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This is an impressive amount of hubris. Does the author assume that all the certifications and testing stages were for show? I don't hold the highest view of L

This is an impressive amount of hubris. Does the author assume that all the certifications and testing stages were for show? I don't hold the highest view of LessWrong and the whole rationalist shtick. This post exemplifies why. Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make a vaccine[^1]. Again, that's an incredible amount of hubris. If there's one universal truth about science, it's that it is extremely specialized. Just because someone knows a lot about chemistry doesn't mean they're qualified to talk about biology. There is no magic Rationality that can have amateurs making vaccines a good idea. Unless you are an expert in vaccines a priori, you cannot suddenly become one in a few weeks. Heck, I'm skeptical of doctors who are not infectious disease experts giving advice. I still hear a lot of "well my sister's neighbor's brother is a pediatrician and he said XYZ". Doctors are certainly more educated than the average person, and if this was a minor medical problem I'd certainly take a random doctor's advice. But this is a pandemic with a novel disease. Listen to the infectious disease experts. [1]: Quite honestly this feels like a plotline from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
centimeter 6y ago
Experts are usually mired in procedure and politics (sometimes for good reason, sometimes not). A smart outsider who isn't constrained in the same way often has a pretty good shot at beating out the established experts. That's not hubris; it's just a viable strategy.
- austinjp 6y ago
  I don't disagree with the premise that outsiders are unconstrained. There is a notion that modern science lacks the frequent paradigm shifting leaps in progress due to bureaucracy and safety. But... obvious issue: without the bureaucracy, how do we ensure safety? Vaccine trials do go wrong, people do die when that happens. I hope we're living through the final years of the tension between population based evidence and processes, vs ultra-individualised medicine. Humanity just needs to keep its shit together for long enough, and learn to operate as a planet rather than as disparate factions.
zamfi 6y ago
> Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make a vaccine I didn't get this from the post at all -- they didn't invent the vaccine, they're just trying a protocol put together by some other biologists they seem to trust. The certifications and testing is not for show, and no one serious is claiming that. Asking an entire population to vaccinate is a huge responsibility; if you're making claims to the public that an injection is safe you'd better be as sure as you can reasonably be that it's true. If you're just experimenting on yourself, the bar is lower: as here, you just need to convince yourself that your risk of adverse outcomes is very low. An individual may be willing to accept a 0.1% risk of severe adverse outcome. A society that asks 300 million people to take that risk will experience 300,000 severe adverse outcomes.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Which is higher, the risk of the vaccine or the risk of COVID (and not just for you, for people you meet and possibly care about)?
  - JacobSuperslav 6y ago
    Risk of Covid is significantly higher. just stating for others.
    - mattmaroon 6y ago
      Well, if you’re talking homemade vaccines, depending on your age and underlying conditions it could easily be that.
      - eyko 6y ago
        Homemade vaccines are not contagious (just stating the obvious).
        logicchains 6y ago
chillee 6y ago
From https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-... > When [an outsider] asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he's optimizing for - being right. > When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  This is a complete straw man, we’ve no idea of the complex layers and motivations of person one and two. The outsider could be a troll and the Director of the CDC probably got there on merit, looking after their power might not be an issue at all; people could just respect and like her as a talented leader. You just don’t know, but simplifying things like this does make “proving” yourself right a lot easier.
  - nlitened 6y ago
    > looking after their power might not be an issue at all; people could just respect and like her as a talented leader This does sound good, though I have seen zero examples of this fairy tale coming true in the real life around me.
    - andy_ppp 6y ago
      Okay so Elon Musk, Collison brothers, even people like Bezos (while immoral on the tax stuff) are all extremely effective. The management at the pension fund I work at are very good at their jobs too... there’s plenty of examples of one is willing to look.
      - nlitened 6y ago
        Yes, I am 100% sure they are great at their jobs, but _also_ they know how to play the politics games. For sure you have to be a good doctor to become a head of CDC, but also you have to masterfully balance that with politics.
ascorbic 6y ago
The truly rational (and ethical) way to get a vaccine early would have been to volunteer in an early-stage trial. You'd even get paid! The risk would be lower, and the likely efficacy would be higher, because even an unproven candidate is more likely to work than something you cooked up in your kitchen. In some early stages there isn't even the risk that you would be in the placebo arm. And of course there's the extra benefit that you would be helping the wider community, though I'm not sure how important that is to true Rationalists.
- tim333 6y ago
  I don't think it was that easy to get in. There are usually only a few thousand in early stage trials and millions who would be up for it.
  - ascorbic 6y ago
    Have you tried? There were still single-arm, paid stage 2 trials recruiting in the UK in December (I can't remember which vaccine). I would've signed-up, but I'm already on the (placebo-controlled, unpaid) J&J stage 3 trial so can't take part in another. A stage 2/3 trial is still more likely to be effective than the homebrew approach, even after accounting for the 50% chance you've been given a placebo. As for how I got onto the stage 3 trial: I signed up here in the summer, and they contacted me in November: https://www.nhs.uk/sign-up-to-be-contacted-for-research https://www.nhs.uk/sign-up-to-be-contacted-for-research
    - tim333 6y ago
      Sort of but not really. I'm an odd case as I had covid in April. I put my name with the NHS anyway in case they still want to try stuff on us survivors.
