Posts
Comments
Butlerian Jihad when?
(Don't throw stones at me, it's satire)
I agree that pain shouldn't measure how hard you are trying.
However, I feel like grit, while not always particularly enjoyable, is what leads to true greatness. Persevering with a challenge, that is.
Of course, there's a difference between that and meaningless suffering. I was always at odds with people working very hard on something that can be easily automated / sped up.
I was just wondering why lesswrong posts about constant false alarm rate...
That's a very interesting approach, I am usually against using google translate but of course it can't be helped if you're an absolute beginner. I'm currently learning Italian. I think I'm gonna try your approach.
My English learning journey (I'm not a native speaker): I used some average textbook for self-learners going through the exercises to understand basic grammar structures such as tenses. I was only around a third into it when I quit and started watching movies in (American) English without subtitles. It was tedious at first, but after half a year or so I had managed to fully enjoy the experience. New grammar structures and vocabulary sank into me automatically
When I want to look up an unfamiliar word, I use Cambridge Dictionary to read various meanings as opposed to translating.
I wonder how this method could apply to Italian in my case. It's somewhat different since I had been exposed to English at school for years (yeah my country is really bad at languages) before embarking on the self-learning adventure.
I have seen mostly a competition of who cries in indignation the loudest.
People are waving the flags and lying in (fake) blood in front of Russian embassies instead of doing something productive.
Yeah I can totally relate to yearning for one thing and wanting to drop everything else. However it's a luxury I can't afford :(
How does the job feel? Do you approach it with the same Feynman-like playfulness or does it feel more like a "system"?
I just wonder how things were/are curiosity-wise. Because it seems like conventional education system is a great curiosity killer (that's why it's a system).
The measles booster comes a year later. Multiple sources confirm that there is no reason to expect a six-months-later second dose to be any less effective a booster.
About this, strange stuff seems to be happening in Lithuania (that's Europe). After around 6 months, you get an invitation for a booster. Previously, you could just test for antibodies and if there were high enough, postpone your booster. This seemed reasonable.
Now they are simply canceling green passes (this thing lets you in malls and other non-essential amenities etc etc) for those who are due to get their third shot. This leads many people to justly question their intentions. The trust is at an all-time low here.
There's also a very curious document which supposedly states that EU is promising to buy enough vaccines to jab everyone around 8 times (disclaimer: I have not read the document deeply enough, so I'm looking for anybody adept at legal language).
Common sense atheism should update on the belief that their website is working.
Here's the relevant archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20110826004919/http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=13156
Question about vaccination: I have seen various sources claiming that to end the pandemic we should have vaccinated over a certain percentage of the population (say, on the scale of a country).
However we have not and now the virus has mutated repeatedly. From this point of view, it sounds as if we will never be over it unless everyone gets bored or something. There is no end in sight as far as I can see. In my country, 61.7% are fully vaccinated, yet the number of daily cases & deaths is indistinguishable from the last fall. Worse, even.
What are your thoughts? I know this is not a rigorous comment (no sources), for this I apologize.
I have picked up a few general tips from YouTube videos:
- Significant objects are put on the intersection of the grid (3x3 or other)
- You want the horizon to not look like it's the Inception movie, i.e it has to be horizontal.
- It's better to make them darker than brighter. You can brighten the darker pictures, but the opposite is a worse operation.
Also, what I found from experience is that it pays off to find something to immobilize your phone/camera. That way, the details are not smudged.
All of that is probably obvious or might be incorrect on professional inspection. A grain of salt is required here :)
Doom Emacs is also about Vim's powerful tools like norm and :%s. It's basically taking the best from the both world (granted, that's subjective). Love it!
Is is passwordy-looking enough that somebody might want to search it through published leaks?
In either case, you should check it on haveibeenpwned.com, though I suspect you do that already.
Oh, I loved that example when I read it in his book!
But there is a workaround: start by pointing out that sometimes one does feel ill and this feeling goes naturally away -- the body is a healing machine!
Funnily enough, she does use this kind of argument herself when advocating against the Covid vaccines.
I think I tried using it once at some point and it went like this:
-- Our body is a healing machine
-- Yeah
-- So homeopathy might not actually do anything
-- Well, it helps those natural body processes
-- How do you know?
