quotas, which sort of gives them help at a cost to their oppressors (men).

But this thinking also means that trans women are more oppressed than woman, so they deserve to get help, even at the expense of women, because while women are oppressed, they're not as oppressed as trans women?

So there's a hierarchy of oppression and it's OK to encroach on the rights of those above you in the hericachy, even if that group is being oppressed by the groups above them?

I'm not saying this is what you believe but what you said in your reply, dumbed down so I can understand it!

To make it more confusing, trans women also have all the rights of men, so not only are they higher up the heirachy than women, but they also want some of the spaces / benefit woman have?

Has anyone plotted out this heirachy?

The transwomen vs. women kerfuffle is the first time the opression spoils system resulted in tangible costs for women and the degradation of female privilege.

The first time women as a class have been but individual women have regularly be out oppressed by group sin other categories.

If there's anything at all to this question, it'd be much better when elaborated in a few paragraphs at least, rather than just one provocative sentence. Good sounding thing [x] is superficially similar to bad sounding thing [y]. Did you know democrats want to SEGREGATE black people with affirmative action? Hitler also segregated. 10k comments, 5k quote tweets, 30k retweets, 50k likes.

Be careful - framing it like this is a good way to convince people Jim Crow laws were right.

The resistance of MtF to invading women spaces seems to be more widespread than against integration. And women actually deserve their own spaces where they can be themselves and away from the battle of the sexes. Bathrooms, locker room, man caves(for the gents) and ladies nights etc are important part of the social life.

There is no right of belonging to a group or acceptance in one.

And to give even more pragmatic answer - I value real women more, so if something makes them uncomfortable and is zero cost to me - I find it totally ok to support alleviation of said discomfort.

We asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to EVERYONE back in the day. Asking women to give up their spaces for trans women isn't asking them to give them up to EVERYONE, just an additional subset of people. A closer analogy would be if we asked categorically that no women-segregated - cis or trans - space ever exist.

Exactly, and specifically this means that there will be an incentive to misrepresent oneself as a woman (as identification grants access privileges). When blacks were allowed into formerly white spaces, there was no possibility or motivation for someone to misrepresent themselves.

Why do sex-segregated spaces exist in the first place?

Because some places are private and thus by design everything going on there is a he-said-she-said. We don't like rape and non-consensual groping, so we go about in ways to reduce them. Gender segregated private areas is the least bad solution to this problem.

On top of that, women, in the feminist age, wanted to have access to some traditionally male activities for things like developing leadership skills, fitness, etc. They would have no hope to not be crushed in the competition (and severely injured in most) without gender segregation.

Toilets: because women don't want to disrobe/defecate in places where men will (at best) hit on them

Sports: because women would be excluded from competition in all but a handful of sports like target shooting and long-distance swimming

In short, because there are real physical and mental differences between male and female that necessitate segregation at times if "equality of opportunity" is a goal. Mixed-sex sports means almost no women get to be professional athletes. Mixed-sex toilets (unless single stall) mean women in practice will never leave the house without a chaperone. "Whites only" is not about giving whites equal opportunities but excluding blacks from opportunities/public life, and giving them inferior alternatives. "Use the (inferior) black fountain" is not the same as "use the (perfectly fine) male toilet".

If you mean in general, all societies have deemed various places the proper/improper place of one sex or another, whether it be kitchens, the outdoors, the sporting field, the birthing room, the tabernacle, etc. We have decided that the public world at large must be open to women, so we have created female-only toilets so they may go about in public.

The sport example is terrible. Olympic swimming excludes pretty much all black people due to genetic factors, but we don't have an equivalent Olympic category for just "black people" with the same level of prestige as the open competition, but for some reason women get their own league...

Someone should probably alert Cullen Jones to this development. I nominate you.

I did not know this. Apparently black successful olympic swimmers do exist, but equally there's this really tall Chinese basketball dude while I'd say that on average the Chinese are not the best suited for Basketball due to their smaller heights.

Anyways: we don't have a special Olympic category for short (under 5'6") male rowers (lightweight rowing exists but those people are still 6'+) while we do for women. Shortness is almost as genetically determined as being female.

Perhaps Burdensome is channeling Al Campanis

If true, I would imagine there certainly could be genetic factors. Similar to how pretty much every single 100 meter gold medalist in the past 30 years has been of recent African ancestry.

Lung volume for instance, Phelps was exceptional partly because of his exceptional lung volume and upper body shape.

There are bone density differences between the races, so yeah bouancy may well differ because of genetics.

Black people tend to have longer limbs and shorter torsos compared to white people, and having a long torso is beneficial for swimmers because you have less drag in the water. Michael Phelps is a good example of a swimmer with an extremely long torso.

https://www.usaswimming.org/meet-the-team/u.s.-olympic-team

There are still a number of black swimmers on the US team, so it's obviously not insurmountable.

Nowhere did I say Olympic. I'm sure there are national and below swimming competitions where black people could be reasonably competitive (assuming your claim is actually true, I have no idea, I assumed black people not being able to swim was just a meme). There is almost nowhere at the high school level and above where women can compete against boys, let alone men. There are also plenty of other sports where black men do fine/great (running, weightlifting, many team sports), whereas, again, there are maybe two or three things nobody really gives a shit about where women are even vaguely competitive with men. Black people are doing fine overall in the realm of sports even if they're disadvantaged in some, but without segregation the number of female athletes past elementary school would be very close to 0.

assuming your claim is actually true, I have no idea, I assumed black people not being able to swim was just a meme

The claim is false, and i suspect that the meme is driven (at least in part) by number of inner-city kids who join the Navy or Marine Corps and end up spending their first couple weeks of boot camp in remedial swim instruction because they've never been in water deeper than their waist. Go to an actual swim meet and you'll see a fair number of black and mixed guys competing just as you do in pretty much every athletic event.

Because an extremely small minority of mentally ill people is not the same thing as black people under Jim Crow, and trans women are demanding access to the women's changing room is not black men under Jim Crow wanting to eat in the same restaurants as white men.

Being trans is not necessarily a mental illness, though gender dysphoria is listed as such. There are plenty of well-adjusted trans people living happy lives, at which point it's a difference, not a disease. It's worth mentioning homosexuality also used to be listed as a mental illness, but that was only because of social prejudice, and is no longer considered such.

It's not a disease but hormones, puberty blockers, surgeries are labeled "trans health care". The answer is of course that saying "trans health care" allows for asking for public financing of puberty blockers etc, but saying it's not a disease supposedly averts "stigma". Even though the woke seem to also advocate that mental illness and disability are not bad and shouldn't be stigmatized in the first place.

There are plenty of people with other mental illnesses that are happy and well adjusted. Alcoholics come to mind. Pedophiles and bestiality-practitioners would be in this category if their conduct was not stigmatized and illegal. That doesn't mean they aren't mental illnesses in general which we need to treat with a deterrence treatment, rather than an encouragement treatment.

That doesn't mean they aren't mental illnesses in general which we need to treat with a deterrence treatment

Sure, but why, in the case of trans? Alcoholism sucks, liver disease, it makes you dumb and act stupidly, etc. "There are plenty of well-adjusted trans people living happy lives" is intended to be an argument that most trans people could be 'well adjusted andhappy' (what does that mean, exactly) and there's no point in 'deterrence'.

Liver disease from alcoholism isn't all that much different in life reduction from hormone therapy + full transition surgeries. The resulting creations are a constant infection risk somewhat akin to an open wound, for the rest of the person's life. Plus, there is little evidence of affirmation actually reducing suicide rate, whereas the suicide rate does plummet for kids who give up on the notion before hormones and surgery.

So there is a massive gain to the individual if they are deterred. There is also a massive gain to society because the deterred is a healthy adult who can procreate.

A lot of trans people, maybe even a majority idk, just don't get SRS at all. That doesn't create an open wound!

It's "somewhat akin to an open wound". Well, how akin? What percent of people with SRS, ten years later - (there were a lot of people who got SRS years ago) - have severe complications today? I'd predict less than 20%.

And the person I know who had SRS doesn't seem to have any long-term medical problems from it.

Do you not think there is a fairly big gap between the quality of life of a transitioned trans person and a birth member of their desired gender(not just because of social factors)?

There aren't any good reasons for 'trans people' to transition in any case.

But I was asking OP to make a good argument for that, rather than just invoke 'mental illness', and non-illuminating claims about suicide or surgery.

Do you not think there is a fairly big gap between the quality of life of a transitioned trans person and a birth member of their desired gender

Not really? If you don't get SRS, which a lot of trans people don't, hormones just make you look ugly and it and voice training and such are a minor cost. I know many trans people who just seem normal and being trans is something they seem to 'benefit' from much more than it 'costs' them, if benefit and cost mean 'happiness' and 'quality of life'. But 'happiness' is just a person's judgement of what they're doing, is it really the same when soyface.jpg is happy about the new marvel movie as when wiles proved fermat's last theorem? Or even just when you have kids? (Arguably: yes, and all that proves is that happiness, itself, isn't worth anything, it's the actual thing that took place or was willed that matters, and that's the confusion). So - given that trans people just pursue images of useful things like signs of being able to have children, but don't do so in a useful or coherent way, being trans is bad. But ... it's honestly pretty similar to modern fashion, makeup, casual sex, and 'consumerism' in that sense. Which, leading nowhere and having no purpose - is just as bad.

