This is just mathematically false, as Pearl showed and won the Turing Award for forty years ago! The standard textbook is called *Causality*, by Pearl; i'm sure people have written intro explainers online.
What Pearl showed is that you can tell which causal models are true by checking for particular conditional dependences among the probabilities. Different claims about causality give different predictions about what joint probability distributions you will infer. In that sense you can in principle get causality from bayes.
I read Scott's post first and then saw the FT article. I initially disagree with Scott that journalists were using "No Evidence" to mean "very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet". Seems like they were using it to mean "Don't believe that ...". But this FT article does explicitly say "casts doubt on the hopes of some experts, based on reports from medics in South Africa". They are mentioning evidence right there -- "reports from medics".
According to Scott's article, journalists use "no evidence" to mean anything from "very likely false" to "we don't know", not "very likely true". (Where he says journalists mean something like "very likely true", he means the negation of the claim there is "no evidence" for, if I understood correctly.)
And when there were reams of video publicly available on the topic at the time?
I think the difference is when NPR sends out "without evidence" they believe that relieves them of the need to actually confront, analyze, and make an argument about their viewpoint regarding the available evidence. Instead, they can smuggle in their conclusion while trying to make it seem the objective truth.
And "rational/scientific thinkers" fall for it regularly. This phenomenon where "smart" people are only smart on a relative scale in comparison to idiotic strawman characterizations (subconscious heuristic imaginations of reality, perceived as reality itself) of Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists seems like one of the most under-reported and plausibly consequential things out there.
Saying someone "claimed something without evidence" is basically accusing them of showing greater-than-justified certainty, which can be true even if it later turns out their claim was accurate. (When it's not just a formal synonym for "lying".)
The implication there is certainly not "it may be true, but it's too early to tell, we need more careful consideration of the issue before we reach the final conclusion" but "it's definitely false, in fact, it's so obviously false that even seriously considering that it might be true makes you look kinda stupid". And when it turns out that it wasn't false of course it does wonders to the credibility.
If they were only talking about safety, maybe. But they are usually talking about effectiveness as well, and both were equally new for the new disease.
Well, as a general rule, we require more evidence to support forcing something on other people (vaccinator mandates, requiring vaccine passports, etc), than we do to support letting people do something to themselves (deciding to take a drug that you think is worthless).
Also, there should be a higher bar for "things you do to healthy people" (here, let's have 250 million Americans take this shot!) than for "things you do for sick people" (let's have 1 million sick people take this drug).
Does ivermectin cause 250 times as many bad side effects as the "vaccine"? How many more people will be getting the shot, compared to taking ivermectin? Have you even bothered to think about that?
Or did you just get your marching order "Pfizer good, ivermectin bad", salute, and follow them?
Yes, actually. And for older individuals with functional immune systems it's a standard very clearly met, especially since even if Ivermectin 'works' it likely doesn't work as well as vaccines do as an over-arching strategy. For younger individuals I haven't had time to review the data, and so make no comments.
Exactly. Although it's a slight variation (and even worse) because they are playing games with a binary definition of a word -- "evidence."
This article talks about scientific "evidence." But a legal definition is probably most appropriate for most phony "fact checks" claiming "no evidence." Any fact is "evidence" so long as it makes a conclusion somewhat more likely to be true. That includes circumstantial evidence, plausible presumptions, uncorroborated statements, anecdotes, etc. You can argue such evidence is weak or not persuasive to you, but that doesn't mean it isn't even "evidence" at all.
However, when confronted with a claim they don't like, "fact-checkers" treat the word "evidence" as if the words means "conclusive proof already established" and then proclaim the assertion debunked because: "no evidence." For checking facts they like, however, any second hand statement or assertion suddenly becomes "substantial evidence" of the good fact.
I'd say this scam is 15% stupidity and 85% bad faith, but the "evidence" for this allocation is open to interpretation.
I 100% agree with the sentiment here, but maybe we SSC/ACX people are weird in how we use "evidence?" I looked up what dictionary.com says:
* that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.
* something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign:
Maybe some people think "evidence" means "proof?"
Similarly: In the last few years I've noticed headline writers using "refute" to mean "dispute," which makes me crazy. But some dictionaries say "refute" means "deny or contradict" - can I blame them?
If that's your position, you should be saying something much stronger when you want to express something like "No Evidence That COVID Vaccines Have Killed 45,000 People"
Some writers seem to be doing a thing lately where they try to avoid repeating a false/low-status/dubious claim when debunking it, but this leads to even less-clear headlines.
"COVID Vaccines' Effect on 45,000 People, Explained"
“Recent popular assertions about coronavirus vaccine safety, examined,” is the sort of headline I would click on, but there are people whose whole job is baiting clicks and they seem to eschew such phrasing, probably with good reason
In "There is no evidence", there's also a bit of a problem with this sneaky word "is". There can be evidence that exists, but has not been found, or has been found but was ~rejected, or has been found but was covered up, and so on and so forth. Of course, this inconvenient complexity of reality can easily be perceptually dismissed with "That's pedantic" or confused appeals to Russell's Teapot, but this is an illusion, it doesn't make the actual epistemic problem itself cease to exist.
Another word that people tend to have problems with is "the", as in "The evidence..." or "The facts....".
It doesn't for sure...but I suspect that is not how reality appears to those who say such things. Personally, I don't think these people are lying, I believe that they are describing reality as they truly see it. Consciousness (and culture, "reality", etc) is to a very large degree a controlled hallucination.
Of course they aren't consciously lying, by and large. Evolution bred us to compete for status first (which is in large part facilitated by sincere and overconfident pushing of our flawed notions), and to arrive at correct beliefs a distant second.
Evolution also bred us to consider our perception of reality to be synonymous with reality itself, and (most) cultures tend to fairly strictly enforce the maintenance of this illusion, at a sub-perceptual/instinctive level.
This might be the case of our perceptions of reality actually having been accurate enough for the purposes of living in the ancestral environment, where you knew everybody by name and (almost) all knowledge was common and orally transmitted.
I disagree, though, that it's exactly what more sophisticated cultures try to enforce. I'd say that they instead strive to create a sort of shared narrative, which is inculcated from the young age and through which reality is interpreted, subconsciously and unquestioningly.
Which hasn't been done of course, and is essentially impossible in most cases.....which is fine, I'm not criticizing that. Rather, it is the utterly brutal inaccuracy of the perception that I find interesting, and that hardly anyone including extremely intelligent and logical people seem immune from this bug. It even seems like there is a process in the mind that id designed to detect and reject discussions of such ideas....which is clearly crazy but I swear this is how people behave.
I don't think that works -- if we think of "evidence" as knowledge used to update priors, in good Bayesian fashion, then by definition, nothing counts as evidence until you actually know it. Facts that haven't been ascertained yet are part of the unknowns you're trying to discover, not data to help you discover them.
1. something which shows that something else exists or is true
2. a visible sign of something
3. material that is presented to a court of law to help find the truth about something
Let's say an incriminating piece of evidence exists at the crime scene (satisfying #1), but it is not discovered by investigators (due to incompetence or malice) - this would fail to satisfy #2 and #3, as well as "knowledge" in "if we think of "evidence" as knowledge used to update priors". So in this case, a Bayesian approach will produce a worse prediction that a super strict epistemic approach.
I don't think your example satisfies definition #1 -- it can't *show* that something else is true until it is discovered by investigators. It's not evidence until it's discovered.
The last sentence is just reinforcing the map vs. territory dichotomy here: knowledge vs. the thing it represents. "Evidence" is a relation of knowledge, not a quality of entities in reality. So things that exist, but haven't been discovered yet, remain part of the reality you're trying to use knowledge to represent, but haven't yet produced knowledge that can be used to improve your model of that reality.
> I don't think your example satisfies definition #1 -- it can't *show* that something else is true until it is discovered by investigators. It's not evidence until it's discovered.
Agree....I was looking at it from the perspective that "it exists (in physical reality) and shows something", *thus it is evidence* - however, many people will claim with complete sincerity that undiscovered evidence *is not evidence* (ie: "There **is** no evidence!!!"). I'm pretty sure we're on the same page but looking from different angles. My main point was that Bayesian reasoning (as I understand it) doesn't take unknown unknowns into account, or at least not substantially (I rarely hear this very real problem noted in discussions as Rationalists are eagerly forming script based conclusions).
But in science today, especially astrophysics, there is little caution in how things are phrased: "The unexpected radiation emanating from two black holes colliding". Black holes, neutron stars, dark matter, etc. are hypothetical constructs which attempt to explain the observed phenomena, but they are talked about as if there were no question about their existence. Actually there are other cosmologies that explain the observed phenomena, don't require any exotic physics, and are backed up by more than a century of laboratory experiments. But the Narrative is so ingrained that these alternates are considered "crackpot" and dealt with like Aunt Clara in the English Music Hall ditty "We never mention Aunt Clara, her picture is turned to the wall".
