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I live in a very very progressive part of the world, and I went to a small local craft market event today. Near the event, there was a 65ish year old woman waving around a GOP tote bag at cars and people passing by. Everyone was ignoring her, but I went to talk to her.
It started out just fine. I told her (in a friendly way) that she's unlikely to change any minds here, and she replied that that she's just trying to show people that there are others out there who have had enough of the progressive orthodoxy, citing CRT, transgenderism, etc. She felt like maybe this might just convince some young people to even question whether there's another viewpoint out there, or convince those who are hiding their views to speak up more. I definitely respected and agreed with that.
Then, her stream of consciousness-style insane ramblings started coming out. She went on for like 7 minutes without pausing, about so many topics I couldn't even keep track, jumping from one to the other. I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs, and somehow she started talking about slavery and pre-civil war America, waving a book around trying to show me underlined passages trying to liken the practice of slavery to what progressives are doing today, maybe implying that leftists want to return to pre-civil war America in some way. It was pretty hard to manage to get away.
This comes in the wake of being at my wife's family event where her crazy uncle kept bringing up conservative talking points apropos of nothing, shoehorning them into conversations which everyone tried politely to ignore, and was a total conversation killer. I'm usually only used to leftists doing that.
These experiences were pretty disheartening to me. I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true. I guess a lot of conservatives really are in their own echo chambers just as much as leftists are. Probably a good number of them really take seriously the conspiracy-style theories of talking head personalities in the style of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. The true disconnect on both sides, from each other and probably also from reality and the true values of most people, is a very sad state of affairs.
I truly believe that the way we tend to talk about things on the Motte and in rationalist-adjacent spaces makes sense, and seems like far more logical discourse than I can find anywhere else. But of course I would, I'm part of this specific world. Any leftist would say the same about their progressive reddit subs, and most republicans would say that about the comments section in the Daily Wire. Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?
Our ramblings are logical, falsifiable, and evidence-based. They have high rates of predictability. Predictions made here about coronavirus often came true, as did predictions on increased homicides in the wake of BLM marches, economic fallout from lockdowns, etc. We shouldn’t hold the nihilistic belief that we can never determine ramblings from truth.
According to my recall, this is accurate.
Not only were people here first on the train to see Covid as a threat at all, they were also the first to notice when the threat began to subside. They were always like 3 months ahead of 'mainstream' knowledge the entire time.
I had a few interactions where I worried that Covid would burn through the population fast if no actions were taken and could mutate into a deadlier version, and users pointed out that commonly, historically and almost necessarily any virus allowed to replicate freely would turn less deadly with time since killing hosts is not conducive to spreading rapidly. And that is what happened with new Covid variants appear with higher R0 but lower death rates, and eventually become dominant.
This was maybe the only forum I was on that didn't immediately fracture it's positions on Covid's severity and likely path along partisan lines.
There were still those who seemed to have partisan leanings, but by and large, almost every development of the disease's effects was accurately predicted and discussed by people from all political stripes, distinct from its economic and political implications.
Including:
The fact that it would be most severe amongst seniors, and almost a nonissue amongst children.
The fact that the vaccine might not provide full immunity.
The fact that communities with lockdowns and masking wouldn't end up with significant differences in death rates from those that 'opened up' and didn't force masking, over the long run.
Sweden was a decent control group
I won't pretend there was any sort of 'community consensus' on the matter, but that was arguably the point, as people stayed very open to incoming information and, generally, also acknowledged that data in the short term would be highly noisy and uncertain so nothing would become very evident until we were well into the pandemic. It didn't become 'snap-to-grid' where you can predict a person's opinion on the virus itself (as separate from their policy preferences for dealing with it) from their other positions.
Agreed, rats really shone during covid. I felt vindicated in the usefulness of our talks here, that was objective proof we were more than a fun debating club, we had actual knowledge of how the world works. Expert opinion, or perhaps more accurately, the mainstream perception of expert opinion, was just wrong. More importantly, we could have made real money off this, sigh.
The most interesting part of the saga as a culture war observer was that in the first few months, the political sides hadn’t fully crystallized around the covid danger issue, which made partisan discussions amusingly unstable and prone to whiplash (eg, parts of the left tried to make ‘globalism is good, therefore covid is harmless’ happen, and the right played along by going for the ‘dangerous foreign contaminant’ disgust reaction ) . Then they would find something else in their respective memeplexes to attach to the issue and suddenly switch sides, as if choreographed.
