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Reading this gave me a kind of horrifying idea that goes something like: You know about a deadly disease whose most serious outcomes can be avoided by getting
by mherdeg 5y ago
Reading this gave me a kind of horrifying idea that goes something like:
You know about a deadly disease whose most serious outcomes can be avoided by getting a shot.
Many members of a group in your society have decided they don't want to get the shot. You are annoyed by the way they talk about a lot of things, including the way they talk about avoiding the shot. They, in turn, call you "smug" for the way your group talks about having everyone get the shot.
You realize that if the other tribe keeps acting this way, a lot of them will die -- 1% of them overall, and as many as 10-15% of the oldest members of the tribe, with them having a fresh chance to die with every mutation and reinfection every 12 months.
You realize that smugly insisting that those people should "get the shot" will make them dig in their heels and insist they will never do any such thing. This will, in turn, kill them. This will diminish their tribe's size and political influence. Is this a plan? Is it a thing you are doing on purpose?
- vmception 5y ago1% decrease doesn't diminish their size and political influence substantially, even of the disproportionate elderly population. Then only a fraction of the remainders that lose a loved one would re-evaluate, a large fraction of them would still be bounced back when they realize the other ideas "your group" inherits is even harder to accept as a personality trait. Most of them will inherit just enough to not think further about the matter.
- jfrunyon 5y agoIt's 1% of the whole population, but a much larger percentage of certain political ideologies.
- vmception 5y agowell, sure yeah. far left spiritualists and naturopaths are a tiny population, far right people occupy sparsely populated areas. funny application of horseshoe theory.
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoIIRC some swing states were decided by less than 1%?
- cipheredStones 5y agoThat would be Arizona (0.31%), Georgia (0.24%), and Wisconsin (0.63%), with 37 electoral votes collectively. The total margin in all those states combined was only about 42k votes. If Trump had won all of those instead, there would have been an electoral college tie, which would have resulted in the House deciding on a one-vote-per-state basis. It wouldn't have been pretty. Biden also won Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, by 1.16%.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoThere was an interesting situation in New York. After the 2020 census, they lost a seat in Congress because their population size shrunk proportional to the rest of the country's. If New York had just avoided 2 or 3 of the larger nursing home COVID outbreaks, they'd have kept the seat.
- tomjakubowski 5y agoVery roughly, there's a House seat per 750,000 people in the US. They were really close enough that a couple nursing home populations (in the hundreds) made the difference? Yes, by 89 people. Incredible.
- lambdatronics 5y agoElections swing on fairly small margins. Also, the older folks are more likely to vote than young ones, so the fact that the virus is more deadly to the elderly increases the effect.
- bsedlm 5y agobut why are you so adamant on making everybody so perfectly safe? there used to be something about freedom and risk; heck, about life and risk. it's risky to be alive but it was more risky live way back in the day at what point does safety begin to stifle the drive to live? we as humans originally evolved in a risky environment, we thrived in it, we made it safer for ourselves; but maybe, just maybe, we also acquired a need for this risky behavior and without it our lives feel emptier? the point I am trying to make (granted not very eloquently) starts out from this idea [1] that humans are kind of crazy, and that maybe this crazyness is what makes us so successful; so I put that too much safety may undo this crazyness, it puts it to sleep? see also anti-fragility [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97jBvbmY03g&t=252s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97jBvbmY03g&t=252s
- guidoism 5y agoLess about making those people safe and more about making you safe by making those other not spread the disease to you. For example: Go ahead and drive drunk, I don’t care, just do it on your private property so you don’t kill me. Similarly: Go and don’t get vaxed, honestly I don’t care. But viruses don’t respect borders like cars do, so if you are going to do it then make sure you are isolated on a private island where you don’t leave, or Antarctica, or mars or something.
- EB-Barrington 5y ago"Our vaccines are working exceptionally well. They continue to work well for Delta with regard to severe illness and death - they prevent it, but what they can't do anymore is prevent transmission," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- shkkmo 5y agoPreventing transmission != reducing transmission rates. The vaccines absolutely do the later.
- guidoism 5y agoYikes don’t say that out loud! But seriously, the left needs to think more like this. The right plays dirty and if the left plays like this they get the same outcomes of playing dirty but is not saying anything bad or wrong.
- exolymph 5y agoYou do realize that you're responding to a comment reframing the USA left-establishment's covid vaccine rhetoric, right? Point being, how do you know the left isn't playing like this?
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoThe comment you are replying to is not a novel take. This stuff has long since been thought of by some strategists on pretty much every side of every issue for about as far back as we have record of this sort of thing. Heck, revise the wording a little bit and it could pass for something some enlightenment thinker half a century ago would have said about whatever issue they were talking about that minute.