Related: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.
Then there is the Appeal to Authority:
From Wikipedia:
"One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority.'
Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else." - Carl Sagan
One example of the use of the appeal to authority in science dates to 1923,[22] when leading American zoologist Theophilus Painter declared, based on poor data and conflicting observations he had made,[23][24] that humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. From the 1920s until 1956,[25] scientists propagated this "fact" based on Painter's authority,[26][27][24] despite subsequent counts totaling the correct number of 23.[23][28] Even textbooks[23] with photos showing 23 pairs incorrectly declared the number to be 24[28] based on the authority of the then-consensus of 24 pairs.[29]
There's *something* at the absolute center of the Crab Nebula (supernova remnant). It's flickering every 33 milliseconds, which is enough time for light to travel about 6000 miles, or comparable to the radius of the earth, which sets an upper bound on its size. (otherwise, the hot spot of light causing the flicker wouldn't be able to make it around the ball in time) However, that's if it's rotating at ~the speed of light, which... is a very implausible assumption. If you dial it down to some rotational speed that might actually exist, like 10% of lightspeed, that sets an upper bound of 600 miles across. The equations that capture how white dwarf matter works (which is in a low enough energy domain that known physics holds extremely accurately) rather clearly indicate that no white dwarf can be that small (ie, it's at the point where additional laws of physics start applying).
Also, whatever it is has a temperature of about 1.6 million kelvin (as inferrable via the spectra and a blackbody radiation calculator on the internet), very very far beyond even the toastiest of blue giant stars.
In addition, these sorts of rapidly flickering radiation sources have been found in the centers of some other supernova remnants (like the Vela supernova remnant), and also others have been found in binary orbits with other stars, allowing exact determination of their mass through good old Newton's laws of gravity. Which, again, is well past the limit that the white dwarf equations of state suggest is possible.
And when you put the mass and the radius bounds together (since there are some pulsars which flicker far faster than the crab, which, as previously stated, lets you upper-bound the radius)... For the fastest-rotating one (716 times per second), napkin math says that even if it was rotating at light speed it would have to be less than 260 miles across. ~2 solar masses in a 260-mile ball (which is probably a serious overestimate, since light-speed rotation isn't happening) is the sort of density that... lines up pretty well with estimates of what neutron star densities should be, what pop science says their properties are.
The only authority being relied on here are that the astronomers are accurately reporting the rotation rates, spectra, and orbital periods of these thingies, the rest of the math can be worked out by yourself with a high school physics textbook and a napkin.
I would like to distinguish pulsars and black holes from dark matter. I think the case for dark matter is way way way more solid than you think it is, but doubting dark isn't completely outside the realm of sanity the way the existence of pulsars and black holes is.
Like, for black holes, there's a star at the center of the galaxy that pulls a hairpin turn around *something* at 2% of lightspeed, and via ordinary high-school newtonian physics, that tells you that whatever the heck it is weighs about 4 million solar masses. And we've turned radio telescopes across earth on that thing and *taken a direct picture of the event horizon*.
Thank you for your detailed reply. In Plasma Cosmology the object at the center of galaxies is a plasmoid. Oscillating resonant circuits explain very well the behavior of pulsars. Birkeland currents are a reasonable explanation of the rotation of galaxies and the fact that the equator of the sun rotates more rapidly than the poles. Experiments in plasma labs have produced results that line up very well with cosmological observations.
The refusal to credit the electric force with any role in astrophysics despite a wealth of evidence is beyond puzzling. I have looked long and hard for a credible falsification of Plasma Cosmology, and so far have not found it. Many people just reject the idea out of hand, but worse those claiming to have "debunked" it distort or outright lie. Understanding Plasma Cosmology would take an investment of a few hours of your time. You would find that it all hangs together.
LOL of course the guy that uses astrophysics as their example of bad science is the electric-universe conspiracy theorist. You're not that guy, guy. There are examples of actual bad science but I doubt you'll ever find it with those abilities.
If you actually looked at the data you might change your mind. The standard model has so many infirmities if it was a dog they'd have to put it down. Black holes are metaphysics, not physics. Same with neutron stars, dark matter, etc. They are crutches propping up the standard model with zero experimental evidence. The 80 year search for dark matter has yielded nothing. Rather than dark matter, I propose that it's Giant Space Monkeys riding Giant Space Unicorns herding the galaxies towards the Cosmic Railhead. This is functionally equivalent to the dark matter, dark energy phantasm, only the silliness is more obvious. Can you imagine Newton, Galileo, Maxwell, or Rutherford putting up with the lack of rigor exhibited by the Big Bangers? I can't either.
The value of any theory is its ability to predict outcomes. The predictions made by EU physicist Wal Thornhill before the Deep Impact mission to Tempel 1 proved to be correct, while the mission scientists had the usual collection of "unexpectedly" remarks.
This is my pet peeve about dictionaries. They only tell you how a word is *similar* to other words, not how a word is *different*. But differences *matter*.
My other pet peeve about dictionaries is that they lack information about syntax: "he stops eating" is different from "he stops to eat", but "he starts eating" means the *same* thing as "he starts to eat". I don't know of any dictionary that explains things like this. Another example: put. Put is a ternary verb; it requires three arguments, unlike normal transitive verbs that require two. Merriam-Webster simply describes it as "transitive". "throw" is also transitive: "He throws the ball", but *"he puts the ball" is invalid; instead "he puts the ball in the bag".
_Garner's Modern American Usage_ is terrific and comes *kind* of close to what you're wishing for, in terms of giving information about the idiosyncrasies and particularities of various words. It doesn't contain the 'stops to' example (I checked) but I strongly suspect it contains an entry for the *category* of things you're talking about; I just don't know the name of that category.
It seems like what you're looking for is higher level than a dictionary and lower level than a usage guide, though. I don't have a copy of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary anymore, but it does extend a little ways into the territory your wishing for, certainly much further than any other dictionary I'm aware of.
"you're wishing for"; well, that's a particularly awkward comment for an error like that -- speech to text, I swear it.
Good lord, I'd forgotten just how comprehensive the unabridged OED really is. It has several pages of variations for "put", and very much includes the kinds of details you're looking for. I've uploaded an image at https://imgur.com/a/UKvASc1 which gives the simplest part of what you're commenting on, and they phrase it as "to move (a thing)...to cause [it] to get into or be in some place or position expressed or implied", which I think nicely expresses the multi-argument nature of it (and also points to 23 other subsections of "put" for phrases with prepositions and adverbs). It's really overwhelming, but it *has* to be if it's going to capture that level of detail...
As far as I'm concerned, Bryan Garner is the God-Emperor of the English language, and I accept his opinions on all such questions as received Truth. Can't go wrong with "Modern American Usage," and if you're a lawyer, "Reading Law--the Interpretation of Legal Texts" is even more essential
I wanted to write a comment defending the folk concept of „no evidence“ and blaming science communicators for restricting „evidence“ to „studies officially conducted by scientists“ when it suits them (see also John Schilling‘s comment), but perhaps the biggest culprit here is indeed the English word „evidence“, if it can mean both „hint“ and „proof“.
It’s an important point - that words can have different meanings in different contexts. “Evolved” means very different things to an evolutionary biologist than to a layperson. I think evidence is very much the same - to the average person, the biblical story of Lazarus constitutes evidence.
“No evidence that 45000 died of vaccine complications” and “no evidence that vaccines cause new variants” are just the same kind of “no evidence” hand waving about possibly/likely true claims that the other cases are. If vaccines didn’t contribute to new variants it would violate everything we know about evolution. And with several billion people vaccinated, cases of vaccine-induced myocarditis running around one in ten thousand for males, and plenty of other possible side effects, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that tens of thousands have died due to vaccination
[LOL Scott now appears to have edited the piece to remove the example about vaccines causing new variants being false, but it was there originally]
"And with several billion people vaccinated, cases of vaccine-induced myocarditis running around one in ten thousand for males, and plenty of other possible side effects, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that tens of thousands have died due to vaccination"
Studies of vaccinated individuals find their non-COVID mortality rate is below that of unvaccinated individuals, so, while it is reasonable to "suppose" this, it is contradicted by the evidence.
I think the only thing we should infer from the observation that the NON-covid mortality rate of vaccinated individuals is below that of unvaccinated individuals, is that our method of collecting data is flawed (or there is a relevant variable that isn’t being controlled for). My prior for a covid vaccine actually making people less susceptible to other causes of death is very low.
One confounder that always shows up in nutrition research: whatever "healthy" thing is currently in vogue tends be associated with better health outcomes, even if it's the opposite of what the "healthy" thing was 10 years ago.
The reason: healthy people tend to do whatever is considered "healthy" at the time.
Seems like this effect is likely present re: vaccines!
Clearly incorrect. There are all sort of possible confounders here, some of which are obvious.
