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I think the cult-like following for Vitamin D is an inverse of some of the cult-like following for the vaccines. (VACCINES ARE GOOD, FOLKS, DON'T REPLY SAYING I

I think the cult-like following for Vitamin D is an inverse of some of the cult-like following for the vaccines. (VACCINES ARE GOOD, FOLKS, DON'T REPLY SAYING I'M AN ANTIVAXXER) There are people who believe that the vaccines are much more capable than they are, and go as far as lionizing Pfizer in the form of things like tattoos, Fauci fan art, and so on. Yes, they are a very small segment of the population, but I've run into these people in real life. One of my best friends has a faith-like belief in the vaccines to such a point that he totally clams up if I show a shred of skepticism. This was a guy who practiced formal debate and we used to have many intellectual discussions despite our differences. The people who believe Vitamin D is their Lord and Savior are reacting to the fact that the establishment has almost entirely abandoned the pretense of "diet and exercise" in favor of pharmaceuticals to the exclusion of almost anything else. Vitamin D isn't a cure, but it is very underappreciated, and when the entire medical system not only fails for decades to solve obesity but then fails to tell people to take action in their own lives to get themselves fit and healthy, it's cause to raise an eyebrow no matter what you think about Vitamin D. Both are a result in a division caused by a system that fails to explain its own legitimacy. I think it's great that we have the vaccines. I think Vitamin D is great. I think both are imperfect. But I can't blame people for attaching themselves to either one as if they are separate churches to attend; what have the establishment done to establish our trust? > But that 5000 IU/day put me near overdose territory when I got my serum levels checked. Even my doctor, who is very pro-Vitamin D supplementation, warned me to significantly cut my supplementation. That's interesting. It's been a really long while since I looked at research papers around Vitamin D, but my conclusion was that what was thought to be a daily limit for Vitamin D wasn't entirely justified for the average healthy person, but I'll have to check that again. I've been either getting some sunlight every day or taking 5000 IU supplementally every day and haven't suffered any obvious consequences. Sunlight really is the best though, and you don't need that much sunlight to get a sufficient dose. It also raises levels of nitric oxide which has its own benefits.