"it makes you want to kill yourself at higher rates than Jews during the Holocaust" seems like a good reason to me.

I'm friends with a number of trans people and they basically never bring up suicide or how awful their lives are. They don't read, at all, as a jew during the holocaust. So this isn't plausible. If your goal is to 'ensure universal happiness, and allow all oppressed people to free themselves' - that isn't going to work for right wing ends, like saying 'trans people aren't happy and are oppressed by the schools and medicine'.

The statistics don't agree with your anecdote. Likely because of quite literal survivor bias.

Not enough trans people kill themselves for survivorship bias to matter? It'd need to be at least 20%, and the highest claim I ever saw was 5%.

A hundred times this. If you live in a city I bet you walk past at least one person with schizophrenia every day - not a homeless person (although plenty of the homeless are schizophrenic), a well dressed person going to work or shopping or whatever. You would have no idea, because they are managing their illness and are happy and well adjusted. But they are still schizophrenic, they are still mentally ill.

Everybody talks a good game about inclusion and destigmatising mental illness, but I have yet to see anything that doesn't convince me it is purely because of that stigma that trans people deny being mentally ill despite having an ailment that affects their minds.

Last I checked, refusal to accept one’s own body was considered a mental illness in every other case(anorexia, those people who seek amputation because they believe they don’t have certain body parts, etc). The main difference as far as transgenderism is the political valency.

Yeah I totally agree but it's a counterpoint that came into my head. So I had to ask.

https://rumble.com/v1nhpkq-eu-parliament-member-rob-roos-asked-a-pfizer-representative-at-a-hearing-if.html

Apparently a Pfizer executive acknowledged to some European council of wise elders that, due to moving "at the speed of science," they never tested for transmission reduction in the vaccine.

Did I miss something in the last 2 years? Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)

What does "vaccine efficacy" mean?

Why did some countries roll out a vaccine passport?

Why were people fired from their jobs and as recently as last week members of the US military were "other-than-honorably" discharged because they didn't inject the "vaccine"?

It seems people were fired for their own health, since the jabs didnt prevent transmission.

What is actually going on? I understand the argument of vaccine mandates if they prevent transmission, (even though I dislike it, and disagree, I understand the argument.) But if they didn't substantially stop the spread then why are we firing people from their jobs? For their own health?

There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose. If I dosed millions of people with two shots of saline water and only counted them as vaccinated two weeks after the second saline shot, the statistics would appear such that the "saline vaccinated" were less likely to get Covid.

On Twitter, I see many many people now claiming that noone ever said the vaccines would stop the spread, they merely reduce the severity. But that feels like a bad plot forced retcon for a soap opera. Why did we shut down schools? Why did the leaders of France, UK, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the USA all say horrible things about the "unvaccinated" and the "Antivaxxers"?

Again, I don't like it, but I could almost understand it in the context of a 100% efficacious vaccine that stopped infection and transmission. But if it never substantially stopped transmission then

  1. None of the mandates make any sense, (except perhaps in terms of financial profit.)

  2. Geert Vanden Bossche claims that you should never ever vaccinate during a pandemic, especially with a leaky vaccine because very bad things happen. I don't pretend to know the science but he also claims that this was generally accepted knowledge up until 2020.

(Geert's website: https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/)

Just for transparency, I am a staunch antivaxxer. My wife pressured me to get the jab in summer of 2020. I asked for more time. The argument of social responsibility did carry weight with me at the time. But in July of 2020 the Israeli data showed that the jabs did not prevent infection.

It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.

I thought literally everyone at the time said that the purpose was to reduce severity in most patients (who were typically still expected to get Covid - and indeed eventually did outside of China) and maybe reduce transmission somewhat? Doesn’t seem like a slam dunk.

This is a very interesting topic for me. Originally the vaccines were touted as "efficient and safe". The original promise during the first round of the vaccine was definitely as effective against spread - it was one of the main drivers for vaccination of certain number of people in order to achieve herd immunity. New York Times in September 2021 said that

Scientists initially estimated that 60 to 70 percent of the population needed to acquire resistance to the coronavirus to banish it. Now Dr. Anthony Fauci and others are quietly shifting that number upward.

It was then increased by some percentage points until the new story emerged that vaccines are only there to prevent severe risks of infection. Please do mind you, that originally due to herd immunity goal it was supposed that all people including children should receive the vaccine. Vaccine was literally touted as replacement for lockdown, there were literally "traffic light" systems where severity of lockdown was based on vaccination rate like this example from New Zealand

A high vaccination rate remains a key tool to protect people and minimise the spread of COVID-19. Getting vaccinated means you are less likely to get extremely sick or infect other people.

What followed is that the "or infect other people" part was dropped down as if it never existed. I will end here, but this level of amnesia of things that were blasted 24x7 all over the media and government communication is quite frankly astounding. And I am not singling you out, I have met people who had the same stance toward vaccine as you, where they literally replaced the latest narrative as if it was always the case. But to be frank it is quite scary, mostly because it hugely impedes any learnings from the current pandemic ranging from original designation of "COVID scare is racist" through "WHO says no evidence of human-to-human spread" through "no evidence that masks work" to "mask mandates" to "cloth masks do not work" to "vaccines make people less likely to infect other people" to now where we say that "experts" were always right.

It seems insane to me and do not even get me about "Lab Leak conspiracy" theory. Because yeah, a country of 1.4 billion is origin of novel coronavirus and it happens by chance that Wuhan - one of 100 Chinese cities above population of 1 million - was epicenter of the virus. And BTW it is also the only place in China where there is also Biosafety level 4 Wuhan Institute of Epidemiology that coincidentally happens to research novel coronaviruses. All the stellar Pulitzer journalists did not see anything there to investigate the biggest story of 21st century so far, not enough incentives to go deeper. Quite contrary: to ask questions about potential leak was deemed as conspiracy. For me it is incredible for journalists who regularly look for weak links - like politician getting donation from corporation only for year later to vote in favor of them, they saw nothing suspicious in such a huge red flag. And not only that, they were lock in step to suppress the story.

It wasn't until after Biden's assuming of office that ultra-rapid vaccination rollouts,

Because as of January 20, 2021, vaccines were still incredibly precious and our elite were fighting with each other to be first in line. It was about two months before my very elderly parents got theirs.

Now, did the media blue-checks go from "lol of course there will be no vaccine mandates, look how people are fighting to get them, stop worrying" to "lol of course there are vaccine mandates that is what it means to live in a society" in the space of a few months? Yes.

It wasn't until after Biden's assuming of office that ultra-rapid vaccination rollouts, universally, became the cause celebre of the progressive press

Speaking of Biden, here's a pretty famous quote from July 2021:

You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

I have no doubt that specific scientific writing was clear that a reduction in infections was a probabilistic thing and might wane as time goes on, but here you have the most powerful man in the world, whose administration was trying to mandate the vaccines in various ways and is still requiring them for entering the country as a foreigner, confidently stating that they confer sterile immunity. I'd say that outweighs whatever science reporting or personal anecdotes from upper-class London you can bring to the table.

Throwing in my own anecdotes, the German press was absolutely completely on the same wavelength as Biden here, solid looking and repeated promises about immunity against infection were like 95% of the reason I myself got vaccinated. A common talking point in German (social) media in early 2021 was how Israel had "vaccinated away" its Delta wave. For months on end, even as the divergence steadily shrank and several scandals in data collection undermined its trustworthiness, public health authorities and their lackies in the media obsessed over the differences in unvaccinated and vaccinated case rates, a talking point that is now completely forgotten.

Mainstream COVID discourse was 100% thoroughly permeated with the idea that the vaccines are going to stop transmission up until late summer 2021. This only started to go away in the fall and died completely with the emergence of Omicron.

It wasn't really an out-of-line thing to say in July 2021; once vaccines became widely available infection rates plummeted. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the vaccine rollout began in earnest in January but appointments were hard to come by. Over the next couple months eligibility and availability would slowly expand, and by mid-April nearly everyone was eligible and it was easy to get an appointment. On April 19 there was a rolling average of nearly 5,000 cases per day. By the 4th of July this had dropped to less than 200, a 97% decrease. When infections started picking up again at the end of July, it was in places with notoriously low vaccine uptake and almost always among unvaccinated individuals. Given this situation, what was Biden supposed to think? Yeah, later that summer and heading into fall breakthrough cases became much more common, rates rose in areas with high vaccine uptake, and Omicron eventually blew everything out of the water, but for most of that summer it really looked like we had whipped the pandemic.

I have no doubt that specific scientific writing was clear that a reduction in infections was a probabilistic thing and might wane as time goes on

I'm afraid "might wane as time goes on" is the sort of thing I saw in scientific papers but sadly never in the news ... But the news was quite solid on "probabilistic thing". Literally the very first sentence from the Pfizer press release was Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective, and I don't recall news reports omitting that. News readers, on the other hand ... even news readers leading the free world? We mock or pity the innumeracy of the Pirahã, unable to count to ten, but how many of us can hold "90%" in our heads indefinitely without just rounding it up to 100...

here you have the most powerful man in the world, whose administration was trying to mandate the vaccines in various ways and is still requiring them for entering the country as a foreigner, confidently stating that they confer sterile immunity.