People more likely to get the vaccine might have lower risk behaviors in general.
When we compare what is known broadly about the demographics of vaccine takers versus none vaccine takers, this becomes obvious. People less likely to take the vaccine tend to come from communities where overall diet is less healthy, more dangerous drug use, more poverty- heck, probably more average time spent in a car overall.
It would be remarkable if Covid vaccinations provided additional and unexpected health benefits, wouldn't it? If unvaccinated individuals have a higher non-COVID mortality rate, doesn't this suggest that vaccines do rather less than supposed? 'Healthy population is healthy' is a tautology, not a scientific discovery.
Seriously, I'd like to see evidence of this claim, because it's off intuitively to me. For one thing, unvaccinated individuals are more likely to be seriously ill (as in confined to bed) than vaccinated ones, and time spent in bed means you can't die in a traffic accident (a small risk, but a real one considering the number of person-days we're talking about).
I would go so far and assume that literally all vaccines against any disease give you additional and VERY EXPECTED health benefits.
See my argument above.
Or just consider exercise is good for you and decreases all-cause mortality.
That the cumulative effect of exercise counts, so any period of time in your past, you were prevented from exercising, is time that you didn't spend lowering your all-cause mortality.
Having any specific disease prevents exercise. (or having a worse case, prevents it longer)
It depends on how narrow you define exercise. Being in bed fighting a cold or flu prevents exercise for you muscles, but is strong exercise for your immune system.
"My prior for a covid vaccine actually making people less susceptible to other causes of death is very low."
My prior for that would be fairly high.
If you have a more dangerous disease (cancer, close to having a heart attack, Malaria etc.), where it's a toss-up between recovery and death, a major vs a minor case (or even no case at all) of Covid could make the difference.
And I think that it's reasonable to assume that vaccination would make that difference very often.
[though if you always count Covid as the primary or exclusive cause of death, then we might have a model]
Of course, maybe the side effects of the vaccine could also push you into death, when on the brink. And that would weigh against it.
But iirc, the side effects tend to be stronger, when you have a healthy immune system and are not old. [might just be own conjecture]
My 91 year old frail grandmother didn't notice them, whereas I spent a day in agony after the second vaccination and also with the booster afterwards.
But I'm below 30 and in very good shape. So even if you put me down, there's not a bunch of threats lurking, to finnish me off.
Also a doctor friend told me that getting flu shots seems to confer a general resistance to colds (in her experience). Informal evidence, that. But it seems plausible, if you assume that the flu vaccine effectively frees up capacity, even if you're not particularly susceptible to the flu.
There's something known as non-specific immunity. Some vaccines seem to make you less vulnerable to disease IN GENERAL. We still don't know why. It only seems to function with some vaccines, so it's not some general benefit.
That said, given that COVID has some nasty side effects, it wouldn't be surprising if getting COVID could weaken you and help finish you off from other things.
Classic selection effect because people who get the vaccine differ in other ways (fewer co-morbidities, more health conscious). In fact, people with lots of co-morbidities are sometimes too sick to get the vaccine…because the vaccines actually do have risks
If "studies show vaccinated have lower non-COVID mortality" does not convince you of "vaccinations do not cause mortality increases," what possible evidence *could*?
“Studies show” is not the be-all and end-all of evidence, there are a ton of crap studies out there. Possibly most.
In terms of what would convince me, if all-cause and Covid mortality dropped over the year after we vaccinated 70+ percent of the adult population that would certainly help. Doesn’t seem that’s happening
For me that conclusion is strong evidence that those studies have methodological flaws, and/or naive/deliberately misleading authors -- so I'd say those studies count as "no evidence" either way.
why, when off the top of my head I can think of very obvious confounders related to the demographics of likely vaccine takers vs non takers that I listed above.
You seem to be drawing your conclusion that the studies are flawed based on the idea they showed causality where taking the vaccine leads to lower non-covid mortality. The studies are not claiming causality, they are showing a correlation. This is basic rationalism 101.
>off the top of my head I can think of very obvious confounders related to the demographics of likely vaccine takers vs non takers
If you can think of them, shouldn't the study authors also think of them, and correct for them in their analysis? Or if this is not possible, just, like -- not do that analysis?
If it's so confounded that it's producing a result which clearly doesn't have a possible biological mechanism, then what can we possibly take from it? (Other than "anti-vaxers bad and will probably die")
Also I think that if you look at the demographics of vaccine-takers that are actually relevant to dying of not-covid (age and other health conditions, "living in an old age home" in particular) you will find that vaccine uptake runs in rather the opposite direction that you are hypothesizing -- the point is that *this result is something you should really look into* prior to publishing a study, rather than just handwave it with a single line amounting to "huh, weird -- oh well, we got the result we wanted".
I mean there's beliefs and then there's beliefs -- "a coronavirus vaccine is unlikely to massively (IIRC the OR was like .3) reduce all-cause non-coronavirus mortality" is a pretty well founded belief.
1) Non-specific immunity. Getting certain vaccines seems to make your body better able to reject disease in general. Why? We don't know. But it has been observed with certain vaccines, and seems to be a real effect. One obvious possibility is the theory that challenging our immune systems has the same effect as exercise does - your immune system, in the absence of threats, gets "flabby" and less responsive. There's some evidence for this.
2) Negative COVID side effects. You get sick, recover, but have some new health problem due to COVID. This ends up interacting with something later on and killing you. Or your brain damage from COVID messes with your response time and you crash and die. Or whatever. The all-cause mortality risk is known to go up after having been infected with some diseases, even after clearing them from your system, so it's plausible COVID is the same way.
3) No disruption. Getting COVID can knock you out for a week or two. That can have significant negative health effects for a while. Someone dying a few months later because they are out of shape due to COVID or put on weight due to COVID is plausible.
Of course, it could be due to confounding factors as well.
I think you guys are conflating populations and individuals. Those studies are simply saying that, when looking at a population, the mortality risk of vaccination is less than the selection effect. It's a fact that vaccines will kill some individuals due to how weird immune systems are.
It all boils down to the classic "for the greater good" argument, and frankly I don't know the answer. The obvious choice of anyone responsible for a population of people is pro-vaccination. I would say this holds true for the vast majority individuals who, as far as they know, have normal immune systems. This gets more complicated though if an individual has reason to believe they might have a reaction. If someone has had weird immune reactions to other vaccines, should they get the covid vaccine? If someone ends up with myocarditis from the second dose, should they get a booster? And where are the limits of for the greater good? What if there was a sizable population of people who had adverse reactions, at what point is it not worth the safety of the population at large? Moral philosophy is a messy business with massive grey areas where arbitrary lines must be drawn. While I think a lot of the anti-vaccine movement is anti-science propaganda, I think the lack of acknowledgment of this topic contributes to the anxiety.
The minimum would be an RCT, as opposed to a population study.
One where everyone who dies is tested for COVID, to rule out not only selection effects, but also the possibility that some of the "non-COVID" deaths are actually due to undiagnosed COVID.
Preferably a study that shows that the frequency some particular other cause of death is reduced by the vaccine. In all-cause death studies, the signal is usually weak and easily confounded, because even if an intervention reduces a few particular causes of deaths, there are probably many other causes of death it doesn't affect, and this dilutes the signal. An effect on a particular cause of death is more likely to be convincingly large.
The rate of vaccine-induced myocarditis is probably more like 1 in 50,000-100,000. Moreover, the odds of actually dying from it are very small; most people who develop it recover.
There is evolutionary pressure to escape vaccination (as there is to escape natural immunity), but it’s a matter of how much, and how it relates to other pressures.
Careful with the myocarditis thing. Very age dependent.
>>If vaccines didn’t contribute to new variants it would violate everything we know about evolution.
How so?
Presumably all the coronavirus currently circulating in the world is capable of mutating into a new variant. Widespread vaccination means that out of those variants, the ones which have mutated in such a way as to avoid the vaccine have an advantage over other variants. It doesn't by itself seem to have any mechanism for increasing the rate of variant production. Isn't the common cold constantly mutating and producing new variants?
Lamba in particular is hypothesized to have evolved in an AIDS patient that failed to clear it in spite of having a spike-protein-based vaccine, which could explain why there are so many mutations in the spike protein. Each different type of vaccine provides a different gradient for evolution to climb, so maybe you get more diversity of variants. [low confidence].
It seems like if you have a diversity of different gradients to climb, this makes it more different for any variant to spread, since it has to overcome new barriers for every person with a new vaccination type that it finds.
On the other hand, in the alternative world where no vaccines were made, everyone ends up with the same type of partial natural immunity (the sort you get from getting covid) and there's still a situation where there's evolutionary pressure for variants to evolve to get past the infection-acquired immunity and infect people again. Only now, once a variant has figured out the trick, it can indeed go on to re-infect everyone, since there's no diversity of different protections for different people.