I don’t know if we can repeat the covid feat. It seems the BLM covid riots radicalized some of the more right-wing commenters, and our coverage of the ukraine invasion has not been stellar (imo those same commenters seemed to support russia purely on culture war grounds, like normies, forcing their memeplex battle into the object-level issue).
Perhaps we were just lucky contrarians that time, and we’ll be automatically wrong when the mainstream is right. Or we only have a true advantage on certain subjects that are unprecedented, emotional and involve some, but not too much, multiplying.
Maybe you were lucky covid contrarians but you were mostly right.
However, I knew that the panic about covid was unjustified simply due to my healthcare training. I couldn't know how good the vaccines would turn out to be, or if covid is spread by droplets or aerosols, or if masks are effective. Those things require good studies and evidence. But for the general understanding for a disease that is so much age stratified, it was immediately clear what the upper limit of damage can be (bad for elderly, no effect on kids, variable to all others). Covid resembled exactly how other cold viruses work, kids get it several times per year, and we get constant exposure that keeps our immune system activated therefore we rarely suffer severe disease. It was immediately clear to me that kids are not in danger despite the panic. It was clear that people going outside are of very low risk. I also knew that once covid virus had spread in the country, it didn't make sense to close borders anymore (Australia was an exception due to specific geographic situation). I couldn't understand how people could support all these things despite clear evidence before their eyes about the contrary.
What Tegnell did in Sweden to me seemed like a standard textbook that I had studied at a public health course a couple of years ago before pandemic. I expected the UK going the same route because of all rationalists (e.g. Dominic Cummings) advising them, but alas, politics are so incomprehensible.
I lost my respect to rationalists due to this. I had learned in medicine that human biology is very complex, you cannot assume anything, you cannot make easy logical chains. You have to do RCTs instead. Sometimes things work like magic without our full understanding, like the most common painkiller, paracetamol (Tylenol for Americans).
I visited the conference a week ago with good presentation reminding us about the strength of evidence. The presentation showed the list of all the drugs initially approved for covid treatment (remdesivir, Paxlovid, several mabs etc.) showing the actual evidence for them. It reminded again and again that only RCTs is the gold standard, everything else is second or third class, regardless how much we want to believe. I still remember doctors who being asked about the evidence of mask effectiveness said that parachutes do not need RCTs. Ok, almost nothing in medicine are parachutes, including masks.
I feel vindicated at the end, but the damage done on all us was terrible. We had experimental vaccines made mandatory worldwide with very little evidence from RCTs. It's fine to take risks if we think the situation requires it, but don't force them on people against all medical ethics that were drilled to every healthcare professional. I still don't understand why we had so few dissenting voices from health professionals.
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I bring this point up with a lot of non rationalists. I know nothing about epidemiology, myself, but the point you said makes sense. However, I get a lot of push back from people. People who claim to know more than I do about this stuff tend to think that there's no predicting whether a virus will become more deadly and spread less well, or become less deadly and spread better. They think both are likely, and I'm not sure why. However, they do agree that a virus that is less deadly will necessarily be more contagious and vice versa.
Maybe they're not thinking about the fact that both new variations might arise, but only the one that spreads easier one will outcompete, which will result in the quick demise of the other. Is there any merit to what they're saying? On what basis should I argue back against them? Are there any papers which show this phenomenon, or is there some scientific principle I could point to about it?
Layman: This is true on average, but viruses have avenues to become more deadly without hurting spread. For instance, Long Covid does not penalize the coronavirus at all, because it happens after it has already propagated. Anyways, viruses can become more deadly and spread worse, then they just ... spread worse. They can still spread for other reasons, for instance immune escape.
Regardless, it's important to keep in mind that viruses are never selected for killing the host, it just happens as a side effect that sometimes (short incubation) has pressure to avoid it. All the killing that viruses do is coincidence to begin with. That's one reason why viruses may become more deadly, because it's a random walk to begin with.
Not just Long Covid, but so long as the majority of spread occurs at the presymptomatic phase, then there is little selection pressure at all.
One notable example of Covid evolving to become deadlier was the Delta variant, which is deadlier than the ancestral strain.
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If you are only interested in convincing people to your arguments, give them the image that you are a serious high status person who knows what he is talking about. Arguments and papers and principles don’t convince people, the image does.
On a side note, I am interested in knowing if there has ever been a recorded respiratory infection that turned more deadly and contagious at the same time via mutation and selection. I feel like the covid complex would definitely point to such an example endlessly so there probably isn’t one.
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