On Not Requiring Vaccination

Honestly, I don't know. I'm just trying to be open minded about the weird stuff that might become possible due to rapid advances in AI speeding up tech progress generally. Areas like biotech, where the complexity of the problem and our limited understanding are the bottlenecks will be more likely to progress rapidly than, say, energy or mass constrained areas of tech.

That is all quite reasonable!

I. Regarding the CDC

I tried to write about the CDC taking hyperpathogenic evolution due to imperfect vaccines seriously at an object level (where the CDC was the object level thing being looked at).

It kept veering into, selectorate theory, first past the post voting, Solzhenitsyn, and so on. Best not to talk much about that when the OP is about dancing and voluntary association :-)

Treating imperfect diseases as the object level, and "going doubly meta", I'd point out that (1) argument screens off authority [LW · GW], and also (2) the best way for a group of umpires to get the right answer most reliably is for all of them to look ONLY at the object level: collecting the maximally feasible de-correlated observations using all the available eyes and then use good aggregation procedures to reach Bayesian Agreement over the totality of the observations.

Ideal umpires only give correlated answers through the intermediary of describing the same thing in the world (the actual ball landing in some actual place, and so on). This is why each additional umpire's voice means something extra, on an epistemic (rather than military/strategic) level.

If you want to talk politics, we can, but I think I'd rather talk "umpire to umpire", about "the thing in front of us".

(And also separately, if we get into politics, I don't think the CDC is anything like an ideal umpire, hence why I'd prefer to treat "politics" as a semantic stopsign [? · GW] for now. Why does the CDC say what it says? Politics. Does this answer help predict anything else about the CDC? Mostly not. Does it help keep other arguments clean and safe? Hopefully yes.)

II. Regarding Imperfect Vaccines And Imperfect Immune Operation

I think your "A" and "B" are roughly right, and a sign that I've communicated effectively and you've understood what I'm saying :-)

I think imperfect "endogenous immune responses" in one population would/should/could breed diseases that are unusually pathogenic in other populations.

The moral/deontic universalization argument against imperfect "exogenous immune responses" is just (1) it probably works the same way because biology is biology and evolution is evolution... and (2) we actually have a choice here because we can DO() a vaccine in a way that we cannot easily DO() an innate immune response programmed by our genome to happen in our bodies.

I think the logic I'm talking about is similar to the logic that explains why diseases tend to be especially virulent right after jumping from one species to the next.

It also might partly explain why a handful of endemic East Hemisphere diseases were so harmful to West Hemisphere populations during the genocides from ~1492 to ~1880.

A "maybe exceptional thing" here is that the natural immune system actually sometimes gives quite broad protection (equivalent to a perfect vaccine), as when a mild cowpox infection protects against cowpox and smallpox basically for life.

So "broad, perfect, endogenous, immune responses" exist.

If we had "broad, perfect, exogenous, immune responses", many existing pathogens might be eradicated!

It would push more pathogens into "counterfactual worlds" where they can be imagined, as what "would have happened if the infectious disease defense had not been adequate"... but they wouldn't be directly empirically observable. People would see this medical system, and they would see no diseases, and they might be confused.

There's already a bunch of diseases we don't have... like supermeasles and hyperrabies and sneeze-AIDS-herpes (which covid is kinda close to, but not as bad as, so far as I can tell), and so on... that we could hypothetically have if someone created them in a lab on purpose.

These are hard to count as "bayesian evidence" of "diseases that are only counterfactual and have, in some sense, been kept out of material reality due to no one performing the sequence of actions that would create and/or spread and/or not eradicate them".

Compared to all the hypothetically possible diseases, we've "successfully avoided" most of them! <3

If we "ban Gain-of-Function Outside BSL5s" then we could probably avoid nearly all of them forever.

We have a handful of cases of diseases at the edge of counterfactuality, like smallpox and polio and measles, which were diseases that basically didn't happen in the US back before US institutions fell into serious decline.

So those used to be "diseases that we could more easily 'count' because we used to be able to see them". Very long ago (before the germ theory of disease) they were quite common and very tragic, so we know they can exist. Then science and adequate medicine caused them to not ambiently exist to be counted. So their "absence now" is glaring when they are absent (and their return is (for measles) or would be (for worse ones) even more glaring).