I've read that this isn't necessarily true for natural immunity *or* vaccines. Your immune system will find an antibody that works and start mass-producing it, but it won't find *every* possible antibody. This means that multiple exposures (from boosters or from another infection) can broaden your protection by letting your immune system find more ways to attack it. Which is why boosters still seem to be effective against Omicron despite it having multiple changes from the vaccine strain.
Natural immunity has an advantage here since it has the entire virus to attack and not just the spike protein, but one reason the spike protein was used for the vaccine is because it's part of how the virus gets inside cells, and therefore hard to change without weakening the virus.
My understanding is that the other advantage of going specifically for the spike is that only the spike and the rest of the outer shell are really accessible to antibodies before it attacks a cell (the rest being encapsulated), and antibodies that hit the spike can prevent it from entering new cells, while other antibodies can merely flag it for white blood cells. So natural infection results in both maximally useful "neutralizing" antibodies that hit the spike, and relatively useless non-neutralizing antibodies to other parts of the virus. While the vaccine forces the immune system to go for neutralizing antibodies.
Where natural infection may confer an advantage is in T cell protection, as infected cells can present proteins encapsulated inside the virus to the immune system, which can kill the infected cell. But it appears with this virus that T cell protection without neutralizing antibodies would mean a mild but symptomatic and contagious infection in most cases.
And I believe your immune system will generate multiple kinds of antibodies even after one shot, but will not be as thorough as if it has multiple exposures. This is part of why you see significantly reduced neutralization against certain variants (in particular beta and now omicron) but not zero neutralization.
Which does make one wonder if covid was lab engineered. The responses against that are about the variance from the likely source, assuming basically a "one pass" round of engineering. But there was a decade long time gap between the hypothetical source and the version that leaked (if that's what happened) It seems like the original could have been "watched" for years to see how it evolved naturally, with different divergent strains being stored to see how they would respond to evolutionary pressures, then when a candidate for gain of function research emerged, they created the current strain.
I'm a bit surprised no one proposed this. All the criticism that it couldnt have been a lab leak that I saw was on the assumption that the engineering was all done from the original strain found in caves, as opposed to having played with that version and see how it might mutate under different pressures over the years, THEN doing the direct gai of function engineering.
It could evolve quite a bit if they run it through a series of deliberately-infected humanized mice over years, which is something gain of function researchers might do.
"I'm a bit surprised no one proposed this. " I am not. The only surprise is that you are so naive.
Any suggestion or discussion of a man-made origin for Covid-19 has been Officially Forbidden since the very beginning of this debacle. Any scientist who tried to talk about this has been shouted down, silenced, and shunned. Some have reported direct threats re: loss of funding and employment if they followed this line of thought.
To me, this is the darkest poison imaginable. It's by far the worst damage of this whole pandemic. Threatening scientists with the punishments of politics and religion (excommunication is the only appropriate word) shows that our culture has truly Lost its Way.
In all fairness, there has actually been a lot discussion about this in the science community - mainly informal, but still. To the point where I don't know any colleagues who are seriously entertaining any other theory about the origin of this crap than a lab accident. Mind you, I am a scientist in a somewhat different area (computer science): but I have friends across a lot of neighbouring and not so neighbouring "hard science" fields, including molecular biological research.
All of them, and in particular those who actually are into viral genetics, see it as by far the most likely hypothesis that someone in Wuhan fucked up super hard (Chernobyl-level), and that Covid is the result. So at least parts of the science community seem to have come to conclusions anyway, even though it might not be very visible from the outside. But as you say, voicing those conclusions out loud is not an opportune thing to do, in a lot of places, which is very worrying indeed.
The political and media side of things is really in a bad shape: there, we seem to have the perfect storm together, in that both the U.S. science establishment and the Chinese state would lose face if it were officially acknowledged that Chernobyl v. 2.0 actually happened. In case you saw the HBO miniseries about the Chernobyl 1.0 accident: remember how the Communists tried to save face, by all means. How the various slimy apparatchiks tried to keep the full truth from coming out.
Fast forward to 2021: and look at Fauci and his friends, like that Daszak chap. All of them were to varying degrees involved with the Wuhan lab (Fauci only peripherally, but still). All of them would have their heads on the chopping block if hard evidence emerged that this thing actually comes from there due to negligence and hubris.
Add to that the reluctance of the Chinese state to ever acknowledge that their "fast forward science at all costs" policy might have been part of the problem as well (even though the vast majority of the blame needs to go to the lunatics, most of them Westerners, who proposed and performed those gain of function experiments in the first place), and it does not look good for this to be properly handled at the official level any time soon.
I appreciate and agree with everything you are saying. There are several very damaging things going on here, and our culture and society needs people to start pushing back, loudly, against this stuff:
-- People at Lancet and the NYTimes need to be called on the carpet and explain why they published as God's Own Truth, the justifications and misdirections of Daszac et. al. The NYT continues to quote Daszak as a "leading COVID expert" in all their coverage of this, never mentioning his role (er, "conflict of interest") in causing it.
-- It is impossible to debunk or expose or even rationally disagree with crazy conspiracy theories, when basic questions that normal people might ask, like "maybe this bat coronavirus could have leaked from the one place in the world where these are collected and studied, right where the outbreak started", are branded as crazy conspiracy theories, and then some are later quietly understood to have been COMPLETELY true.
-- The most disgusting and cynical part of all this has been the deliberate conflation of 1) suspicion and criticism of the Communist Chinese Government, with 2) "xenophobia" and "racism", those accusations being among the two most powerful and prejudicial of our times. Such labels, so used, are a spiritual acid.
-- This deliberate miuse of language, along the lines of "no evidence" and "linked to", doesn't just undermine, it DESTROYS trust in both journalism and science. Certainly it diminishes the dignity of all concerned, the liars and the lied-to in equal measure.
I do not think there is a Marvel-Comics-MFDOOM-type conspiracy to cover all this up, but it is certain that the economic and ideological interests of a great many people in the media and even the scientific establishment, all align with never really knowing the origin of this virus.
Knowing the truth of this specific problem is secondary to exposing and escaping from the atmosphere where inquiry is forbidden and people are afraid to voice their opinions and knowledge.
/Sorry if this became a rant. I just don't know of many communities where rational inquiry is considered so important, where people would likely agree with this line of, let's call it, "militant skepticism"
> I don't know any colleagues who are seriously entertaining any other theory about the origin of this crap than a lab accident. ... I am a scientist in ... computer science
Granted, his list of "six impossible things" you have to believe to be a "lab leaker" range from "not impossible" to "not needed in a lab-leak hypothesis", but I find that fora for experts to talk to other experts tend to be a reliable information source, especially if they have few views/subs (quacks seek public attention!) As of now this video has 122 views including myself, the channel has 77 subscribers, and its content is technical, signs which point to a nonpoliticized information source.
I only wish I had a good way of finding unpopular information sources like these...
This is just mathematically false, as Pearl showed and won the Turing Award for forty years ago! The standard textbook is called *Causality*, by Pearl; i'm sure people have written intro explainers online.
What Pearl showed is that you can tell which causal models are true by checking for particular conditional dependences among the probabilities. Different claims about causality give different predictions about what joint probability distributions you will infer. In that sense you can in principle get causality from bayes.
If anyone else wants to see the deleted comments, control-F "penttrioctium" here: https://web.archive.org/web/20211219013338/https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
I read Scott's post first and then saw the FT article. I initially disagree with Scott that journalists were using "No Evidence" to mean "very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet". Seems like they were using it to mean "Don't believe that ...". But this FT article does explicitly say "casts doubt on the hopes of some experts, based on reports from medics in South Africa". They are mentioning evidence right there -- "reports from medics".
According to Scott's article, journalists use "no evidence" to mean anything from "very likely false" to "we don't know", not "very likely true". (Where he says journalists mean something like "very likely true", he means the negation of the claim there is "no evidence" for, if I understood correctly.)
Edit button?!
Edit: Edit button!!
Holy moly this will help.
Wanna see this for myself thanks
E: sweet
Edited to add - Joy of joys and splendidness abounds. All is forgiven. I love Big Brother.
Edit: I also wan't to try, I hope you don't mind
I have immediate work to do!
edit again
xxx2222
111
Finally!!!
Headline: "Scant Evidence of an Edit Button"
lol!
Whooohoooooo (edit whooooohoooooooo)
This reminds me of Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor.
Yes! Burdens of proof! Why are we demanding extraordinary evidence for vaccines and not for ivermectin. Why are we “digging deeper” only selectively
Who is "we", and what specifically does "demanding" refer to? There's a fair amount of conversation going on out there.
Don't forget the phrase "without evidence" adopted recently by some journalists in order to imply someone was lying without coming out and saying it.
Example: "Trump claimed without evidence, Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense."
"With no evidence" was better than saying "lying" because Trump would often assert things we just had no idea about.
But then, well, [insert Scott's entire essay here].
