I think the core problem is some people see themselves as immune to the herd mentality of mainstream consensus but they are really just oppositional to it. This does not free you from the bias, it just takes it and multiplies it by -1.
I don't read Bret so I don't know exactly what his stance on the vaccines is, but I am pretty sure they have been wildly overhyped. Early promises of making you immune, just one or two shots then you are done, herd immunity, etc. have all proven quite false, and now the sketchy data practices and sharing is coming to light, the CDC is taking down previous claims that the internally manufactured spike proteins don't last in your system (on the quiet, no less), is actively ignoring adverse reaction data (which suggest extremely high risks by vaccine standards), and data coming out of Europe that suggest that the vaccines offer some protection when you get COVID but also make it more likely that you do get it multiple times... at this point I am more inclined to think that Emily Oster is being too sanguine about things, too blindly trusting of US official numbers perhaps, than to think other people are too skeptical. (Leaving open the possibility that Bret W. thinks the vaccines will turn you into a lizardman or something... I have seen too much crazy from others to assume he isn't without reading all of his work :) )
The IDW emerged because they challenged consensus on a variety of topics and were willing to do so publicly. The fact that their ideas remain counter-consensus (hasn't aged well judged by whom?) is not surprising. As someone who listens to Brett's weekly podcast and reads everything here (going back to Econlog), perhaps I'm under-exposed to consensus thinking. But I find it hard to disagree with Weinstein's factual assertions about the efficacy of the vaccines. Whether there is a big pharma-big government-big media conspiracy is open for debate. I tend to favor incompetence over conspiracy to explain how big organizations work, but its a special kind of incompetence that yields record profits from a mandated medical procedure that has proven ineffective in preventing infection.
We need people who push back on consensus regularly, even if they are only correct a portion of the time. It just puts the work back on the reader to sift through the noise for the signal. What is our alternative source of signal currently?
Hoffer wrote that, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." The incentives cause convergent evolution to grift, a carcinization where the crab is audience capture, relentless self-promotion, and an always-be-closing approach to selling the latest snake oil, riding the current events news cycle for 'donations', and generally separating fanboy fools from their money as much as possible as often as possible.
The only reason IDW had a different failure mode is because they had a different source of funding.
The evidence against the effectiveness of Ivermectin seems to be extremely low quality. Scott Alexander's post about Ivermectin is extremely tendentious and flawed. I highly recommend reading Alexander Marinos' Substack posts where he goes into this in detail (https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-corrects-error-ivermectin?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F11624209-alexandros-marinos&utm_medium=reader2). Scott Alexander applies the wrong statistical techniques to aggregate the trial data, the correct technique finds that the affect of Ivermectin to treat COVID is statistically significant. Scott even acknowledges this error but amazingly, refuses to update his conclusion. This is only the most egregious of a litany of errors that are made in Scott Alexander's Ivermectin post. I recommend taking a second look at the data on Ivermectin.
The vaccines were wildly over-hyped. Their deadliness might be wildly exaggerated too, but the VAERS data is data, even if it might be corrupted in both directions. I predicted in April of 2020 that vaccines, even if one could be developed and deployed by the end of 2020, would not stop COVID. I wrote then that the virus would be endemic just like every other respiratory virus in history. These viruses simply mutate far too quickly for any vaccination program to be successful at eradication, and eradication is what was promised by people like Fauci, Birx, and Wallensky. The only real plan that can succeed is to learn better at treating the sick's symptoms that lead to disability and death, and hope the virus isn't evolutionarily pressured to evolve into more deadly strains.
We will almost certainly see another big late Fall/Winter wave this year, and I predict that deaths will again cross 2000/day in the US, but hopefully that number will be a little lower than it was last Winter, and lower again in the Fall/Winter 2023/24.
The mistake these hard-IDW guys made is a classic one: assuming that because the mainstream narrative is crappy or wrong in some respect, the anti-mainstream views must be right.
A key thing to get through one's head is that establishment elites could be 90 percent full of shit, and yet the rebel dissenters themselves be 99 percent full of shit. Perhaps nobody has a good handle on what's going on, but usually on questions of fact the elite consensus represents at least one mostly defensible response to the evidence.