-- It makes you heal faster
-- But why am I not healing faster?
-- Cuz homeopathy is gentler (and therefore slower) than conventional drugs
-- So it doesn't do anything
-- ... the cycle repeats
Hm, valid point I suppose. I just have to be careful to not end up with a bigger issue than I've started with.
I believe it will give her more leverage over me the next time. It's like blackmailing people into doing worse things than the blackmail, and then using those to blackmail further.
Also, you can't just consult doctors in a few days here. You have to make an appointment and wait for a good deal of time (up to two months usually), so it's only worth doing if you've got a serious issue.
Hm, there's the classic injection in your butt (widely used in medicine), there are local injections near knees / neck / elbows / spinal cord (sometimes you need the stuff close to the problem). Afaik homeopathy is not administered to veins. That's about all I can think of / witnessed myself.
Yeah, it seems to have been. Proposed edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20110718032458/http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=3
My strategy of having peace is described in my question. As to how to make peace, there have been a few ways suggested, e.g. setting boundaries. I can't see any others really. Do what you both agree on together, do the rest separately in your own way.
This is a good strategy, and I agree I need to upgrade my communication skills. Thank you so much!
Have it in your head, and imagine your mother saying whatever would maximally trigger you and how you might respond with emotion communication and boundary setting. ("I feel disrespected" -> "it's not my fault you won't see the light of homeopathy" -> "now I'm feeling like you don't care that you're making me feel this way")
Good call. I lose my cool very rarely, usually I'm just not responding to the triggers like "you're a coward" which makes me look better in the overall pictures (like I'm not the mean one). Upping my game a little will be for the best.
With all due respect, "learn how" is why I am here, it is in my very question.
I do have a job, and hence some experience outside my family bubble. However, at work I deal with scientists who are a very different kind of people as you might imagine.
Thanks!
Thanks for the info. I already have some minor heart issues, so this info worries me quite significantly. Could you please provide the source of those particular numbers?
Also, please share if you've done any related calculations / comparisons. I'd be very interested.
If you're not bothered by injections and have appropriate technique then all you have to do is shoot saline in front of your mother.
I might do just that if I ever feel an urge to be confined in a psychiatry clinic.
The obvious problem with using OC on your relatives is that you typically have care for them.
Agreed, that's something I'd use on my college peers, not relatives.
This situation is a test. It is not the last time you will be confronted with this kind of thing. If you favor science, then what do you think your logical course of action should be if prior courses have failed?
I have mentioned what action seems obvious at the end of my question. Persuasion will most likely fail. Plausible solutions are middle grounds and / or moving out.
Thank you for your thoughts.
Is this the most important thing for me to do right now?
To be honest, my mind draws a blank here. While it is not my top priority, the things as they are now might impact my mother's health and sanity in the future. I wish there were a way to save everyone.
The issue comes from the default mode of "distrust authority and anyone with power while prioritizing persecuted-looking people's words". This comes from the elderly generation having grown in the totalitarian regime. A reasonable concern, but it also helps them discard any scientific papers if the guts disagree. Add to that scarce knowing of statistics, and we get what we get.
This was just a side note of why I might not succeed.
Also, because I read the last sentence of your post in a somewhat struggling tone (which may not be true, because words on a screen), I can share that doing a few sessions of talk therapy can be really helpful in a situation like this.
Yeah, you nailed me, but I think I can manage for the time being. I draw on joy and peace in other parts of my life. Not to mention talk therapy is expensive, and I'd have to be in significant trouble to prioritize allocating resources for that.
Yeah, I suppose this is the only way. I wish I could save her the money and emotional attachment, but I see no way to do it and every time I try, we just end up fighting.
Thanks for the amazing tool suggestion! I wonder why I've never seen it used in Lesswrong estimations before.
Maybe, at some point. I can certainly see how things can go downhill here, but then again, they are anyway.
Honestly, I think your chances to change your mother's opinions on homeopathy are close to zero.
Agreed.
(Unless perhaps it is that case that someone else is pressuring her into homeopathy, and you could somehow undermine her trust in that third party. But that is manipulation.)
