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A pure hypothetical thought experiment: imagine it occurs that the Pfizer mRNA vaccination + all booster follow-ups (4+ shots) regimen is disastrous to health, and has a high 10-year mortality rate. In other words, those who strictly adhered to the recommended CDC/Pfizer vaccination schedule have a 25% of dying by the decade’s end, or some such risk. What would be the public’s response and what would be the just punishment for those involved?
I think in such a hypothetical, the whole political climate of 21st century neo-neoliberalism will be fundamentally altered. There would be a huge rightward shift on distrust to authorities, especially but not limited to scientists and public health authorities. I don’t think the public would be satisfied with Fauci and other heads being tried, and will demand sentences for the thousands of individuals involved in the decision similar to what we would see in the Nuremberg trials. This would also fundamentally change the political climate, as the “vax-maxxed” lean left.
-- Profound dysegenic effects on the population. I'm not here to argue what the "smart" opinion is, or to generalize to the whole grouping, but the numbers don't lie: and it would be horrifying.
The discrepancies just get worse as you work into the tails, especially once you correlate with education. We'd lose disproportionately smart, educated, employed people relative to dumb, uneducated, and unemployed people. Simple facts. Fall of civilization level event? Maybe.
-- I think your definitions of Left-Right might be idiosyncratic to mine. One would think that the reaction to such an occurrence would be civil libertarian and a strong enshrinement of bodily autonomy, something like Kulak's dreamland. One could equally see urges towards civil libertarianism leading to 60s/BLM excesses and a corresponding backlash. I don't see a strong Right-Wing gain in the sense in which the Republican party passed the Patriot Act or the sense in which the Right wing favors abortion restrictions. All the political effects will be downstream of the dysgenic effects. If we lost 20% of our engineers, lawyers, codemonkeys maybe we get a safetyism administration that seeks to carefully husband our remaining human resources.
-- I'd like to think that political leaders involved would be permanently discredited, but that has not been my experience of prior disasters. See E.G. the Iraq war; people today say that everyone supported it. I point out that I went to large protests against it and Ted Kennedy fillibustered it, they say I'm nitpicking. It will all be memory holed.
Well, if the vaccine is that deadly, how smart are the "smart, educated" people who went ahead and got it, versus the "dumb, uneducated" who were suspicious and sceptical?
This kind of class-sneering drives me batty. Oh no, all the morons and idiots will survive! What do you care, if your smart, educated, employed corpse is in the grave?
A "street-smart" deliveryman or welder aren't economic substitutes for a physics professor or a staff engineer, even though the former guessed right on the murdervaccine. Kinda moot though considering they're not dying, though. In cases where large-scale bad choices are made, there is selection at play, and the high IQ gay techie who doesn't reproduce is in a meaningful sense worse than, and is losing to, the 'working class white' with three kids - but those three kids still can't take the "distributed systems architect" the techie had.
How nice to know that we have arrived at our current state of progress due to easily recognisable hereditary classes/castes. Smart people have always had smart kids in a distinct band of the population different from the dumb masses. No working-class labourer ever made it out of manual work where they grunted at each other over pints of beer up to the elevated cloud mansions.
Sorry, Cardinal Wolsey. No place for you, Thomas Cromwell. You are irrevocably tainted with the smear of the lower, dumber classes. It is only the children of the dukes who will go on to be the intelligent discoverers of scientific principles. There will always be a Robert Boyle, there will never be an Isaac Newton. We can see this via Elon Musk's kids who are all out there working on their Nobels!
This comment would've made more sense if it was posted before my reply to nybbler, where I agreed that many of the current group of very smart people are the children of people outside that group.
I do think that a large, say >25%, subset of the smartest people dying will harm society's overall success more than an equivalent total number of randomly chosen people dying, because genes are very important to intelligence and intelligence is heritable.
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Eh, my grandfather was a working class white person with six kids, and at least three of them could have done that job. Maybe 4.
That's incredibly common, yeah, a lot of smart/successful people come from less smart/successful backgrounds. Sorting is reducing that, but not that much. My point was that the vast majority of working class people can't serve in those jobs, so killing all the physics professors would make society much worse off, which is entirely compatible with that because the number of normal people is much larger than the number of very smart people.
And yet amazingly society recovered from the Black Death. Why, it's almost like you can survive, rebuild, and educate the next generation to become physics professors!
Also income isn't necessarily a 1-to-1 proxy to actual societal necessity.
For every heart surgeon that gets hypothetically mowed down you're losing a lot of senior marketing professionals (as somebody who's done that job), makework and bureaucrats who could fade out of existence with the real world barely noticing. My personal ascent to the 1% has generally been distinctly uncorrelated with any sort of 'how much does my job actually do for anybody' principle.
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