indeed

This was the grift all along

Someday he'll live out his life wealthy and entitled with access to the best doctors and lifestyle money can buy. He'll coast through life using his family name and resources to open doors and skirt accountability until he finally dies on his estate surrounded by dozens of people who'll talk about him like he's the second coming.

That seems more accurate.

This comment comes after the one you responded to was deleted.

In medicine it can be extremely difficult to definitively identify cause and effect. The human body is extremely complex, and many variables are involved with everything.

There's still legitimate debate on whether the COVID vaccine could cause long COVID symptoms in a small amount of patients.

But how do you retroactively prove that the patient didn't have asymptomatic COVID when they got vaccinated?

Imagine one of the dumbest persons on earth who is also a well known antivax telling you that you have to get some vaccines... and yet many people will still firmly oppose... We do live in the dumbest timeline.

Of course, if people are just blatantly ignoring or refuting established scientific results, there’s not much you can do…

Well... there you are, unfortunately. That will happen pretty much literally every time, no matter what you do, because it was never about the science. It will never be about the science, because we already know they're completely wrong about everything and therefore they need to make science irrelevant.

Conspiracy theories sell people the idea that they're seeing through "the bullshit" (sum total of human expertise, generally) which is a powerful feeling, that the dull world of undeniable facts and logic can't quite measure up to. Too easy to deny them anyway, you see. The package tends to come with a bunch of rationalizations for why, the instant you seem like you're not buying it, they no longer have to listen to anything you say.

Acknowledging that plenty of common vaccines have extremely rare, but nonetheless potentially severe side effects.

Unfortunately, if you don't also want to acknowledge the ones that are blatant lies, you are instantly The Enemy. Given stuff like belief perseverance and the backlash effect it's understandable to want to try, though.

Being "supportive" when arguing against known bullshit is not my forte, so I wouldn't be the one to get good results out of the supposed strat of... agreeing them out of their position(?), but I am damn curious about what it'd look like.

To me personally, the choice is easy (I press the button), but I recognise that people see this as a dilemma.

A false one, to belabor the point, but it's not relevant anyway. The reality is that if you get within light years of the concrete thought experiment, they'll be real suspicious. If any part of it is remotely realistic, you'll lose them instantly: "do you want a thousand times higher risk of death, and also help spread a potentially lethal and disfiguring infection?" cannot be made to sound all that reasonable.

That's he disgust truth. He's just another rich, know-nothing cunt.

But how do you retroactively prove that the patient didn't have asymptomatic COVID when they got vaccinated?

Or they simply developed CFS/ME around the time they were vaccinated, since the two are both poorly understood and look virtually identical. Hell, long COVID may just be a specific cause of CFS.

At the same time I wouldn't discount the idea that the vaccine could cause it in susceptible individuals or under specific circumstances either. We simply don't really have any understanding of what long COVID and other post viral syndromes actually are. (We don't really understand viruses that well, they aren't even alive in the conventional sense)

Seriously insane anti-intellectualist culture were one's correctness is measured by how confident and loud one proclaims one's "facts" and how famous one is, rather than by being or not an expert in an applicable domain.

You see that shit even amongst people who think they're leftwing - notice the frequent parroting of some shit or other said by showbiz celebrities as long as it aligns with one's beliefs. (Sorry but an Acting Professional isn't really an authoritative source for jack shit anything outside their expert domain in showbiz, even if one agrees with what they say, hence their words on other subjects should be treated as having the same weight as those of any other random non-expert).

Yeah social media is all about projecting vibes and knowing no one will bother to put any effort into finding any facts. And people are so saturated with information they won't remember that you're saying the exact opposite thing from what you said last week. With social media facts finding just slows you down, you win by producing more content, so you have an edge if you ignore the facts.

“I DECLARE VACCINATIONS!”

Yes, and rfk jr's anti vaccine grifting rhetoric also resulted in so many increased infant and child deaths in Samoa they needed to import more child sized coffins from new Zealand

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Samoa_measles_outbreak

You misspelled stupid.
Sincerely, a mostly dumbass American.