I'm currently reading HPMOR with my younger kids, and we just hit the chapter where "It would be like a Muggle newspaper testing political candidates to rate their level of scientific literacy." is thrown out as an example of cultural changes that really really ought to happen but never ever will.

I'm currently reading HPMOR with my younger kids, and we just hit the chapter where "It would be like a Muggle newspaper testing political candidates to rate their level of scientific literacy." is thrown out as an example of cultural changes that really really ought to happen but never ever will.

I don't want that to happen. You'd get the same kind of people rating the candidates on scientific literacy that are currently rating "misinformation" in social media or who run "fact-checking" websites.

By all means disagree (and one should disagree) with these ridiculously stupid or at best unnecessary policies, but the consensus in my circles was always that the vaccine might only ever help reduce severity and potentially transmission to a limited extent, albeit perhaps enough that hospital capacity could meet demand.

Okay, I get your point that you were part of enlightened community that knew what WHO message was false and what was correct, maybe you had some link to researchers and all that. You had privilege to act individually, you were probably one of the "nonessential workers" who could do so. But then I have to challenge you about your quote (bolded):

I thought literally everyone at the time said that the purpose was to reduce severity in most patients (who were typically still expected to get Covid - and indeed eventually did outside of China) and maybe reduce transmission somewhat? Doesn’t seem like a slam dunk.

You meant "literally all my 20 friends who knew what's what" or is it "literally" billions affected and probably hundreds of millions of shills?

I thought literally everyone at the time said that the purpose was to reduce severity in most patients

The scientists said that they were only testing for proving making individuals less likely to die, which they were very good at in the pre-Omicron days.

A bunch of other people, particularly in the media, showed up and said "well, that must mean it reduces transmission, right?" and then said "it obviously reduces transmission" even though the scientists said they never tested proved that.

This is some alternate kind of motte-and-bailey, where the useful idiots say wrong things that you can claim credit for in case they turn out to be right, but disavow if they are wrong.

This is some alternate kind of motte-and-bailey

"Distributed motte-and-bailey" is the term that seems most popular.

A bunch of other people, particularly in the media, showed up and said "well, that must mean it reduces transmission, right?"

I could swear it was actual scientists pointing out expected reductions in R (albeit with huge error bars). And I wouldn't say they were wrong to! It would be wrong to say that reducing detectable infection rates must reduce infection-and-retransmission rates, but that's still the correct prior to have in the absence of more direct (and much much harder to obtain) evidence.

they were very good at in the pre-Omicron days.

Now this is where priors seemed to be getting ignored. "Optimal virulence theory says mutations which spread fast will outcompete merely-more-lethal variants" might not have been a prior to hold strongly, but the objections I saw weren't just "that's the null hypothesis but we shouldn't just assume it will certainly be true", they went as far as "coronaviruses have a gene-proofreading function, we shouldn't assume they will mutate at all".

The scientists said that they were only testing for making individuals less likely to die, which they were very good at in the pre-Omicron days.

No, this is not what was stated, not what was requested by the FDA, and not what anyone believed about vaccines at the time. Here's the FDA guidance for development and licensure from June 2020. Scroll down to page 13 and start looking through the Efficacy Considerations section:

Either laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 or laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection is an acceptable primary endpoint for a COVID-19 vaccine efficacy trial.

This is pretty normal, what everyone would have considered the bog-standard endpoint until the Covid vaccine retconning started up. You check whether the vaccine prevents infection and you get a double-whammy - can't die from something you're not infected with and can't infect other people with something you're not infected with.

As it is possible that a COVID-19 vaccine might be much more effective in preventing severe versus mild COVID-19, sponsors should consider powering efficacy trials for formal hypothesis testing on a severe COVID-19 endpoint. Regardless, severe COVID-19 should be evaluated as a secondary endpoint (with or without formal hypothesis testing) if not evaluated as a primary endpoint.

This phrasing makes zero sense if the expectation was that the only thing anyone would test for is whether vaccination impacted severity. Severity was worth checking as a secondary endpoint precisely because it's possible that you'd impact severity without impacting likelihood of infection and transmission, but this would generally be considered a disappointing result.

Of course, that might just be what the FDA wanted to see and the companies weren't able to meet that criterion, or elected to go with other study designs. We can look at the original December 2020 emergency approval of the Pfizer vaccine though:

First primary endpoint: COVID-19 incidence per 1000 person-years of follow-up in participants without serological or virological evidence of past SARS-CoV-2 infection before and during vaccination regimen – cases confirmed ≥7 days after Dose 2

Second primary endpoint: COVID-19 incidence per 1000 person-years of follow-up in participants with and without evidence of past SARS-CoV-2 infection before and during vaccination regimen – cases confirmed ≥7 days after Dose 2

Severity shows up under the secondary efficacy endpoints. Their results:

For participants without evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection prior to 7 days after Dose 2, VE against confirmed COVID-19 occurring at least 7 days after Dose 2 was 95.0%. The case split was 8 COVID-19 cases in the BNT162b2 group compared to 162 COVID-19 cases in the placebo group (Table 6). The 95% credible interval for the vaccine efficacy was 90.3% to 97.6%, indicating that the true VE is at least 90.3% with a 97.5% probability, which met the pre-specified success criterion.

The specificized success criterion was preventing infection. The stated effect was preventing infection. Anyone that now tells you that the scientists were only testing whether it made individuals less likely to die is badly misinformed or is telling a whopper.

Thanks for the specific quotes. I'll save this one to reference it.

You are saying "stops infection" where I am saying "stops transmission."

I guess when I said "only testing" I should have said "only proving."

What is the proposed mechanism for transmission without infection?

You are looking at "how do you get A without B" when I am looking at "given B can we stop A" which is a different thing.

Putting aside the logical incoherence of transmission without infection, I'm at least glad we can agree that your original claim that "scientists said that they were only testing for making individuals less likely to die" is demonstrably a retcon.

Putting aside the logical incoherence of transmission without infection

Yes, the thing that I never said, it is logically incoherent. Yes.

I thought literally everyone at the time said that the purpose was to reduce severity in most patients (who were typically still expected to get Covid - and indeed eventually did outside of China) and maybe reduce transmission somewhat? Doesn’t seem like a slam dunk.

What did you guys know that the people running the trials didn't? See my post here regarding what the actual endpoints for vaccine testing were.

"COVID’s over."

People, (in the military,) are still getting fired for not submitting to the jab. The USA still has a ridiculous requirement for foriegners flying into the country to be jabbed.

Colleges still require.jabs despite elevated risk of myocarditis in young men. Et cetera.

The battle continues apace.

I suppose your gcentral point is that "A lot more outrageous things other than the covid response are concurrently being done, why devote so much bandwidth to that?"

You can reach that conclusion if you think the covid response is entirely in the domain of politics. Which it more or less has been. Evidenced by the vastly different restrictions by country/region.

However, here's a counterpoint. It shouldn't have been. And that is very hard for people to swallow. The covid fiasco turned me into a conflict theorist.

Covid is an outside threat. Its the natural world vs humans. If there was ever any time for all sides of the political aisle to cooperate, it was against against covid. It was prime time for mistake theorists to shine. As opposed to immigration, foreign conflict or almost any other CW issue; the threat of covid could have been minimized using hard scientific metrics. Just argue out the methods, tally up the costs and benefits, let the process of "doing science" deal with it, problem solved....

LMFAO that totally happened! Instead we got vibes based methods (mask mandates, they just work), copying CCP with no regard for cost/benefits (lockdowns), shit that makes no sense (travel bans after local spread), multiple instances absolute retardism (killing 17 million minks ???), LIES LIES LIES (lab leak hypothesis, vaccines 1,2,3,4,5,6,9000), I think I don't need to reiterate any further, its a dead horse.

It showed that being correct or effective is worth noting at all. It's all about the vibes. Our ideas are amazing their ideas are icky. It's nice when our ideas work too, but that's secondary. What you really need is social capital. You need people to get the right vibes off of you, and you can do whatever you want, you are the science!

I suppose if you were sufficiently jaded, this wouldn't have been nothing new. But I and many others were probably not as jaded. Some of us thought that problems will be solved using the most objective means possible with regards to practicality and efficiency and etc, you know.. competence ?

Having that illusion broken was a watershed moment for me. I still continue to talk about covid because it possibly can't be like this, all the way down. There has to be some hope right?

Having that illusion broken was a watershed moment for me. I still continue to talk about covid because it possibly can't be like this, all the way down. There has to be some hope right?

It is absolutely like this all the way down. And indeed that is the only way it can be. The curtain must remain undisturbed, the sausage factory must not be observed. It is only the fictional layer of "Surely they know what they are doing" that keeps our society together at all. There are not truths that keep us together. Only lies. Which is why they have to be protected. That is where your hope lies I think.

Consider this. The original UK response was very muted. They were going to let it burn through. Very little contact tracing, no lockdowns. 6 weeks later they climbed down and changed tactics. Why?

