ifyoubuildit

> Ignoring that most, like Trump, just outright admitted it

So if trump said it, it must be true?

The rest of what you said could be translated to: "I believe it was such a good idea, all the rich and powerful must have done it".

How is this not a gut feeling?

My skepticism is solely for your argument, not that these people did or did not take the vaccine, which is something that I consider basically unknowable without a lot of leaps of faith.

Edit: in fact, here's my equally unprovable assertion: most people got the vaccine because they didn't want to lose their jobs. Rich and powerful people don't have to worry about that. Therefore fewer of them got the vaccines.

So basically you have a gut feeling that you feel very passionately, but that we have no way of evaluating.

It might be just as likely that zero of the people in such a position took the vaccines for all we know. How is this somehow more enlightened than the idiocracy that you are decrying?

> Every single plutocrat that pulls the levers that get you riled on your march to becoming Soylent Green got the vaccines. Every single power broker got the vaccines

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am curious how you came to know this so confidently.

I've only really heard of cisa in terms of "fighting disinformation", which seemed more than a little dubious. Can someone speak to what their mission is and how effective they've been at it?

Or is this like the DHS where you just get to say that we haven't had any more 9/11s, so clearly the money and complete transformation of how we think about personal liberties was worth it?

Theoretically, it makes sense that we would need something like a cyber defense agency. Realistically, this doesn't seem like something the government (even at the best of times) would be capable of doing effectively.

Sure. But you put evidence in quotes, presumably because you probably don't trust their source(s). Just like they don't trust yours.

Obviously, in your head your sources are evidence while their sources are 'evidence', and the same might be true for them.

And there's the actual hard part: institutional trustworthiness is in the shitter. Everyone will have their sources that they trust, and if were honest, none of us can really vet any of them.

A lot of these disputes can be simplified to "I don't trust your sources".

There's a good standup bit out there: we used to have a word for "doing your own research": reading! Now everyone gives you shit for it.

Is it only ok for luxury items? What happens when you swap steaks out of that sentence?

You have a hundred (dollars|pens|shoes|boxes of cereal), you probably won't notice if I take one.

I don't feel right taking one if I have other options. Whether or not someone notices doesn't make theft OK, it just means you get away without consequences (depending on your religious beliefs).

Not to mention you probably have to trespass/break and enter to do it.

I didn't take being barely able to afford ramen as someone who is going to starve to death. Their health is probably pretty poor, but I was assuming like in real life there would be other options.

Like I said before, if the alternative is death, then obviously stealing is justified. But if the alternative is the soup kitchen or something, then I can't justify stealing the steak. Otherwise you're on a slippery slope.

OK, thanks for spelling them out.

I don't see how either of those principles suggest I should go steal the steaks, because I could easily end up being the person who is stolen from.

Its not surprising when starving people steal, and you can't really blame them for it. And people shouldn't waste frivolously when there are people in their community that are lacking.

But adding these unwritten caveats to private property rights based on whether someone is satisfied with their lot or not... I can't wrap my head around it.

I have no idea what any of that means

What is it then if its not just my feelings? Can you give me some specific principle to go by? When is it OK for me to decide that someone else's possessions should be mine?

Sure it would feel bad, but would my feelings justify taking the steaks from them?

Maybe this is me being a dumb peasant, but I can't imagine where I would get the right to have a say in that.

How is it different from me looking at my neighbor in his bigger house with his nicer car and deciding that those should be mine instead? Or my neighbor with a smaller house wanting my stuff?

Maybe I wasn't being clear, since I didn't mean to accuse anyone of anything.

I'm not disputing that someone had the genuine experience of antidepressants saving their life. I'm asking if that precludes antidepressants acting as a placebo.

In other words both things can be true: antidepressants saved someone's life and antidepressants can act as placebo (even in the case where they saved someone's life). And notice I'm saying "can be true". I'm not saying they are true, cause I have no idea.

This is a logic question, not some kind of moral attack.

A: The same is true for people that say that antidepressants are mostly placebo. They are not.

B: When people say that antidepressants saved their life, they aren’t joking or exaggerating in the least.

Are placebos unable to save lives?

Not claiming antidepressants are or are not mostly placebo, and don't mean to minimize the pain of depression in anyway. I just don't think whether or not they saved a person's life is an indication either way. The placebo effect is real, right? As in the subject actually gets better after taking it.

> Keep your pet theories to yourself if you are not a subject matter expert or someone who has experienced it first hand.

This is the internet, friend. I wish you the best, but maybe don't put too much hope into that one. I think you'll have better luck cultivating the ability to be comfortable having your own beliefs while others have different (possibly wrong!) ones.

Maybe you mean in any modern sense of the word, but I'm pretty sure that is indeed a large part of what it used to mean.

> you pay about 35% total of income in taxes.

That's what's directly taken out of your check right? But how much more do you pay after that in other taxes? And if you go even further, how much higher are the prices of everything that you purchase due to the various taxes involved in their production?

What is the limiting principle here?