It's usually easy to point out some places where the elites are far off base, but much harder to do a better job yourself. To do better, you have to incorporate the well-evidenced aspects of the mainstream picture. I think of this as the Zvi Mowshowitz way of doing business, although it bears mentioning that even ZM was not always right.
That is the big epistemic lesson of the pandemic IMO.
I suggest you take a look at Alexandros Marinos's public peer review of Scott Alexander’s essay on ivermectin. I have gone back and forth on this, first agreeing with Scott but now not so sure. It certainly seems like it's still up for debate, and if Bret turns out to be right on this, that gives him a pretty good track record on his covid predictions.
This note about Sam Harris, IDW star, supporting an unfree and unfair pre-election censorship of Hunter Biden's laptop info "because of Trump", does seem to be anti-rational.
I guess it depends on their success would be categorised. Shapiro, the Weinsteins, Peterson, Douglas Murray, supported by Rogan as a kind of hinge, emerged in response to it becoming increasingly difficult to publicly utter things which were uncontroversial until five minutes earlier. I don't know if you can draw a straight line from them to the likes of Shellenberger, Loury, Christakis, McWhorter, basically half of Lex Fridman and Rogan's guests nowadays, but it seems to me that IDW-type material is much, much more easy to access than was the case before they emerged. Not that that seems to have arrested the capture of the institutions by their opponents.
Bret original opposition to the evolving crazy "woke" behavior took academic courage that seems lacking in most of our institutions. However, his expansion into areas far from his areas of competence were sure to get him into trouble. His rhetorical skills improved over time in the spotlight as it seems to do with most people, but his scientific base didn't expand.
Everyone who knew something about biology and evolution knew that the the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolution would be driven by increasing transmission. It may be questionable whether a virus is dead or alive (could just exist as active or inactive), but the "prime directive" it must follow for existence is "survival and growth". As virus, especially RNA virus, can have very high mutation rates with the survivors evolving better transmission capability, it will happen. Once the host is dead and isn't breathing, transmission rates go to zero fairly rapidly with this virus so increasing virulence isn't an advantage but creating more virus in the host may help the spread but a byproduct may be higher virulence. If the virus doesn't have high numbers the asymptomatic host may not efficiently transfer the virus to others.
Predicting evolution towards better transmission is obvious, but evolution for lower virulence and mortality rate is complex takeoffs that can't be predicted. We also have more people primed immune systems both the easy way with a vaccine and a hard-way (much higher risk) by actual infection that prevents serious infection and death. We also had a lot of the co-morbidity people removed from the population (a million or so of very high risk people). We don't really know whether it is evolving to lower virulence or we are just seeing immunity impacts and lost of the most susceptible people.
His lack of STEM knowledge and breath left me cold, when he got into my playground.
His brother is much stronger in his thinking in several STEM areas, but these aren't general areas that create large fan bases.
I've long felt that the assessment of Covid treatments has been distorted by the great misunderstanding of the actual mortality risk of Covid. The perception being that Covid has a high risk of hospitalization and death. Reality being that it is low in both regards. Why does this matter?
From the beginning of Covid we heard of doctors and clinics claiming that in their treatment of Covid ZERO patients had died. At the same time we heard reports of thousands dying in hospitals and nursing homes. What gives?
(1) The clinics found a cure for Covid
(2) Hospitals are killing patients and calling it a Covid death
(3) People are dying (which happens in hospitals and nursing homes) and those deaths are being labeled as Covid for reasons.
As studies have come back showing there are no miracle Covid pills, we need to rule out (1). That leaves (2) and (3) and neither of these reasons should make us feel good. Either hospital protocols are deadly or hospitals and nursing homes are practicing deception.
I think the core problem is some people see themselves as immune to the herd mentality of mainstream consensus but they are really just oppositional to it. This does not free you from the bias, it just takes it and multiplies it by -1.