And when there were reams of video publicly available on the topic at the time?
I think the difference is when NPR sends out "without evidence" they believe that relieves them of the need to actually confront, analyze, and make an argument about their viewpoint regarding the available evidence. Instead, they can smuggle in their conclusion while trying to make it seem the objective truth.
And "rational/scientific thinkers" fall for it regularly. This phenomenon where "smart" people are only smart on a relative scale in comparison to idiotic strawman characterizations (subconscious heuristic imaginations of reality, perceived as reality itself) of Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists seems like one of the most under-reported and plausibly consequential things out there.
The academic studies discussing the difference between "bullshit" and "lying" would prove valuable.
Saying someone "claimed something without evidence" is basically accusing them of showing greater-than-justified certainty, which can be true even if it later turns out their claim was accurate. (When it's not just a formal synonym for "lying".)
The implication there is certainly not "it may be true, but it's too early to tell, we need more careful consideration of the issue before we reach the final conclusion" but "it's definitely false, in fact, it's so obviously false that even seriously considering that it might be true makes you look kinda stupid". And when it turns out that it wasn't false of course it does wonders to the credibility.
In the UK its very hard for newspapers to ever call someone a liar.
They could be mistaken or just stupid no matter how much evidence you have that they said something obviously false with a motive to mislead people.
Maybe some people feel more comfortable taking a medicine whose toxicity is well known therefore they demand more evidence for new medicine.
If they were only talking about safety, maybe. But they are usually talking about effectiveness as well, and both were equally new for the new disease.
Well, as a general rule, we require more evidence to support forcing something on other people (vaccinator mandates, requiring vaccine passports, etc), than we do to support letting people do something to themselves (deciding to take a drug that you think is worthless).
Is the actually difficult for you to understand?
Also, there should be a higher bar for "things you do to healthy people" (here, let's have 250 million Americans take this shot!) than for "things you do for sick people" (let's have 1 million sick people take this drug).
Does ivermectin cause 250 times as many bad side effects as the "vaccine"? How many more people will be getting the shot, compared to taking ivermectin? Have you even bothered to think about that?
Or did you just get your marching order "Pfizer good, ivermectin bad", salute, and follow them?
"Have you even bothered to think about that?"
Yes, actually. And for older individuals with functional immune systems it's a standard very clearly met, especially since even if Ivermectin 'works' it likely doesn't work as well as vaccines do as an over-arching strategy. For younger individuals I haven't had time to review the data, and so make no comments.
division of labor
Exactly. Although it's a slight variation (and even worse) because they are playing games with a binary definition of a word -- "evidence."
This article talks about scientific "evidence." But a legal definition is probably most appropriate for most phony "fact checks" claiming "no evidence." Any fact is "evidence" so long as it makes a conclusion somewhat more likely to be true. That includes circumstantial evidence, plausible presumptions, uncorroborated statements, anecdotes, etc. You can argue such evidence is weak or not persuasive to you, but that doesn't mean it isn't even "evidence" at all.
However, when confronted with a claim they don't like, "fact-checkers" treat the word "evidence" as if the words means "conclusive proof already established" and then proclaim the assertion debunked because: "no evidence." For checking facts they like, however, any second hand statement or assertion suddenly becomes "substantial evidence" of the good fact.
I'd say this scam is 15% stupidity and 85% bad faith, but the "evidence" for this allocation is open to interpretation.
Absolutely!
I 100% agree with the sentiment here, but maybe we SSC/ACX people are weird in how we use "evidence?" I looked up what dictionary.com says:
* that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.
* something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign:
Maybe some people think "evidence" means "proof?"
Similarly: In the last few years I've noticed headline writers using "refute" to mean "dispute," which makes me crazy. But some dictionaries say "refute" means "deny or contradict" - can I blame them?
If that's your position, you should be saying something much stronger when you want to express something like "No Evidence That COVID Vaccines Have Killed 45,000 People"
Yeah, absolutely.
Some writers seem to be doing a thing lately where they try to avoid repeating a false/low-status/dubious claim when debunking it, but this leads to even less-clear headlines.
"COVID Vaccines' Effect on 45,000 People, Explained"
If it *can't* be explained in a headline, that's a good summary.
But, also, feels like clickbait.
Hmm. Is "this issue is too complex to be summarized in the headline" good because it gives nuance, or bad because it is clickbait?
“Recent popular assertions about coronavirus vaccine safety, examined,” is the sort of headline I would click on, but there are people whose whole job is baiting clicks and they seem to eschew such phrasing, probably with good reason
https://xkcd.com/2551/
Given psychology studies, the correct headline there is "COVID Vaccines are safe and effective".
A lot of people will think that COVID vaccines kill people just by reading a headline debunking the idea.
In "There is no evidence", there's also a bit of a problem with this sneaky word "is". There can be evidence that exists, but has not been found, or has been found but was ~rejected, or has been found but was covered up, and so on and so forth. Of course, this inconvenient complexity of reality can easily be perceptually dismissed with "That's pedantic" or confused appeals to Russell's Teapot, but this is an illusion, it doesn't make the actual epistemic problem itself cease to exist.
Another word that people tend to have problems with is "the", as in "The evidence..." or "The facts....".
Right. A more humble and honest phrasing would be "we", or even better, "I don't have evidence". Doesn't quite pack the same punch though, does it?
It doesn't for sure...but I suspect that is not how reality appears to those who say such things. Personally, I don't think these people are lying, I believe that they are describing reality as they truly see it. Consciousness (and culture, "reality", etc) is to a very large degree a controlled hallucination.
Of course they aren't consciously lying, by and large. Evolution bred us to compete for status first (which is in large part facilitated by sincere and overconfident pushing of our flawed notions), and to arrive at correct beliefs a distant second.
Evolution also bred us to consider our perception of reality to be synonymous with reality itself, and (most) cultures tend to fairly strictly enforce the maintenance of this illusion, at a sub-perceptual/instinctive level.
This might be the case of our perceptions of reality actually having been accurate enough for the purposes of living in the ancestral environment, where you knew everybody by name and (almost) all knowledge was common and orally transmitted.
I disagree, though, that it's exactly what more sophisticated cultures try to enforce. I'd say that they instead strive to create a sort of shared narrative, which is inculcated from the young age and through which reality is interpreted, subconsciously and unquestioningly.
Or "there is no credible evidence", which in fact often boils down to "there is no evidence that I would find credible".
I agree, the “is” further implies a comprehensive search for evidence was undertaken and completed in a rigorous manner
Which hasn't been done of course, and is essentially impossible in most cases.....which is fine, I'm not criticizing that. Rather, it is the utterly brutal inaccuracy of the perception that I find interesting, and that hardly anyone including extremely intelligent and logical people seem immune from this bug. It even seems like there is a process in the mind that id designed to detect and reject discussions of such ideas....which is clearly crazy but I swear this is how people behave.
I don't think that works -- if we think of "evidence" as knowledge used to update priors, in good Bayesian fashion, then by definition, nothing counts as evidence until you actually know it. Facts that haven't been ascertained yet are part of the unknowns you're trying to discover, not data to help you discover them.
This kind of demonstrates the trickiness of it I think.
If you consider the scenario of a crime having been committed, and then take a dictionary definition:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evidence
1. something which shows that something else exists or is true
2. a visible sign of something
3. material that is presented to a court of law to help find the truth about something
Let's say an incriminating piece of evidence exists at the crime scene (satisfying #1), but it is not discovered by investigators (due to incompetence or malice) - this would fail to satisfy #2 and #3, as well as "knowledge" in "if we think of "evidence" as knowledge used to update priors". So in this case, a Bayesian approach will produce a worse prediction that a super strict epistemic approach.
I don't understand your last sentence though?
I don't think your example satisfies definition #1 -- it can't *show* that something else is true until it is discovered by investigators. It's not evidence until it's discovered.
The last sentence is just reinforcing the map vs. territory dichotomy here: knowledge vs. the thing it represents. "Evidence" is a relation of knowledge, not a quality of entities in reality. So things that exist, but haven't been discovered yet, remain part of the reality you're trying to use knowledge to represent, but haven't yet produced knowledge that can be used to improve your model of that reality.
> I don't think your example satisfies definition #1 -- it can't *show* that something else is true until it is discovered by investigators. It's not evidence until it's discovered.
Agree....I was looking at it from the perspective that "it exists (in physical reality) and shows something", *thus it is evidence* - however, many people will claim with complete sincerity that undiscovered evidence *is not evidence* (ie: "There **is** no evidence!!!"). I'm pretty sure we're on the same page but looking from different angles. My main point was that Bayesian reasoning (as I understand it) doesn't take unknown unknowns into account, or at least not substantially (I rarely hear this very real problem noted in discussions as Rationalists are eagerly forming script based conclusions).