You note that a bunch of small business just won't be viable if you up the taxes, but you agree on the need to do it. So do you just keep upping the taxes until nothing is profitable except giant soulless corporations (who will then probably subvert the tax system anyway)?

> What I think a lot of people who are anti-vax miss is the risk of the vaccine compared to the risk of COVID

Why do people still frame this as either/or? How many people out there didn't get covid after they got some number of shots?

The only real scenario is covid with n shots, where n >= 0. In other words, when you got covid, how many shots had you gotten.

(Not anti vax myself, though generally avoid whatever drugs I reasonably can)

I can't say I agree that "regular pickups" are very utilitarian, unless you're talking about the base trim work trucks. They seem to me to be incredibly expensive luxury vehicles for the most part.

I think the quality ranges a lot.

I got one of these free energy audit things which included swapping out up to 30 or so bulbs with LEDs. Whatever contractor did it seems to have gotten the cheapest bulbs they could, and the majority of them have failed by 4 or 5 years later. So far so good on the name brand ones I replaced them with.

> No it isn't. Getting rubella while pregnant would be much much worse for the fetus, while likely mild for the woman.

Does the doctor give the pregnant woman that vaccine? (I meant same difference about "temporal recommendation" vs "recommending against")

> Ergo: The Jannsen vaccine is better than getting covid without it.

If you had already recovered from covid and were younger, the upside was negligible, so I don't think it would meet "grossly outweigh".

> It is blanketly recommended before coming in contact with HPV.

It seems to be recommended for ages 9 to 26, so presumably there is a downside for those younger than 9.

(https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/recommendations.htm...)

If you just compare the downsides of a successful vaccine (which is not all vaccines) to the downsides of the disease it targets, it should obviously always come out that the vaccine was a net win. But you can see how that gets pretty far from "there is no downside to any vaccine" right?

Chat gpt mentions oral polio. You're probably better off having had the oral polio vaccine if you are 100% going to be exposed to polio. But you wouldn't be doing a random first world resident a favor advising them to get the oral polio vaccine (which isn't suggested by "there is no downside to any vaccine")

So granted, you have an infinitely better argument than the original. And maybe that's the argument they meant to make.

> It's a temporal recommendation, not against.

Same difference. "There is no downside to any vaccine" means at any time, if you see a label that says "vaccine", it's never a bad idea for you to take it.

I'm not claiming any expertise here, but some examples:

The jannsen covid shot: you're likely to come in contact with covid, this one is only recommended for folks who can't do mRNA for whatever reason. (The same concept applies to any vaccine that isn't considered the best of its kind)

HPV: not just blanket recommended to everyone, yet you are very likely to come into contact with HPV.

Chatgpt comes up with plenty more examples, but the concept is simple. Just because something is called a vaccine (or medicine in general) does not make it some kinda special power up that everyone should be maximizing their exposure to.

Still false. Maybe if you qualify it further to currently prescribed vaccines (e.g fda certified ones that haven't been taken off the market for whatever reason, or just superceded by newer better vaccines), you'd be closer, but some of those vaccines still wouldn't be recommended to certain people for certain reasons (say after a certain age, or maybe if they're pregnant, or if they have certain conditions, etc, etc, etc)

I don't think it's being particularly pedantic to say "there is no downside to any vaccine" is just wrong, and not really something that should be repeated. It's more of a religious statement than anything else, and it's the exact kind of thinking that comes out of the insane pressure put on people during covid.

> There is no downside to taking any vaccine.

This is just wrong. Go figure out which vaccines you haven't had, and then figure out why they haven't been prescribed to you. (Hint: It's not because your doctors are anti-vax)

This is the result of the covid era info landscape, thinking like this.

Medicine is not an unqualified good. Here's a simple test. Go take some chemo meds. Assuming you don't have cancer, would that be good? Or go swallow a bottle of Tylenol. Would that be good?

Medicine is only good in certain specific circumstances when administered in the right way. Its not "more doses of anything labeled vaccine equals more good". Otherwise we would give children the rabies vaccine.

If you are a perfectly healthy person, one surefire way to become a not healthy person is to put a bunch of drugs that you don't need into your body.

It's contrived and breaks down pretty easily, but why isnt it more like this:

- both wearing seatbelts and getting in an accident have a significant chance of causing x

- you are almost definitely going to get in an accident

- are your chances of x greater or lesser given car accident while wearing seatbelt?

I think your framing is correct (though it'd be better to just say were better off in general), but I haven't seen anyone give a convincing answer to that question in favor of the shots.

> The consensus has been that this is an acceptable risk, particularly since COVID itself is associated with an increased risk of myocarditis.

This made more sense to me when people still believed that the shots meant getting covid was very unlikely. It's easy to find people who got lots of shots, it's hard to find people who didn't get covid.

It always seemed implied that p(shot cardio issues) < p(covid cardio issues), and nobody ever talks about p(shot cardio issues) + p(covid cardio issues).

Did anybody rigorously demonstrate that a vaccinated covid case doesn't have these risks?

A fun exercise for headlines like these is to replace "AI assistants" with "people on the internet", and see how different you feel about it.