Life imitates art

Back when the WHO was denying that it was airborne, I knew it likely was based on the contagiousness of it and various reports around the world about how it was spread.
- ditto for when the WHO experts were declaring "no evidence" of human-to-human transmissions. Weasel words like that may be epistomologically and technically correct, but they're useless for public policy and fail to consider the harm caused to their reputation, public trust, and consequences if it turns out to be airborne (as it did)
I knew Trump's travel ban on China was a good idea even before he did it, but the experts at the time were decrying it as xenophobic. The criticism from the health community was not driven by evidence and basic scientific reasoning about disease transmission (their supposed are of expertise) but rather ideology.
I knew masks were probably worthwhile (or at least did no harm so they should be encouraged) when Faucci and company were telling us no reason to wear a mask while simultaneously complaining about a lack of PPE for first responders. I knew it was a lie for obvious reasons and confirmed by Faucci himself later. This is like the WHO case above, so while that one was maybe a case of poor public communication/leadership, this was is probably a case of the experts lying to your face when they find it convenient. The antimasker movement and other backlash is directly attributable to this clear fact of horrible leadership from the experts
I knew the lockdowns were bad policy; interestingly the "experts" are bipolar on this with evidence in scholarly journals published before 2019 against lockdowns but then for some weird reasons they were adopted all over the place in 2020 despite what the science up to that time said. Like masks, there are now dozens (hundreds?) of papers being published all over the place claiming all kinds of contradictory results, but the main point is the experts failed 100% to account to human psychology in and economic consequences in these policies. Throw in standard corporate corruption and lobbying (exemptions for corporations while tiny businesses get fucked) and it's clear the experts designed nothing in this around data and science outside of the tautological "can't have transmission if the business is shutdown"
I knew the deaths and infections numbers trotted out by experts in their daily briefings were full of shit because there was never anywhere close to enough tests and many infected have essentially zero symptoms. This made all their hemming and hawing look so ridiculous when it was obvious case numbers were likely 10x higher and their IFR and CFR numbers were completely junk with massive error base since we never (and still don't) have a clue what the denominator should be.

On and on. Why was I able to get these predictions right while the experts were wrong? My guess is because they are so detached from reality of normal day to day people and how they will behave. Health experts are supposed to take that kind of thing into account when formulating policy for the real world, but it's hard when you're at CDC headquarters living in the suburbs in a $1m house and talking with similar people to empathize and understand how somebody working in retail in Iowa or a college student in Mississippi is going to react to whatever ill-conceived policy you recommend.

They should have told the truth at every step of the way because public trust is incredibly easy to erode. But they think they know better than everyone else and can control how people should act. It is their ego and arrogance that has produced and amplified both the disastrous response to covid and the public's trust in them.

I'll spare you my thoughts on vaccines and predictions about what will happen there unless you're interested.