"Initially, Prime Minister Boris Johnson largely kept Britain open, resisting the kind of lockdowns seen elsewhere in Europe. In a speech on 3 February, Johnson's main concern was that the "coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage".[30] On 11 February, a "senior member of the government" told the ITV journalist Robert Peston that "If there is a pandemic, the peak will be March, April, May" and, further, that "the risk is 60% of the population getting it. With a mortality rate of perhaps just over 1%, we are looking at not far off 500,000 deaths".[31] On 8 March, Peston reported that the government believed the Italian government's approach to lockdown to be based on "several of the populist – non-science based – measures that aren't any use. They're who not to follow".[32] "

** and then**

"The slogan "Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives" was first suggested internally in a government conference call on 19 March, days before they imposed a full national lockdown.[citation needed] The slogan was introduced concurrently with the national lockdown imposed on 23 March, ordering the public against undergoing non-essential travel and ordering many public amenities to close."

Because MPs were getting their inboxes flooded with emails and letters about doing nothing. The public faith was shaken. People like politicians who "do something" and so something had to be done. The faith of the public is essentially the only important thing, and while you can influence that, it is a wild beast and cannot be tamed entirely. Sometimes you have to let the herd have its head so to speak.

The theatre in security theatre is and always has been the most important part. And for that, the suspension of disbelief must be maintained. People must think it is effective even if it isn't. Because the truth that there is very little one can do is too much. And it is the same for Covid. The reason most nations ended up going the same way is not because they were particularly authoritarian in and of themselves (see the UK initially deciding not to) but because it is what their populace wanted. But you can't say that out loud because that destroys the illusion. So you move from:

"On 11 March, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England Jenny Harries said that the government was "following the science" by not banning mass gatherings. She also said, on face masks, "If a healthcare professional hasn't advised you to wear a face mask... it's really not a good idea and doesn't help""

**to **

"Essential travel included food shopping, exercise, medical attention, and travelling for necessary work, which included those working in the healthcare, journalism, policing, and food distribution industries.[66] To ensure that the lockdown was obeyed, all shops selling "non-essential goods", as well as playgrounds, libraries, and places of worship, were to be closed.[67] Gatherings of more than two people in public were also banned, including social events, such as weddings, baptisms and other ceremonies, but excluding funerals.[68]"

We are capable of great things in the service of shared illusions. As long as we don't look down, we can walk on air. But we are also herd animals and it is what the herd sees and does not see that counts.

Covid measures are very much the equivalent of TSA, the Patriot Act, Shock and Awe, and terror threat levels for people born after 1999 or so. A wakeup call that "respectable" organs of society are often (a) incompetent, run by gladhanding careerists who are trying to implement policies that make themselves look useful while filling the political checkboxes they've been handed (b) cynically trying to push through unpopular reforms by not letting a good crisis go to waste.

Reflecting on Covid (or the War on Terror) is useful. There's a good saying that goes something like "Who you are in adversity is who you always were." Well, the government you see in a crisis is the government you always have.

I thought literally everyone at the time said that the purpose was to reduce severity in most patients

There was a lot of wild talk of all sorts about the shots, what they would or would not do, and what refusal/hesitancy to get them would/would not do. In particular, the claim that the shots were primarily about lessening severity of symptoms is at odds with the primary justification for coercive measures - that the shots would make one immune to, or at least not able to transmit, COVID to other vulnerable persons, and so refraining from getting the shots was tantamount to recklessly endangering the lives of everyone who came into coughing range.

If I dosed millions of people with two shots of saline water and only counted them as vaccinated two weeks after the second saline shot, the statistics would appear such that the "saline vaccinated" were less likely to get Covid.

Why so? You think the two week gap has that much statistical power? That would only be over a short timespan.

I would've thought a stronger argument would be that the vaccination wears off after a few months. I'm happy with vaccines that protect for decades but not the annual flu shot. IMO the two shouldn't share the same word. It's like calling a Bradley or a BMP a 'tank'. They're like tanks in that they have turrets, tracks, guns and armour. But the role is different, real tanks have bigger guns, heavier armour are less mobile and don't transport infantry.

"Two weeks after the second shot" isn't a two week gap, it's a four week or more gap.

Why so? You think the two week gap has that much statistical power? That would only be over a short timespan.

How much fake efficacy can be created this way depends on both how many people are infected in the beginning and the current rate at which the disease is spreading. Running a toy SIR model of a 0% mortality disease with R0 1.14 (that's apparently the median estimate for wild-type Covid under Western lockdown) and 100 people, 10 of which are infected at the start, you end up with a total of 46 infected people after 10 weeks.

If you apply the accounting trick and only count infections starting after week 2, you instead get 29 total infections, so even a saline injected population would imply a vaccine efficacy of ~40% simply by counting this way. If R0 were 0.85 instead, you'd get 50% VE, if only 2 of 100 start out as infected it'd be 20%, if 10 people were already recovered at the start of the study you'd get 60% etc. pp. Point is: how much of an effect this can have depends a lot on the initial conditions of the population you're studying.

The folks at Politifact disagree.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/oct/13/instagram-posts/alleged-revelation-about-pfizer-vaccine-trial-noth/

  • -11

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Is there a reason that you find Politifact credible?

Why would I not find it credible? Have they been known to lie?

Whether or not he does, and whether or not politifact is actually credible (fwiw I think they are not), I see lots of people both leftist and vaguely unaligned pointing to politifact as a bipartisan source. The fact that politifact doesn't agree, and that they were able to spin this in a way to make it seem less damning for the pro-vaccine crowd, doesn't bode well for this being the story that convinces the world that vaccine mandates were wrong. I'm sure more organizations and publications will follow suit.

Maybe I misread @Skylab's post, but he seemed to present this story as further evidence that the Powers That Be acted immorally. Not that this story will remove wool that covers the eyes of the sheeple.

I wouldn't disagree with anything you just said. It's unclear to me why you're presenting this as potentially disagreeing with my above post, could you explain?

Archive link

As usual they're gerrymandering the claim so they can get the sticker result they want. Pfizer "were hopeful in spring/early summer 2021 that vaccines would be effective against transmission" but "transmission was not a study endpoint". "Prevention of transmission (and asymptomatic COVID) were not primary endpoints of these trials and were never a claim of the pharmaceutical companies in developing these vaccines"

So the vaccines were developed and tested for preventing severe disease. Fair enough. But the "point" of this story is that vaccine mandates were sold politically as preventing transmission, while that was never actually the aim of these vaccines and was not scientifically demonstrated, as admitted by the FDA in their emergency use authorization. Whether Pfizer technically collected some data on transmission while researching symptom reduction is besides the point.

@Skylab's argument stands completely.

Did I miss something in the last 2 years? Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)

How, exactly, would you propose to measure transmission reduction in the context of a clinical trial? You enroll a thousand people, 500 vaccine, 500 placebo. 50 in each group get COVID. What next? Do you test whether their cohabitants get sick? Couldn't those people have gotten it somewhere else? You'd have to massively increase your study size to find a signal in the noise, or else try some kind of challenge study.

When you run a clinical trial, to my knowledge (and to be fair I'm not exposed to many infectious disease/vaccine style trials) you need endpoints that focus on the people you actually enrolled. Other papers will try to measure spread at a more macro scale.

And indeed, this is false - the vaccines did reduce spread (I linked 6 studies there with varying effect sizes) early in the pandemic, back when the vaccine actually matched the virus in circulation and (speculatively) the variant in question was much less infectious and more severe. I'd hazard a guess that the updated boosters could also reduce spread, although this might prove to be false given the characteristics of omicron plus some fringe possibilities like original antigenic sin.

What does "vaccine efficacy" mean?

You run into some weird semantic problems trying to strictly define it, and other problems disseminating information to the public through media outlets rather than directly from ID docs. As far back as February 2021, people were saying reducing symptomatic disease. You can also read how the Pfizer group defined vaccine efficacy in their original clinical trial paper, and it's not related to transmission.

Why did some countries roll out a vaccine passport?

It might have made sense very early on. I'd agree that it rapidly became counterproductive and foolish as new variants emerged and the vaccines certainly did not prevent spread. You could maybe make an argument that in some places like Canada the healthcare system was truly getting fucked at some points by COVID patients, although by then the data wasn't even clear that the vaccines had a strong effect against severe COVID anymore as far as I'm aware. Whether these policies persisted due to incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, malice or something else - who knows. You'll find plenty of folks here convinced that they know the answer to that question, so I'll leave it to them.

But if they didn't substantially stop the spread then why are we firing people from their jobs? For their own health?

We probably shouldn't be.

There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose.

Can you cite the study you're referring to?

Geert Vanden Bossche claims that you should never ever vaccinate during a pandemic, especially with a leaky vaccine because very bad things happen. I don't pretend to know the science but he also claims that this was generally accepted knowledge up until 2020.

How would you know that? The only real comparator that makes sense is Flu, and we vaccinate for that every year; regardless of whether we did or not, annual flu strains have emerged for much longer than we've vaccinated. HIV was a pandemic, but has no vaccine regardless and is a very poor comparator. SARS, MERS, etc never really took off. So we have no empirical data to support that argument.

