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This is also why vaccination is so critical and why "young healthy people" should not opt out: when you get the virus, even if it's a mild case, you are in effe

by api 5y ago

This is also why vaccination is so critical and why "young healthy people" should not opt out: when you get the virus, even if it's a mild case, you are in effect donating processing power to what amounts to a global supercomputing project to evolve more virulent strains of COVID. That's how evolution works. The more chances the virus has to replicate, the more likely it is to become more virulent or even worse learn to evade the vaccine. If the delta variant jumps the vaccine hurdle we are back to early 2020 but with something 2-4X as contagious. Scientific literacy matters and know-nothing populist bullshit (regardless of whether it is "left" or "right" in flavor) is dangerous. There is no such thing as a "post-truth era." Being wrong carries the death penalty, eventually. Civilization insulates us quite a bit allowing a lot of people to go nuts with little consequence, but if enough people are wrong enough for long enough the wall collapses and the consequences arrive. If you think this is fun, your kids and grandkids are gonna have a blast with 800ppm CO2 levels.

abystander 5y ago
> know-nothing populist bullshit Can we flag this for unnecessary sanctimony?
throwaway316943 5y ago
That entirely depends on the selection pressure being applied. A vaccine that only targets the spike protein is a great way to select for a mutation with a different spike protein. Limiting human contact selects for strains that can infect during short periods of exposure… oops.
- api 5y ago
  Vaccination means you don't need to limit exposure so much, which reduces selection for casual transmissibility. It also means the existing un-mutated virus has far less of an opportunity to "experiment" and mutate further.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    > It also means the existing un-mutated virus has far less of an opportunity to "experiment" and mutate further. You seem to be ignoring the time variable. If wide-spread vaccination slows the spread, then the spread lasts longer, unless and until the virus is totally eradicated.
    - api 5y ago
      Vaccinate enough and the virus can be totally eradicated even if the vaccine is only 50% effective. With a 90+% effective vaccine it's fairly easy. We did this with smallpox.
effie 5y ago
> evolve more virulent strains of COVID. More virulent virus does not always mean worse disease. It maybe that more virulent variants will be also causing less severe diseases. Hints of this are present now (low deaths/day) but we will see what the variants really do in the coming months. > That's how evolution works. The more chances the virus has to replicate, the more likely it is to become more virulent or even worse learn to evade the vaccine. Yes but this process happens in the whole interacting population, you can't blame just the unvaccinated people for this. The virus is likely to mutate towards variants that are better at infecting vaccinated people. Realistically, we can't stop this process without isolating everyone all the time. Vaccination will protect most people who chose to get vaccinated from getting the severe disease. It won't stop evolution of the virus.
vladTheInhaler 5y ago
This raises a point that I have been pondering for a while. When we are living in a "state of nature" we have a very small circle of concern, mostly around things like finding enough food, avoiding predators, and creating shelter. Having correct opinions about these subjects is a matter of life and death. But when we introduce society things get kind of unbalanced. We start getting information about all kinds of events from outside our immediate surroundings, which is really exciting to the "opinion having" part of our brains. But we aren't really accountable for those opinions - we won't die if we think the moon landing is fake, or Obama is a lizard-person. So it allows for a lot of "mental rot" to accumulate unchecked. The beliefs that have the most direct impacts on us are still heavily constrained though. Stuff like "My boss will fire me if I stop coming to work" or "I will be hungry later if I don't buy groceries" etc. largely keep society functional. But we don't actually have any sort of consensus reality - we just think we do because people's crazy beliefs don't usually impinge on the public sphere. And without any evidence to the contrary, we just sort of assume other people think roughly what we do. But with issues like COVID-19, suddenly everyone's crazy opinions about which secret society is using 5G to control our minds actually matter a great deal. And as society becomes more interconnected, those things will matter more and more. How can we solve collective action problems like climate change or pandemic response when we can't agree on basic facts about the world? It seems possible that "society" as a whole might be an unsustainable condition. It can last long enough that we become dependent on each other, but then it destroys itself because of that interdependence.

by api 5y ago

abystander 5y ago

> know-nothing populist bullshit Can we flag this for unnecessary sanctimony?

throwaway316943 5y ago

That entirely depends on the selection pressure being applied. A vaccine that only targets the spike protein is a great way to select for a mutation with a different spike protein. Limiting human contact selects for strains that can infect during short periods of exposure… oops.

api 5y ago
Vaccination means you don't need to limit exposure so much, which reduces selection for casual transmissibility. It also means the existing un-mutated virus has far less of an opportunity to "experiment" and mutate further.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  > It also means the existing un-mutated virus has far less of an opportunity to "experiment" and mutate further. You seem to be ignoring the time variable. If wide-spread vaccination slows the spread, then the spread lasts longer, unless and until the virus is totally eradicated.
  - api 5y ago
    Vaccinate enough and the virus can be totally eradicated even if the vaccine is only 50% effective. With a 90+% effective vaccine it's fairly easy. We did this with smallpox.

effie 5y ago

> evolve more virulent strains of COVID. More virulent virus does not always mean worse disease. It maybe that more virulent variants will be also causing less severe diseases. Hints of this are present now (low deaths/day) but we will see what the variants really do in the coming months. > That's how evolution works. The more chances the virus has to replicate, the more likely it is to become more virulent or even worse learn to evade the vaccine. Yes but this process happens in the whole interacting population, you can't blame just the unvaccinated people for this. The virus is likely to mutate towards variants that are better at infecting vaccinated people. Realistically, we can't stop this process without isolating everyone all the time. Vaccination will protect most people who chose to get vaccinated from getting the severe disease. It won't stop evolution of the virus.

vladTheInhaler 5y ago

This raises a point that I have been pondering for a while. When we are living in a "state of nature" we have a very small circle of concern, mostly around things like finding enough food, avoiding predators, and creating shelter. Having correct opinions about these subjects is a matter of life and death. But when we introduce society things get kind of unbalanced. We start getting information about all kinds of events from outside our immediate surroundings, which is really exciting to the "opinion having" part of our brains. But we aren't really accountable for those opinions - we won't die if we think the moon landing is fake, or Obama is a lizard-person. So it allows for a lot of "mental rot" to accumulate unchecked. The beliefs that have the most direct impacts on us are still heavily constrained though. Stuff like "My boss will fire me if I stop coming to work" or "I will be hungry later if I don't buy groceries" etc. largely keep society functional. But we don't actually have any sort of consensus reality - we just think we do because people's crazy beliefs don't usually impinge on the public sphere. And without any evidence to the contrary, we just sort of assume other people think roughly what we do. But with issues like COVID-19, suddenly everyone's crazy opinions about which secret society is using 5G to control our minds actually matter a great deal. And as society becomes more interconnected, those things will matter more and more. How can we solve collective action problems like climate change or pandemic response when we can't agree on basic facts about the world? It seems possible that "society" as a whole might be an unsustainable condition. It can last long enough that we become dependent on each other, but then it destroys itself because of that interdependence.