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I don't take issue with your conclusions, but I do with your arguments. I think precision and correctness are important, since a lot of vaccine skepticism comes

I don't take issue with your conclusions, but I do with your arguments. I think precision and correctness are important, since a lot of vaccine skepticism comes from people making incorrect arguments. > 1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects). I do trust the authorities to be incompetent enough not to collect such data. > 2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy I do trust governments to engage in groupthink. That's kind of like the idiot's version of coordinating a conspiracy. In the process, I trust authorities to "message" and dishonestly manipulate information going out in ways which appear coordinated.

ithkuil 5y ago
Groupthink is indeed a real problem, but if you really believe all it takes is groupthink to hide severe side effects (possibly deaths) of vaccines that would compete in magnitude with covid causalities, you should entertain the possibility you're engaging in a groupthink of another polarity. I mean, sure. Governments have been and will be dishonest and lying and have been and will be again caught red handed. They also have been and will be accidentally right about various things. If whatever a government says is always the opposite of true, then it would be super easy to have certainties! I wish that were true. Unfortunately I don't think that works that way.
- murgindrag 5y ago
  I don't think OP's logic requires side effects of vaccines to be anywhere close to COVID19 causalities. It's a personal decision. Without vaccines, at present, my risk of COVID19 would be marginal at best: - I live in an area with a high vaccination rate, and a low incidence rate - I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks (which are probably more effective than vaccines), and pretty strong social distancing, which I can do working from home. I'm vaccinated, but if I wasn't, my odds of catching COVID19 would be nominal at best. That's different than, for example, a retail worker. If I didn't believe vaccines were perfectly safe, OP's decision wouldn't be crazy. I am a general-purpose nerd, and I know enough biology to make an informed decision without relying on political authority figures. If that wasn't the case, I might make the same decision as OP. Now, I can do the math on why, if many people make the same decision as OP, we'll have a serious problem, but again, most people (not OP specifically) can't do math. You can have empathy without agreement.
  - ithkuil 5y ago
    > I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks Will you take this strong precautions forever? I may be wrong (because what do I know?), but my assumption is that COVID will become endemic and sooner or later we'll all get it. I don't know that for sure, I didn't spend a lot of time following the numbers and reading right and left about this topic. I just can't devote significant time into doing a "proper study" of the matter. So, instead I'm going to apply my personal heuristic, like everybody else. In my previous comment I shared my personal heuristics about "can the government effectively hide the dangers of the vaccine?" Here I'll respond to whether I believe it's rational to not get vaccinated because other people will be vaccinated and the problem will go away without me risking it: From what I could see, COVID seemed to be very transmissible; despite strong social distancing and lockdowns the contagions kept going. The only way to stop it would be to either doing a prolonged and airtight global lockdown (hard to implement) or to have a vaccination rate that exceeds the herd immunity threshold. And this vaccination level has to be maintained throughout the world, or else we have to lock down travel in perpetuity, which is again, IMO hard to implement. Currently we do observe regional variation in covid spread; my intuition is that a lot that can be attributed to the "reverse tinkerbell effect": we're avoiding travel, in some cases forbidding travel, testing people who travels; we cannot reach the conclusion that if you live in an area where vaccination level is high you're going to be fine; as soon as travel resumes you'll encounter unvaccinated people more often. As I said, I don't know; it's just a heuristic. I think it's possible that I'll catch covid in the next few years. Let's put a generously low probability of 0.1%. Then let's attach a generously low probability of having serious problems if I do catch it, again 0.1% (probably higher than that, but lets be generious). With those number I'd have a chance of one in a million to get severe problems of covid in the near future. There have been 3.4 billion doses of vaccine administered so far; if 1 in a million of them had severe side effects, that would mean 3.4 million people would be affected; I think somebody would have noticed. This is why I was focusing on addressing whether the governments can actively hiding this problem. That's the main counterarguments I hear to my heuristic about pros/cons of getting the vaccine now, namely that there are indeed million of people who're suffering from the vaccine but we don't know about them because the government is lying (I find this hard to believe; I cannot rule that out logically, but my credence in that proposition is quite low)

ithkuil 5y ago

Groupthink is indeed a real problem, but if you really believe all it takes is groupthink to hide severe side effects (possibly deaths) of vaccines that would compete in magnitude with covid causalities, you should entertain the possibility you're engaging in a groupthink of another polarity. I mean, sure. Governments have been and will be dishonest and lying and have been and will be again caught red handed. They also have been and will be accidentally right about various things. If whatever a government says is always the opposite of true, then it would be super easy to have certainties! I wish that were true. Unfortunately I don't think that works that way.

murgindrag 5y ago
I don't think OP's logic requires side effects of vaccines to be anywhere close to COVID19 causalities. It's a personal decision. Without vaccines, at present, my risk of COVID19 would be marginal at best: - I live in an area with a high vaccination rate, and a low incidence rate - I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks (which are probably more effective than vaccines), and pretty strong social distancing, which I can do working from home. I'm vaccinated, but if I wasn't, my odds of catching COVID19 would be nominal at best. That's different than, for example, a retail worker. If I didn't believe vaccines were perfectly safe, OP's decision wouldn't be crazy. I am a general-purpose nerd, and I know enough biology to make an informed decision without relying on political authority figures. If that wasn't the case, I might make the same decision as OP. Now, I can do the math on why, if many people make the same decision as OP, we'll have a serious problem, but again, most people (not OP specifically) can't do math. You can have empathy without agreement.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  > I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks Will you take this strong precautions forever? I may be wrong (because what do I know?), but my assumption is that COVID will become endemic and sooner or later we'll all get it. I don't know that for sure, I didn't spend a lot of time following the numbers and reading right and left about this topic. I just can't devote significant time into doing a "proper study" of the matter. So, instead I'm going to apply my personal heuristic, like everybody else. In my previous comment I shared my personal heuristics about "can the government effectively hide the dangers of the vaccine?" Here I'll respond to whether I believe it's rational to not get vaccinated because other people will be vaccinated and the problem will go away without me risking it: From what I could see, COVID seemed to be very transmissible; despite strong social distancing and lockdowns the contagions kept going. The only way to stop it would be to either doing a prolonged and airtight global lockdown (hard to implement) or to have a vaccination rate that exceeds the herd immunity threshold. And this vaccination level has to be maintained throughout the world, or else we have to lock down travel in perpetuity, which is again, IMO hard to implement. Currently we do observe regional variation in covid spread; my intuition is that a lot that can be attributed to the "reverse tinkerbell effect": we're avoiding travel, in some cases forbidding travel, testing people who travels; we cannot reach the conclusion that if you live in an area where vaccination level is high you're going to be fine; as soon as travel resumes you'll encounter unvaccinated people more often. As I said, I don't know; it's just a heuristic. I think it's possible that I'll catch covid in the next few years. Let's put a generously low probability of 0.1%. Then let's attach a generously low probability of having serious problems if I do catch it, again 0.1% (probably higher than that, but lets be generious). With those number I'd have a chance of one in a million to get severe problems of covid in the near future. There have been 3.4 billion doses of vaccine administered so far; if 1 in a million of them had severe side effects, that would mean 3.4 million people would be affected; I think somebody would have noticed. This is why I was focusing on addressing whether the governments can actively hiding this problem. That's the main counterarguments I hear to my heuristic about pros/cons of getting the vaccine now, namely that there are indeed million of people who're suffering from the vaccine but we don't know about them because the government is lying (I find this hard to believe; I cannot rule that out logically, but my credence in that proposition is quite low)