gameswithgo 5y ago
Vaccines are probably 3 orders of magnitude more effective at reducing the spread of covid than vitamin d. Not 3 times, 3 orders of magnitude, probably more than that really. Imperfect as they are it is still an amazing and wonderful thing we were able to create and get them out so quickly, likely millions of lives saved and millions more would have been if not for morons spreading lies
- ravenstine 5y ago
  For sure, I don't deny that at all. My point is that these things are reflections of society (civilization?) as a whole. If society is being fractionated, you'll see it with vitamins and vaccines. From what I've seen, few things haven't seen some amount of fractionation for my whole life. It doesn't really matter whether or not any of this stuff works if the establishment isn't widely considered to be legitimate. You will inevitably end up with two camps, or possibly an entire loss of control. The point of actually doing things to instill confidence is to give few to no reasons for society to fractionate down the middle. Like, if you want people to take vaccination seriously, you probably don't want to tell the public you won't take the vaccine because you don't like the current president. You also probably want to level with them and at least tell them some of the truth as opposed to using omission and indirection, and no coercion, to get them to do what you want them to do. Oh, and it would also be a good idea to not villainize skeptics, because there will always be people who are wrong, instead favoring giving them reason to come to your side. All of the above that I just mentioned happened, at least in the United States. It's not hard to find sound-bites of establishment top-brass saying that they wouldn't take the vaccines because they didn't trust Trump. When people on both sides see this indignance and then see these politicians make a complete 180 once they've restored their power, why in the hell would you expect anyone to trust them with their health? A skeptical person is going to start wondering what else those politicians have lied about and why the establishment health experts haven't told people to improve their health as part of the fight against the pandemic. If mainstream news comes out trying to downplay Vitamin D, they might think "heck, if they're saying that then I should probably believe the opposite". I'm sure I'll be misunderstood by what I've said there, but hopefully someone reads this and considers it if they haven't before. I've never been anti-vaccine, and if I ever said anything in the past that came off that way, either I misspoke or I was wrong.
  - watwut 5y ago
    I like how the you manage to blame primary pro-vaccine people for not promoting them perfectly for vaccine skepticism ... while completely ignoring pure FUD and lies routinely used by anti-vaccine movements. And how it is only democrats who are responsible for some anti-vaccine claims despite massive anti-vaccine, anti-masks campaigns from republican politicians.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
"There are people who believe that the vaccines are much more capable than they are, and go as far as lionizing Pfizer in the form of things like tattoos, Fauci fan art, and so on" I was genuinely thinking you are making it up. Then I checked the web. First I shook my head, but then I reminded myself US is a nation of 330+ million people. Some are bound to do something outlandish like branding your body with corporate logo for no pay. Mildly related, I am currently going through Ellul's work and I am in awe of American propaganda machine.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  Yeah I'm not pretending that they make up any sort of majority or massive minority, but they are small and can be loud. If there really were that many of them, the Fauci propaganda film on Disney+ wouldn't have been so highly ratio'd, I think. Plus I live in California and, yeah, we can be pretty weird like that. Putting aside the particularly enthusiastic individuals, there are many people who really want to believe that this problem is going to go away because the government and Big Pharma will make it happen. I think everyone wants to believe that. I want to believe that science and technology can put a stop to this and maybe we can enter a new renaissance. The difference is that some have gone as far as to view any sort of questions as a form of heresy. Or they've reached a point where they can't handle any amount of disagreement. I'm a little biased, perhaps. I have a few sets of friends and family that became so heavily invested in the pandemic that they entirely closed themselves off for the last year and a half. My best friend whom I've known almost my whole life and I consider to be a brother not only has decided he can't have an earnest discussion about strategy against the virus but I've only seen him twice in the last year and I've not been able to see his wife or his son who was born last year. I effectively have a non-blood nephew whose first years I'm missing out on, and at this point I just don't find it to be reasonable. One of my cousins and his family remained totally locked up this whole time, going as far as to decontaminate all of his mail and leave it to air out in the garage for a week. I can't meet his children either, and until recently his children couldn't see other children. He and his wife would throw a conniption fit if they know that I was more skeptical than they. None of these people even care that I've been vaccinated. There's more personal stories I have, but those are the ones that emotionally affect me the most. I've talked to many others on Discord that have similar stories about their own social circles. So yeah, when some people witness such extreme reactions and realize that the establishment has shown an almost total lack of interest in self-improvement, they are liable to think "Big Phrama doesn't want me to take Vitamin D, so that must mean it works against COVID! And if it doesn't, well, screw Big Pharma anyway." In another circumstance, although I am kind of a supplement fiend myself, I'd have made fun of the Vitamin D, HCQ, and Ivermectin people in any other circumstance. Now I just see it as just a reflection of our collective ignorant choices rather than as an aberration. And to be honest, I just can't bring myself to shame the people who overestimate Vitamin D because at least they don't act like I carry the black plague.