I was explaining to my kids how their whole mindset is survival of the fittest. Get a sick...if you die or live if on you and your genes. The weak need to be culled out of exsistence so we can be a stronger species. Regret and shame of their own family tree.

The weird right-wing conspiracy nutters feel the same way about Fauci. It's wild how obsessed they are with Fauci needing to be punished for a mix of unspecified and entirely invented crimes. Second only to Obama in that department.

So, what company paid him to say that? He obviously didn't come up with that on his own.

"I lost my virginity to an all metal toilet in Guam. It was Robert Downey Sr's 43rd birthday party, I was bill cosby's +1 and we were celebrating at the corporate training restaurant for Cici's pizza. The toilet penetrated me with the confidence of an Olympic fencing champion and I saw the face of god. They served corn dogs, but reverse what you're picturing."

-RFK Jr., 12 years old, mumblng to himself and convulsing before passing out in a ditch after snorting the entire contents of a full size fire extinguisher

Well, they are right, you just have to define "fit" in terms of intelligence and tool use, as is narrated in schools to describe the difference between a man and a chimp. And they are clearly not fit, don't be like them, they are a bad branch.

The sad thing is that millions of people have actually been looking to him for medical advice, which is like taking wardrobe and makeup advice from Ronald McDonald.

MAGGA: 🎶 FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME... 🎵

what the fuck did i just read

The truth, brother... The truth.

P.S. RFK Jr. probably killed a young girl with a golf club and the family had a "lesser" cousin take the fall. And his wife later hung herself. What the fudge, right?

he told them to vaccinate because school is about to start

TRAITOR

He is placing his own opinions over the health of Americans. He is making Americans sick (and dead) to validate his own beliefs. He is a TRAITOR.

You put it much better than I ever could, 'specially the last sentence.

Now imagine if instead of recommending vaccination during an outbreak, it was recommended before anything happened. Crazy thought, I know. Only way this could have happened is by not having a complete moron obsessed with his countless delusions as the fucking head of the health department of one of the largest country in the world, is all.

he should resign, he's way too late for redemption

So should Elon for shutting down Usaid

In other news RFK is gonna save the mid term election by eating shit. It's not going down easily.

He can always just pay a bribe make a donation and get a pardon.

The "trolley problem" is a philosophical dilemma regarding the morality of allowing harm caused by inaction versus causing harm by direct action. In a common form of the dilemma, you are faced with a situation where a train trolley is headed to hit a number of people. You have the option to pull a lever that will direct the trolley to hit a smaller number of people, thus actively condemning that smaller number.

The argument can be made (though I disagree with it), that you are "more responsible" for deaths caused by pulling the lever than those caused by inaction. Whether or not you agree with this argument, plenty of research has shown that humans are typically very averse to causing known harm by direct action, even though they know that inaction will cause greater harm. That is: "Human instinct" in the trolley problem seems to be to not pull the lever, even though a majority of people agree that it is the morally correct decision.

Finally, the above discussion is more or less completely independent of the number of people on the two tracks. Whether it's 1:2, or 1:1 000 000 doesn't really change the moral argument of action vs. inaction. If you get into the kind of numbers where the number of deaths would have global secondary consequences, you have a new kind of dilemma though. However that's not the case here, hence my choice of pulling two arbitrary numbers out of a hat, rather than using actual numbers for vaccine side effects and infection lethality.

What I'm doing here is noting that the question of vaccinating or not is philosophically equivalent to the trolley problem. Therefore, we can use research of the trolley problem to understand how vaccine sceptics think, and to learn something about how people can be convinced that pulling the lever is the morally correct choice.

Capitalism when the plague outbreak shatters an economy and all the money you piled on isn't going to save you from sickness that doesn't give a damn.

Trolley problem is just a pros and cons list made visceral. If the pros don't outweigh the cons there's no point. Before we even bring morality and mortality into this the amount of pros are different for different people to make a decision (even as non visceral as changing a job).

