This is the context of your quote (above the vaccines being “more useful” for immunocompromised people):
In the first two paragraphs, you said that if an immunocompromised person starts off 100x more likely to die of any illness than a healthy person (presumably you meant that to include covid, pre-vaccination), then after vaccination they will still be 100x more likely to die than a healthy (but now vaccinated) person.
That is a claim that the vaccine has the same mathematical effectiveness (or risk reduction ratio) for both healthy and immunocompromised people.
Here are the quotes that make that claim specifically:
And then in the next paragraph, you said:
So your claim about vaccines being “as useful” for immunocompromised people was literally presented – by you – as “[a]nother way of saying” that vaccines were as mathematically effective for immunocompromised people as they were for healthy people.
But now you are saying:
You are the one who originally presented your “useful” claim as having the same meaning as your effectiveness claim. It was not a translation made up by Elliot after the fact: it is the context of the original quote.
OK, I see that now. I haven’t figured out if it was a bad idea to use numbers at all or if I just needed to put context around them, like tried to in a follow-up:
I’ll try again:
What I’m saying is different because it makes a distinction between the before and after state with regard to COVID vaccines, and depends on the COVID vaccine rather than being opposed to it.
I’ll make a direct comparison with flu. Without vaccines, both COVID and flu are dangerous to everyone. Both COVID and flu are much more dangerous to elderly and immunocompromised (“high risk”) people than they are to the general population.
In 2020, COVID was a special emergency compared to flu for reasons including:
(1) We expected a COVID vaccine to be coming; flu already had a vaccine
(2) We were just beginning to learn about effective COVID treatment protocols; we had lots of experience treating flu
(3) We had reason to expect we might effectively stamp out COVID once a vaccine for it arrived; we already knew stamping out flu was beyond our current capabilities
(4) Nobody had got COVID and recovered prior to 2020 so nobody had natural antibodies; Lots of people had got flu and recovered so lots of people had natural antibodies.
These factors applied to both the general population and high risk people. But they mattered most to high risk people because high risk people were way more likely to have serious complications or death from COVID.
By Mid-2021 those factors had all changed, both for the general population and high risk people.
(1) We now have a widely available COVID vaccine. Like flu vaccine, COVID vaccine offers significant protection to both the general population and high risk people
(2) We know a lot more about what is effective and what isn’t in treating people who do get COVID
(3) It no longer seems likely that vaccines will allow us to stamp out COVID
(4) Significant numbers of people (most people think more than the official case counts) have also had COVID and recovered so they have natural antibodies.
That means COVID is now less special / emergency than it was in 2020, and more of a thing we have to deal with on an ongoing basis.
I think the main exception is hospital overload, which can still be a special / emergency type problem with COVID.
Are you trying to deny that COVID is more contagious than the flu (before delta, which significantly increased the contagiousness, or after too?) and/or deny that having COVID is worse than having the flu (worse symptoms, worse lingering effects, higher death rate)?
You like lost track of your own argument or something, somehow, and accused others of translating stuff when they were just reading the plain meaning of your statements. That’s not an issue of insufficient context or mistakenly choosing to use numbers when you shouldn’t but of some kind of thinking/reading/analysis error IMHO. I think it would be more fruitful to try exploring that vs continuing to try to distinguish yourself from anti-vaxxers. You could try using discussion trees and going slow.
ingracke said that AndyD had a lot of mistakes in thinking about issue under discussion and that ingracke wouldn’t point them all out cuz that’s a lot of unpaid work that ingracke didn’t expect anyone to appreciate.
I think AndyD’s response is bad here. Andy basically suggests he’s Roark-like and doesn’t care what other people think about what he writes, and maybe other people like ingracke have a situation different than that (i.e. less Roark-like). It’s a response that validates ingracke’s assumption that further discussion of mistakes would go unappreciated (imagine if Andy had responded with gratitude for crits so far and curiosity for more instead of with what he actually wrote)
Is there anything we can expect in the near/medium term that would be a reasonable criteria for stopping? Or should indoor mask wearing be the new normal indefinitely until something major changes (like successful anti-aging, or eliminating COVID)?
That was not my intent. I intended something approximately:
My engagement with CF is hobby-like and not particularly goal oriented. Maybe other people like ingracke have a situation where their engagement with CF is goal oriented and writing posts people will appreciate is important to some goal they have.