I don't read Bret so I don't know exactly what his stance on the vaccines is, but I am pretty sure they have been wildly overhyped. Early promises of making you immune, just one or two shots then you are done, herd immunity, etc. have all proven quite false, and now the sketchy data practices and sharing is coming to light, the CDC is taking down previous claims that the internally manufactured spike proteins don't last in your system (on the quiet, no less), is actively ignoring adverse reaction data (which suggest extremely high risks by vaccine standards), and data coming out of Europe that suggest that the vaccines offer some protection when you get COVID but also make it more likely that you do get it multiple times... at this point I am more inclined to think that Emily Oster is being too sanguine about things, too blindly trusting of US official numbers perhaps, than to think other people are too skeptical. (Leaving open the possibility that Bret W. thinks the vaccines will turn you into a lizardman or something... I have seen too much crazy from others to assume he isn't without reading all of his work :) )
The IDW emerged because they challenged consensus on a variety of topics and were willing to do so publicly. The fact that their ideas remain counter-consensus (hasn't aged well judged by whom?) is not surprising. As someone who listens to Brett's weekly podcast and reads everything here (going back to Econlog), perhaps I'm under-exposed to consensus thinking. But I find it hard to disagree with Weinstein's factual assertions about the efficacy of the vaccines. Whether there is a big pharma-big government-big media conspiracy is open for debate. I tend to favor incompetence over conspiracy to explain how big organizations work, but its a special kind of incompetence that yields record profits from a mandated medical procedure that has proven ineffective in preventing infection.
We need people who push back on consensus regularly, even if they are only correct a portion of the time. It just puts the work back on the reader to sift through the noise for the signal. What is our alternative source of signal currently?
you lose the social circle that blocks you from going nuts. a feedback mechanism holding your sanity in place.
being in academy protects you in this sense. it's peer pressure to have at least defensible views.
once you're "our of the system" you lose this protection, and sanity/quality peer pressure.
Moreover, you intentionally learn to "ignore the crowd" which weakens your mental defences.
Hoffer wrote that, "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." The incentives cause convergent evolution to grift, a carcinization where the crab is audience capture, relentless self-promotion, and an always-be-closing approach to selling the latest snake oil, riding the current events news cycle for 'donations', and generally separating fanboy fools from their money as much as possible as often as possible.
The only reason IDW had a different failure mode is because they had a different source of funding.
‘…the virus would evolve to be less deadly but more contagious.’
Slight adjustment…
… the virus would evolve to be less deadly THEREFORE better adapted to transmission. How all endemic evolve.
The evidence against the effectiveness of Ivermectin seems to be extremely low quality. Scott Alexander's post about Ivermectin is extremely tendentious and flawed. I highly recommend reading Alexander Marinos' Substack posts where he goes into this in detail (https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-corrects-error-ivermectin?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F11624209-alexandros-marinos&utm_medium=reader2). Scott Alexander applies the wrong statistical techniques to aggregate the trial data, the correct technique finds that the affect of Ivermectin to treat COVID is statistically significant. Scott even acknowledges this error but amazingly, refuses to update his conclusion. This is only the most egregious of a litany of errors that are made in Scott Alexander's Ivermectin post. I recommend taking a second look at the data on Ivermectin.
The vaccines were wildly over-hyped. Their deadliness might be wildly exaggerated too, but the VAERS data is data, even if it might be corrupted in both directions. I predicted in April of 2020 that vaccines, even if one could be developed and deployed by the end of 2020, would not stop COVID. I wrote then that the virus would be endemic just like every other respiratory virus in history. These viruses simply mutate far too quickly for any vaccination program to be successful at eradication, and eradication is what was promised by people like Fauci, Birx, and Wallensky. The only real plan that can succeed is to learn better at treating the sick's symptoms that lead to disability and death, and hope the virus isn't evolutionarily pressured to evolve into more deadly strains.
We will almost certainly see another big late Fall/Winter wave this year, and I predict that deaths will again cross 2000/day in the US, but hopefully that number will be a little lower than it was last Winter, and lower again in the Fall/Winter 2023/24.
The mistake these hard-IDW guys made is a classic one: assuming that because the mainstream narrative is crappy or wrong in some respect, the anti-mainstream views must be right.
A key thing to get through one's head is that establishment elites could be 90 percent full of shit, and yet the rebel dissenters themselves be 99 percent full of shit. Perhaps nobody has a good handle on what's going on, but usually on questions of fact the elite consensus represents at least one mostly defensible response to the evidence.