I think in a courtroom, when they say "proof" they mean "evidence." While mathematicians think "proof" means "is completely true, zero doubt remains."
And I think normies are closer to mathematicians than lawyers on this issue.
But in science today, especially astrophysics, there is little caution in how things are phrased: "The unexpected radiation emanating from two black holes colliding". Black holes, neutron stars, dark matter, etc. are hypothetical constructs which attempt to explain the observed phenomena, but they are talked about as if there were no question about their existence. Actually there are other cosmologies that explain the observed phenomena, don't require any exotic physics, and are backed up by more than a century of laboratory experiments. But the Narrative is so ingrained that these alternates are considered "crackpot" and dealt with like Aunt Clara in the English Music Hall ditty "We never mention Aunt Clara, her picture is turned to the wall".
Related: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.
Then there is the Appeal to Authority:
From Wikipedia:
"One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority.'
Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else." - Carl Sagan
One example of the use of the appeal to authority in science dates to 1923,[22] when leading American zoologist Theophilus Painter declared, based on poor data and conflicting observations he had made,[23][24] that humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. From the 1920s until 1956,[25] scientists propagated this "fact" based on Painter's authority,[26][27][24] despite subsequent counts totaling the correct number of 23.[23][28] Even textbooks[23] with photos showing 23 pairs incorrectly declared the number to be 24[28] based on the authority of the then-consensus of 24 pairs.[29]
There's *something* at the absolute center of the Crab Nebula (supernova remnant). It's flickering every 33 milliseconds, which is enough time for light to travel about 6000 miles, or comparable to the radius of the earth, which sets an upper bound on its size. (otherwise, the hot spot of light causing the flicker wouldn't be able to make it around the ball in time) However, that's if it's rotating at ~the speed of light, which... is a very implausible assumption. If you dial it down to some rotational speed that might actually exist, like 10% of lightspeed, that sets an upper bound of 600 miles across. The equations that capture how white dwarf matter works (which is in a low enough energy domain that known physics holds extremely accurately) rather clearly indicate that no white dwarf can be that small (ie, it's at the point where additional laws of physics start applying).
Also, whatever it is has a temperature of about 1.6 million kelvin (as inferrable via the spectra and a blackbody radiation calculator on the internet), very very far beyond even the toastiest of blue giant stars.
In addition, these sorts of rapidly flickering radiation sources have been found in the centers of some other supernova remnants (like the Vela supernova remnant), and also others have been found in binary orbits with other stars, allowing exact determination of their mass through good old Newton's laws of gravity. Which, again, is well past the limit that the white dwarf equations of state suggest is possible.
And when you put the mass and the radius bounds together (since there are some pulsars which flicker far faster than the crab, which, as previously stated, lets you upper-bound the radius)... For the fastest-rotating one (716 times per second), napkin math says that even if it was rotating at light speed it would have to be less than 260 miles across. ~2 solar masses in a 260-mile ball (which is probably a serious overestimate, since light-speed rotation isn't happening) is the sort of density that... lines up pretty well with estimates of what neutron star densities should be, what pop science says their properties are.
The only authority being relied on here are that the astronomers are accurately reporting the rotation rates, spectra, and orbital periods of these thingies, the rest of the math can be worked out by yourself with a high school physics textbook and a napkin.
I would like to distinguish pulsars and black holes from dark matter. I think the case for dark matter is way way way more solid than you think it is, but doubting dark isn't completely outside the realm of sanity the way the existence of pulsars and black holes is.
Like, for black holes, there's a star at the center of the galaxy that pulls a hairpin turn around *something* at 2% of lightspeed, and via ordinary high-school newtonian physics, that tells you that whatever the heck it is weighs about 4 million solar masses. And we've turned radio telescopes across earth on that thing and *taken a direct picture of the event horizon*.
IT'S OVER.
Thank you for your detailed reply. In Plasma Cosmology the object at the center of galaxies is a plasmoid. Oscillating resonant circuits explain very well the behavior of pulsars. Birkeland currents are a reasonable explanation of the rotation of galaxies and the fact that the equator of the sun rotates more rapidly than the poles. Experiments in plasma labs have produced results that line up very well with cosmological observations.
The refusal to credit the electric force with any role in astrophysics despite a wealth of evidence is beyond puzzling. I have looked long and hard for a credible falsification of Plasma Cosmology, and so far have not found it. Many people just reject the idea out of hand, but worse those claiming to have "debunked" it distort or outright lie. Understanding Plasma Cosmology would take an investment of a few hours of your time. You would find that it all hangs together.
LOL of course the guy that uses astrophysics as their example of bad science is the electric-universe conspiracy theorist. You're not that guy, guy. There are examples of actual bad science but I doubt you'll ever find it with those abilities.
If you actually looked at the data you might change your mind. The standard model has so many infirmities if it was a dog they'd have to put it down. Black holes are metaphysics, not physics. Same with neutron stars, dark matter, etc. They are crutches propping up the standard model with zero experimental evidence. The 80 year search for dark matter has yielded nothing. Rather than dark matter, I propose that it's Giant Space Monkeys riding Giant Space Unicorns herding the galaxies towards the Cosmic Railhead. This is functionally equivalent to the dark matter, dark energy phantasm, only the silliness is more obvious. Can you imagine Newton, Galileo, Maxwell, or Rutherford putting up with the lack of rigor exhibited by the Big Bangers? I can't either.
The value of any theory is its ability to predict outcomes. The predictions made by EU physicist Wal Thornhill before the Deep Impact mission to Tempel 1 proved to be correct, while the mission scientists had the usual collection of "unexpectedly" remarks.
This is my pet peeve about dictionaries. They only tell you how a word is *similar* to other words, not how a word is *different*. But differences *matter*.
My other pet peeve about dictionaries is that they lack information about syntax: "he stops eating" is different from "he stops to eat", but "he starts eating" means the *same* thing as "he starts to eat". I don't know of any dictionary that explains things like this. Another example: put. Put is a ternary verb; it requires three arguments, unlike normal transitive verbs that require two. Merriam-Webster simply describes it as "transitive". "throw" is also transitive: "He throws the ball", but *"he puts the ball" is invalid; instead "he puts the ball in the bag".
_Garner's Modern American Usage_ is terrific and comes *kind* of close to what you're wishing for, in terms of giving information about the idiosyncrasies and particularities of various words. It doesn't contain the 'stops to' example (I checked) but I strongly suspect it contains an entry for the *category* of things you're talking about; I just don't know the name of that category.
It seems like what you're looking for is higher level than a dictionary and lower level than a usage guide, though. I don't have a copy of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary anymore, but it does extend a little ways into the territory your wishing for, certainly much further than any other dictionary I'm aware of.
"you're wishing for"; well, that's a particularly awkward comment for an error like that -- speech to text, I swear it.
Good lord, I'd forgotten just how comprehensive the unabridged OED really is. It has several pages of variations for "put", and very much includes the kinds of details you're looking for. I've uploaded an image at https://imgur.com/a/UKvASc1 which gives the simplest part of what you're commenting on, and they phrase it as "to move (a thing)...to cause [it] to get into or be in some place or position expressed or implied", which I think nicely expresses the multi-argument nature of it (and also points to 23 other subsections of "put" for phrases with prepositions and adverbs). It's really overwhelming, but it *has* to be if it's going to capture that level of detail...
Here's a direct link to that page: https://archive.org/embed/in.ernet.dli.2015.99997/2015.99997.The-Oxford-English-Dictionary-Vol-8poy-ry
As far as I'm concerned, Bryan Garner is the God-Emperor of the English language, and I accept his opinions on all such questions as received Truth. Can't go wrong with "Modern American Usage," and if you're a lawyer, "Reading Law--the Interpretation of Legal Texts" is even more essential
_American Heritage_ will explain the difference between synonyms.
I wanted to write a comment defending the folk concept of „no evidence“ and blaming science communicators for restricting „evidence“ to „studies officially conducted by scientists“ when it suits them (see also John Schilling‘s comment), but perhaps the biggest culprit here is indeed the English word „evidence“, if it can mean both „hint“ and „proof“.
I think the word they are really looking for is "rebut" but it has fallen out of fashion and doesn't occur to them.
It’s an important point - that words can have different meanings in different contexts. “Evolved” means very different things to an evolutionary biologist than to a layperson. I think evidence is very much the same - to the average person, the biblical story of Lazarus constitutes evidence.
“No evidence that 45000 died of vaccine complications” and “no evidence that vaccines cause new variants” are just the same kind of “no evidence” hand waving about possibly/likely true claims that the other cases are. If vaccines didn’t contribute to new variants it would violate everything we know about evolution. And with several billion people vaccinated, cases of vaccine-induced myocarditis running around one in ten thousand for males, and plenty of other possible side effects, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that tens of thousands have died due to vaccination
[LOL Scott now appears to have edited the piece to remove the example about vaccines causing new variants being false, but it was there originally]
"And with several billion people vaccinated, cases of vaccine-induced myocarditis running around one in ten thousand for males, and plenty of other possible side effects, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that tens of thousands have died due to vaccination"
Studies of vaccinated individuals find their non-COVID mortality rate is below that of unvaccinated individuals, so, while it is reasonable to "suppose" this, it is contradicted by the evidence.
