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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

/r/Wallstreetbets just had someone put $775k, the person’s entire net worth, into options on the idea that the market will crash by 6/19. I am sure comments like yours give them hope that they are right.

Personally, I think that the economy will change significantly, but crash vs recover for markets is different. If suddenly workers got a fair wage and everyone got universal healthcare we could easily see the country doing a lot better while the markets would tank as this would undoubtedly be paid for by loss of corporate profits.

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That's a dumb bet. If the system crashes odds are pretty high they aren't getting paid.

From a first principal perspective there is no reason why anyone should think that it is impossible for China or another country to create 2 billion vaccine doses in the next 6 months. There are plenty of reasons to say this will not happen but it isn't impossible. If it does happen everything flips very quickly.

It’s also possible no vaccine will be discovered as there are no coronavirus vaccines.

Your black-and-white answer to this also has a pretty low probability. We may not find a vaccine, however we may find ways of treating the illness making the ICU less needed.

There are no human approved coronavirus vaccines. There were a number of SARS vaccines that never finished clinical trials because SARS became pretty much a non-issue before they finished. There are also coronavirus vaccines approved for animals. Both of these things could potentially help with faster developing a vaccine for COVID-19.

From a practical perspective, there seems to be no appetite in the medical community to attempt this. We have vaccine candidates now, and the consensus opinion seems to be that we should go through the trial process. There just isn't much room to shorten the timeline without cutting corners and safety and efficacy verifications. Unless we learn something dramatic and terrifying new about this virus in the near future, I don't see what would cause this calculus to change.

Which first principles are you using to come to that conclusion?

Huh?

From first principles there is no reason why anyone should think that their won't be 2 billion vaccines tomorrow (perhaps via divine intervention). Heck, from first principles I'm not even sure Australia exists (Maybe Australia is a giant hoax. After all, i have never been there.)

Proving things from first principles is really hard. The fact you weren't able to disprove a statement from first principles is not strong evidence the statement is actually true.

Sorry, I don't believe in a magical skyman as a first principal.

Well you can of course take anything you want as a first principle, this is kind of an odd choice. Typically people take as first principles foundational things they believe to be true but know they can't prove. Things like, our memory reflects things that happened in the past or other people exist as real people and aren't just complex NPC.

Most atheists believe that there is no reasonable evidence for a deity, thus it makes no sense to believe in one (or some varation of that). In particular they believe this conclusion is rational and can be arrived at through reasoning. Taking "there is no deities" as a first principle, is in essense taking a view about religion on just "faith". My understanding is that to most atheists, this sort of appeal to faith is an anathema.

Before administering a vaccine into everybody, we must first make sure it's not worse than the disease (on average, what is a very high var).

This test takes some time, so no, not on the next 6 months. One can realistically expect it by 2022, if we are willing to rush and accept some risk.

By the way, 6 months is how long it takes to create a batch of flu vaccines.

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