- salt-thrower 5y agoSocial conditioning by years of right-wing media to distrust everything any scientist says is what will cause the outcomes we're seeing, not a cartoonish reverse psychology plot.
- mst 5y agoBreitbart actually published an article making exactly this argument, with an in-built implication in the way it was argued that that meant getting vaccinated was a way to 'own the libs'. I hope it caused a few more people to get vaccinated.
- lijogdfljk 5y agoI like the thought experiment, but i would counter that i suspect the 1% that would die would be replaced by a larger volume of new group members - due to the divisive nature of "us vs them", everyone has to choose, and so the forced unity ends up increasing overall members. Forcing people to choose increased membership of both parties. Not a statement, just a thought.
- tshaddox 5y agoConsider that causing 1% of the group's population to die might not weaken the group and in fact might make the group stronger.
- XorNot 5y agoDisease doesn't kill "weaker" members of a group, it kills susceptible ones. The Spanish Flu notably had a much higher mortality amongst younger, healthier people.
- tshaddox 5y agoI didn't mean some sort of darwinian thing where the average strength goes up. I mean that the strength of the group as a whole could very well increase.
- jandrese 5y agoCOVID however is most fatal to the eldery. Letting it simply rage out of control could push back the social security crisis a few years. I don't think anything as Machiavellian as this is going on. I think it was all just a culmination of decades anti-expert propaganda and knee-jerk obstructionism coming to a head in a terribly fatal way.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y agoThe elderly though often serve an important part in society. In particular, they can care for grandchildren.
- willob33 5y agoHe’s effectively describing Trump’s leaked plan to let covid ravage blue urban areas before the election, but here framing it as a liberal plot as a narrative device Maybe he’s a Republican astroturfer Someone just learned the root language of real human economics taught to us as abstractions through story and pie chart.
- 5y ago
- EB-Barrington 5y agoCorrection - it's not 1%, it's 100%. Of both tribes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- willob33 5y agoIt’s just business
- yongjik 5y agoYou had me until the last paragraph. If "smugly" insisting X would make them dig in their heels, what are we supposed to do? Say "Oh of course it's totally in your rights, please send your unvaccinated children to the same school my kids go to"? Because I don't think it will change their minds either. What happened to "personal responsibility" that these people like so much? If the whole country tells these people to get vaccinated, they don't, and they die, then I don't think I should be held responsible for being smug, or snarky, or whatever.
- taejavu 5y ago[flagged]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoThe vaccines don't prevent those things. They do lower the probability - or at least, that's the claim. That's not perfection, but it's not nothing, either. As to whether the claim is accurate... that's outside the scope of this comment.
- taejavu 5y agoWho's claiming that? My impression is that official sources are now acknowledging it does nothing but lessen the chance of serious illness & hospitalisation for the person taking it.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoThat's not my impression. My impression is that official sources are claiming that it reduces the chances that you get it at all, and maybe reduces the chances that you'll pass it on as well. I have never (that I recall) seen an official source saying what you claim. (Mind you, I'm not saying that you're wrong in your assessment of the effectiveness of the vaccine. I'm not even saying that you're wrong in your read of what officials are claiming - just that I have never seen it.) Can you point me to someone official making that claim? And, what country are you in?
- hutzlibu 5y agoThat would be a very, very bad plan we are not talking about, because it would make people so radical, that in the end they rather shoot people of the other tribe, than getting the shot. (and that already happened) It would make them form secret circles, where they only talk or listen to each other further radicalising themself. And they do not have a choice, because they have their dogma of vaccine == poison - so they feel pushed to connect stronger in their own circles of "awakened minds". And with the deadly disease not at all deadly enough to kill them all out - this "no talk about plan" will just make them stronger effectivly. Before they were just weirdos spread out. Now the weirdos are organizing and arming themself.
- mherdeg 5y agoSo I mean, the very first antivaccine movement involved firebombs (https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/1/82 https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/1/82) not to mention some questionable research ethics; maybe none of this is really new. Your comment reminds me of something I read a few years back and CANNOT find again which I think said something like: * The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for a delusional disorder have sort of a carve-out for religion. * Specifically if a lot of people live together in a community and all believe something disconnected from reality but it isn't hurting their day-to-day life this isn't a mental illness, it's just part of their culture and it should not be diagnosed as a mental illness. * Modern use of the Internet has made it easy for people who share common interests to come together in a community and hang out together, where previously they would have formed an extreme minority of their community and had what were obviously non mainstream views. * For example, people who believe that radiation causes terrible illness (electromagnetic hypersensitivity) can all live together in a city with no cell phones or power lines and maybe none of them would have any kind of mental illness because their beliefs were a norm - which previously would have been impossible. I was struck by this observation but could never find it written down again.
