Bruce Lewis's Shortform
post by Bruce Lewis (bruce-lewis) · 2023-11-12T02:16:12.849Z · LW · GW · 5 commentsContents
5 comments
5 comments
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comment by Bruce Lewis (bruce-lewis) · 2023-11-14T18:55:55.486Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I got a paying customer on https://en.howtruthful.com/ yesterday. Hopefully more to come.
comment by Bruce Lewis (bruce-lewis) · 2023-11-19T02:33:09.294Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I liked the xkcd on empiricism: https://xkcd.com/2855/
comment by Bruce Lewis (bruce-lewis) · 2023-11-12T02:16:13.147Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I made this video HowTruthful and the COVID-19 vaccine that illustrates my line of reasoning from a few years ago.
Replies from: ChristianKl↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2023-11-13T05:06:35.790Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It seems like it's not driving the reasoning to the actual empiric cruxes.
If you look at "Vaccines are 100% effective at preventing COVID-19 infection, transmission and death" the pro-empiricism reasoning would be to look at clinical trials who didn't find them 100% effective.
"Vaccines work via your own immune system and therefore can't be more effective than your own immune system" seems either quite wrong or too vague to be wrong. It's possible for vaccines to lead to the immune system generating antibodies that are more effective than what you get through exposure to the virus.
A lot of the work on mRNA vaccines against the cancer of an individual person falls into that category as does work to create universal flu vaccines.
It seems to me like the framework is lacking ways to make claims more specific.
Replies from: bruce-lewis↑ comment by Bruce Lewis (bruce-lewis) · 2023-11-13T21:45:59.839Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
OK so the immune system comment simply meant that since vaccines rely on a system that isn't 100% effective, they can't themselves be 100% effective. It definitely wasn't intended to compare a vaccine-trained immune system to a non-vaccine-trained immune system.
To make a statement more specific, just make the more specific wording a "pro" argument. Because it's something someone might say when arguing for the main statement. I just made a new introductory video today that illustrates this.