I'm just a random person on the internet so you'll take what I have to say with a grain of salt, but I saw so many mistakes these experts were making at the time. So take it from my perspective and consider what you'd think "experts" people are doing if you saw things these ways: * Back when the WHO was denying that it was airborne, I knew it likely was based on the contagiousness of it and various reports around the world about how it was spread. - ditto for when the WHO experts were declaring "no evidence" of human-to-human transmissions. Weasel words like that may be epistomologically and technically correct, but they're useless for public policy and fail to consider the harm caused to their reputation, public trust, and consequences if it turns out to be airborne (as it did) * I knew Trump's travel ban on China was a good idea even before he did it, but the experts at the time were decrying it as xenophobic. The criticism from the health community was not driven by evidence and basic scientific reasoning about disease transmission (their supposed are of expertise) but rather ideology. * I knew masks were probably worthwhile (or at least did no harm so they should be encouraged) when Faucci and company were telling us no reason to wear a mask while simultaneously complaining about a lack of PPE for first responders. I knew it was a lie for obvious reasons and confirmed by Faucci himself later. This is like the WHO case above, so while that one was maybe a case of poor public communication/leadership, this was is probably a case of the experts lying to your face when they find it convenient. The antimasker movement and other backlash is directly attributable to this clear fact of horrible leadership from the experts * I knew the lockdowns were bad policy; interestingly the "experts" are bipolar on this with evidence in scholarly journals published before 2019 against lockdowns but then for some weird reasons they were adopted all over the place in 2020 despite what the science up to that time said. Like masks, there are now dozens (hundreds?) of papers being published all over the place claiming all kinds of contradictory results, but the main point is the experts failed 100% to account to human psychology in and economic consequences in these policies. Throw in standard corporate corruption and lobbying (exemptions for corporations while tiny businesses get fucked) and it's clear the experts designed nothing in this around data and science outside of the tautological "can't have transmission if the business is shutdown" * I knew the deaths and infections numbers trotted out by experts in their daily briefings were full of shit because there was never anywhere close to enough tests and many infected have essentially zero symptoms. This made all their hemming and hawing look so ridiculous when it was obvious case numbers were likely 10x higher and their IFR and CFR numbers were completely junk with massive error base since we never (and still don't) have a clue what the denominator should be. On and on. Why was I able to get these predictions right while the experts were wrong? My guess is because they are so detached from reality of normal day to day people and how they will behave. Health experts are supposed to take that kind of thing into account when formulating policy for the real world, but it's hard when you're at CDC headquarters living in the suburbs in a $1m house and talking with similar people to empathize and understand how somebody working in retail in Iowa or a college student in Mississippi is going to react to whatever ill-conceived policy you recommend. They should have told the truth at every step of the way because public trust is incredibly easy to erode. But they think they know better than everyone else and can control how people should act. It is their ego and arrogance that has produced and amplified both the disastrous response to covid and the public's trust in them. I'll spare you my thoughts on vaccines and predictions about what will happen there unless you're interested.

[–] [Deleted] 0 points (+0|-0)

Why was I able to get these predictions right while the experts were wrong?

probably for a multitude of reasons but probably not many of the ones your thinking. perhaps it was because it was a fluid situation with a lot of moving pieces they were trying to juggle. nobody bats 1.000, especially on something so enormous. expecting perfection is ridiculous.

as for vaccinnes, i'd love to hear what side effects you expect to magically pop up so many months into trials.

[–] CDanger [OP] 0 points (+0|-0)

perhaps it was because it was a fluid situation with a lot of moving pieces they were trying to juggle

That's pretty close to the problem. It's a huge chaotic system that is difficult to predict. It involves questions of economics, virology, statistics, leadership, and an understanding of human nature. Faucci et al had tunnel vision on their domain of epidemiology, but in the real world that expertise is pretty worthless if you don't understand the interactions with those other domains. This isn't just a case of they got unlucky and I got lucky, it's a matter of the wrong philosophy that they took to approaching a problem of predicting under massive uncertainty with disparate domains. Their own expertise blinded them to the possibility of being wrong, and their egos and incompetence of leadership made that problem even worse. These leaders just don't take the right approach to decision making under uncertainty and yet have the nerve to call you an idiot for calling them out on that mistake. They mentally just write you off as some uninformed conspiracy wacko. In fact, this is the very reason for the massively expanding cynicism and distrust of their authority.

i'd love to hear what side effects you expect to magically pop up so many months into trials.

Let's not start off with a strawman fallacy. It's good that you refer to these as trials, because the current rollout is in fact a trial and experiment, and health officials are once again being dishonest about that and overselling the safety. Notice a pattern here? The predictable result is that for anybody who thinks like I do, has paid attention to their words and actions, and sees their pattern of duplicitous conduct and horrible judgement will have alarm bells ringing.

The truth is these drugs are not FDA approved, and all the talk about how they "went through the same process but at a faster speed" for emergency authorization reveals a flaw in thinking. Suppose there are two drugs A and B where drug A is approved after 5 years of study and use while drug B is approved after 50 years of study and use. Statistically drug B is the safer choice even though they might have gone through the same approval process, had the same number of trial participants, and been examined by the same clinicians. Time has done "free" work for us on drug B by showing that over a longer time frame any issues that could have surfaced would have surfaced. We do not have that assurance for drug A. This is the kind of philosophical or statistical truth that the experts refuse to acknowledge even exists. These are the kinds methodological tunnel vision flaws in their thinking that I referred to earlier.