      - pell 6y ago
        How's your health been since the infection if you don't mind the question?
sampo 6y ago
> can therefore harness the power of science to make a vaccine The title is misleading. He didn't really make the vaccine. The peptide sequences were designed by people with real biology credentials [1,2]. He ordered the peptides online. All he did himself was mix the peptides with some liquids [3] and spray his nose. [1] https://radvac.org/ https://radvac.org/ [2] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Estep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Estep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Church_(geneticist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Church_(geneticist) [3] Ok, now I am misleading. There is also chitosan, vinegar, activated charcoal, and more steps than just mixing proteins with liquids.
- text70 6y ago
  So what he effectively did is create chitosan nanoparticles loaded with protein/carbon nanoparticles. This, I would imagine, is to allow the proteins to help bypass every protease, lysosome, and other defensive mechanisms that your body and cells have to protect against non-self proteins. These antigens, would then need to be presented by major histocompatability complexes to induce an immune response.
vasco 6y ago
I agree this is dangerous and wouldn't work in a large scale, but I abhor this attitude of "only the experts can speak". He did it on himself and showed what he did, how do you think things actually get made, by sitting around waiting for experts to show up? How did they become experts?
- pron 6y ago
  > How did they become experts? Definitely not like that.
  - casefields 6y ago
    True, because you might win a Nobel prize: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank-infectious-broth-gave-himself-an-ulcer-and-solved-a-medical-mystery https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...
    - pron 6y ago
      Did you miss the part that he'd become a doctor and observed patients for years before he started experimenting on himself to treat the very condition he was already an expert on? This is like the Galileo complex, where people think their ideas are right because they are rejected by the establishment, forgetting that by the time Galileo started promoting heliocentrism, he'd already been one of the most respected, well established scientists in Europe, and, in fact, his views were accepted by the majority of establishment scientists. It was the non-experts who rejected him.
- austinjp 6y ago
  In this domain, in an ideal world, things "get made" through transparency, collaboration and scrutiny. Expertise is earned, not declared. You don't have to "wait", but you do need to trust. These people exist, and nearly anyone can join their ranks. It is indeed hubris to suggest expert-level ability is possible without the experience to back it up. Expertise in one domain does not confer expertise in another. Side note: expertise is surprisingly hard to define. And I don't believe that "only the experts can speak". All voices bring something.
d0mine 6y ago
You don't need to be an expert to assemble your own furniture. That is all he did here: just followed instructions from https://radvac.org/white-paper/ https://radvac.org/white-paper/ https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/ https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/.
concordDance 6y ago
Um... are you reading the same post as the rest of us? He's just trying out something an actual expert has made to see if it works when he tries to do it. So far it hasn't worked, as he admits, but it certainly could. Sure, it's probably with greater cost, higher risk and less effectiveness than the mass produced vaccines I expect (and the author would likely agree). But it's certainly not the case thay a layman can never do what an expert can do, particularly if they are following expert instructions, they just shouldn't expect to do it as reliably or well as an expert (for example, with a bit of reading up you can wire your house and it'll probably be ok, but the expert is far less likely to electrocute himself and has a much lower chance of doing something that will lead to your house burning down). Are you so offended by someone spending $1000 and a few hours on a hobby that may have some useful results that you must assume bad things about them?
- danpalmer 6y ago
  The hubris is to expect that someone at home can manufacture something worthy of being called a vaccine if they're just smart enough to follow the science. Theoretically this might be true, but in practice it seems obvious that this will fail. I can think of so many ways in which this could be subtly invalid and I am in no way an expert. I would expect someone with commercial lab experience or vaccine production experience to be able to point out a hundred ways in which this won't work. Maybe the more obvious problem though is that we can't know if it works either. Without a valid scientific study on the effectiveness it's all just a guess. To call it a vaccine is hubris because it is precisely this study that deems a concoction of ingredients to actually be a vaccine. I'd expect Less Wrong to be the first place to point out all the flaws in the idea of just getting an antibody test to decide if it's working.
  - concordDance 6y ago
    > The hubris is to expect that someone at home can manufacture something worthy of being called a vaccine if they're just smart enough to follow the science. Are you defining "vaccine" in a manner that makes those 19th century things called "vaccines" not actually vaccines? Vaccines aren't magic that can only be done by a suitably blessed priest and aren't necesarily even very high tech...
fab1an 6y ago
No offense, but you do sound a little triggered, and I completely understand why (in some sense). That being said, there are many different types of wrong/right, and the way in which the self-vaccinating Rationalist is "wrong"/"right" about the world is somewhat inverse to the way in which decorated science commitee can be wrong / right.
Kim_Bruning 6y ago
Well, we are commenting on a site called "Hacker News"; so I guess you do have to expect and be tolerant of people who would try their hand at wetware hacking too. I think a lot of people here probably think they're as smart or smarter than the average Google, Microsoft or Apple engineer. (Some readers are actually Google, Microsoft or Apple engineers, and some (others) may -indeed- be smarter). Possibly some amount of hubris comes with the territory? ;-)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