By using much smaller numbers, you are giving a false impression of vaccines. Instead of 1 vs 10k, saying 1 vs 100 is similar to me asking if someone would switch jobs if salary is 100$/year difference when it might actually be 10k$/year.

I'm not arguing against your premise of Trolley Problem but against the numbers. As humans, we can still fathom the difference between 10, 100 and 1000. These aren't big numbers which get washed out into nothingness of 'big'.

Trolley problem is just a pros and cons list made visceral.

I fundamentally disagree with this, and it seems to me that many others do as well. The trolley problem is fundamentally about the morality of allowing something bad to happen through inaction, versus actively choosing a lesser evil.

While it's true that the numbers can influence what people answer here, the numbers are not the core point of the thought experiment. The core point of the thought experiment relates to whether you are personally responsible for the consequences of inaction, versus your responsibility for the consequences of direct action.

Crucially, as discussed in depth in Daniel Kahnemans' "Thinking Fast and Slow", humans appear to be instinctively averse to taking actions with known negative consequences, even when they know that the consequences of inaction are worse. This is supported by the experiment referenced in the wikipedia page linked above.

The point here is that we can try to understand vaccine sceptics line of thought by understanding why humans appear to have this aversion. As mentioned in my first comment, I'm well vaccinated, and know fully well that statistically, both for myself and others, getting relevant vaccines is the right choice. Regardless, I felt a twinge of doubt when getting my initial covid shots. Not due to any logical reasoning, but an instinctive gut feeling: It felt more risky to actively expose myself to a vaccine rather than do nothing, even though I know the opposite is true. I very quickly overcame that twinge of doubt because I try to make decisions based on facts rather than feelings. While anecdotal, this is a concrete example of how human intuition does not always match actual statistics and logically sound decision making.

I think that if we want to prevent vaccine scepticism from spreading, one place to start is trying to understand why people think along these lines: That direct action infers a heavier responsibility than inaction. The first place to start in that regard is recognising that the trolley problem is a very real dilemma for many people, and that surveys have consistently shown that not all people make the same choice in trolley problem situations, even though the correct choice seems obvious to many of us.

By using much smaller numbers, you are giving a false impression of vaccines.

Sure, I could have used more realistic numbers here, I won't argue that. However, I hope I've been able to convince you that my point is not related to the numbers, but to the underlying psychology of making these choices, regardless of the numbers. Therefore, I just pulled some numbers out of the air to construct the example in the OC.

It will never be about the science, because we already know they’re completely wrong about everything and therefore they need to make science irrelevant.

I think there's an interesting discussion to be had here regarding cause and effect. You seem to be arguing that these people do not believe in science, therefore they end up as conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, etc. I'm not entirely convinced that's the case. I think it's common that people first establish a gut feeling regarding what is true, then begin disbelieving science when science disagrees with them. Basically, I think the casual chain is inverted relative to you. Of course, once people have started disbelieving science, the rabbit hole is open.

the supposed strat of… agreeing them out of their position(?)

That's not really what I'm arguing for. My point is that it never strengthens your position to disagree with things you know are correct, just to try to make a point. If someone says "water is denser than oil, therefore 1 L of water is heavier than 2 L of oil.", it doesn't help you to start by disagreeing with the initial statement. Likewise, when someone says "vaccines cause dangerous side effects, therefore ...", it doesn't help your position to disagree with the initial statement, which is well documented to be true. An immediate example that comes to mind is that the Astra Zeneca (I think) COVID vaccine caused several deaths due to triggering a very rare heart complication (if I remember the details correctly). If your initial counter argument is "vaccines don't cause deadly side effects", you can immediately be brushed off as having no idea what you're talking about, since it's well documented that they do. Any successful counter argument needs to start by acknowledging what is correct in the initial statement, before dialling in on why the conclusion is wrong.