hinkley 5y ago
Stop feeding the antivaxxers then. We do precautionary actions that may not save us all the time. Seatbelts, shelter in place during tornadoes. Crossing at intersections. Just because these activities fail for a lot of people doesn’t make the practitioners sheeple. This insistence that all of the societal technology that we’ve developed that got us from 100,000 humans to 7 billion is bad is pastoralism at best, a suicide cult at worst. Sheep weren’t that numerous before humans either, which makes me wonder of the “sheeple” comments are projection, accidental or otherwise. Going back to pre-enlightenment society will reduce us to just another animal.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  > Stop feeding the antivaxxers then. Why should anyone take you seriously after reading this sentence? Although you may not intend this, how am I to know that you aren't implying a level of dishonesty in what I've shared? Because that certainly seems to be what you are saying. Do you think that I think that I'm feeding "antivaxxers" and not being forthright about it? I just don't find it productive when you and countless others make such a statement. In fact I'm not even sure what you define as an "antivaxxer". If you are going to call me out, at least be a bit more precise. If there's something I said that suggests that I'm merely feeding antivaxxers, or doing so in a way that goes beyond what the system has already done to feed the so-called antivaxxers, by all means, tell me how I'm the problem. > We do precautionary actions that may not save us all the time. Seatbelts, shelter in place during tornadoes. Crossing at intersections. Just because these activities fail for a lot of people doesn’t make the practitioners sheeple. This insistence that all of the societal technology that we’ve developed that got us from 100,000 humans to 7 billion is bad is pastoralism at best, a suicide cult at worst. I don't think we would have enacted seatbelt laws if the tradeoff was severe restrictions on civil freedoms and possible damage to society as opposed to, you know, the minor inconvenience of just putting on the belt. And putting on a seatbelt isn't really the same argument as injecting a rushed vaccine using technology that hadn't yet been deployed to humans on a wide scale, as well as being at the point of coercing people to do so. That's a tangent I shouldn't have just entertained, though, because I am not necessarily here to debate such nuances. My point isn't really to argue for or against vaccines per se, despite my having shared some of my personal perspective on the matter. The point that I was making is that both the conspiracy-level skepticism and the science/vaccine zealots are all a result of the same thing, and if we don't wake up to all the extreme divisions we are seeing, it's not going to matter what we do. Vaccines, Vitamin D, whatever. If too many of us can't agree on anything, and the system is operating in such a way where the division is seemingly intentional, how exactly can we blame people in either camp from going to the extreme? > “sheeple” This is not a word that I used and, if you reexamine what I've contributed to this thread, you will see that I'm not condemning people in any such way. While I do believe that most people respond to systemic control beyond a point I consider reasonable, I no longer dismiss this as a character flaw more than a symptom of the information age. I'm sorry if I am reading too far into what you are saying here. I'm just not sure exactly why you brought that up. > Going back to pre-enlightenment society will reduce us to just another animal. Agreed. While I think we need to be far more careful about the road we choose to go down as a post-enlightenment world (assuming you were referring to the Age of Enlightenment and the philosophy that came from it), we can't go back and I don't think it would actually be desirable to go back.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
With regards to The Vax'ers vs The Vitamin D'ers... If nothing else this study / paper does raise the question: What was the Vitamin D "status" of those who took part in the vax trials? That is, perhaps the vax is effective, but as dependant on Vit D levels? Lower D? Less effective vax?? Yeah, hard to study, but given all the sociopolitical implications, certainly someone should make the effort?
pdonis 5y ago
> Sunlight really is the best though The problem is that, for many people, their ability to synthesize Vitamin D from sunlight decreases as they age. (Also you have to be living at a latitude where you can get enough UV from sunlight.) Having your blood levels of Vitamin D checked regularly can help you to decide whether you need supplementation, and if you do, it can help you to adjust your dosage.
downWidOutaFite 5y ago
Btw I stopped reading at "the establishment" because I know your worldview is informed by random suspicions about a vague cabal that controls the wold.
willcipriano 5y ago
A parody I found of your friend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_s5y9Ls83Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_s5y9Ls83Q
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> The people who believe Vitamin D is their Lord and Savior are reacting to the fact that the establishment has almost entirely abandoned the pretense of "diet and exercise" in favor of pharmaceuticals to the exclusion of almost anything else It doesn't get much more establishment than the NYT, and yet somehow their pages are filled every day with "diet and exercise" articles. Not really sure what you're trying to say here.