In terms of why the immune system might sometimes internally do imperfect immune response already: it might just be that when it happens the species it happens to evolves to extinction, and this might be a way to use Gain-of-Function to kill all humans, if someone (like a hostile AI) wanted to do that. The modeling is very tricky. There are some known evolutionary systems (like hyperparasites) that can probably grow to a certain point and then catastrophically collapse to total extinction if there is a single well-mixed evolutionary compartment.

Also, arguably, it is "genocidally/evolutionarily correct strategy" to maintain a few "pet" diseases within your stable of "imperfect immune response diseases"? (Like earlier I mentioned "sudden oak death" being harborded by bay trees.)

With a "pet hyperpathogen" when you meet other similar animals after periods of long separation you have a decent chance to kill them without even really trying (as with the Europeans in North America), and so maybe this is a "good evolutionary strategy" even if it is wildly immoral. I don't think anyone who was all three of (1) sane, (2) reasonable, and (2) emotionally intact has ever claimed that evolution is stepwise continuously moral. It is at best "long run moral" and maybe not even that.

If my fears about the evolution of worse pathogens due to systematic exposure to imperfect vaccines is valid...

...then I guess "distant people (like future generations and people in other countries)" are just lucky right now that such a small percentage of current Americans are taking the new imperfect covid vaccines.

If my fears are right, then if we took imperfect vaccines very reliably across nearly the whole population, that might hurt distant people by making them either have to take the vaccine as well, or else suffering greatly.

But contrariwise, if my fears about the evolution of more pathogenic strains due to imperfect vaccines are not how things actually would or do or are working (which could be scientifically true as far as I know) then the low level of "personally effective even if imperfect" vaccine uptake is a minor tragedy. We're leaving health on the table for no reason, if that's the world we live in.

All my arguments here boil down to "if it hurts we shouldn't do it, but if it helps then we should do it, and I'm not sure which situation we're actually in, but almost no one is even looking at it very hard".

Knowing which thing is actually true, and convincing lots of people to believe the actual truth, has high aggregate Value of Information (VoI).

Millions of lives and lots of ill health are at stake considering the breadth and depth of time and space.

Answering this question properly is the sort of thing that a competent benevolent philosopher with a decent budget for important empirical efforts "would be interested in being able to do".

The ethics of it would be a little weird. The highest quality evidence would probably involve doing "random assignment challenge trials" on whole human societies, where isolated societies that want to ban imperfect vaccines "just in case" are randomly forced to use them anyway, to satisfy a scientific curiosity about whether that random assignment reliably makes their ambient diseases more harmful to people who haven't taken the imperfect vaccine yet.

With Marek's Disease we can just do this for chickens, since chicken death and illness isn't nearly as morally important as human death and illness. Like: we already torture chickens to death for the sake of Chicken McNuggets, and scientific truth about important questions is much more important than Chicken McNuggets, so I tentatively think it would be ethically OK to do that kind of research in the current wildly-non-utopian situation?

But my understanding is that we've already done that research, and it says "yeah, imperfect vaccines promote the evolution of diseases that are more virulent in the non-vaccinated, in chickens, with this one disease".

Maybe we should kill a lot more chickens with another disease?

Or kill a lot of ferrets with another disease? Or something?

To "prove it more broadly, and more generally, with slightly more data"?

Except I think that most humans simply don't have the patience to think about this stuff, and they won't understand or care about "why one particular vaccine might be net good but some other particular vaccine might be net bad based on <complex evidence and arguments>".

My current working model is that it is just "reasonably inferrable to anyone with the patience and interest in looking at the data and thinking properly" that taking an imperfect covid vaccine is not something a good Kantian would do, because universalizing the behavior among all people able to follow moral maxims (which includes all humans, right?) would be a net negative overall...

But also my current working model says that almost no one cares or wants to think about it very much, especially since the existing levels of imperfect vaccine uptake are already pretty low (quite a bit less than 50%), and therefore less likely to cause the evolutionary effects at the sociologically observed levels of default behavior.

So maybe we can use imperfect vaccines to protect the 5% of people who are most vulnerable, and just watch out for pathogenicity levels in the non-vaccinated, and then ban the imperfect vaccine based on live data? Or something?

Performing medical self-experiments is kind of heroic <3