But, assuming you're referring to this page (since you didn't actually link to anything), what do you want to do in this counterfactual world? Let everyone get COVID and then his hope is that children generate sterilizing immunity? Moreover, why wouldn't a population where 50% have natural immunity and the other 50% are spreading the virus behave any differently compared to a population where 50% have vaccine immunity and the other 50% are spreading in terms of variants emerging? His argument would hinge on natural immunity restricting transmission whereas vaccination did not, which as far as I'm aware, is not the case.

Children have an amazing innate immune capacity to generate sterilizing immunity. From a public health viewpoint (herd immunity!), it is therefore critical that we leave the children alone. But protecting our children from C-19 vaccination is also critical from an individual health viewpoint as vaccination with these non-replicating vaccines will prevent adequate education of their immune system. This is because spike (S)-specific, non-neutralizing antibodies (Abs) that are continuously recalled by the circulating Omicron (sub)variants will steadily outcompete their innate Abs and thereby prevent the child’s innate Abs to instruct the immune system on how to discriminate ‘self’ from ‘self-like’

It's just false; the half-life of antibody titers for both natural immunity and vaccinations is much too short for anyone to maintain sterilizing immunity for long. For a while, the antivaxx crowd latched onto original antigenic sin (OAS) and argued that natural immunity would be better, but the last time I looked at the data coming out, OAS was a larger problem for people who were naturally infected with the alpha variant as opposed to vaccination, with T cell responses being the wild card. We don't have a counterfactual world where we tried Geert's approach so he can claim he was right until the end of time, but most of the evidence points away from his model.

It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.

The rationalization for vaccines was a huge mess of idealogues on twitter, the media and talking heads on TV pushing their favored ideas with about as much exposure to scientific data and literature as the two sources you give.

Meanwhile, Florida's AG is fearmongering about vaccine side effects (scroll down to 'Florida man' section. I think Zvi is a bit dismissive of myocarditis because other papers have shown it is a side effect, but why Florida tried to do this...I don't know) and it seems like significantly more Republicans died of COVID (although I'm a bit leery of politically-charged population scale studies like this). Even John Nolte repeatedly argued that the mRNA vaccines were a triumph, and the anti-vaxx movement was orchestrated by the left to try and kill old Republican voters.

Whether these policies persisted due to incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, malice or something else - who knows. You'll find plenty of folks here convinced that they know the answer to that question, so I'll leave it to them.

The obvious answer is, "yes". The malice was expressed in sufficiently open fashion that there's no way that a desire to stick it to "antivaxxers" wasn't part of the equation. Likewise, there was enough public health incompetence over the past couple years that I can't imagine it didn't have a role to play here. Finally, bureaucratic inertia is such a constant that even the most pro-government intervention people acknowledge it as an issue. Combine the three and there's not a chance in hell of the people who implemented mandates admitting that they were wrong.

it seems like significantly more Republicans died of COVID (although I'm a bit leery of politically-charged population scale studies like this)

They controlled for age and locations, which are the two most obvious confounders. I'd be interested in seeing the 2022 data when it comes out, since you could still argue the April-December 2021 die-off is going to end up being mortality displacement, much like anti-lockdown Sweden having higher excess deaths in the early pandemic but lower excess deaths later.

Even John Nolte repeatedly argued that the mRNA vaccines were a triumph, and the anti-vaxx movement was orchestrated by the left to try and kill old Republican voters.

It seems to me the origins of the Republican anti-vaccine turn is coterminous with their anti-lockdown turn: June 2020 and the "racism is the real virus" BLM riots. The seeds were there before, but the real resistance started when it became clear Covid rules didn't apply to public events that benefit the left.

What is actually going on? I understand the argument of vaccine mandates if they prevent transmission, (even though I dislike it, and disagree, I understand the argument.) But if they didn't substantially stop the spread then why are we firing people from their jobs? For their own health?

Somewhat. In my blue-tribe environment, the primary story was always about the health system getting overloaded. If it's true that vaccines reduce COVID severity to at least normal cold levels, then even if they have no effect on transmission, in a setting where everyone is vaccinated COVID can be ignored from the perspective of societal organisation and policymaking just as mild seasonal flu is.

Of course, there was always an unspoken sense in which the most technocratically-minded people thought that those who_don't take COVID seriously_ are a real problem, which unlike the other thing I do find to be an instance of ugly tribalism - that is, those who would still go to a friend's birthday party and hang around in their personal space and go on a road trip and hug the stranger next to them at a football game. Legal and enforcement feasibility prevented going after those people directly, but it was understood that not taking the vaccine was a reasonable proxy for the worst offenders. On paper, you fire for refusal to get vaccinated; really, you want to fire for believing that COVID is not a big enough deal (and therefore probably sabotaging all aspects of the response).

the statistics would appear such that the "saline vaccinated" were less likely to get Covid.

Why?

Within a 3 month period, the saline vaccinated are only being being measured for 6 weeks. Since they only count as vaccinated 2 weeks after the second saline shot. We would expect them the saline vaccinated to have 50% less likelihood to develop Covid within the three month period.

It's a sleight of hand magic trick.

To be fair to Pfizer, as far as I know they never said the vaccine reduced transmission. They didn't contradict the various public health officials who said it did, of course. It's also fairly likely that it did reduce transmission, for a short period.

It *probably did, from the release of the vaccines until omicron showed up at which point it stopped attenuating the spread.

Edit: changed absolutely to probably because yeah, let's be reasonable

I don't think we can go farther than probably did. The apex of reduced transmission coincided with summer months in most countries where we have good data. The omicron case load increase occurs as we head into winter at around the time that initial dose course vaccine immunity likely begins to wane. The confluence of new strains, waning immunity, and seasonality all likely played a role in the apparent reduction of vaccine efficacy against transmission. Still, the apparent efficacy at preventing infection and demonstrable induction of a significant neutralizing antibody response makes it seem pretty likely that the initial vaccine worked as intended against the prevailing strains, at least for a few months.

If I remember correctly, the "official" vaccine discourse followed something of a curve. At the beginning, before the vaccine was actually rolled out, the promises around vaccines were indeed quite modest; they were supposed to reduce severity and maybe somewhat hinder transmission, being another tool in the toolpack (which still mainly revolved around lockdowns and NPIs at this point).

At some point around the rollout and early 2021, the vaccine-related claims spun out of control, with vaccines being portrayed as a wonder drug that would essentially considerably reduce severity and also stop transmission; it's very likely a large part of this was wishful thinking related to the idea that one-stop solution that would get us out of the crisis would exist where it was possible to combat COVID and not do the onerous lockdown/restriction cycle that was already getting dumped by the business community. It's not surprising that businesses jumped on the vaccine mandate train very quickly, either.

When this didn't quite turn out as expected, the official institutions - which continued to be unwilling to return to large-scale lockdowns after spring 2021, in most places at least - then turned towards vaccine passports as a Hail Mary, maybe the vaccines would do what the hype discourse claimed they would do if you just tried to put them in as many arms as possible, or it was possible to have your cake and eat it too by having lockdowns only for the demonized unvaccinated and not for the majority of the population that was vaccinated or would presumably get vaccinated as soon as they were prevented from going to the bar or would be under the threat of severance or whatever.

Of course we also know this didn't quite work out this way, so the whole thing was essentially just quietly shelved, and the claims around vaccines implicitly returned to the more modest framework, without it being acknowledged that the hype-and-bust cycle took place.

I'm not a fan of the vaccine mandates but there's a couple of things I think we should keep in mind here. These facts combined don't justify the mandates, but it does explain some of the situation.

  • Vaccine efficacy is the relative risk difference of infection, severe illness or death (3 different measures) between a vaccinated and control groups, over a set duration. This is the standard way to measure a vaccine's efficacy and it doesn't take transmission into account. It obviously doesn't take into account what happens after your experiment duration is over. So we quickly found ourselves estimating efficacy by looking at hospital admissions and vaccination base-rates once experiments were finished.

  • The vaccine seemed much more promising against the initial strains of the virus. If I recall correctly it prevented ~95% of infections for a few months. Such a strong efficacy against infection does a lot to prevent transmission.

  • There is reason to believe a milder case results in less transmission. You're spreading for shorter periods and expelling smaller viral loads. There was evidence of this. (Admittedly I don't think this is significant enough)

  • Testing for transmission reduction would have been infeasible. There is no standard objective way to measure this. Even with infinite money and without red tape it's not clear whether we should have counted covid particles in the infected's breathing air or something like that, and we couldn't have confidently turned into a "X % transmission reduction"

  • Regarding vaccinating during a pandemic, maybe Bossche is right, we'll never know. However, so far, it looks like the escaping variants we got mostly came from areas that weren't vaccinated. Perhaps it would be less risky if we didn't "meddle with nature" but we were rightly confident that the vaccines would save many vulnerable people's lives.

Vaccine efficacy is the relative risk difference of infection, severe illness or death (3 different measures) between a vaccinated and control groups, over a set duration.

More people died in the vaccinated group than in the control group in Pfizer's trial.

Edit: You can downvote me all you like but the simple fact remains that more died in the vaccinated group than the control group. That's only 1 out 3 criteria but a pretty big one. By itself probably nothing but you might want to check the overall excess mortality rate of highly vaccinated countries to see if it went up or down afterwards just to be safe...