Her belief came to be when doctors predicted unhappy health developments unless she did this and that (meaning abortion and surgeries). Homeopathy wasn't so unwelcoming, and somehow things have gotten sorted out on their own. So yeah, zero chance here.
You should have a doctor, who is different from your mother's doctor.
Healthcare doesn't work like this here, however our family doctor suggests nothing unconventional. The whole healthcare system here (free one, that is) seems to employ the "you are fine unless you are dying" strategy. Again, you can see how homeopathy might feel like a relief.
...and I felt happy
I feel that way every time I have a chance to rent an apartment for a while :)
I predict I would trap myself by hinting that I believe homeopathy and simply am afraid of injections (I'm not, but I take no pleasure either). Don't you think so?
Hm, I might put it to use at some point, thanks for the concept!
Unfortunately, right now I am being coerced into taking an immunity "boost", whose desired outcome is not really possible to measure. "Your immunity will get stronger" is too vague.
And of course, I am not going to have it instead of a Covid vaccine as I am being told to do.
Hm,
But maybe VAERS is more under-reported than that, and a factor of 10 is more fair?
It may be a negative slope: the more serious a side effect is, the more it gets reported. Going by that, a factor of two or three for blood clots sounds pessimistic enough. Then we'd still be somewhere around the base rate.
This study estimates the risk of cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) and portal vein thrombosis (PVT) following Covid-19 diagnosis vs vaccination (mRNA).
Excluding those with prior history of CVT or PVT, we get 3.53/100K and 17.5/100K cases, respectively. This includes both hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients.
Also, for CVT
Among the 23 events, 7 were observed in patients under the age of 30, 4 between 30 and 39, 2 between 40 and 49, 3 between 50 and 59, 2 between 60 and 69, and 5 between 70 and 79.
I am afraid if we only look at the relevant group (e.g. under 30, hon-hospitalized), we will end up with too small a sample to draw any conclusions, so I'm not going to do so. But excluding those with prior history seems to be a good choice.
Supposing nobody gets both CVT and PVT, we end up with a total of 21.03/100K cases. This is still 2.6 times more than your worst-case scenario. Of course, the probabilities are not adjusted for those recovered from Covid-19 and having natural immunity, in which case the risk probably goes down drastically.
The study itself concludes you're about 10 times more likely to get thrombosis from Covid-19 than from Pfizer/Moderna. I wonder how Jannsen compares to that.
Side note: my mother had a contact with an infected individual. Coincidentally, she tested for antibodies soon after that, and found out they shot up quite drastically (about 7-fold) from almost not existing to a decent level. This gets me thinking just how pointless it is to race after constantly high levels. Haven't we known for a good deal of time that the immune system produces what's necessary at the moment?
Thank you! I have edited my post, which hopefully will bring more clarity.
There was a lot of hubub about blood clots regarding Janssen but that turned out to be nothing.
Hmm, source? I have found this, it's rather new. I agree that the numbers are somewhat low. However the law of big numbers still applies. Maybe you happen to have more recent statistics with mentioned risk groups?
If you want a single Pfizer, though, you can just get one. There’s no way to force you back in for the second dose.
Ah, I should mention that I’m in America.
Regrettably, it works differently in Europe (and Lithuania in particular).
There's a thing called "Opportunity passport" that works inside the country and EU Digital Covid-19 Certificate that works in the whole Union. They grant you certain rights over others, such as unrestricted travel.
In Lithuania, a bill has recently been passed that denies the non-vaccinated access to:
- non-essential stores
- stores, whose area is over 1500 sqm
- beauty salons
- library
- small repair services > 15 mins of time
- any indoors cultural / sports / celebration events
- outdoors events > 500 people
As you see, those docs are pretty essential, and you won't get them unless you comply.
Why do you want to avoid making your immune system do work?
Because a few immunologists suggested it is not a good thing to subject one's immune system to unnecessary work.
There are other threats it might have to deal with, so I would like to avoid useless / distracting labor.
True. Have you been able to find any plausible justification for why mRNA vaccines make you that sick? From what I know, they only create the protein spikes.
I wonder if we haven't observed adverse side effects due to small sample or the vaccine actually being better. How do we tell?
