4 ms·

I'll give my two cents then. People are probably not gonna like it here but I think alternative perspective is important. I got vaccinated in June 2021 and hav

I'll give my two cents then. People are probably not gonna like it here but I think alternative perspective is important. I got vaccinated in June 2021 and haven't been following any restrictions or rules for the last ~10mo. No masks (unless forced or asked), haven't limited human contact, haven't stopped seeing Grandma, etc. I have traveled extensively in the past four months, including to two foreign countries. I nominally live in the epicenter of the new outbreak in NYC which accounts for the lion's share of cases as of this writing (unless something drastically changed in the past day). I have not gotten COVID-19. [0] If I did, it was a very mild case that gave no symptoms. I was in contact with people who had COVID-19 on Christmas and New Year's Eve (both tested positive after the fact, they did not know prior). I got tested December 23rd for a flight, results were negative. I got tested yesterday, results were negative. I feel great though I had a bad cold on the ~27th which I think was from traveling and not COVID specific given I tested negative twice. [0]: I had a very bad, vaguely defined flu back in January 2020 that knocked me out for a week that may have been an early COVID-19 case. But everybody says this and then their antibody tests show up negative. I haven't gotten antibody tests to confirm and given that I'm vaccinated it's likely they'd show up positive for that anyway.

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Terretta 5y ago
> People are probably not gonna like it here but I think alternative perspective is important. Thanks, I hate it. :-) Anecdata is the worst*, as generally only self-identified outliers feel compelled to share. So then there’s more outlying noise than there should be, and normals get confused. Still useful in the sense of serving to illustrate probability curves mean tails exist, so a bunch of people must be outliers, oh look here’s one. But where it goes wrong is when someone looks at 1000 viewpoints on whatever, identifies the 2 who think it’s aliens, and creates a “both sides” narrative. Or self-identifies: hey y’all, I’m a walking survivor bias! For policy, “alternative perspective” of an outlier is worth exactly 2 cents, but must be stacked up against the 80 cents of the bell curve. In other words, yes, the case must exist, but is not illustrative of what a normal distribution participant can expect or how they should behave. * Anecdata is also the best. Edge cases matter for bounding problem spaces, contingency or mitigation planning, or maybe even important for novel discovery. For instance, while it shouldn’t determine majority behavior, why one individual might seem immune to COVID could be very worth a quick check to see if worth looking into. If it’s not tail luck, if it’s immunity, that could reveal an undiscovered mechanism helpful to the normal distribution.

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Terretta 5y ago

> People are probably not gonna like it here but I think alternative perspective is important. Thanks, I hate it. :-) Anecdata is the worst*, as generally only self-identified outliers feel compelled to share. So then there’s more outlying noise than there should be, and normals get confused. Still useful in the sense of serving to illustrate probability curves mean tails exist, so a bunch of people must be outliers, oh look here’s one. But where it goes wrong is when someone looks at 1000 viewpoints on whatever, identifies the 2 who think it’s aliens, and creates a “both sides” narrative. Or self-identifies: hey y’all, I’m a walking survivor bias! For policy, “alternative perspective” of an outlier is worth exactly 2 cents, but must be stacked up against the 80 cents of the bell curve. In other words, yes, the case must exist, but is not illustrative of what a normal distribution participant can expect or how they should behave. * Anecdata is also the best. Edge cases matter for bounding problem spaces, contingency or mitigation planning, or maybe even important for novel discovery. For instance, while it shouldn’t determine majority behavior, why one individual might seem immune to COVID could be very worth a quick check to see if worth looking into. If it’s not tail luck, if it’s immunity, that could reveal an undiscovered mechanism helpful to the normal distribution.