gameswithgo 5y ago

Vaccines are probably 3 orders of magnitude more effective at reducing the spread of covid than vitamin d. Not 3 times, 3 orders of magnitude, probably more than that really. Imperfect as they are it is still an amazing and wonderful thing we were able to create and get them out so quickly, likely millions of lives saved and millions more would have been if not for morons spreading lies

ravenstine 5y ago
For sure, I don't deny that at all. My point is that these things are reflections of society (civilization?) as a whole. If society is being fractionated, you'll see it with vitamins and vaccines. From what I've seen, few things haven't seen some amount of fractionation for my whole life. It doesn't really matter whether or not any of this stuff works if the establishment isn't widely considered to be legitimate. You will inevitably end up with two camps, or possibly an entire loss of control. The point of actually doing things to instill confidence is to give few to no reasons for society to fractionate down the middle. Like, if you want people to take vaccination seriously, you probably don't want to tell the public you won't take the vaccine because you don't like the current president. You also probably want to level with them and at least tell them some of the truth as opposed to using omission and indirection, and no coercion, to get them to do what you want them to do. Oh, and it would also be a good idea to not villainize skeptics, because there will always be people who are wrong, instead favoring giving them reason to come to your side. All of the above that I just mentioned happened, at least in the United States. It's not hard to find sound-bites of establishment top-brass saying that they wouldn't take the vaccines because they didn't trust Trump. When people on both sides see this indignance and then see these politicians make a complete 180 once they've restored their power, why in the hell would you expect anyone to trust them with their health? A skeptical person is going to start wondering what else those politicians have lied about and why the establishment health experts haven't told people to improve their health as part of the fight against the pandemic. If mainstream news comes out trying to downplay Vitamin D, they might think "heck, if they're saying that then I should probably believe the opposite". I'm sure I'll be misunderstood by what I've said there, but hopefully someone reads this and considers it if they haven't before. I've never been anti-vaccine, and if I ever said anything in the past that came off that way, either I misspoke or I was wrong.
- watwut 5y ago
  I like how the you manage to blame primary pro-vaccine people for not promoting them perfectly for vaccine skepticism ... while completely ignoring pure FUD and lies routinely used by anti-vaccine movements. And how it is only democrats who are responsible for some anti-vaccine claims despite massive anti-vaccine, anti-masks campaigns from republican politicians.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

"There are people who believe that the vaccines are much more capable than they are, and go as far as lionizing Pfizer in the form of things like tattoos, Fauci fan art, and so on" I was genuinely thinking you are making it up. Then I checked the web. First I shook my head, but then I reminded myself US is a nation of 330+ million people. Some are bound to do something outlandish like branding your body with corporate logo for no pay. Mildly related, I am currently going through Ellul's work and I am in awe of American propaganda machine.

ravenstine 5y ago
Yeah I'm not pretending that they make up any sort of majority or massive minority, but they are small and can be loud. If there really were that many of them, the Fauci propaganda film on Disney+ wouldn't have been so highly ratio'd, I think. Plus I live in California and, yeah, we can be pretty weird like that. Putting aside the particularly enthusiastic individuals, there are many people who really want to believe that this problem is going to go away because the government and Big Pharma will make it happen. I think everyone wants to believe that. I want to believe that science and technology can put a stop to this and maybe we can enter a new renaissance. The difference is that some have gone as far as to view any sort of questions as a form of heresy. Or they've reached a point where they can't handle any amount of disagreement. I'm a little biased, perhaps. I have a few sets of friends and family that became so heavily invested in the pandemic that they entirely closed themselves off for the last year and a half. My best friend whom I've known almost my whole life and I consider to be a brother not only has decided he can't have an earnest discussion about strategy against the virus but I've only seen him twice in the last year and I've not been able to see his wife or his son who was born last year. I effectively have a non-blood nephew whose first years I'm missing out on, and at this point I just don't find it to be reasonable. One of my cousins and his family remained totally locked up this whole time, going as far as to decontaminate all of his mail and leave it to air out in the garage for a week. I can't meet his children either, and until recently his children couldn't see other children. He and his wife would throw a conniption fit if they know that I was more skeptical than they. None of these people even care that I've been vaccinated. There's more personal stories I have, but those are the ones that emotionally affect me the most. I've talked to many others on Discord that have similar stories about their own social circles. So yeah, when some people witness such extreme reactions and realize that the establishment has shown an almost total lack of interest in self-improvement, they are liable to think "Big Phrama doesn't want me to take Vitamin D, so that must mean it works against COVID! And if it doesn't, well, screw Big Pharma anyway." In another circumstance, although I am kind of a supplement fiend myself, I'd have made fun of the Vitamin D, HCQ, and Ivermectin people in any other circumstance. Now I just see it as just a reflection of our collective ignorant choices rather than as an aberration. And to be honest, I just can't bring myself to shame the people who overestimate Vitamin D because at least they don't act like I carry the black plague.