As another humorous way of expressing this point, consider this article which reveals the flawed approach how medical experts evaluate data and scenarios while ignoring any evidence that doesn't meet their declared standard of evidence. This is the WHO "no evidence of human transmission" scenario. See, this isn't just them getting unlucky and me getting lucky, it's their poor judgement realizing that in the real world their is evidence from other domains, and their restrictive world view of randomized controlled trials offers one kind of evidence but misses many opportunities where we actually can make better decisions earlier before waiting for the costly experiments to come in.

So imagine my position when I hear people call me a conspiracy theorist for pointing out these problems. It's a fact that these vaccines can't be as safe as other treatments that have been around for years. There are other points I could bring up about this rollout too, but nobody's paying me here, my rambling thoughts won't change any public policy, and this is getting quite long already, so let's focus on this longevity angle. It's a fact that these medicines haven't gone through the full FDA approval process. My position is actually strongly scientific, and the twitter idiots repeating these celebrity talking head experts on TV and telling us to "trust the experts" are espousing the anti-scientific worldview. I see all kinds of coercive tactics being discussed by these sociopath leaders to convince the "vaccine hesitant" of the errors of their ways. See, they see us as little kids that are just stupid and can't make decisions for ourselves. We get all kinds of idiotic incentive schemes with free donuts, free beer, and free tickets to baseball games for taking part in this huge clinical trial. Shouldn't that last sentence ring all kinds of alarm bells in your mind that shows our business, health, and scientific leaders are all comfortable getting cozy together pushing these kinds of programs because they think you're an idiot and they know what's best for you? Shouldn't our doctors instead be telling us that we shouldn't eat donuts and drink beer in exchange for taking medicine and focus on answering our questions in an honest conversation? Overall, this is just atrocious leadership that will backfire.

So answering your original point, will there be massive side effects? I couldn't tell you. We've seen some of these already with blood clotting, and it sounds like the science on that is still out and it isn't fully understood as we continue to roll this out to the general population at full speed and shame anybody who asks questions. Our leaders have shown tremendous willingness to use censorship and downplay anything that undermines their goals, so we can't trust the data of reported side effects since these are drastically underreported and now systematically ignored as not politically expedient. Noticing the pattern of dishonesty and failed leadership here?

Basically they need to be honest but they haven't for anything during this whole fiasco, so what will happen is people won't believe them and won't get the vaccine. Their worldview is too arrogant and dishonest, and that is why they are making these mistakes and throwing up their hands in the air and patting themselves on the back by saying well, it's all a fluid situation with a lot of moving pieces, so I think we're actually doing pretty well--so long as we can just fix the thinking of some of those idiot antivaxers. These experts are the root cause of why we have antimaskers and antivaxers. It's all so sadly predictable.