The point of the trolley problem is not to use it to convince the vaccine sceptics, but to use research on it to understand how they think, and thereby understand how they can be convinced. Surveys have consistently shown that not all people agree on what to do in the trolley problem situation (around 10 % choose to do nothing). It's only a false dilemma if you view it from a utilitarian standpoint, but the whole point of the thought experiment is exactly to compare a utilitarian standpoint to other views. There's quite a bit of research regarding the psychology of how we experience the consequences of action vs. inaction, and it appears that humans instinctively prefer inaction over actions with negative consequences, even when inaction carries more negative consequences. The book "Thinking fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman goes into some detail on this. I think a lot of vaccine scepticism is grounded in this instinctive response, which in turn causes people to disbelieve science due to confirmation bias.

I think this level of privileging the antivaxxer rhetoric is just irresponsible - if it would help, maybe. But they are not arguing in good faith, out of good information, or any other good impulse. Similarly to the Flat Earth bullshit and most other CTs you can point at, it's about feeling superior. Moon landing and flat earth CTs are almost lethally cringe but patchouli bullshit instead of vaccines means people literally die in droves, of a solved problem.

My point is that it never strengthens your position to disagree with things you know are correct, just to try to make a point. If your initial counter argument is “vaccines don’t cause deadly side effects”, you can immediately be brushed off as having no idea what you’re talking about, since it’s well documented that they do.

Huh? Typo or false syllogism? You wouldn't get much of an opportunity to disagree with anything correct, they're antivaxxers. Anyway, you wouldn't deny that. You would, even more correctly, point out that the 'rona was still the worse deal if you were actually rationally worried about any outcome. This is the sort of thing I mean when I say jumping through hoops to try and make something reasonable out of a fundamentally unreasonable position. It isn't going to help, because you cannot keep it up. Sooner or later you'll reach the end of where carefully not discussing anything in the discussion can get you.

I honestly think you're misunderstanding me a bit here. I'm not advocating for privileging anti-vaxxer rhetoric or jumping through hoops to "let them have some wins". I'm trying to underscore that the first step to developing education, informational campaigns, deprogramming regimes, etc. is to understand the thought process behind becoming an anti-vaxxer. There are plenty of comments in this thread alone along the lines of "When presented a choice between a small risk of a mild fever versus getting tuberculosis, obviously the correct choice is to get the vaccine". I think that line of argumentation is counter-productive, since it

1. Underplays the documented risk of many vaccines
2. Doesn't address the core issue I think causes vaccine scepticism in the first place.

Firstly, nobody who's afraid of getting a vaccine due to the associated risks will be convinced by "The only risk is a small risk of a light fever", since that's just provably false. Secondly, the line of argumentation anchors on the risk associated with vaccines, rather than anchoring on the risk associated with not getting them. Since I think the root cause of vaccine scepticism is irrational fear of getting them, I think it's more productive to anchor counter arguments, education, information campaigns, etc. on the very real danger associated with not having vaccines. Since fear is the underlying driving force here, we should aim to make fear of the disease outweigh fear of vaccines, not by down-playing the risk of vaccines, but rather by emphasising the risk of the diseases (which many or most vaccine sceptics downplay into absurdity).

Basically, many vaccines do have a very low but non-zero probability of causing severe side effects. We humans are known to place irrationally large weight on these kind of unlikely but severe outcomes. Trying to downplay these outcomes is not likely affect peoples perception of the risk, because we're notoriously bad at this kind of risk assessment.

I see the angle. Thanks for explaining.

I find the fact that "vaccines as a voluntary action that comes with a twinge" to be very weird.

Both parts:
(a) Voluntary action for something that should be legally mandated like wearing a seat belt or using specific construction materials or layouts or an engineer to pass the house design: all the rules that are written in blood.
(b) Twinge of doubt for something that has been so successful in the past. Choosing to drive a car (with or without a seat belt) isn't seen as something that comes with a twinge of doubt that an accident will happen (though statistically that's more likely)

Their musician should just play the guitar and stay out of politics, so I can politicise their songs in support of his enemies and tell him he doesn't understand their music.

