5 ms·

Epidemiologists and virologists have literally dedicated their lives to effectively containing and dealing with infectious agents. Other medical doctors have fo

by ttfkam 6y ago

Epidemiologists and virologists have literally dedicated their lives to effectively containing and dealing with infectious agents. Other medical doctors have focused at least a decade of intense study on the human body and the processes by which human life perpetuates and ends. But by all means, let's all presume that an economist like Robin Hanson—whose primary interest it would seem to be opening up commerce during a pandemic—has somehow come up with an idea that has escaped the notice of that entire segment of the population dedicated to human health. Let's ask Mike Pence about his thoughts on the use of bloom filters as relational database indexes while we're at it. I'm sure he'll point out that mauve seems to have the most RAM. Sure, experts can have blind spots, but c'mon!

djaque 6y ago
I'm a physicist and I cringed hard when the HEP people in my department started pushing out arXiv papers about covid-19. I see this a lot in CS too. It's easy for people in these more abstract fields to look at another problem space and see patterns that remind them of their own work. They seem to discount experience and familiarity.
- ttfkam 6y ago
  People always want to believe the Dunning-Kruger Effect applies only to other people.
  - djaque 6y ago
    Hahahaha... I guess that's one way to put it.
cameldrv 6y ago
Sometimes you need an outsider. I don't think that the issue with this is scientific -- basically we know that it might work, but we'd have to test it to know. The problem is that medical ethics deviates from everyday ethics, and also ethics in other government regulated fields. This is mostly the legacy of Josef Mengele and to some extent the Tuskegee experiment, but collectively we essentially said "we never want to do that again, so let's make rules that keep us well away from that line." The reason the idea isn't getting much attention is that anyone in the field that is serious knows that the study would never get past an Institutional Review Board, so it's pointless to even try. It seems to me that we need to revisit our tenets of medical ethics in borderline cases like this one, where the stakes are so high. To me, you should be able to do riskier experiments in these cases if the subjects are truly informed volunteers, and you keep the risk to them to an absolute minimum consistent with doing the experiment. There's a very similar issue with vaccine challenge trials.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  The thing is, we already are doing way riskier experiments to deal with COVID. We sent the Moderna vaccine into human trials with barely any mouse data at all. What Hanson is proposing is giving his pet approach, inoculation with live virus, special treatment. The reason we're not pouring time and money into validating inoculation is because we have literally dozens of vaccine platforms, some with decades of evidence backing them up, that promise far higher theoretical safety and efficacy than inoculation's theoretical safety and efficacy. We'd rather pour our focus into approaches like moderna's vaccine, which could be highly scalable, and J&Js vaccine and AstraZeneca's vaccine because those platforms are known to work in other diseases. We've got companies like Codagenix using the tools of molecular biology to create attenuated forms of the virus without tradition time consuming development techniques. When we already have these candidates developed and have them barreling forward, why would anyone want to spend time and effort developing and testing a worse approach? The risk/reward doesn't make sense.
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    Yes, but it's uncertain when those vaccines will be available or whether they will work. Even as a backup plan, it makes sense to me to evaluate variolation. With millions of lives worldwide and the entire global economy on the line, you do not want to put all your eggs into even ten baskets. As for the time and effort, I'm assuming that the existing vaccine developments are adequately staffed. There are many other medical researchers that are working on other things that could work on this.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  > Sometimes you need an outsider. As someone that makes a living at the intersection of a couple of different fields maybe that is true. But the last person to take advice from is an academic economist. We literally have thousands of different trained professionals working on this right now and NONE of them think what Robin Hanson wants to do is a good idea.
ggreer 6y ago
You are misconstruing Hanson. He's not saying that we should mass-variolate tomorrow. He just wants it to be legal for such experiments to be tried (including experiments with unproven vaccines). There are doctors and domain experts who are willing to try this approach, and there are volunteers who are willing to be infected. The problem is that our institutions have made such trials illegal. It looks like at least half the population will contract this disease over the next couple of years. Around 0.5% of those will die. If we wait until an extremely safe vaccine is mass produced, far more lives will be lost than if we use methods that the authorities consider unsafe. The main issue seems to be that people attribute COVID-19 deaths to nature, while they blame any experimental immunity deaths on the researchers. It's the same logic that anti-vaxxers use. Yes, some vaccines do have side-effects and every once in a while, someone does die from them. But that's a far better outcome than the disease itself, so we accept the tradeoff. As I said, in this emergency, around 0.5% of people infected will die. That means that a treatment with a 0.1% mortality rate would reduce overall deaths by 4x! That's a far more effective intervention than say... ventilators (which only reduce mortality by around 20%). Yet no government will allow volunteers to get a treatment with such a high mortality rate, so we're all stuck with "natural" infection and its 0.5% mortality. This is peacetime thinking in the middle of a war. It should be clear by now that our institutions have failed us. The CDC & FDA forbade researchers from testing for a month. It's only because some researchers decided to break the law that we discovered community spread when we did.[1] The Surgeon General repeatedly told the public that masks don't work.[2][3] The WHO said the same thing.[4][5] If we judged these institutions by the same standard that people in this thread are using for Robin Hanson, we'd want to drastically curtail their power and allow for more experiments. That's exactly what Hanson is proposing. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de... 2. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321... 3. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1245697453413851136 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12456974534138511... 4. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929 5. https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1243171683067777024 https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1243171683067777024
- ttfkam 6y ago
tinus_hn 6y ago
The best way to prevent the spread of viruses like Corona is to put everyone in a straightjacket and chain them to the floor in their home. Epidemiologists will keep saying people need to stay inside because that’s safer. You need the other people to have a voice as well because you can’t live and eliminate all risks at the same time.
- ttfkam 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Sorry but refuting an argument you think is a straw man fallacy requires more than providing a link to Wikipedia.
    - ttfkam 6y ago
      You're right. > The best way to prevent the spread of viruses like Corona is to put everyone in a straightjacket and chain them to the floor in their home. Epidemiologists will keep saying people need to stay inside because that’s safer. This is a hyperbolic take on shelter in place orders and wearing masks. You have replaced the actual recommendations and public orders with a call for complete removal of bodily autonomy even though this was never the case. At no time were people unable to drive to the grocery store for example. They were however restricted from congregating at the beauty salon because of obvious issue with viral transmission. You have substituted "we need to take precautions as a society" with "let's remove everyone's ability to use their arms and move more than a few feet". Then you went on to suggest that this is akin to what epidemiologists would have us do if given their preference. If you honestly believe what is happening now is just a precursor to your replacement premise, profound elimination of bodily autonomy, this would fall under another common logical fallacy known as the slippery slope. > You need the other people to have a voice as well because you can’t live and eliminate all risks at the same time. Has anyone said, "We want to eliminate all risks"? Has anyone said, "Hanson must not be allowed to speak"? No. The actual proposed arguments have been, "We want to mitigate risk while looking more closely at what the risks levels actually are," and "Hanson is an economist, not a medical professional who has dedicated their life to the study of infectious disease; therefore his opinion should not carry as much weight as theirs." So you see? The actual arguments have been substituted for your more hyperbolic and untenable remarks. The hyperbolic remarks are then refuted, not the original arguments. Ergo: straw man fallacy Good day, sir.