I don't know when the first year was they they could have designed a successful vaccine against a novel virus in a day and a half, but the odds of that happening just before covid hit are obviously very low, especially since more recent trials and studies are showing that we can also quickly develop (better) vaccines against the flu and malaria, and the success with covid was not an unlikely outcome.
I did not get this part (maybe there's a missed word or something. Are you implying that they had all tech in place to successfully manufacture such vaccines quickly?
So, to sum up:
- mRNA has been studied and used (?) for about 30 years now
- Moderna and BioNTech have been around for a while, and their past research has built up their scientific base.
- Out of 18 mRNA vaccines developed around the world only 3 made it to clinical trials, and two made it to production
- 9 "old-school" vaccines made it through the trials
This does sound somewhat realistic: old tech is better-known and had more successful attempts at.
This essay of yours might be worth its own post :)
Your comment got me thinking about the probability of what I described once again:
There's a vaccine for a previously unknown virus made with completely new technology ... made in an astonishingly short time.
Such miracles only happen in people's imagination.
Previously, I noticed one simple explanation: the vaccine is not as safe / effective.
Now I realize there's another: the mRNA vaccines are not that new, they simply never made it public before. Just something that dawned on me.
I'll study the links and get back here. Thank you for your time and effort!
Interesting information, thanks. However, the choice is as follows (numbers indicate available units):
1. Moderna (4990)
2. Comirnaty (Pfizer) (25111)
3. Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca) (6073)
4. Janssen (3611)
The viral vector technology has previously been used for Ebola, right? What do we know about that?
UPD: apparently, we might get Novavax sometime soon. I might want to wait for that.
In Lithuania, a bill has been passed that denies the unvaccinated rights to:
- non-essential stores
- stores, whose area is over 1500 sqm
- beauty salons
- library
- small repair services > 15 mins of time
- any indoors cultural / sports / celebration events
- outdoors events > 500 people
And their main slogan is "Turn your shoulder - become free!"
While these actions are supposed to be coercive, I feel they're doing much the opposite. And it makes non-swayed judgement really hard.
Thank you for detailed comments!
I have similar thoughts about the approval process, though much less coherent.
From a citizen (non-medical education) level of knowledge, I wonder how we should go about reaching a decision regarding getting a jab.
Though I am obliged to say, where I and my SO currently live (Lithuania and Russia) it will soon become not a "whether", but "which" in a month due to regulations.
...vaccines happen to be safe and effective, but it’s not clear that we wouldn’t be in a similar position in the future where the thing in question wasn’t safe and/or wasn’t effective
I think both that the vaccines are safe and effective based on the evidence, and also that if the evidence did not strongly say they were safe and effective, we wouldn’t be contemplating such policies
Could you explain how you arrived at the safety conclusion? Wait, let me explain why I myself am getting overwhelmed (maybe I start from the wrong viewpoint).
There is an unprecedented need for a vaccine, and a few companies / people have got an opportunity to get extremely rich fast (and so they have). I cannot seem to get it out of my head how media and papers are all unanimous in supporting the vaccine. How do we discern honest from swayed / funded unjustly?
Last February, you could still find articles / papers like this:
...to prevent Covid-19 transmission, another type of antibodies could be the more important player. The immune system that patrols your outward-facing mucosal surfaces—spaces like the nose, the throat, the lungs, and digestive tract—relies on immunoglobulin A, or IgA antibodies. And we don’t yet know how well existing vaccines incite IgA antibodies.
People who get sick and recover from Covid-19 produce a ton of these more-specialized IgA antibodies. Because IgA antibodies occupy the same respiratory tract surfaces involved in transmitting SARS-CoV-2, we could reasonably expect that people who recover from Covid-19 aren’t spreading the virus any more. (Granted, this may also depend on how much of the virus that person was exposed to.)
Now it's all just "safe and effective".
One more red sign in my head: there's a vaccine for a previously unknown virus made with completely new technology (granted, mRNA wasn't discovered yesterday, but it's never been used like this before), in an astonishingly short time, which is also safe and effective. How probable would this sound to someone completely ignorant of all the media and the whole Covid-19 thing?
Please note, I am not an angry antivax. I am confused and seeking answers.