centimeter 6y ago

Experts are usually mired in procedure and politics (sometimes for good reason, sometimes not). A smart outsider who isn't constrained in the same way often has a pretty good shot at beating out the established experts. That's not hubris; it's just a viable strategy.

austinjp 6y ago
I don't disagree with the premise that outsiders are unconstrained. There is a notion that modern science lacks the frequent paradigm shifting leaps in progress due to bureaucracy and safety. But... obvious issue: without the bureaucracy, how do we ensure safety? Vaccine trials do go wrong, people do die when that happens. I hope we're living through the final years of the tension between population based evidence and processes, vs ultra-individualised medicine. Humanity just needs to keep its shit together for long enough, and learn to operate as a planet rather than as disparate factions.

zamfi 6y ago

> Underneath this post is the assumption that the author is so much smarter than everybody else because they are Rational with a capital R and can therefore harness the power of science to make a vaccine I didn't get this from the post at all -- they didn't invent the vaccine, they're just trying a protocol put together by some other biologists they seem to trust. The certifications and testing is not for show, and no one serious is claiming that. Asking an entire population to vaccinate is a huge responsibility; if you're making claims to the public that an injection is safe you'd better be as sure as you can reasonably be that it's true. If you're just experimenting on yourself, the bar is lower: as here, you just need to convince yourself that your risk of adverse outcomes is very low. An individual may be willing to accept a 0.1% risk of severe adverse outcome. A society that asks 300 million people to take that risk will experience 300,000 severe adverse outcomes.