by ttfkam 6y ago

djaque 6y ago

I'm a physicist and I cringed hard when the HEP people in my department started pushing out arXiv papers about covid-19. I see this a lot in CS too. It's easy for people in these more abstract fields to look at another problem space and see patterns that remind them of their own work. They seem to discount experience and familiarity.

ttfkam 6y ago
People always want to believe the Dunning-Kruger Effect applies only to other people.
- djaque 6y ago
  Hahahaha... I guess that's one way to put it.

cameldrv 6y ago

Sometimes you need an outsider. I don't think that the issue with this is scientific -- basically we know that it might work, but we'd have to test it to know. The problem is that medical ethics deviates from everyday ethics, and also ethics in other government regulated fields. This is mostly the legacy of Josef Mengele and to some extent the Tuskegee experiment, but collectively we essentially said "we never want to do that again, so let's make rules that keep us well away from that line." The reason the idea isn't getting much attention is that anyone in the field that is serious knows that the study would never get past an Institutional Review Board, so it's pointless to even try. It seems to me that we need to revisit our tenets of medical ethics in borderline cases like this one, where the stakes are so high. To me, you should be able to do riskier experiments in these cases if the subjects are truly informed volunteers, and you keep the risk to them to an absolute minimum consistent with doing the experiment. There's a very similar issue with vaccine challenge trials.