- hutzlibu 5y agoWell, I don't know anyone who has the absolute truth, and people claiming they do is a good sign for me to avoid them. So in general I am very tolerant for weirdos and the general right of people to live their own ways, if they are not harming me. But I think it is a bad idea pushing people further into radicalisation amd isolation and this is what I see is happening now worldwide, on a new scale unseen before.
- salt-thrower 5y agoWhat's the difference between: A) smugly telling them to do it so that they won't do it, and B) genuinely telling them to do it because you care about public health, but they interpret it as smug? Also, the kind of reverse psychology you're describing generally only works on children.
- spurgu 5y agoI don't know, most people like to at least have the illusion of making their own choices.
- JetAlone 5y agoThe most highly approved of DMs do tend to be good at concealing the railroad tracks...
- spurgu 5y agoI was trying to scroll through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DM but couldn't find anything fitting... Am I too old or two young or too out of touch? :D
- crystalmeph 5y agoI think they mean Dungeon Master, the architect / narrator of multiplayer role playing games. A good DM will guide the players through a well-planned story, in part by making the layers feel that they are in control of the story themselves.
- dqpb 5y agoMy wife does something similar to me all the time. If she knows that I’m uncertain about a fact, she’ll feign a kind of mistaken certainty in the (true) fact to bait me into taking a bet against it. Then I lose the bet. Same thing in politics - If you know the other side is uncertain about a position that you have high confidence in, stake your position and then politicize it so the other side is forced to either concede or stake their claim to the weaker position.
- ninorata 5y agoWe just have to wait till the mid terms to see how much the tribe has been reduced... I mean you have to be right, the TV said the same thing!
- nwiswell 5y ago> We just have to wait till the mid terms to see how much the tribe has been reduced I realize you are saying this just to be snarky and wage ideological battle, but the fact is that we don't. The data is readily available about political affiliation as a predictor for vaccination rates, and vaccination status as a predictor for COVID mortality. 90+% of Democrats are vaccinated, and mortality rates are around 20 times higher among the unvaccinated. It is not an exaggeration to say that materially all of the COVID deaths over the past few months have been among conservatives. May I gently suggest that 100,000+ preventable deaths among your ideological fellow-travelers deserves reflection beyond the political consequences next November? https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/10/01/for-covid-19-vaccinations-party-affiliation-matters-more-than-race-and-ethnicity/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/10/01/for-covid-1... https://dshs.texas.gov/immunize/covid19/data/vaccination-status.aspx https://dshs.texas.gov/immunize/covid19/data/vaccination-sta...
- DarylZero 5y ago>You realize that smugly insisting that those people should "get the shot" will make them dig in their heels and insist they will never do any such thing LOL
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y agoThere is also the old fashioned way of earning people's trust, by being honest and demonstrating with your actions that you are trustworthy. Censoring discussions, enforcing vaccinations, displaying double standards (elite partying unmasked) and so on are the opposite of that. Also, to many it may be acceptable to risk some lives in exchange for freedom. In fact society does that all the time, sending people to police the streets, or to wars. Individuals also do risky things for the sake of freedom all the time, for example riding motorbikes or seeking adrenaline kicks in dangerous sports.
- rthomas6 5y agoIf Democrats/the left could pull back enough to model the minds of Republican voters, they could have framed the vaccine as "the war against China's virus". They could have talked about a great foreign threat to our nation, and that we need to band together as Americans to fight it. Degenerates in other countries might not be taking the fight seriously, but Americans are, because we are the greatest nation on earth with the best people. Who cares if it leaves out a lot of nuance, and is not literally true, if it works?
- Jwarder 5y agoI think this would work in the scope of vaccines, but I fear the effects of inflaming xenophobia. There were plenty of reports of random violence against asians the past year; I'd rather avoid increasing that.
- emilfihlman 5y agoIsn't the reasoning that few might die for vaccine, but overall it's a better result?
- lovich 5y agoYou know we could have. We could have sacrificed a whole lot of our values to capitulate to people who think Facebook posts counter decades of research, we could have capitulated to one of their several abhorrent values like xenophobia so that they might finally go along with something that’s good for themselves and the country. Frankly I’m not interested in that sort of capitulation anymore. I’m not even interested in the phrasing of the argument. The unvaxxed masses need to figure out how to capitulate to us. They need to step back and model our minds to figure out how to frame their views in an acceptable manner. Otherwise they can continue to lose their jobs, get kicked off internet platforms, and keep filling hospital beds gasping for the vaccine after it’s far too late to help them. Fuck em