andy_ppp 6y ago
Which is higher, the risk of the vaccine or the risk of COVID (and not just for you, for people you meet and possibly care about)?
- JacobSuperslav 6y ago
  Risk of Covid is significantly higher. just stating for others.
  - mattmaroon 6y ago
    Well, if you’re talking homemade vaccines, depending on your age and underlying conditions it could easily be that.
    - eyko 6y ago
      Homemade vaccines are not contagious (just stating the obvious).
      - logicchains 6y ago

chillee 6y ago

From https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-... > When [an outsider] asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he's optimizing for - being right. > When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does.

andy_ppp 6y ago
This is a complete straw man, we’ve no idea of the complex layers and motivations of person one and two. The outsider could be a troll and the Director of the CDC probably got there on merit, looking after their power might not be an issue at all; people could just respect and like her as a talented leader. You just don’t know, but simplifying things like this does make “proving” yourself right a lot easier.
- nlitened 6y ago
  > looking after their power might not be an issue at all; people could just respect and like her as a talented leader This does sound good, though I have seen zero examples of this fairy tale coming true in the real life around me.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    Okay so Elon Musk, Collison brothers, even people like Bezos (while immoral on the tax stuff) are all extremely effective. The management at the pension fund I work at are very good at their jobs too... there’s plenty of examples of one is willing to look.
    - nlitened 6y ago
      Yes, I am 100% sure they are great at their jobs, but _also_ they know how to play the politics games. For sure you have to be a good doctor to become a head of CDC, but also you have to masterfully balance that with politics.

ascorbic 6y ago

The truly rational (and ethical) way to get a vaccine early would have been to volunteer in an early-stage trial. You'd even get paid! The risk would be lower, and the likely efficacy would be higher, because even an unproven candidate is more likely to work than something you cooked up in your kitchen. In some early stages there isn't even the risk that you would be in the placebo arm. And of course there's the extra benefit that you would be helping the wider community, though I'm not sure how important that is to true Rationalists.

tim333 6y ago
I don't think it was that easy to get in. There are usually only a few thousand in early stage trials and millions who would be up for it.
- ascorbic 6y ago
  Have you tried? There were still single-arm, paid stage 2 trials recruiting in the UK in December (I can't remember which vaccine). I would've signed-up, but I'm already on the (placebo-controlled, unpaid) J&J stage 3 trial so can't take part in another. A stage 2/3 trial is still more likely to be effective than the homebrew approach, even after accounting for the 50% chance you've been given a placebo. As for how I got onto the stage 3 trial: I signed up here in the summer, and they contacted me in November: https://www.nhs.uk/sign-up-to-be-contacted-for-research https://www.nhs.uk/sign-up-to-be-contacted-for-research
  - tim333 6y ago
    Sort of but not really. I'm an odd case as I had covid in April. I put my name with the NHS anyway in case they still want to try stuff on us survivors.
    - pell 6y ago
      How's your health been since the infection if you don't mind the question?

sampo 6y ago

> can therefore harness the power of science to make a vaccine The title is misleading. He didn't really make the vaccine. The peptide sequences were designed by people with real biology credentials [1,2]. He ordered the peptides online. All he did himself was mix the peptides with some liquids [3] and spray his nose. [1] https://radvac.org/ https://radvac.org/ [2] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Estep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Estep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Church_(geneticist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Church_(geneticist) [3] Ok, now I am misleading. There is also chitosan, vinegar, activated charcoal, and more steps than just mixing proteins with liquids.

text70 6y ago
So what he effectively did is create chitosan nanoparticles loaded with protein/carbon nanoparticles. This, I would imagine, is to allow the proteins to help bypass every protease, lysosome, and other defensive mechanisms that your body and cells have to protect against non-self proteins. These antigens, would then need to be presented by major histocompatability complexes to induce an immune response.

vasco 6y ago

I agree this is dangerous and wouldn't work in a large scale, but I abhor this attitude of "only the experts can speak". He did it on himself and showed what he did, how do you think things actually get made, by sitting around waiting for experts to show up? How did they become experts?

