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Comment by woofie11 | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the point of preregistered hypotheses.

Odds of conspiracy, with a clear hypothesis and confirmation of that hypothesis, go up drastically. That happened here.

It wasn't a super-unlikely hypothesis either. We're talking about announcing a result a few weeks earlier versus later. That's not an unreasonable decision for a blue-leaning businessperson or scientist to make.

What reduces odds are the number of preregistrations. There were dozens about this strong.

My own prior went from 1% odds to maybe 35% odds. Yours may be different, likely based on your prior based on where you fall on the political spectrum. Right-wingers will probably go 35% to 80%, and left-wingers from 0.01% to 1%.

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> That's not an unreasonable decision for a blue-leaning businessperson or scientist to make.

I just want to make the obligatory point that the way the Trump administration has handled the Covid response in the US goes beyond red and blue ...

Do any down voters want to step up and say they think the Trump Administration has competently handled the pandemic?

It's obvious to anyone willing to look at the facts, and to be honest with themselves, that this administration has done a terrible, terrible job of responding to the pandemic which has probably caused the unnecessary deaths of a lot of people.

And that's not a partisan thing to say. Or rather, it shouldn't be ...

> That's not an unreasonable decision for a blue-leaning businessperson or scientist to make.

Intentionally murdering possibly thousands of people (or tens of thousands? or what, who knows?!) for some assumed political gain is absolutely, 100% an unreasonable decision for any human to make. Intentionally delaying a vaccine would certainly be a crime, no? Not to mention absolutely abhorrent and completely evil.

That is not a "reasonable decision" to make by any stretch of the imagination.

> Intentionally murdering possibly thousands of people (or tens of thousands? or what, who knows?!) for some assumed political gain is absolutely, 100% an unreasonable decision for any human to make. Intentionally delaying a vaccine would certainly be a crime, no? Not to mention absolutely abhorrent and completely evil.

You mean delaying the announcement of a vaccine. They didn't delay the process.

You seem to be jumping to an awful lot of conclusions without really explaining what you understand is happening here.

(I note that I don't understand at all what you're asserting.)

No. I didn't write "Intentionally murdering possibly thousands of people" or "Intentionally delaying a vaccine"

I wrote "We're talking about announcing a result a few weeks earlier versus later."

And if that was the goal, I think it worked. It looks like Biden won by literally tens of thousands votes. An announcement a week earlier probably would have swung the election to Trump.

At a cost of zero lives.

If the vaccine works as announced, we're still weeks away from the end of the trial, and months away from widespread distribution.

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