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To be fair, people are primed to be skeptical of this stuff because of all the incidents when definitions in online dictionaries and wikipedia would quietly change overnight to back up what had been said by some presidental candidate or politician.
If you're referring to Amy Coney Barrett and Merriam-Webster's usage note in the entry for 'sexual preference', please note that at least that particular lexicographic outfit considers their vocation to be describing how words are used, rather than prescribing how they ought to be used; thus they were not, like Willy the Word Decider, decreeing the term to be doubleplusungoodspeakful, but noting that many other people had taken offence at its use. (This is the same reason that certain four-letter words for below-the-waist bodily functions are listed as more taboo than four-letter words referring to the loss of eternal salvation: the man on the Clapham Omnibus will take more umbrage at "Fuck $NAME1" than he would at "God damn $NAME1".
Vaccine is another one. Redefined over night.
Don't forget "herd immunity".
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What do you mean by this?
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-CDC-definition-for-vaccination_fig1_367030584
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Maybe it means vaccine went from "get it and you won't get X" to "get it and it reduces your chances of getting X somewhat"
The covid shot didn't reduce your chances of getting it at all, it simply reduced the severity of symptoms (if Pfizer et al are to be believed).
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How much of this is a redefinition and how much of it is a more correct clarification on what that thing is.
Even before COVID I was aware vaccines don't prevent an ailment with 100% effectiveness. I get the flu vaccine every year, and maybe 20% of the time I'll still get the flu - I figured most people have had similar experiences.
Did a large swath of people actually believe a vaccine had 100% effectiveness before COVID?
Notoriously, it wasnât called the flu vaccine but flu shot.
For many vaccines, there was near 100% protection.
Do you have a citation for this?
Here's a paper from the 90s referring to it as vaccine.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7668032/
Common usage was the flu shot. Thatâs still the common usage (ie get your flu shot)
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That's never been true though?
Measles is something like 3% post vaccine, and mumps is something like 12% per a quick google.
Flu is a bit more obvious - the idea behind the flu vaccine is to make the flu uncomfortable but not require hospitalization and result in death, it's never really been entirely preventative.
Measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines are really good protection, good enough that they break the chain of transmission resulting in herd immunity (which means even the people for which the vaccine failed probably won't get the disease). Diphtheria vaccine is that good too.
Flu vaccine is a joke. The vaccine gives you flu symptoms, and you often get the flu anyway.
This was my experience, so even before 2020 I avoided the flu shots whenever I could. It probably wasn't true, but I have a mental association of getting the flu every year I got a flu shot (and never when I didn't).
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The flu vaccine certainly doesn't work as well as some of the other vaccines, but it is very clearly a vaccine, I don't know what the other poster is on about on that front.
The flu vaccine is one of the odder and more complicated vaccines we have - we have to guess for the yearly formulation some years we guess better than others (based off of the expectation of what this years flu will look like). It also is not good at preventing you from getting an infection, what it is good at is preventing you from dying. People will often say "oh I have the flu" no, usually they have the common cold - the flu is ass.
As for if it makes sense? Young unvaccinated people die from the flu every year, not a lot of them but they do. Vaccinated people have a much better time - all cause mortality reduction in 65+ is 20%. If you are the kind of person who doesn't wear a seat belt maybe skip the vaccine, but if you wear a seat belt then this is up there with the most impactful things you can do to prevent random risk of death.
The COVID vaccine gave me flu symptoms, flu vaccine never did - which is the case for most people. If you do that's certainly a better reason to skip it, but when my non medical (male) friends ask me about it I ask them if they are a pussy.
You can go to bed a few hours earlier in order to prevent death in you and your family/friends.
The flu vaccine is crap and the assumptions made to get it to show a mortality reduction at all are questionable. If you're the kind of person who doesn't wear a seat belt, you probably won't get the vaccine either, and your traffic death will be part of the "all cause mortality" that vaccinated-seat-belt wearers are compared against.
The COVID vaccine gave me a week of symptoms, each time. Then I got COVID, which gave me two weeks of symptoms. I should have skipped that one too.
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And here was me thinking a dictionary told me the definition and meaning of a word, not that "many people at this precise moment use 'bad' to mean 'good', hence we define 'bad' as meaning 'good', e.g. "School shootings are bad" means "School shootings are good, proper, right, and praiseworthy".
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Thatâs a less denying the charges and more admitting to them. Iâd also point to the increasing redefinition of âassault rifleâ â which does have a technical meaning
((Itâs also just nakedly not true: the organization would spin in its grave rather than recognize how Red Tribers use a disputed trans-adjacent word.))
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There were other cases. The most obvious one is perhaps the case where the dictionary swiftly âupdatedâ its definition of recession to include a non-standard but not totally made up one that didnât embarrass Joe Biden as he campaigned for reelection.
Plus the Wikipedia edit wars around whether or not Kamala Harris was âborder czarâ when it would embarrass her (though thatâs more two-sided) and the redefinitions of âCultural Marxismâ from part of the Wikipedia series on Marxism to âAnti-Semitic Conspiracy Theoryâ.
Meriam-Websterâs dictionary definitions veer left and include left-wing extemporising: https://archive.vn/FI0tu
Wikipedia notably excludes most right-wing publications from being neutral sources while keeping lots of left-wing ones.
Itâs a common pattern: the activists rush forward, then the respectable âwe just report the worldâ orgs immediately provide cover by recognising activist claims and laundering them into respectability. So Joe Public thinks âI donât remember that word meaning thatâ, goes to the dictionary, see it does mean that (as of 10 seconds ago), and goes, âah, guess I must have been wrong and the Republicans are making a big fuss over nothingâ.
Do all of these individual actions have plausible explanations? Yes. Would they rush to change the definition of certain words to help Trump in the same way, or consider right-wing usages and mores valid in the way they do left-wing ones? Not a chance in Hell.
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I agree that's the motivating factor. But I think it's important to improve people's mental models of how a big corporation actually works, as compared to the dynamics involved in e.g. Wikipedia mod types.
There's another angle I'm more sympathetic of, where stories like this are shit thrown against the wall to pressure corporations to act more in line with their goals. The Left has done a fantastic job of this ("A Google vision classifier identified black people as monkeys, and that's because Google wants us to throw black people into zoos!"). If so, I can't complain too much: Google should be more sensitive to the Right, so have at it. But it should be recognized as what it is: shit being flung, not an actual useful model of reality.
Certainly. I was under the impression a low/mid level true believer going rogue could change the data, maybe with another couple of people turning a blind eye, which is why I put the likelihood of it being true at say 10%, but I haven't worked somewhere like google and I'd be interested if you think that's wrong.
It's possible, though very unlikely. No one would have the permissions to change the prod geo data unilaterally. However, members of the team that owns that part of the system (so, probably a dozen people) can assume privileges that would give them that power. Part of that process to assume privilege is getting permission from another member of the team; you'd need a collaborator, or (more likely) lie about the reason you need the privilege. Also, critically, that escalation of privileges and the actions you take are all logged and auditable; if shit hits the fan with a PR disaster, there will be a very clear trail leading to you, and that would lead to an immediate firing.
It is vanishingly unlikely that anyone would be so motivated to put their career on the line for an obviously ineffectual action (the number of voters who switched their vote from Pratt to Bass based on a mislabeled satellite view of the Palisades is exactly zero). And the population of potential rogue employees who could do that is genuinely very small: it'd have to be someone very stupid and very passionately interested in Bass's electoral prospects who happens to be on the small team who can even assume those privileges.
Makes sense, thank you for explaining.
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