You appear to be repeating the claim referenced here. 14 people died in the control group and 15 people died in the vaccinated group - from all causes. The linked article is obviously not unbiased, but I cannot find any fault with the facts presented. Unless you're asserting that the researchers lied or miscategorized causes of death, you haven't rebutted any criteria.

But all-cause mortality is arguably the MOST important measure for any drug or vaccine - especially one meant to be given prophylactically to large numbers of healthy people, as vaccines are.

I never claimed to "rebut any criteria." I pointed out that the Pfizer trial failed 1 of the 3 criteria, arguably the most important one.

It gets worse-

9 vaccine recipients died from cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or strokes, compared to 6 placebo recipients who died of those causes. The imbalance is small but notable, considering that regulators worldwide have found that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are linked to heart inflammation in young men.

But all-cause mortality is arguably the MOST important measure for any drug or vaccine

Where can I find that argument?

I never claimed to "rebut any criteria." I pointed out that the Pfizer trial failed 1 of the 3 criteria, arguably the most important one.

You keep using "arguably" as a sneaky hidden appeal to authority, when what you mean is "In my opinion."

9 vaccine recipients died from cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or strokes, compared to 6 placebo recipients who died of those causes. The imbalance is small but notable, considering that regulators worldwide have found that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are linked to heart inflammation in young men.

Yes, that's an interesting piece of information which is certainly worth following up on to see if it has any significance, but by itself it does not provide meaningful evidence for an anti-vacc argument.

Speaking of appeal to authority, we have a moderator with a poorly concealed grudge against me, speaking "ex cathedra," to apply an AP factcheck on my very true statement. Nothing you posted contradicted my factual statement in the least.

I would recommend that you not take discussions so personally as that tends to generate more heat than light, but you do you.

Dude, first of all, I was not speaking as a moderator. We're allowed to participate like everyone else. Consider addressing the arguments instead of reaching for ad hominems because you got pulled up on the facts.

You need to get rid of this persecution complex you have where every time a mod interacts with you, you think it's because we have a grudge against you. None of us have a grudge against you. We don't know you or care who you are. You started claiming a grudge the very first time you got modded as a new user, when it was impossible for anyone to have formed a personal bias against you. (I presume you are probably someone who came here from reddit, but I neither know nor care who you were there.)

That last line is the most obvious case of projection I have seen in quite a while

because you got pulled up on the facts

This never happened.

Again, I would caution you against taking these discussions so personally.

Good luck!

[citation needed]

The Pfizer trial is my citation. I thought that was clear.

That's not a citation, you have to be more specific, like providing a link to a paper or report and, if it's long, preferably quoting the relevant section. For example, the first citation I found while googling was this paper, which says, under "Adverse Events":

Two BNT162b2 recipients died (one from arteriosclerosis, one from cardiac arrest), as did four placebo recipients (two from unknown causes, one from hemorrhagic stroke, and one from myocardial infarction)

So I would conclude that your claim is simply wrong until you provide actual evidence.

edit: someone linked numbers above. 15 vs 14 deaths out of a population of almost 22,000 in each group is obviously noise. You cannot consider a "primary end point" which you do not have the statistical power to measure.

I keep seeing this clip (and then people referencing it in other media) all over the conservative internet, along with conservative people drawing the same conclusions, that this is some bombshell piece of evidence that will tear apart the myth of vaccine mandates. Let me be clear: I want this, and the conclusion to be true, because I want a piece of bulletproof evidence that I can use against people who still believe that mandatory vaccination was and still is the best way to go. I don't like those people or their mandates, and I'd like to argue against them with very firm evidence. But I'm skeptical that this clip is that, especially because I haven't really seen anyone on the other side acknowledging anything about it, whether it's to eat crow or argue back. It seems to me to be potentially something where the conservatives once again think they have rock solid proof of something, but it never goes further than that, because we never even hear the other side's response to it, because it's so miniscule that they don't even have to acknowledge it. In other words, the same old of people living in different universes.

Let me say again, I hope I eat the above words. I want to steelman this particular clip and conclusion, by attacking it the way its opponents may attack it. So here are some questions:

  1. There's a weird splice in the video between Roos and Pfizer woman. Are we in-fact seeing something that was edited to look like some sort of damning admission, instead of an actual damning admission?

  2. Pfizer woman says "did we know about stopping immunization before it entered the market". She doesn't say "transmission" or "spread" or "reinfection" or whatever, she says "immunization", which seems to make no sense in the context presented. Was this a clip that was taken out of context to make it sound like she was really trying to refer to the question Roos asked, but it was about something else?

  3. Does this have any implications on other vaccines and their trials, like Moderna or J&J?

  4. Even if the vaccine was not explicitly tested for transmission, was it still a reasonable assumption for them to make that it could have a decent chance to stop transmission? Or was it a reasonable assumption for politicians to make, and there was just some information lost in the shuffle?

  5. I don't know much about Roos, I've never heard of him before, but does he have much bipartisan cred? He comes off in the whole clip like a conservative commentator the likes of Tucker Carlson, gloating about how he just owned some lib. He even has a gotcha-like printout saying "Pfizer CEO? Where is Transparency?" in front of him when he asks the question, as if he's only asking as a formality and has already drawn his conclusions. The way he comes off, and the above edits and strangeness makes this whole conclusion that this is a death-blow to the conspiracy of vaccine mandates seem somewhat non-credible.

I don't know much about Roos, I've never heard of him before, but does he have much bipartisan cred?

Who has bi-partisan cred these days?

Tom Hanks apparently, for one.

I don't know much about Roos, I've never heard of him before, but does he have much bipartisan cred?

The term "bipartisan" doesn't really apply in European politics, unless the two "parties" you're referring to are abstract pro- and anti-vaccination groups.

That said, he is apparently a member of a fringe right-wing party, so my guess would be "no".

The science communication on vaccines was really bad. Expecting long-term protection from anything other than severe disease was unscientific wishful thinking that a lot of people who should have known better repeated. TWiV ("This Week in Virology" podcast which tries hard to limit their claims to ones backed by published scientific papers) talks about this a lot, especially in their recent episodes with Andy Slavitt and Paul Offit (another with Offit a few weeks earlier) (Paul Offit is a vaccine scientist who was one of two "no" votes on the FDA panel deciding whether to recommend the new bivalent boosters). (BTW, those links are all to podcasts; for transcripts, they recommend you view them on YouTube and use YouTube's auto-transcription feature.)

It's unclear where the science breakdown happened, but in general vaccines do not prevent infection, only serious disease; the question is whether the vaccine's effect on the disease progression is sufficient to prevent/reduce transmission and without modern tools like PCR tests it's really hard to tell the difference. COVID-19 is not the only disease we know this is true for. IPV (Inactivated Polio Vaccine), the injected Polio vaccine used in most developed countries) does not prevent transmission of Polio, it only protects from severe disease (mild Polio looks like any other cold and no one tests people with minor colds for Polio infection). That Wikipedia link strongly implies that the vaccine does a lot more than that, and the common belief that IPV confers immunity to Polio is probably an indirect cause of the recent case of severe Polio in New York. Polio is apparently a specialty of the host of TWiV so he talks about it a lot and in detail. Our entire Polio eradication effort is based partially on this misunderstanding and they talk on TWiV about how the entire approach may be misguided; that is, that the end-game looks like everyone gets IPV forever, not that we can eventually feel safe not bothering like with Smallpox (although, uh, see Monkeypox).

Note this appears to be mostly a property of the infectious agent (and its interactions with the human immune system), not the vaccine. For whatever reason, the human immune system doesn't maintain long-term a strong enough defense against coronaviruses to be able to fight them off fast enough to stop the infection before transmission; it's not clear to me this has anything to do with the virus mutating. Other viruses take long enough from infection to transmission that a second exposure usually does not result in the individual becoming contagious.

What does "vaccine efficacy" mean?

TWiV repeatedly harps on this, that "vaccine efficacy" without specifying efficacy against what is poor communication. Efficacy against death is relatively straightforward to define. Efficacy against severe disease... actually already gets tricky because this usually is measured through counting hospitalizations with certain codes and different countries and different times through the pandemic have had very different standards for who to hospitalize (and how good they are at coding them properly). Efficacy against infection requires defining what counts as an "infection": a rapid test? a PCR test? if so, at what cycle count threshold? or infectious viral load? once again at what threshold? (and in whose BSL-3?)

Here you’re using the scientific definitions of “infection” and “serious disease” which most people don’t know. In culture they use the colloquial definitions.

If you’re around someone with chicken pox and you don’t get big itchy spots, colloquially you didn’t catch it or “get infected”, no matter how big a viral load can be found in their systems. This could be due to vaccination or immunity due to a previous case.

Thus, what most people expected from a COVID-19 vaccine was that they wouldn’t “catch it” afterward. A sense of betrayal is, therefore, reasonable given the political medical messaging.

Yes, I was trying to get at the disconnect between what the science says and what the media/public believe the science says. That oversimplification of how vaccines work has resulted in a lot of bad policy and people feeling lied to and writing things like (quoting the original post in this thread):

Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)

which is based on a misunderstanding of what vaccines do, albeit one that was justifiably common before we had an easy way to check for infection separate from disease.

I'm really unclear from listening to TWiV how long scientists have known this / how wide-spread the knowledge was. The scientists on TWiV maintain they have been saying that all along (and, obviously, their episode history is public so they've pointed to instances of them saying it in 2020).