pron 6y ago
> How did they become experts? Definitely not like that.
- casefields 6y ago
  True, because you might win a Nobel prize: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank-infectious-broth-gave-himself-an-ulcer-and-solved-a-medical-mystery https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...
  - pron 6y ago
    Did you miss the part that he'd become a doctor and observed patients for years before he started experimenting on himself to treat the very condition he was already an expert on? This is like the Galileo complex, where people think their ideas are right because they are rejected by the establishment, forgetting that by the time Galileo started promoting heliocentrism, he'd already been one of the most respected, well established scientists in Europe, and, in fact, his views were accepted by the majority of establishment scientists. It was the non-experts who rejected him.
austinjp 6y ago
In this domain, in an ideal world, things "get made" through transparency, collaboration and scrutiny. Expertise is earned, not declared. You don't have to "wait", but you do need to trust. These people exist, and nearly anyone can join their ranks. It is indeed hubris to suggest expert-level ability is possible without the experience to back it up. Expertise in one domain does not confer expertise in another. Side note: expertise is surprisingly hard to define. And I don't believe that "only the experts can speak". All voices bring something.

d0mine 6y ago

You don't need to be an expert to assemble your own furniture. That is all he did here: just followed instructions from https://radvac.org/white-paper/ https://radvac.org/white-paper/ https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/ https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/.

concordDance 6y ago

Um... are you reading the same post as the rest of us? He's just trying out something an actual expert has made to see if it works when he tries to do it. So far it hasn't worked, as he admits, but it certainly could. Sure, it's probably with greater cost, higher risk and less effectiveness than the mass produced vaccines I expect (and the author would likely agree). But it's certainly not the case thay a layman can never do what an expert can do, particularly if they are following expert instructions, they just shouldn't expect to do it as reliably or well as an expert (for example, with a bit of reading up you can wire your house and it'll probably be ok, but the expert is far less likely to electrocute himself and has a much lower chance of doing something that will lead to your house burning down). Are you so offended by someone spending $1000 and a few hours on a hobby that may have some useful results that you must assume bad things about them?

danpalmer 6y ago
The hubris is to expect that someone at home can manufacture something worthy of being called a vaccine if they're just smart enough to follow the science. Theoretically this might be true, but in practice it seems obvious that this will fail. I can think of so many ways in which this could be subtly invalid and I am in no way an expert. I would expect someone with commercial lab experience or vaccine production experience to be able to point out a hundred ways in which this won't work. Maybe the more obvious problem though is that we can't know if it works either. Without a valid scientific study on the effectiveness it's all just a guess. To call it a vaccine is hubris because it is precisely this study that deems a concoction of ingredients to actually be a vaccine. I'd expect Less Wrong to be the first place to point out all the flaws in the idea of just getting an antibody test to decide if it's working.
- concordDance 6y ago
  > The hubris is to expect that someone at home can manufacture something worthy of being called a vaccine if they're just smart enough to follow the science. Are you defining "vaccine" in a manner that makes those 19th century things called "vaccines" not actually vaccines? Vaccines aren't magic that can only be done by a suitably blessed priest and aren't necesarily even very high tech...

fab1an 6y ago

No offense, but you do sound a little triggered, and I completely understand why (in some sense). That being said, there are many different types of wrong/right, and the way in which the self-vaccinating Rationalist is "wrong"/"right" about the world is somewhat inverse to the way in which decorated science commitee can be wrong / right.

Kim_Bruning 6y ago

Well, we are commenting on a site called "Hacker News"; so I guess you do have to expect and be tolerant of people who would try their hand at wetware hacking too. I think a lot of people here probably think they're as smart or smarter than the average Google, Microsoft or Apple engineer. (Some readers are actually Google, Microsoft or Apple engineers, and some (others) may -indeed- be smarter). Possibly some amount of hubris comes with the territory? ;-)