Thanks for being understanding and engaging in good faith :)

I think making vaccines legally mandated is an interesting discussion. On one hand, I think they should be mandated for reason that they are, statistically, proven to reduce overall harm to people. On the other hand, it think it's a bit scary to go that way, since we are then putting a lot of trust in whatever political body will decide which vaccines have a risk/benefit profile that should make them mandatory. It's a lot easier with seat belts or construction practices, since there are literally no downsides to either.

I've had a thought experiment with others about a hypothetical autonomous car that is guaranteed to never end up in (or cause) any accident, but has an astronomically small probability of spontaneously combusting at any given moment. Let's make that probability small enough that the number of deaths and injuries caused by cars every year is reduced to 1 % of what it currently is, with the remaining incidents being caused by the spontaneously combusting cars. Now, for any individual, it's statistically safer to drive this car. As a society, everyone is safer if these cars are mandated (no pedestrians are killed, we don't need to spend healthcare resources on car-related injuries, etc.).

From a utilitarian perspective, these cars should be mandated. From a purely logical risk-minimisation perspective, everyone should be jumping at the opportunity to use this much safer car. However, when you ask people, it turns out that most don't want the car. Despite knowing that this car would (statistically) drastically reduce their probability of being hurt or killed in traffic, the idea of getting into a vehicle that can spontaneously combust at any given moment seems absurd to them.

That brings us to the "Twinge of doubt for something that has been so successful". We humans are generally terrible at risk assessment. We tend to heavily over emphasise extreme outcomes (the car combusting) while also under emphasising "mundane" outcomes (people crash and die every day, but it surely won't happen to me), and overestimating our own skills (by far most drivers think they're above average, and can therefore avoid collisions). The analogous vaccine-related line of thought would be that people hear that 1 / get severe complications from vaccines, which is over emphasised, while "hundreds of people in the US are killed by tuberculosis every year, but it surely won't happen to me", and overestimating our own immune system.

Basically, a lot of fear is simply irrational, and that's linked to the human nature of being crap at intuitive risk assessment. I think fear of vaccines also falls into this category of irrational fear, and I don't really think it can be rationalised away. That's why I think programs to counter vaccine scepticism need to be based in how to make the rational fear of disease win out, rather than trying to completely dispel the irrational fear far too many people have related to vaccines.

Some Tesla models have a higher than 0 chance of driving you into a truck or median in auto mode (or catching fire or trapping you inside due to malfunction door but that's just the design language of the car) as compared to you controlling the car. People still jump at driving one with FSD (the marketing term)

I think the phrasing and giving statistical info might be the problem? Eg: if I wetr yo give you a choice between a fresh tomato and a slightly less fresh, but all-natural tomato. Ofc, the other tomato might also be all-natural but the mere fact that I gave extra info changes the deal, as if I'm giving you a secret.

On the side of legally mandated vaccines, lots of countries mandate vaccines without religious or personal exemptions. Only health based contra-indications can be used an excuse to not have them (for kids/mothers).

Other countries even have legal requirements of vaccination to work in certain high risk professions (health/child/communal/elderly care) or travel (eg: meningococcal for Hajj)

Having a govt which makes only good decisions is not just important for vaccines but also other parts of life. Your doubt of seatbelt having no downside is not completely correct. It has a well-documented and unaddressed substandard to negative impact on people with non-standard size/weight/shape.

Your doubt is what make me think this vaccine hesitancy is deeply social, not just personal. It is not seen in several societies

Sounds like the deep state got to him....lolol

Which would be a great move if you’re hosting a Halloween party…

Or robbing a bank…

Just saying 🤓

Keep em coming guys…

Reddit aint got %#!* on us ✌🏻

Too late. Kids won't get significant immunity in time. Prepare for a shit show this fall but different from the explosive shit show of the summer.

No, I can’t deal with your racism and bad smells. Stay away from decent people.

What a great interview though

What the hell is going on? I used to say we live in the dumbest timeline. Now it's like we're living in a glitching timeline where nothing makes sense. Nothing feels real. It's all just bullshit to make you outraged, and it'll change tomorrow when there's some other stupid bullshit to make you outraged.