4 ms·

Sometimes I wish the experts would not just talk about their desire to know more, but also considering the consequences of taking or not taking chances. For ex

• arcticbull 5y ago
  This is the psychology of prison reform. You don't want to be the elected official who's responsible for one released prisoner killing someone so you lock up all the prisoners forever. [edit] it's also the psychology of investing in infrastructure for your software project. It's impossible to count the set of things that didn't happen because of your work. It's much easier to count the set of negative things that did happen as a result of your not doing that work.
  • oezi 5y ago
    But we want prison reform. We should demand it rather than letting politicians hide behind status quo in-action. Right? Investing software quality is a goos example because we all know the trade-off between perfect software and launching with bugs. The conversation with vaccines in the epidemic has been too much looking for perfection.
    • arcticbull 5y ago
      Agreed, it's been a lot of demanding perfection from vaccines in case there's some nebulous potential harm - a feeling we can never assuage - while allowing the virus with known, realized, actual harm run rampant. I still hear people talk about how they don't want the vaccine "because it hasn't been studied enough" when it's literally been given almost six billion times.
      • peteradio 5y ago
        > when it's literally been given almost six billion times. You are putting all of your eggs in one basket AND counting them before they've hatched. That's a pretty serious double whammy. I'm only half serious but I think the above is pretty representative of some common concerns.
        • arcticbull 5y ago
          Nope, I’m considering that mRNA technology has been researched for longer than I’ve been alive and so have coronaviridae. I’m also aware that the standard approaches to verify safety and efficacy have been used and safety was never a concern.
          • Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
            I’m also aware that the standard approaches to verify safety and efficacy have been used and safety was never a concern. A quibble: Phase IV "post-marketing" is where you find the really rare adverse effects that you can't find in Phase III trials, which for the FDA authorized and approved vaccines were as big as they get, but still have a maximum of 23,000 people getting the vaccine. So that rare brain blood clotting problem with Janssen's vaccine actually had one case of it in its clinical trial, but that wasn't enough signal to detect it as a problem. But after 6 million or so people got it in the US there were enough cases reported to the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a handful or so it could be detected and addressed. Same sort of thing happened with the heart and heart lining inflammation for the mRNA vaccines. But as you say, these are the standard approaches, no extra length pre-marketing testing would have discovered them based on how vaccines work, and for drugs roughly the same thing happens as you discover there are some people who just don't tolerate them. For more on this, look into "black box" warnings that are regularly added to the prescribing information for doctors from Phase IV surveillance.
            • arcticbull 5y ago
              Thanks for the clarification!
• rkk3 5y ago
  > If you have the guts (like Israel) to take a chance as a society you might save another 1 life per 2.000 to 10.000 this fall. Screw testing let's deploy to prod cause we need to seem like we are doing something! 65+ (Who are almost 80% of deaths in the US) and At risk groups are still advised to get it & everyone else will still have significant protection from the first shots. Not that the young and the healthy were at high risk to begin with...