I think the only thing we should infer from the observation that the NON-covid mortality rate of vaccinated individuals is below that of unvaccinated individuals, is that our method of collecting data is flawed (or there is a relevant variable that isn’t being controlled for). My prior for a covid vaccine actually making people less susceptible to other causes of death is very low.
One confounder that always shows up in nutrition research: whatever "healthy" thing is currently in vogue tends be associated with better health outcomes, even if it's the opposite of what the "healthy" thing was 10 years ago.
The reason: healthy people tend to do whatever is considered "healthy" at the time.
Seems like this effect is likely present re: vaccines!
> is that our method of collecting data is flawed (or there is a relevant variable that isn’t being controlled for).
Seems fairly certain it's about group differences.
Clearly incorrect. There are all sort of possible confounders here, some of which are obvious.
People more likely to get the vaccine might have lower risk behaviors in general.
When we compare what is known broadly about the demographics of vaccine takers versus none vaccine takers, this becomes obvious. People less likely to take the vaccine tend to come from communities where overall diet is less healthy, more dangerous drug use, more poverty- heck, probably more average time spent in a car overall.
Right, this is the most plausible version of "there is a relevant variable that isn’t being controlled for".
It would be remarkable if Covid vaccinations provided additional and unexpected health benefits, wouldn't it? If unvaccinated individuals have a higher non-COVID mortality rate, doesn't this suggest that vaccines do rather less than supposed? 'Healthy population is healthy' is a tautology, not a scientific discovery.
Seriously, I'd like to see evidence of this claim, because it's off intuitively to me. For one thing, unvaccinated individuals are more likely to be seriously ill (as in confined to bed) than vaccinated ones, and time spent in bed means you can't die in a traffic accident (a small risk, but a real one considering the number of person-days we're talking about).
I would go so far and assume that literally all vaccines against any disease give you additional and VERY EXPECTED health benefits.
See my argument above.
Or just consider exercise is good for you and decreases all-cause mortality.
That the cumulative effect of exercise counts, so any period of time in your past, you were prevented from exercising, is time that you didn't spend lowering your all-cause mortality.
Having any specific disease prevents exercise. (or having a worse case, prevents it longer)
This comment serves as a good guideline for demonstrating the necessity of psychic hygiene when exposed to commenters
I do not understand, what you mean.
It depends on how narrow you define exercise. Being in bed fighting a cold or flu prevents exercise for you muscles, but is strong exercise for your immune system.
It's likely a selection effect
"My prior for a covid vaccine actually making people less susceptible to other causes of death is very low."
My prior for that would be fairly high.
If you have a more dangerous disease (cancer, close to having a heart attack, Malaria etc.), where it's a toss-up between recovery and death, a major vs a minor case (or even no case at all) of Covid could make the difference.
And I think that it's reasonable to assume that vaccination would make that difference very often.
[though if you always count Covid as the primary or exclusive cause of death, then we might have a model]
Of course, maybe the side effects of the vaccine could also push you into death, when on the brink. And that would weigh against it.
But iirc, the side effects tend to be stronger, when you have a healthy immune system and are not old. [might just be own conjecture]
My 91 year old frail grandmother didn't notice them, whereas I spent a day in agony after the second vaccination and also with the booster afterwards.
But I'm below 30 and in very good shape. So even if you put me down, there's not a bunch of threats lurking, to finnish me off.
Also a doctor friend told me that getting flu shots seems to confer a general resistance to colds (in her experience). Informal evidence, that. But it seems plausible, if you assume that the flu vaccine effectively frees up capacity, even if you're not particularly susceptible to the flu.
There's something known as non-specific immunity. Some vaccines seem to make you less vulnerable to disease IN GENERAL. We still don't know why. It only seems to function with some vaccines, so it's not some general benefit.
That said, given that COVID has some nasty side effects, it wouldn't be surprising if getting COVID could weaken you and help finish you off from other things.
Some vaccines have non-specific beneficial health effects that boost your immunity to disease in general. We don't know why, but they do.
It's entirely plausible that the COVID vaccine does as well.
That said, group effects seem more likely.
However, if the vaccine killed a bunch of people, that'd be very unlikely.
Classic selection effect because people who get the vaccine differ in other ways (fewer co-morbidities, more health conscious). In fact, people with lots of co-morbidities are sometimes too sick to get the vaccine…because the vaccines actually do have risks
If "studies show vaccinated have lower non-COVID mortality" does not convince you of "vaccinations do not cause mortality increases," what possible evidence *could*?
“Studies show” is not the be-all and end-all of evidence, there are a ton of crap studies out there. Possibly most.
In terms of what would convince me, if all-cause and Covid mortality dropped over the year after we vaccinated 70+ percent of the adult population that would certainly help. Doesn’t seem that’s happening
Basically, you don't understand infectious diseases, nor do you understand randomized controlled trials, nor are you interested in understanding.
Less of this type of comment please. mixtyplyk seems to be arguing in good faith to me. He, and you, both said 'studies' not 'RCTs'
For me that conclusion is strong evidence that those studies have methodological flaws, and/or naive/deliberately misleading authors -- so I'd say those studies count as "no evidence" either way.
why, when off the top of my head I can think of very obvious confounders related to the demographics of likely vaccine takers vs non takers that I listed above.
You seem to be drawing your conclusion that the studies are flawed based on the idea they showed causality where taking the vaccine leads to lower non-covid mortality. The studies are not claiming causality, they are showing a correlation. This is basic rationalism 101.
>off the top of my head I can think of very obvious confounders related to the demographics of likely vaccine takers vs non takers
If you can think of them, shouldn't the study authors also think of them, and correct for them in their analysis? Or if this is not possible, just, like -- not do that analysis?
If it's so confounded that it's producing a result which clearly doesn't have a possible biological mechanism, then what can we possibly take from it? (Other than "anti-vaxers bad and will probably die")
Also I think that if you look at the demographics of vaccine-takers that are actually relevant to dying of not-covid (age and other health conditions, "living in an old age home" in particular) you will find that vaccine uptake runs in rather the opposite direction that you are hypothesizing -- the point is that *this result is something you should really look into* prior to publishing a study, rather than just handwave it with a single line amounting to "huh, weird -- oh well, we got the result we wanted".
This is a fully general argument to never updating your beliefs.
I mean there's beliefs and then there's beliefs -- "a coronavirus vaccine is unlikely to massively (IIRC the OR was like .3) reduce all-cause non-coronavirus mortality" is a pretty well founded belief.
There's three obvious mechanisms:
1) Non-specific immunity. Getting certain vaccines seems to make your body better able to reject disease in general. Why? We don't know. But it has been observed with certain vaccines, and seems to be a real effect. One obvious possibility is the theory that challenging our immune systems has the same effect as exercise does - your immune system, in the absence of threats, gets "flabby" and less responsive. There's some evidence for this.
2) Negative COVID side effects. You get sick, recover, but have some new health problem due to COVID. This ends up interacting with something later on and killing you. Or your brain damage from COVID messes with your response time and you crash and die. Or whatever. The all-cause mortality risk is known to go up after having been infected with some diseases, even after clearing them from your system, so it's plausible COVID is the same way.
3) No disruption. Getting COVID can knock you out for a week or two. That can have significant negative health effects for a while. Someone dying a few months later because they are out of shape due to COVID or put on weight due to COVID is plausible.
Of course, it could be due to confounding factors as well.
I think you guys are conflating populations and individuals. Those studies are simply saying that, when looking at a population, the mortality risk of vaccination is less than the selection effect. It's a fact that vaccines will kill some individuals due to how weird immune systems are.
It all boils down to the classic "for the greater good" argument, and frankly I don't know the answer. The obvious choice of anyone responsible for a population of people is pro-vaccination. I would say this holds true for the vast majority individuals who, as far as they know, have normal immune systems. This gets more complicated though if an individual has reason to believe they might have a reaction. If someone has had weird immune reactions to other vaccines, should they get the covid vaccine? If someone ends up with myocarditis from the second dose, should they get a booster? And where are the limits of for the greater good? What if there was a sizable population of people who had adverse reactions, at what point is it not worth the safety of the population at large? Moral philosophy is a messy business with massive grey areas where arbitrary lines must be drawn. While I think a lot of the anti-vaccine movement is anti-science propaganda, I think the lack of acknowledgment of this topic contributes to the anxiety.
The minimum would be an RCT, as opposed to a population study.
One where everyone who dies is tested for COVID, to rule out not only selection effects, but also the possibility that some of the "non-COVID" deaths are actually due to undiagnosed COVID.