One of the more accessible and effective ways to avoid that is to have more organized discussions with things like explicit written discussion trees, differentiating discussion comments from nodes meant to be added to the tree, and explicitly stating goals. A comment vs. main point distinction can be done even without a tree, and I think would help significantly. Often all people in a discussion experience that, from their point of view, some their side comments get replies while some main points don’t. And having two types of text enables things like asking a few questions or discussing something a bit before deciding what to say about it as an actual claim you put forward. It means the stuff that’s actually subject to debate is more curated and chosen intentionally, instead of everything you say being of equal seriousness. (One of the main reasons this works is if you label something as not a debate claim, then people won’t mind it and won’t try to debate it. They don’t feel any pressure to reply or correct it since you aren’t putting it forward as a serious claim – it’s just some idea you’re toying with and mentioning. Whereas if you say the same thing but with no meta data, then people may think it’s meant as a challenge or claim that they need to refute.)
Explicit feedback on these techniques has been broadly positive, but I haven’t had very much success getting people to actually do them. There seem to be unstated objections or problems.
It can also help if a discussion goal is more focused on learning/practice/study rather than debate. Debating stuff like politics, current news or religion is especially hard to do well, and lends itself to oppositional debates, and seeing people who disagree as members of the other team or tribe, instead of cooperation or collaboration.
One of the things I think I observed in thread was local optima oriented responses that tried to score debating points about some sub-issue instead of trying to find the constraint(s) and make progress on the big picture. Writing out the tree that explicitly maps out the relevance of sub-issues can help with that. Another issue that trees help with is losing track of some of what was said.
The Wolfsburg-headquartered company was expecting the semiconductor situation to improve after the summer holidays but that hasn’t been the case. Malaysia, where many of Volkswagen’s suppliers are based, has been hit hard by the coronavirus in recent weeks, leading to several factory shutdowns.
Diess said he believes the chip shortage issues will start to dissipate as countries reduce Covid-19 transmission, but he expects there to be a general shortage of semiconductors for some time. “We will face a general shortage of semiconductors because the internet of things is growing so fast so there will be constraints which we will try to manage,” he said.
Raw materials crisis
Ford Europe’s Herrmann, meanwhile, estimates the chip shortage could continue through to 2024, adding that it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when it will end.
The shortage is thought to have been exacerbated by the move to electric vehicles. For example, a Ford Focus typically uses roughly 300 chips, whereas one of Ford’s new electric vehicles can have up to 3,000 chips.
AD suggests that he wasn’t trying because that’s a better look than failing. Saying you aren’t really trying in general is a generic excuse for failures.
AD denies that he was trying to frame himself as Roark-like and attack ingracke as not being Roark like. But then he did it again in this message. He frames ingracke as having goals where it’s important to get certain reactions from others, unlike himself.
That is not what ingracke was actually saying in the first place. ingracke was basically like “going through all your errors would be of no benefit to anyone, so i’m not going to” but more polite. That is not an admission of second-handedness or a statement about having some goal. It’s more of a statement that a particular action wouldn’t work for any goal. It doesn’t try to identify what goals ingracke has.
AD derailed so much in this discussion. One of the most egregious cases was here. He says here that relative risk ratios stay the same before and after people are vaccinated. Which is wrong. But when people tried to correct him, he simply would not admit to having said it. He just kept changing his story to deny having ever meant anything that was refuted.
Here, AD is talking about unvaccinated people. He acknowledges that some people are both high risk and unvaccinated
But in a followup post he says he’s talking about vaccinated people:
Immunocompromised is a type of high risk person, so this connects to the earlier comments about unvaccinated high risk people. But now he’s talking about vaccinated people after previously he said unvaccinated.
AD’s writing contains a lot of ambiguity in general, which helps with retroactively changing its meaning. So here’s another statement:
So first he was talking about unvaccinated high risk people, then he switched it to talking about vaccinated high risk people. AD also implies that ingracke thinks vaccines are useless for immunocompromised people (which is an absurd attack).
I think this wasn’t discussed previously because AD makes so many errors that one can’t respond to all of them. And when one does respond to an error, he writes multiple new errors, so the discussion gets really big and nothing gets resolved. Even if errors were being fixed at a reasonable rate, the discussion might still grow exponentially, but basically none of them get fixed.