hinkley 5y ago

Stop feeding the antivaxxers then. We do precautionary actions that may not save us all the time. Seatbelts, shelter in place during tornadoes. Crossing at intersections. Just because these activities fail for a lot of people doesn’t make the practitioners sheeple. This insistence that all of the societal technology that we’ve developed that got us from 100,000 humans to 7 billion is bad is pastoralism at best, a suicide cult at worst. Sheep weren’t that numerous before humans either, which makes me wonder of the “sheeple” comments are projection, accidental or otherwise. Going back to pre-enlightenment society will reduce us to just another animal.

ravenstine 5y ago
> Stop feeding the antivaxxers then. Why should anyone take you seriously after reading this sentence? Although you may not intend this, how am I to know that you aren't implying a level of dishonesty in what I've shared? Because that certainly seems to be what you are saying. Do you think that I think that I'm feeding "antivaxxers" and not being forthright about it? I just don't find it productive when you and countless others make such a statement. In fact I'm not even sure what you define as an "antivaxxer". If you are going to call me out, at least be a bit more precise. If there's something I said that suggests that I'm merely feeding antivaxxers, or doing so in a way that goes beyond what the system has already done to feed the so-called antivaxxers, by all means, tell me how I'm the problem. > We do precautionary actions that may not save us all the time. Seatbelts, shelter in place during tornadoes. Crossing at intersections. Just because these activities fail for a lot of people doesn’t make the practitioners sheeple. This insistence that all of the societal technology that we’ve developed that got us from 100,000 humans to 7 billion is bad is pastoralism at best, a suicide cult at worst. I don't think we would have enacted seatbelt laws if the tradeoff was severe restrictions on civil freedoms and possible damage to society as opposed to, you know, the minor inconvenience of just putting on the belt. And putting on a seatbelt isn't really the same argument as injecting a rushed vaccine using technology that hadn't yet been deployed to humans on a wide scale, as well as being at the point of coercing people to do so. That's a tangent I shouldn't have just entertained, though, because I am not necessarily here to debate such nuances. My point isn't really to argue for or against vaccines per se, despite my having shared some of my personal perspective on the matter. The point that I was making is that both the conspiracy-level skepticism and the science/vaccine zealots are all a result of the same thing, and if we don't wake up to all the extreme divisions we are seeing, it's not going to matter what we do. Vaccines, Vitamin D, whatever. If too many of us can't agree on anything, and the system is operating in such a way where the division is seemingly intentional, how exactly can we blame people in either camp from going to the extreme? > “sheeple” This is not a word that I used and, if you reexamine what I've contributed to this thread, you will see that I'm not condemning people in any such way. While I do believe that most people respond to systemic control beyond a point I consider reasonable, I no longer dismiss this as a character flaw more than a symptom of the information age. I'm sorry if I am reading too far into what you are saying here. I'm just not sure exactly why you brought that up. > Going back to pre-enlightenment society will reduce us to just another animal. Agreed. While I think we need to be far more careful about the road we choose to go down as a post-enlightenment world (assuming you were referring to the Age of Enlightenment and the philosophy that came from it), we can't go back and I don't think it would actually be desirable to go back.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

With regards to The Vax'ers vs The Vitamin D'ers... If nothing else this study / paper does raise the question: What was the Vitamin D "status" of those who took part in the vax trials? That is, perhaps the vax is effective, but as dependant on Vit D levels? Lower D? Less effective vax?? Yeah, hard to study, but given all the sociopolitical implications, certainly someone should make the effort?

pdonis 5y ago

> Sunlight really is the best though The problem is that, for many people, their ability to synthesize Vitamin D from sunlight decreases as they age. (Also you have to be living at a latitude where you can get enough UV from sunlight.) Having your blood levels of Vitamin D checked regularly can help you to decide whether you need supplementation, and if you do, it can help you to adjust your dosage.

downWidOutaFite 5y ago

Btw I stopped reading at "the establishment" because I know your worldview is informed by random suspicions about a vague cabal that controls the wold.

willcipriano 5y ago

A parody I found of your friend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_s5y9Ls83Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_s5y9Ls83Q

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

> The people who believe Vitamin D is their Lord and Savior are reacting to the fact that the establishment has almost entirely abandoned the pretense of "diet and exercise" in favor of pharmaceuticals to the exclusion of almost anything else It doesn't get much more establishment than the NYT, and yet somehow their pages are filled every day with "diet and exercise" articles. Not really sure what you're trying to say here.