The following are all different possibilities:

  1. The politicians/media lied to us, knowing vaccines wouldn't stop transmission,

  2. Their science advisors told them vaccines would stop transmission because that was the scientific consensus,

  3. [...] but their science advisors should have known better,

  4. [...] there's no reasonable way their science advisors could have been expected to know better but actually new science later showed that was wrong.

I think we're unlikely to have a productive conversation if we can't agree on which of those (or possibly some other option I haven't listed; that certainly isn't an exhaustive list) worlds we live in. TWiV seems to be saying that (3) is accurate. (And TWiV appears to be a group of appropriately qualified experts to be making such claims.) (EDIT: Or to be less consensus building-y, at least be having a discussion about which world we live in.)

Because the goals of the bureaucrats was to do something that they could easily measure so they could make pretty graphs that declared themselves successful, the goal of the zero Covid twitterati was to do something to punish people who didn’t take Covid seriously, and the goal of Pfizer was to sell vaccines.

All of these goals could be accomplished with vaccine mandates, and whether they actually reduced Covid infections, deaths, strain on the healthcare system, etc was pretty much irrelevant. The claims about the jab being a miracle cure were intended as a noble lie to justify self congratulatory graphs, restrictions on the outgroup, and lucrative contracts to vaccinate the entire population, respectively.

I tried skimming the top few responses to your post to see if I had anything to add. I see a very wide range of perspectives on this, both internally in my own mind and across my diverse friend group.

I am not addressing your discomfort with policies, because I share many of them.

A practical anecdote because my dad has severe COPD

My household (girlfriend, brother, father, myself) all got covid last December. My father is 72, has COPD, diabetes (afaik reduces ability to heal the body to SOME degree), 1 partially collapsed lung that never recovered after hospitalization, severely overweight, etc. etc. etc. He's on all the medicines. While he's surprisingly spry for someone in his condition it is clear that he is highly at risk from a respiratory illness. Even the cold makes me worry.

We got vaccinated summer 2021, and my father got boosted about 2 weeks before I caught Covid. Normally, he takes a while to recover from colds and other things, but he had a markedly shorter infection with Covid than my brother and girlfriend. He was like 2-4 days. I was 3-5 days and my brother and girlfriend took about 7 days to get back to normal.

Yes, there's luck involved, but luck must also get applied on a bell curve, right? How likely do I find it that the "vaccine" didn't perform it's utility function appropriately by giving my father increased active antibodies for a while?

Does that mean I support mandatory vaccination policies? Absolutely not, but I also push back against this idea that the vaccine doesn't do anything, or shouldn't have been approved or delivered to people.

Vaccine legitimacy

Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)

People seem to mix up "totally eliminates risk from a virus" and "primes the immune system in some meaningful way." A lot of people wanted total protection from the Covid virus, and what we got was a priming of our immune system to a virus which mutates rapidly. I feel like some of your argument falls (E.g. using "vaccines" in quotes) in to word games in order to discount the utility of priming the immune systems of the population.

If there was a medical intervention that reduced the chances of catching HIV or cancer by some amount (20, 50, 90%), how many people in the population would take it? At what efficacy threshold would you take a pill or injection against a form of cancer?

There was a really good ZDogg MD podcast with Paul Offit (on the CDC vaccine advisory board, voted against youth boosters based on the evidence presented to CDC [maybe that increases his credibility?]) https://zdoggmd.com/paul-offit-10/

They get in to some of the technical details on why a vaccine for a rapidly mutating corona virus has no chance of totally stopping the virus, and how that compares to a virus with different characteristics. The technical details matter.

If consenting adults want to take an experimental medicine, I have no problem with that.

But when medical experimentation is mandated, at risk of losing your job, or ability to participate in society, then I have a huge problem with it. I see it as a brazen violation of the Nuremberg Code by the authorities.

There were honestly so many retcons over the course of COVID that I lost track. I can only hope someone more spiteful than me collected them all lest they be memoryholed. I at least remember when the WHO edited the definition of 'herd immunity' to exclude natural immunity after the vaccine came out, or when magazines retroactively attached prefaces to articles about how leaky vaccines might make diseases more virulent explaining this did not apply to COVID for unspecified reasons

I recall one genuinely intelligent friend who told me in late 2020 that "once the vaccines come everyone just needs to get jabbed and this will all be over" and in early 2022 "you should have gotten vaccinated because that's a fixed viral load whereas the virus in the wild might give you any sort of load and then you don't actually know what happened to you."

My impression from this and similar interactions: Arguments are soldiers and covid vaccinations are primarily a tribal signal.

In late 2020, I believed the same thing as your friend, that vaccines will stop transmission. It was very reasonable belief at the time, especially given the vaccine trial data. Had it actually been true, vaccine mandates would have made much more sense, and I wouldn’t have had minded them. Too bad it turned out false.

Yeah. I won't presume to claim that everyone who was optimistic about vaccines or supportive of mandates did not actually believe in the efficacy of these things; I just find it startling that some who were proven evidently wrong still retain their absolute certainty about it and simply muster new arguments in favor of old propositions. It's not impossible to do so with internal consistency, but I doubt that most are so consistent and suspect instead that they align their beliefs and arguments with whatever their tribal identity favors.

You didn’t pay attention to this stuff back in 2020? We discussed it extensively at the motte.

Pfizer execs didn’t have to “acknowledge” that they didn’t test for transmission reduction, it was quite obvious from the get go, based on the actual design of the clinical studies. This was never seen as a requirement for approval.

It sure would have been nice if vaccines stopped transmission, and many (including me) believed at the time that the vaccines will in fact do so. This turning out not to be the case was initially a big disappointment, and then, when they started doing forceful vaccination mandates when we already knew they don’t do shit for stopping transmission, was pushing me into white rage every time I thought about it. Nevertheless, the actual studies never tested that.

The reason was twofold: first, the higher priority was to figure out if there actually is reduction in symptoms and negative outcomes — this is what was meant by “efficacy”. Initial studies used for approval showed pretty huge risk reductions, on the order of 90% reduction in having observable Covid symptoms with positive tests. I don’t believe that anyone believes that the vaccines have this good efficacy at blocking symptoms today. I am not sure what is the reason for this discrepancy. Maybe it’s because the vaccines were targeting original variant, and the virus evolved to be much better at spreading. Maybe the elevated response from vaccine lasts for very short time, couple of months at most. I don’t know, stopped paying attention at Covid science altogether somewhere in the middle of 2021, when I realized that the science and the truth were mostly irrelevant for the policies and narratives.

Second, it is actually pretty hard to design a study that measures efficacy at stopping transmission with any good degree of confidence that would be approved by IRB, a notoriously NIMLY (Not In My LaboratorY) bodies. Useful studies are “””unethical””” to run, so we’ll let the virus spread to billions and kill millions without trying to understand how it does so through direct experiment, instead we collectively decided to just watch its shadows on the cave’s wall.

Yes, I agree with you that most of the covid restriction have made very little sense at best, and starting from somewhere in 2021, they were basically a lunacy. But, dude, Covid is so last year, we already litigated this here to death, there is probably nothing new you can say here on this topic that hasn’t been already said last year by others. At this point, I’m so over it that I’m actually puzzled when someone around me even brings up Covid unironically. I will never trust the “””experts””” on this, or any other topic that actually matters to the society ever again, but, again, I already said it last year as well. It’s over, current thing is different now.

" I am not sure what is the reason for this discrepancy."

They used relative risk reduction instead of absolute risk reduction.

That does not explain the discrepancy he raised at all. It is an entirely separate issue.

Well, it's still the anti-covid measures that, as far as I can tell, are the single worst thing that ever happened to me through no fault of my own, and the impact of which is still very palpable, and the perpetrators of which are currently getting away with it because the public at large is over it and I am not yet willing to let it go. Not until bodies have hit the floor, until heads have rolled, or until apologies have been spoken.

I'm biased in the opposite direction: My parents are 65 years old. In that age group, there was a 10% chance of death given infection in 2020. If one of my parents (~19% chance) had died, it would unquestionably have been the worst thing that had ever happened to me. In comparison, the lockdowns are a tiny footnote of badness. Covid was on an exponential trajectory and there were no vaccines, so I am incredibly glad that the lockdowns happened.

You know, early on in 2020 I also heard that covid would be very bad for the elderly and, as someone who takes filial piety seriously, I locked myself down tight. Stayed at home for months, didn't see anyone, wore masks and gloves and disinfected everything all the time, was disappointed that the borders weren't closed. In summer, an tiny outdoor family party was organized under the conditions that everyone would maintain maximum security measures. Turns out that a few minutes in everyone reverted to old habits and dropped the masks and distancing, much to my surprise. And a few weeks later parties were cropping up all over the place with nary a thought to the supposedly dangerous disease running rampant, and I was the only one who still stuck to the interpretation that if the disease is as dangerous as we're told, we should behave accordingly. Not even the sick and elderly were noticeably careful anymore, and there I was excusing myself and going home after waving at people from a distance. And I caught covid anyways, so much for masks and disinfectants and distancing and isolation.