vikramkr 6y ago
The thing is, we already are doing way riskier experiments to deal with COVID. We sent the Moderna vaccine into human trials with barely any mouse data at all. What Hanson is proposing is giving his pet approach, inoculation with live virus, special treatment. The reason we're not pouring time and money into validating inoculation is because we have literally dozens of vaccine platforms, some with decades of evidence backing them up, that promise far higher theoretical safety and efficacy than inoculation's theoretical safety and efficacy. We'd rather pour our focus into approaches like moderna's vaccine, which could be highly scalable, and J&Js vaccine and AstraZeneca's vaccine because those platforms are known to work in other diseases. We've got companies like Codagenix using the tools of molecular biology to create attenuated forms of the virus without tradition time consuming development techniques. When we already have these candidates developed and have them barreling forward, why would anyone want to spend time and effort developing and testing a worse approach? The risk/reward doesn't make sense.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  Yes, but it's uncertain when those vaccines will be available or whether they will work. Even as a backup plan, it makes sense to me to evaluate variolation. With millions of lives worldwide and the entire global economy on the line, you do not want to put all your eggs into even ten baskets. As for the time and effort, I'm assuming that the existing vaccine developments are adequately staffed. There are many other medical researchers that are working on other things that could work on this.
Gibbon1 6y ago
> Sometimes you need an outsider. As someone that makes a living at the intersection of a couple of different fields maybe that is true. But the last person to take advice from is an academic economist. We literally have thousands of different trained professionals working on this right now and NONE of them think what Robin Hanson wants to do is a good idea.

ggreer 6y ago

You are misconstruing Hanson. He's not saying that we should mass-variolate tomorrow. He just wants it to be legal for such experiments to be tried (including experiments with unproven vaccines). There are doctors and domain experts who are willing to try this approach, and there are volunteers who are willing to be infected. The problem is that our institutions have made such trials illegal. It looks like at least half the population will contract this disease over the next couple of years. Around 0.5% of those will die. If we wait until an extremely safe vaccine is mass produced, far more lives will be lost than if we use methods that the authorities consider unsafe. The main issue seems to be that people attribute COVID-19 deaths to nature, while they blame any experimental immunity deaths on the researchers. It's the same logic that anti-vaxxers use. Yes, some vaccines do have side-effects and every once in a while, someone does die from them. But that's a far better outcome than the disease itself, so we accept the tradeoff. As I said, in this emergency, around 0.5% of people infected will die. That means that a treatment with a 0.1% mortality rate would reduce overall deaths by 4x! That's a far more effective intervention than say... ventilators (which only reduce mortality by around 20%). Yet no government will allow volunteers to get a treatment with such a high mortality rate, so we're all stuck with "natural" infection and its 0.5% mortality. This is peacetime thinking in the middle of a war. It should be clear by now that our institutions have failed us. The CDC & FDA forbade researchers from testing for a month. It's only because some researchers decided to break the law that we discovered community spread when we did.[1] The Surgeon General repeatedly told the public that masks don't work.[2][3] The WHO said the same thing.[4][5] If we judged these institutions by the same standard that people in this thread are using for Robin Hanson, we'd want to drastically curtail their power and allow for more experiments. That's exactly what Hanson is proposing. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-de... 2. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12337257852839321... 3. https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1245697453413851136 https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/12456974534138511... 4. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929 5. https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1243171683067777024 https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1243171683067777024

ttfkam 6y ago

tinus_hn 6y ago

The best way to prevent the spread of viruses like Corona is to put everyone in a straightjacket and chain them to the floor in their home. Epidemiologists will keep saying people need to stay inside because that’s safer. You need the other people to have a voice as well because you can’t live and eliminate all risks at the same time.

ttfkam 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Sorry but refuting an argument you think is a straw man fallacy requires more than providing a link to Wikipedia.
  - ttfkam 6y ago
    You're right. > The best way to prevent the spread of viruses like Corona is to put everyone in a straightjacket and chain them to the floor in their home. Epidemiologists will keep saying people need to stay inside because that’s safer. This is a hyperbolic take on shelter in place orders and wearing masks. You have replaced the actual recommendations and public orders with a call for complete removal of bodily autonomy even though this was never the case. At no time were people unable to drive to the grocery store for example. They were however restricted from congregating at the beauty salon because of obvious issue with viral transmission. You have substituted "we need to take precautions as a society" with "let's remove everyone's ability to use their arms and move more than a few feet". Then you went on to suggest that this is akin to what epidemiologists would have us do if given their preference. If you honestly believe what is happening now is just a precursor to your replacement premise, profound elimination of bodily autonomy, this would fall under another common logical fallacy known as the slippery slope. > You need the other people to have a voice as well because you can’t live and eliminate all risks at the same time. Has anyone said, "We want to eliminate all risks"? Has anyone said, "Hanson must not be allowed to speak"? No. The actual proposed arguments have been, "We want to mitigate risk while looking more closely at what the risks levels actually are," and "Hanson is an economist, not a medical professional who has dedicated their life to the study of infectious disease; therefore his opinion should not carry as much weight as theirs." So you see? The actual arguments have been substituted for your more hyperbolic and untenable remarks. The hyperbolic remarks are then refuted, not the original arguments. Ergo: straw man fallacy Good day, sir.