> perhaps it was because it was a fluid situation with a lot of moving pieces they were trying to juggle That's pretty close to the problem. It's a huge chaotic system that is difficult to predict. It involves questions of economics, virology, statistics, leadership, and an understanding of human nature. Faucci et al had tunnel vision on their domain of epidemiology, but in the real world that expertise is pretty worthless if you don't understand the interactions with those other domains. This isn't just a case of they got unlucky and I got lucky, it's a matter of the wrong philosophy that they took to approaching a problem of predicting under massive uncertainty with disparate domains. Their own expertise blinded them to the possibility of being wrong, and their egos and incompetence of leadership made that problem even worse. These leaders just don't take the right approach to decision making under uncertainty and yet have the nerve to call you an idiot for calling them out on that mistake. They mentally just write you off as some uninformed conspiracy wacko. In fact, this is the very reason for the massively expanding cynicism and distrust of their authority. > i'd love to hear what side effects you expect to magically pop up so many months into trials. Let's not start off with a strawman fallacy. It's good that you refer to these as trials, because the current rollout is in fact a trial and experiment, and health officials are once again being dishonest about that and overselling the safety. Notice a pattern here? The predictable result is that for anybody who thinks like I do, has paid attention to their words and actions, and sees their pattern of duplicitous conduct and horrible judgement will have alarm bells ringing. The truth is these drugs are not FDA approved, and all the talk about how they "went through the same process but at a faster speed" for emergency authorization reveals a flaw in thinking. Suppose there are two drugs A and B where drug A is approved after 5 years of study and use while drug B is approved after 50 years of study and use. Statistically drug B is the safer choice even though they might have gone through the same approval process, had the same number of trial participants, and been examined by the same clinicians. Time has done "free" work for us on drug B by showing that over a longer time frame any issues that could have surfaced would have surfaced. We do not have that assurance for drug A. This is the kind of philosophical or statistical truth that the experts refuse to acknowledge even exists. These are the kinds methodological tunnel vision flaws in their thinking that I referred to earlier. As another humorous way of expressing this point, consider [this](https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094) article which reveals the flawed approach how medical experts evaluate data and scenarios while ignoring any evidence that doesn't meet their declared standard of evidence. This is the WHO "no evidence of human transmission" scenario. See, this isn't just them getting unlucky and me getting lucky, it's their poor judgement realizing that in the real world their is evidence from other domains, and their restrictive world view of randomized controlled trials offers one kind of evidence but misses many opportunities where we actually can make better decisions earlier before waiting for the costly experiments to come in. So imagine my position when I hear people call me a conspiracy theorist for pointing out these problems. It's a fact that these vaccines _can't_ be as safe as other treatments that have been around for years. There are other points I could bring up about this rollout too, but nobody's paying me here, my rambling thoughts won't change any public policy, and this is getting quite long already, so let's focus on this longevity angle. It's a fact that these medicines haven't gone through the full FDA approval process. My position is actually strongly scientific, and the twitter idiots repeating these celebrity talking head experts on TV and telling us to "trust the experts" are espousing the anti-scientific worldview. I see all kinds of coercive tactics being discussed by these sociopath leaders to convince the "vaccine hesitant" of the errors of their ways. See, they see us as little kids that are just stupid and can't make decisions for ourselves. We get all kinds of idiotic incentive schemes with free donuts, free beer, and free tickets to baseball games for taking part in this huge clinical trial. Shouldn't that last sentence ring all kinds of alarm bells in your mind that shows our business, health, and scientific leaders are all comfortable getting cozy together pushing these kinds of programs because they think you're an idiot and they know what's best for you? Shouldn't our doctors instead be telling us that we shouldn't eat donuts and drink beer in exchange for taking medicine and focus on answering our questions in an honest conversation? Overall, this is just atrocious leadership that will backfire. So answering your original point, will there be massive side effects? I couldn't tell you. We've seen some of these already with blood clotting, and it sounds like the science on that is still out and it isn't fully understood as we continue to roll this out to the general population at full speed and shame anybody who asks questions. Our leaders have shown tremendous willingness to use censorship and downplay anything that undermines their goals, so we can't trust the data of reported side effects since these are drastically underreported and now systematically ignored as not politically expedient. Noticing the pattern of dishonesty and failed leadership here? Basically they need to be honest but they haven't for anything during this whole fiasco, so what will happen is people won't believe them and won't get the vaccine. Their worldview is too arrogant and dishonest, and _that_ is why they are making these mistakes and throwing up their hands in the air and patting themselves on the back by saying _well, it's all a fluid situation with a lot of moving pieces, so I think we're actually doing pretty well--so long as we can just fix the thinking of some of those idiot antivaxers_. These experts are the root cause of why we have antimaskers and antivaxers. It's all so sadly predictable.

[–] [Deleted] 0 points (+0|-0)

It's a fact that these vaccines can't be as safe as other treatments that have been around for years

that is mighty dubious. see the earlier death rates this caused as they used outmoded treatments on patients. i'm not sure what treatments you suggest are safer and still effective. i have read a fair bit though by no means the totality of knowledge. if there are any, i'd really love to hear it because it would be news to me.

its not the pointing out these problems that makes you a conspiracy nut, its the degree you will go to convince yourself that this is an everybody else problem and not a you problem that makes you a conspiracy nut. you have - without evidence or reason (apart from your own/others' theories) - come up with your own narrative for who these people are, what their motives are and why they are evil. and you are calling others sociopaths.

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/s/cringe