And then came the vaccines and everyone rejoiced and got jabbed and continued with life as before. I declined the jab because, as I thought, I'd already had the disease so what's the point. But oh boy, did I ever miss the point! Because from that point on as everyone enjoyed normal social and family life, they sure as hell gave me a wide berth. Uninvited to gatherings, told not to visit, regularly insulted for not getting vaccinated, treated as if I were not even one vector among many but the primary source of the disease. Told in no uncertain terms that only the unvaccinated were to blame for the pandemic in the first place, that it would all be over if not for them. Rejected by polite society, by friends and even by family, for not getting this fantastic vaccine and apparently being at fault for the whole mess. For all of 2021. And then came the long, lean winter of 21/22 in which not only all the previous still held, but the vaccine mandate hung over our heads as absolutely imminent. Politics were certain, media were certain, the public seemed certain, that soon everyone would either be vaxed or imprisoned or fined until they were either of the other two. It took politics a while to get the mandate passed, but in the meantime all kinds of measures against the unvaccinated were discussed and some of them enforced. Not measures against the virus, mind you, but purely against the unvaxed. I don't know what exactly prevented the mandate from coming to pass, but those were fun months, never knowing what the next rule against you would be, what form of social participation would be banned next, or which public and tax-funded institution would no longer admit those monstrous unvaccinateds, or whether they'd go through with forcing employers to fire the unvaccinated. I still don't know what exactly prevented the mandates in the end; I suppose politics got cold feet when it came to ruining the livelihoods of millions of people and/or imprisoning them. Public and media condemned them for not getting the job done, though.

And then everyone, vaxed or not, got covid. And survived with no lasting harm. And quietly shut up about everything in what should have been a very embarrassing silence but instead just turned out to be a giant memory hole.

As you can tell by the wall of text, I am still rather sore about the whole business. We often talk about social trust as in to what a degree can you trust individuals simply because they are of the same society as you. I think there was another kind of social trust, trust that society will not turn on you at the drop of a hat for no good reason, and that one died.

I think I have been much to gentle with my compatriots. I was too happy to be allowed back at the tables. I have neglected to spit bile in their faces and return their insults and make clear to them that in spite of my love for them, I detest them and will never again be able to muster the same kind of trust in them that I took for granted in better times. I shall resolve to do so from now on. My disappointment may not be infinite, but it is a deep dark well and I will draw from it extensively before it runs dry.

Why did I ever just let it slide? This is not to be let slid.

I'm sorry for you, but none of that happened to me. My parents and me have still managed to avoid getting Covid. I haven't, or haven't met anyone who, slagged off on people who weren't gonna get vaccinated. (Aside from "well that's weird.") I've personally always considered "getting infected" to be equivalent or better to vaccination. On the other hand, my workplace forced a coworker with children and asthma (vaccinated, but still) to come in to work (when we're well set up for wfh) when we've had several infections in the company, and also took the absolute minimum of legally required steps. So I have a somewhat different reference class for Covid skeptics.

I went to an ACX meetup while in the middle of Covid. We were all vaccinated, otherwise healthy, and sat outside with good minimum distance. This was also the only time i was around a bunch of people with the Covid Warn app in the wild. I was also at LWCW, we did mandatory Covid tests on arrival and every morning, which seems to have avoided spread at the event. Maybe your social group is just .. not good.

That may well be. We Germans like us a witch hunt every now and then.

How confident are you that

a) lockdowns kept your parents from getting infected and

b) an infection would have been lethal for at least one of them?

Well, as mentioned, there was a 10% in that age group, so combined 20%. Chance of infection is the big one I'm not sure about, because we were looking at an exponential; at early doubling rates, a few weeks delay in imposing a lockdown could make the difference between single-digit percentage and near certainty. It's also unclear though how much of an effect mandated lockdowns would have had, given that some groups of people locked down voluntarily. I don't have a good mental model for spread here that accounts for groups with divergent risk preferences; how many degrees of distance really are there in a population? If Germany is a small-world network on a weekly scale, then assuming nobody locked down at all you'd see total spread in something like five hops. That's not what we saw, but we also don't have a good control for it. On the other hand, my parents are very pre-internet and would definitely not have done daily purchases, food etc., online. (Otherwise I'd have been very blasé about it; they had basically no other in-person social contacts through the early pandemic.) If it got to a point where there was a solid (single-digit per visit) chance of infection when visiting a supermarket, they would almost certainly have got it.

At the current stage I'm resigned to them getting it eventually; lethality is still down and they're multiply-vaccinated, so I just have to accept the diceroll. No reason not to push it out though; our tools for dealing with severe infections only improve over time.

Sidenote: IMO the strongest argument for school lockdowns is that schooling connects lots of otherwise-separate social groups. Same for WFH. I'm imagining a model of "societal layers", where each layer is a class of contact groups. Typical layers are friends/family, schools, and the workplace. Given ingroup isolation, you'd expect an infection to bounce through societal layers of connection to reach otherwise-isolated subgroups. In-person meeting, classroom, family, workplace, in-person meeting, etc. I don't know how much effect cutting one of those layers would have, but I believe cutting all but one of them would slow spread massively. Ie. if you have online schooling and WFH, then in-person meetings alone don't matter much. If you mandate social distancing and shut down schools, you can relax WFH, etc. On the other hand, if you don't do WFH and don't do social distancing, you might as well keep schools open.

My dad is twenty years older than that. He just took care of himself rather than expecting thousands of other people to lose their jobs and not speak to each other in an entirely symbolic effort to protect him.

Not that he's ever particularly social in the first place, really... Not sure he even noticed anything different:

"Sorry, I don't eat at restaurants"

"Oh, because of Corona?"

"No, all their other beers are terrible too"

It's very challenging to take care of yourself without regularly being within six feet of many other humans.

Sorry you're being downvoted, but it really is trivial for an elderly person who doesn't have constant doctor appointments to virtually eliminate their risk. And there's very little other people could do that would complement those precautions rather than substitute for them, no matter how much effort the general public put in; all restaurants being shut down by public order doesn't give any extra help to an ancient who has already sensibly decided not to go to restaurants.

The whole thing was a generalized guilt trip intended to make people suffer pointlessly so they felt like "part of the cause"

I guess it depends on how used you are to ordering online? A lot of the risk area is shops.

If you're living somewhere with lots of foot traffic you also can't go anywhere, though that wasn't the case for me.

Even the Great Barrington Declaration called for devoting resources to help isolate the elderly while everyone else moved on, and not just leave the elderly to figure it out or not whatever.

Yeah, throwing all policy weight behind that would have actually done something at a relatively trivial cost.

most of the covid restriction have made very little sense at best, and starting from somewhere in 2021, they were basically a lunacy

The reason I keep bringing Covid up is because so few people seem to recognise the lunacy of Covid restrictions. The consensus in my social circle even today seems to be that "lockdowns/vaccine mandates/[insert restriction here] were unpleasant, but a necessary evil to stop the spread". No matter how much data I offer demonstrating that there's no way that these measures pass a cost-benefit analysis (or even do any good at all), they seem married to this worldview.

I'm not worried that these restrictions will be reinstated in reaction to another strain of Covid, that ship has sailed. I'm worried in a few years' time when the next pathogen comes along, and everyone thinks "Well, lockdowns and vaccine mandates worked last time, better do it again." So I'll keep on banging this drum until a majority of the populace is actually saying "never again".

I mean at this point it's just sunk cost. No way you'll convince most people that they've been actively shooting themselves in the foot for that long and that is was literally for no reason.

Maybe in ten years you'll be able to study this and say that we all acted like a bunch of panicky idiots, write a report identical to those that were available at the time that said that you shouldn't shut down the whole economy for mild and even fairly serious illnesses, and have some other epidemiology nerds nod along, as we prepare to do the stupid thing all over again next time, having learned nothing.

Just for transparency, I am a staunch antivaxxer. My wife pressured me to get the jab in summer of 2020. I asked for more time. The argument of social responsibility did carry weight with me at the time. But in July of 2020 the Israeli data showed that the jabs did not prevent infection.

All else aside for a moment, I really object to this being what we're now calling "antivax". As some here know, I was an immunologist by training and research, I spent about ten years of my life working on vaccine and vaccine-adjacent research, and I used to spend a decent bit of time on social media arguing in favor of childhood vaccines and trying to convince people to get them. It would never have occurred to me to call someone antivax on the basis of them saying, "I don't know about this specific new vaccine, I'd really like to see what the dose course and long-run efficacy is before I take it".

There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose. If I dosed millions of people with two shots of saline water and only counted them as vaccinated two weeks after the second saline shot, the statistics would appear such that the "saline vaccinated" were less likely to get Covid.

The bookkeeping was sketchy and dishonest due to creating different start points for the experiment, but the underlying principle would be basically fine as long as you adjusted time courses appropriately. Obviously, we do want to know what happens immediately after vaccination (in case there are adverse outcomes that include increased risk of infection), but if we're thinking about long-run quality of a vaccine, it does make sense to start your ticker a couple weeks after a boost, because there is little or no expected benefit in the short-run. With appropriate statistics, this would be fine.

It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.

Wasn't the motte that vaccines are at least not more dangerous than the virus, while the bailey was that getting vaccinated is what good people do? At least that's how the arguments went in my social circles.


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