It's usually easy to point out some places where the elites are far off base, but much harder to do a better job yourself. To do better, you have to incorporate the well-evidenced aspects of the mainstream picture. I think of this as the Zvi Mowshowitz way of doing business, although it bears mentioning that even ZM was not always right.
That is the big epistemic lesson of the pandemic IMO.
I suggest you take a look at Alexandros Marinos's public peer review of Scott Alexander’s essay on ivermectin. I have gone back and forth on this, first agreeing with Scott but now not so sure. It certainly seems like it's still up for debate, and if Bret turns out to be right on this, that gives him a pretty good track record on his covid predictions.
This note about Sam Harris, IDW star, supporting an unfree and unfair pre-election censorship of Hunter Biden's laptop info "because of Trump", does seem to be anti-rational.
https://www.based-politics.com/2022/08/18/anti-trump-writer-sam-harris-admits-the-media-tried-to-swing-election-for-biden-and-actually-defends-it/
Censoring the truth about bad news on one candidate means the election is NOT 100% "free and fair".
This immoral censorship, alone, is enough to base a claim that "the election was stolen".
Trump is speaking the truth when he says "the election was stolen".
Or ... selective censorship is not "stealing" the election?
I guess it depends on their success would be categorised. Shapiro, the Weinsteins, Peterson, Douglas Murray, supported by Rogan as a kind of hinge, emerged in response to it becoming increasingly difficult to publicly utter things which were uncontroversial until five minutes earlier. I don't know if you can draw a straight line from them to the likes of Shellenberger, Loury, Christakis, McWhorter, basically half of Lex Fridman and Rogan's guests nowadays, but it seems to me that IDW-type material is much, much more easy to access than was the case before they emerged. Not that that seems to have arrested the capture of the institutions by their opponents.
Bret original opposition to the evolving crazy "woke" behavior took academic courage that seems lacking in most of our institutions. However, his expansion into areas far from his areas of competence were sure to get him into trouble. His rhetorical skills improved over time in the spotlight as it seems to do with most people, but his scientific base didn't expand.
Everyone who knew something about biology and evolution knew that the the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolution would be driven by increasing transmission. It may be questionable whether a virus is dead or alive (could just exist as active or inactive), but the "prime directive" it must follow for existence is "survival and growth". As virus, especially RNA virus, can have very high mutation rates with the survivors evolving better transmission capability, it will happen. Once the host is dead and isn't breathing, transmission rates go to zero fairly rapidly with this virus so increasing virulence isn't an advantage but creating more virus in the host may help the spread but a byproduct may be higher virulence. If the virus doesn't have high numbers the asymptomatic host may not efficiently transfer the virus to others.
Predicting evolution towards better transmission is obvious, but evolution for lower virulence and mortality rate is complex takeoffs that can't be predicted. We also have more people primed immune systems both the easy way with a vaccine and a hard-way (much higher risk) by actual infection that prevents serious infection and death. We also had a lot of the co-morbidity people removed from the population (a million or so of very high risk people). We don't really know whether it is evolving to lower virulence or we are just seeing immunity impacts and lost of the most susceptible people.
His lack of STEM knowledge and breath left me cold, when he got into my playground.
His brother is much stronger in his thinking in several STEM areas, but these aren't general areas that create large fan bases.
TCS Daily! Takes me back :)
I've long felt that the assessment of Covid treatments has been distorted by the great misunderstanding of the actual mortality risk of Covid. The perception being that Covid has a high risk of hospitalization and death. Reality being that it is low in both regards. Why does this matter?
From the beginning of Covid we heard of doctors and clinics claiming that in their treatment of Covid ZERO patients had died. At the same time we heard reports of thousands dying in hospitals and nursing homes. What gives?
(1) The clinics found a cure for Covid
(2) Hospitals are killing patients and calling it a Covid death
(3) People are dying (which happens in hospitals and nursing homes) and those deaths are being labeled as Covid for reasons.
As studies have come back showing there are no miracle Covid pills, we need to rule out (1). That leaves (2) and (3) and neither of these reasons should make us feel good. Either hospital protocols are deadly or hospitals and nursing homes are practicing deception.
Econlog OG checking in...