We cannot do the science, because such a randomized test would be deeply unethical. Compare to having pregnant women smoke cigarettes to study effect on the fetus. You do this only afterwards with observational data.
Next to politization there is also public health, which is more of a management science than an emperical science. And economic concerns.
From all the data worldwide, you only reduce risk of hospitalization and death, not for spreading to your grandmother or catching it from a bypasser sneezing in your face. To act like there is no risk for the leaky vaccinated, is to actually increase your risk. Data shows that asymptomatic breakthrough infections are able to cause long-COVID. Now you did not even feel sick and gave your body and immune system rest to clear the virus. Very risky!
> We cannot do the science, because such a randomized test would be deeply unethical.
Thank you for perfectly illustrating the problem. I was actually sort of worried that people wouldn't take me seriously when I said that science has become so political that we actually can't do any. It sounds conspiratorial, doesn't it? But, alas:
1) I post results of RCTs showing that masks do little, if anything.
2) Someone replies that the evidence is insufficient for reasons X, Y, Z.
3) I say "great, let's gather more evidence to resolve those uncertainties".
4) Someone replies "we can't, it's unethical".
Quite a fine castle you've built on that cloud, good sir. Very safe indeed.
In a First, Randomized Study Shows That Masks Reduce COVID-19 Infections
A large study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Jason Abaluck and Mushfiq Mobarak tested the effectiveness of a mask-promotion program in Bangladesh in increasing mask use and preventing symptomatic infections. The study found that masks significantly lower symptomatic infections, especially among older people and when surgical masks [instead of cloth] are used.
That's literally the study this thread is talking about. It's great that they did it -- it should have been done in early 2020, all over the world. We should have dozens of other studies just like it.
The fact that we don't is an indication of how hard it's been to pursue any sort of science in this area. Almost nobody funds it, you can't get it published if it doesn't fit the public health narrative, and even if you do, the the news media won't report on it, and it might just get censored on social media.
Make that zero. To their credit, the authors of the Bangladesh mask study released the raw data. "The difference between the two groups was small: only 20 cases out of over 340,000 individuals over a span of 8 weeks." Drawing any conclusions from such small amount of data is deeply unserious.
It isn't a political issue to not do studies that require doing things that actively and intentionally put people at things we know are highly likely to put them at risk of physical harm. The world decided this was unethical long before the current political climate.
In masks + covid context it feels like "unethical" is used as a thought terminating cliche.
* The pandemic is affecting 8,000,000,000 people all around the world. A large size RCT enrolls X0,000 participants. For example, the Pfizer covid mRNA vaccine clinical trial had 21,728 placebo participants. For every RCT participant, the RCT results are going to inform the course of action for hundreds of thousands of people. This is to say that such RCTs are extremely valuable given the high infectiousness of the virus.
* The risk to the participants is at worst a moderate increase in the chance of being infected with covid. The covid fatality risk to a healthy adult is small. In the US there have been about 50,000 deaths with covid in <50yo age group. An RCT with 20,000 <50yo people on the placebo arm may see about 3 covid deaths assuming all the placebo participants are going to be infected. Realistically, only a fraction of participants are going to actually be infected with covid, thus there is a good chance every single one of the RCT participants will continue their lives just fine, especially if the study designers are careful to not include people with serious comorbidities.
* Vaccines are available to reduce the death risk by another order of magnitude if deemed necessary. Alas, while the vaccines have strong effects in preventing serious covid, they only have a middling effect on preventing infections [edit: after a few months]. The mask/no mask infection effect remains measurable.
* Covid is endemic. Everyone is at risk to to be infected with covid sooner or later. Wearing a mask may decrease the daily risk by a moderate margin, unfortunately integrated over many days the infection probability approaches 1. The RCT is merely speeding the risk by a moderate margin for the placebo arm participants.
* There is a large pool of potential volunteers that don't (want to) wear masks anyways. Adults have the right to volunteer for risky activities, including activities that may result in death.
This is a well written argument, and I don't disagree with the majority of it. However, there is one key point that I do disagree with, and makes the rest of it moot:
>* There is a large pool of potential volunteers that don't (want to) wear masks anyways. Adults have the right to volunteer for risky activities, including activities that may result in death.
This is certainly true. But the difference is that once we begin performing medical studies that ask this of people, the medical industry is now complicit in adults performing risky activities that may result in death and is asking people to do so, or if doing so, to do so for the benefit of medical research. This is a line that has not been crossed by the modern medical research industry as it has been long decided that this extra pressure, however small, is a lever they do not want to pull because it is fundamentally incompatible with 'Do no harm.'