Preferably a study that shows that the frequency some particular other cause of death is reduced by the vaccine. In all-cause death studies, the signal is usually weak and easily confounded, because even if an intervention reduces a few particular causes of deaths, there are probably many other causes of death it doesn't affect, and this dilutes the signal. An effect on a particular cause of death is more likely to be convincingly large.
The rate of vaccine-induced myocarditis is probably more like 1 in 50,000-100,000. Moreover, the odds of actually dying from it are very small; most people who develop it recover.
There is evolutionary pressure to escape vaccination (as there is to escape natural immunity), but it’s a matter of how much, and how it relates to other pressures.
Careful with the myocarditis thing. Very age dependent.
>>If vaccines didn’t contribute to new variants it would violate everything we know about evolution.
How so?
Presumably all the coronavirus currently circulating in the world is capable of mutating into a new variant. Widespread vaccination means that out of those variants, the ones which have mutated in such a way as to avoid the vaccine have an advantage over other variants. It doesn't by itself seem to have any mechanism for increasing the rate of variant production. Isn't the common cold constantly mutating and producing new variants?
Lamba in particular is hypothesized to have evolved in an AIDS patient that failed to clear it in spite of having a spike-protein-based vaccine, which could explain why there are so many mutations in the spike protein. Each different type of vaccine provides a different gradient for evolution to climb, so maybe you get more diversity of variants. [low confidence].
It seems like if you have a diversity of different gradients to climb, this makes it more different for any variant to spread, since it has to overcome new barriers for every person with a new vaccination type that it finds.
On the other hand, in the alternative world where no vaccines were made, everyone ends up with the same type of partial natural immunity (the sort you get from getting covid) and there's still a situation where there's evolutionary pressure for variants to evolve to get past the infection-acquired immunity and infect people again. Only now, once a variant has figured out the trick, it can indeed go on to re-infect everyone, since there's no diversity of different protections for different people.
I've read that this isn't necessarily true for natural immunity *or* vaccines. Your immune system will find an antibody that works and start mass-producing it, but it won't find *every* possible antibody. This means that multiple exposures (from boosters or from another infection) can broaden your protection by letting your immune system find more ways to attack it. Which is why boosters still seem to be effective against Omicron despite it having multiple changes from the vaccine strain.
Natural immunity has an advantage here since it has the entire virus to attack and not just the spike protein, but one reason the spike protein was used for the vaccine is because it's part of how the virus gets inside cells, and therefore hard to change without weakening the virus.
My understanding is that the other advantage of going specifically for the spike is that only the spike and the rest of the outer shell are really accessible to antibodies before it attacks a cell (the rest being encapsulated), and antibodies that hit the spike can prevent it from entering new cells, while other antibodies can merely flag it for white blood cells. So natural infection results in both maximally useful "neutralizing" antibodies that hit the spike, and relatively useless non-neutralizing antibodies to other parts of the virus. While the vaccine forces the immune system to go for neutralizing antibodies.
Where natural infection may confer an advantage is in T cell protection, as infected cells can present proteins encapsulated inside the virus to the immune system, which can kill the infected cell. But it appears with this virus that T cell protection without neutralizing antibodies would mean a mild but symptomatic and contagious infection in most cases.
And I believe your immune system will generate multiple kinds of antibodies even after one shot, but will not be as thorough as if it has multiple exposures. This is part of why you see significantly reduced neutralization against certain variants (in particular beta and now omicron) but not zero neutralization.
Which does make one wonder if covid was lab engineered. The responses against that are about the variance from the likely source, assuming basically a "one pass" round of engineering. But there was a decade long time gap between the hypothetical source and the version that leaked (if that's what happened) It seems like the original could have been "watched" for years to see how it evolved naturally, with different divergent strains being stored to see how they would respond to evolutionary pressures, then when a candidate for gain of function research emerged, they created the current strain.
I'm a bit surprised no one proposed this. All the criticism that it couldnt have been a lab leak that I saw was on the assumption that the engineering was all done from the original strain found in caves, as opposed to having played with that version and see how it might mutate under different pressures over the years, THEN doing the direct gai of function engineering.
It could evolve quite a bit if they run it through a series of deliberately-infected humanized mice over years, which is something gain of function researchers might do.
"I'm a bit surprised no one proposed this. " I am not. The only surprise is that you are so naive.
Any suggestion or discussion of a man-made origin for Covid-19 has been Officially Forbidden since the very beginning of this debacle. Any scientist who tried to talk about this has been shouted down, silenced, and shunned. Some have reported direct threats re: loss of funding and employment if they followed this line of thought.
To me, this is the darkest poison imaginable. It's by far the worst damage of this whole pandemic. Threatening scientists with the punishments of politics and religion (excommunication is the only appropriate word) shows that our culture has truly Lost its Way.
In all fairness, there has actually been a lot discussion about this in the science community - mainly informal, but still. To the point where I don't know any colleagues who are seriously entertaining any other theory about the origin of this crap than a lab accident. Mind you, I am a scientist in a somewhat different area (computer science): but I have friends across a lot of neighbouring and not so neighbouring "hard science" fields, including molecular biological research.
All of them, and in particular those who actually are into viral genetics, see it as by far the most likely hypothesis that someone in Wuhan fucked up super hard (Chernobyl-level), and that Covid is the result. So at least parts of the science community seem to have come to conclusions anyway, even though it might not be very visible from the outside. But as you say, voicing those conclusions out loud is not an opportune thing to do, in a lot of places, which is very worrying indeed.
The political and media side of things is really in a bad shape: there, we seem to have the perfect storm together, in that both the U.S. science establishment and the Chinese state would lose face if it were officially acknowledged that Chernobyl v. 2.0 actually happened. In case you saw the HBO miniseries about the Chernobyl 1.0 accident: remember how the Communists tried to save face, by all means. How the various slimy apparatchiks tried to keep the full truth from coming out.
Fast forward to 2021: and look at Fauci and his friends, like that Daszak chap. All of them were to varying degrees involved with the Wuhan lab (Fauci only peripherally, but still). All of them would have their heads on the chopping block if hard evidence emerged that this thing actually comes from there due to negligence and hubris.
Add to that the reluctance of the Chinese state to ever acknowledge that their "fast forward science at all costs" policy might have been part of the problem as well (even though the vast majority of the blame needs to go to the lunatics, most of them Westerners, who proposed and performed those gain of function experiments in the first place), and it does not look good for this to be properly handled at the official level any time soon.
Alexander,
I appreciate and agree with everything you are saying. There are several very damaging things going on here, and our culture and society needs people to start pushing back, loudly, against this stuff:
-- People at Lancet and the NYTimes need to be called on the carpet and explain why they published as God's Own Truth, the justifications and misdirections of Daszac et. al. The NYT continues to quote Daszak as a "leading COVID expert" in all their coverage of this, never mentioning his role (er, "conflict of interest") in causing it.
-- It is impossible to debunk or expose or even rationally disagree with crazy conspiracy theories, when basic questions that normal people might ask, like "maybe this bat coronavirus could have leaked from the one place in the world where these are collected and studied, right where the outbreak started", are branded as crazy conspiracy theories, and then some are later quietly understood to have been COMPLETELY true.
-- The most disgusting and cynical part of all this has been the deliberate conflation of 1) suspicion and criticism of the Communist Chinese Government, with 2) "xenophobia" and "racism", those accusations being among the two most powerful and prejudicial of our times. Such labels, so used, are a spiritual acid.
-- This deliberate miuse of language, along the lines of "no evidence" and "linked to", doesn't just undermine, it DESTROYS trust in both journalism and science. Certainly it diminishes the dignity of all concerned, the liars and the lied-to in equal measure.
I do not think there is a Marvel-Comics-MFDOOM-type conspiracy to cover all this up, but it is certain that the economic and ideological interests of a great many people in the media and even the scientific establishment, all align with never really knowing the origin of this virus.
Knowing the truth of this specific problem is secondary to exposing and escaping from the atmosphere where inquiry is forbidden and people are afraid to voice their opinions and knowledge.
/Sorry if this became a rant. I just don't know of many communities where rational inquiry is considered so important, where people would likely agree with this line of, let's call it, "militant skepticism"
BR
> I don't know any colleagues who are seriously entertaining any other theory about the origin of this crap than a lab accident. ... I am a scientist in ... computer science
Then it would be prudent to see what biologists or virologists have to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhsBE0C8Zcg
Granted, his list of "six impossible things" you have to believe to be a "lab leaker" range from "not impossible" to "not needed in a lab-leak hypothesis", but I find that fora for experts to talk to other experts tend to be a reliable information source, especially if they have few views/subs (quacks seek public attention!) As of now this video has 122 views including myself, the channel has 77 subscribers, and its content is technical, signs which point to a nonpoliticized information source.
I only wish I had a good way of finding unpopular information sources like these...