It isn't 'do no harm, except a little when we think it might outweigh the downsides'
It's a line I don't think we should cross. I understand why someone would disagree with that.
The hypothesis for why masks work is due to the laboratory-measured reduction in transmission from the host. The only way to test this is to have a large population where most do not wear masks or most do wear masks. You will not find enough volunteer to make such a test possible. Individual mask wearing does not test this hypothesis.
I feel like I am going insane. Pure psychopathy or scientism to want randomized controls for studying infection of a deadly virus. Absolutely disgusted. No wonder we had a lab-leak...
It is unethical. All your accusations of narrow-mindedness, but you can't see the obvious, glaring ethical problems with such a trial.
Not the least because it would be completely infeasible. You may pretend that we can "simply" do a "controlled experiment" but you ignore how impossible it is to tell any sizeable group of people to behave in a certain way and report honestly about it.
"Randomised control trials" are the platonic ideal but in the real world, you can't endanger people for your curiosity, and you will have greatest problems to actually enforce your test protocol. It's more than "tricky". Unless you have access to some spherical people in a vacuum.
Right-wing cancelation happens, but it is usually reported as a campaign of harassment.
Instead of calling your advertisers to complain about perceived racism, think unsavory stuff like spam and GamerGate threats.
Right canceling grew out of troll and gamer culture. Left canceling SJW grew out of decades-old activism.
It is of similar type: ganging up on someone your group picked as the next victim, robbing them of their safety or speech without a formal and fair judgment.
But left-wing canceling (say, leaving 100 bad reviews on Yelp for a family business of someone going viral for a 10 second out of context clip on Twitter) is way more advanced and sophisticated. 4chan lost gamergate the moment the press focused on the death threats of a few incapable of expressing their autistic rage in an argument.
The left is more savvy. It knows that a single newspaper photo of 3 activists has similar value to a hundred uncovered protests. They know how to wield the taboo of racism as a weapon to avoid critique. They make you remember why their victim deserved it.
Correct. A canceling is social/mob justice, never settled in a court of law.
To conflate the two is playing into the pitchforks of the cancel crowd. These label legal acts or free speech as illegal racism or hate speech, and we should not go along with that madness.
Cancel tactics are precisely the way they are, because they were designed to function without playing by societies formal rules, or the reasonable defense of choosing not to listen to someone you deeply despise, yet leave their speech and platform alone (they do not care about Alex Jones, but care about the views of those who like to listen to him).
Your absolutely valid point was downvoted/cancelled in a similar manner: projected to be factually incorrect due to political bias against Thiel.
People complain about the target selection and first-mover advantage of Von Neumann, in the same thread which seems to be taken over by collateral damage of polarizing identity politics propaganda, set to target social cohesion of American civilians (which leaks into Western culture) done by the very same adversaries targeted decades back by Von Neumann.
A first strike is not lunacy. It is a rational decision, if the nuclear arms race is viewed under game theory.
He was a consultant, not had his hand on the button. The people with the hand on the button were talking about the rising threat and how to deal with it in the future. Neumann rightly reasoned that if there ever came a conflict, the winning move would have been an early first strike.
If you look at his statements, these are statements of mathematical fact, not political strategy.
If anything, he showed the hypocracy of target selection and its justifications for war. You want to play to win, or worry about rules and perceptions, unsure of if your opponent employs similarly intelligent analysts and game theorists?
Look at the target selection of American adversaries in their information warfare. Made by lunatics? Or made to win a shadow war and damage American culture and politics without regard to military status?
In the prisoner's dilemma isn't a core constraint that the prisoners can't collaborate? Therefore you can't cooperate for the best outcome and both are independently incentivized to defect.
In global diplomacy the goal is to coordinate for the best outcome. So I'm not sure a strike first 'defection' is the rational move.
Game Theory eventually settled on Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD can be seen as the tit-for-tat strategy in an iterated PD with multiple level thinking (If we have crazy von Neumann, do they have similar consultants? Do they know that we think Neumann is a lunatic? etc.) and super rationality (we are all players on the same board, damaging other players reduces our own chances to grow, we should be competing against those urging for war, on either side).
Von Neumann was consultant on game theory, not on geopolitical diplomatic strategy. War generals wanted to talk about future conflicts. Von Neumann reminded them that all talk of winning future conflicts could be made moot by a single move. And he reasoned that intelligent analysts on the other side would inform their generals similarly. Both did a good job, and the generals are commended for taking things outside pure maths into consideration.
What is our solution for when Russia joins the game and gets access to its own nukes?
The Spockian rational answer is: make this question irrelevant and increase our power on the board, by making sure Russia cannot even join the game we are currently winning.
To make good decisions you need diverse expert input like this. All in all, I think von Neumann's work helped keep the nuclear war on paper, instead of reality. His input of a first strike evolved into MAD and allowed us to reach an equilibrium.
Also, for any of this to work, no matter the theory or rationale or lack thereof, the otherside has to believe that you're both capable and willing to execute any given plan.
Meaning that floating crazy-but-rationlized war strategies, especially sourced from individuals who are respected and known to be influential, can itself be seen as part of the overall strategy.
Regardless of whether said strategies are officially adopted or not. It's posturing.
Exactly. Trump weaponized this principle, making very rash and sudden moves during negotiations. This disadvantaged others, because they had trouble predicting his reaction to their own actions, thus moderating them in his favor or "You're fired!". I think a US general took it upon himself to inform China they would not be attacked, no matter what Trump threatened, because he himself was unable to model Trump's mind. "My task at the time was to de-escalate".
Also why MAD does not work well against information warfare. Is the current polarization of culture and politics a natural outgrowth of American culture, the result of unwitting civilians being targeted by military black and grey propaganda, or an unentangleable combination of the two? Did the opponent push the button? Did we push it back in the 80s and did they notice? Where exactly do we stand and draw the line, allowing countries to defend their (cultural) borders and feel safe, without the constant threat and fallout from offenders, who act like children pushing their parents to see how far they can go.
Sometimes I suspect these larger than life scientists working on the top-secret projects, Turing, Feynman, Shannon, Neumann, Kolmogorov, Tesla, Satoshi, were actually collections of people working undercover, an Alan Smithee catch-all type to launder intelligence, take credit, while keeping it in the shadows. Like the unnamed people supporting Bobby Fisher in his match against Russia. Modern day equivalents would be companies like Google, Dell, IBM, and Microsoft.
The moment the bomb became a button, was the moment the physicists had to step aside, and let the decision theorists step in. The bomb effectively became about how to make winning decisions. Decision science itself weaponized, opponents worrying about the analysts on the other side, not the aviators: you would know they would follow orders, and drop the bomb if instructed. You never fully know what those instructions were going to be, but you wanted to find out. Strategic Cold war espionage and misinformation must have ran wild.
There's no such restriction in the prisoner's dilemma.
Lets make it explicit. Let me _pretend_ that I'm going to work with you on the prisoner's dilemma game. I pretend that I'm trustworthy, and coordinate with you that we both trust each other.
That's when I betray you and take all the money for myself.
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In an *iterated* prisoner's dilemma, I simply work with you for the first X-1 trials (where X is the number of trials), and then betray you on the final trial. Since you know I'm going to betray you on the final trial, you betray me on the 2nd to last final trial. Etc. etc. This follows like induction all the way to the 1st trial.
Which means my best move is to betray you in the 1st trial, as per the rule of induction. But you know, pretend that I'm going to work with you (so that you choose trust in the 1st trial).
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Where things go sideways is iterated + public prisoner's dilemma. That is, there are 3 players, and the 3rd player watches what the other 2 players do. Each iteration, we rotate who plays the game.
Finally, we have a situation where trust is a good move: if only to "prove" to the other player that you're trustworthy and possibly get more gains over the long term.
There is no logical reason. The emotional reason, of course, is that one targets men and the other targets women. Most activism these days is retalitory, not consolidatory. So you are allowed to attack white men, because they are always in a position of power.
But both outlets are owned by Bezos, so maybe both outlets are just toxic. The fish rots from the head.
The Post is quoting when it uses both phrases. They are reporting what people involved said. One person used the phrase "bro culture" and there was another incident where a manager referred to some female employees as "mean girls".
Zoom has attention tracking, which when enabled silently, shows an admin if the screen is maximized or if the user is focused on other applications. They don't yet tell admins what other apps the user is active in, just whether the user is active.
Another angle for Zoom to do that, is that it is a massive Chinese spyware application, which can target users by meta data or IP, like it did by messing with the calls of activists. A bit like how anti-virus companies are sometimes charged with exfiltrating secret documents.
> As of April 2, 2020, we have removed the attendee attention tracker feature as part of our commitment to the security and privacy of our customers. For more background on this change and how we are pivoting during these unprecedented times, please see a note from our CEO, Eric S. Yuan.
Next to politization there is also public health, which is more of a management science than an emperical science. And economic concerns.
From all the data worldwide, you only reduce risk of hospitalization and death, not for spreading to your grandmother or catching it from a bypasser sneezing in your face. To act like there is no risk for the leaky vaccinated, is to actually increase your risk. Data shows that asymptomatic breakthrough infections are able to cause long-COVID. Now you did not even feel sick and gave your body and immune system rest to clear the virus. Very risky!