[FRIAM] Collective sensemaking

Mon Jul 19 23:58:10 EDT 2021

Thanks for the replies gentlemen.

Am I correct in asserting that the gist of what you guys say about this
ground truth exercise is that if you don't trust the referees you can't
trust the result? If yes, I'll agree with you on that point.

But, of course, that still does not change my mind about Bret and Heather,
I like their views and consider them honest brokers and will be monitoring
this process used to fact-check them; I'm not stubborn, if the results of
the process indicate that they are unreliable then I'll change my mind.

Pieter

On Tue, 20 Jul 2021 at 04:08, David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> It is generous (and good), to try to reduce this to something as clean as
> logical fallacies.
>
> Your earlier email was really to the point, though, about motives.
>
> Neither here nor there, an anecdote from my own experience.
>
> I had not heard of any of these people, as I normally don’t, until Bill
> Maher had BW and HH on his show.  It is a pity that Bill badly enough needs
> the persona of the cynical skeptic that some subset of his commitments are
> contrarian just, it seems, for its own sake.
>
> I remember the following to assertions from them.  (Paraphrased, but
> should be close):
> BW: (about whether the virus was in some way manmade) “Isn’t it suspicious
> that most people have infected each other inside, yet bats live outside.”
> I immediately brought to mind Spock’s line to Kirk in one of the 1960s
> Star Trek episodes (the one about Nomad) “A dazzling display of logic,
> captain.”
>
> A poor fact-checker would be stuck on that one: Bats, after all, _do_ live
> outside, and people _do_ mostly infect each other with COVID inside.  Hmm.
> Now what?
>
> Then on why they wouldn’t take vaccines:
> BW and HH jointly: Our ancestors didn’t evolve with vaccines, so we should
> expect them to be dangerous in unknown ways.
>
> It is interesting that the only biological component of the mRNA vaccines
> — mRNA in the medium or injected into cells — is the one thing we _have_
> been living with since we were bacteria.  That’s even before the origin
> Stone Age.  The parts of the vaccines that are new are the chemical parts:
> the delivery vehicle and the adjuvants.  If there were to be real
> surprises, I would expect those to come from those.  But of course a
> one-time chemical exposure is limited in its effect by dose and whatever
> the chemical does.  I continue to be interested in what the adjuvants are
> in these vaccines, and what is known of their history, but haven’t taken
> time to read.  A source is here:
> https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2020.589833/full
>
> That all becomes interesting now, in light of the fact that the mRNA
> vaccines are the _simplest_ RNA-carrying vaccines we have ever had; much
> simpler than viral vector vaccines.  I wondered if there might be some
> advantage from having so little uncontrolled diversity and complexity.
> Right now, it appears that both of the adenovirus vaccines (AZ and J&J) may
> have an identifiable incidence of Gillian-Barre at about the 10e-5 level,
> which would put it at about 4x the annual flu vaccine’s correlation.  That
> is not settled yet, but the experts think there might be one.  Yet, with
> many more doses in the US, EU, Japan, and I guess elsewhere, of the Pfizer
> and Moderna formulae, I am not yet seeing any reports of G-B upticks that
> seem to correlate with them.  And it is the same data sets that would be a
> source for all these.  So I am eager to see if there is a real difference,
> and whether we can find out where it comes from.  It could well come back
> to the way our familiarity with viruses, possibly in combination with
> adjuvants, tunes immune responses.
>
> Anyway,
>
> Eric
>
>
> On Jul 20, 2021, at 5:59 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I intended to ignore this. A right-wing publication <
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2frationalwiki.org%2fwiki%2fQuillette&c=E,1,5xAe5gKvP5GEkMF5Jy760f7p5E-YIiCXn6VPUFS5KkVueVNYI5hOVJ04h4Dd3OVYcWquJ-Q5n9rmDLBp0VwlwR1anEaB7VBThufosT3Tl492brNFPDtD0I2ww5yF&typo=1>
> criticizing an alt-right troll <
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbookshop.org%2fbooks%2fagainst-the-web-a-cosmopolitan-answer-to-the-new-right%2f9781789042306&c=E,1,RIDuZAwRSSrQWqY0iDNF0muhPD2iPPIm9ULWPwv7JPRoy9mgEPISBUwSpd8JMhvGo15cpJpWV3Hj2JmHPP8J2LGKdb8UCsWPunIsHX1uZKAV67MYSQ,,&typo=1>?!
> Good, I'm glad your community of sociopaths is fractured. Maybe you'll all
> eat each other and let the world heal.
>
> But because I'm a rubber-necker who loves zombie and slasher movie gore, I
> finally looked into the "Ground Truth Challenge" and it seems to present an
> opportunity to explore the composition/division fallacy:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition
>
> which should concern anyone interested in obscure gen-phen mapping. Let's
> just assume the referees involved will find against all the unrejected
> objections to isolated claims made by BW. Does that, then, imply that BW is
> not "promoting quackery"?
>
> As a fan of conspiracy theories like Jack Parsons being an occult
> practitioner, the Deep Hot Biosphere, Evolution Without Selection, etc.,
> it's difficult NOT to notice how conspiracy peddlers like BW effectively
> use factoids and then rely on their audience to "fill in the gaps". This is
> the essence of Lakoff's diagnosis of Trump's ... uh ... performance art
> rallies. It's the essence of how leaders like Charles Manson persuade their
> followers to, say, murder people, without ever explicitly ordering them to
> do so.
>
> As I've alluded before, the fallacy of composition is particularly lethal
> to narrativity ... just because the factoids are, in isolation, "true",
> doesn't mean the narrative they serve is "true". What we desperately need
> is a calculus by which to demonstrate how/when/why systemic properties
> reduce and when they don't. And we don't even need culture war fetishes
> like ivermectin or critical race theory to discuss it. We can retreat to
> safe territory like physics and math. >8^D
>
>
> On 7/17/21 10:16 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>
> I'm a big fan of but some members of this group have been highly
> critical of Bret Weinstein in previous emails. I'll be monitoring the
> exercise described below where the integrity of Bret Weinstein will be
> scrutinized.
>
> Background
> The online magazine Quilette published an article
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fquillette.com%2f2021%2f07%2f06%2flooking-for-covid-19-miracle-drugs-we-already-have-them-theyre-called-vaccines%2f&c=E,1,Jy6cC_XpQiIbm8e4pYMva0efNyTmgqanDxTUB8cpbnkS2rSxAyp02FGF1lqzJPIUkafQeJ5yK9y_PUmuPCWmJtgzbxBllnzmxO-CCQ4LwEmzkm37VHvm&typo=1
> <
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fquillette.com%2f2021%2f07%2f06%2flooking-for-covid-19-miracle-drugs-we-already-have-them-theyre-called-vaccines%2f&c=E,1,G1dxtRFLasu1wmdQaQubJE17NUG2NOGaF-qQfHpN9oAYdg9xaHt_xsc8da2xv06eCM3sf4xXSmwQ1ytW0GMp1fQHTEsCTXwNffWXk4GveEjTQ11uW7VAWCDCWA,,&typo=1>
> highly critical of Bret Weinstein and his guests.
>
> Now, supporters of Bret decided to challenge the article and are launching
> a $10k "Ground truth challenge".
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.betterskeptics.com%2flaunching-the-10k-ground-truth-challenge%2f&c=E,1,TWt3NADFGWKReb829jbamrThxBZmne5j28ERcAuQPgEts2r-LPlqV1IFgqYHmw3_XWKlL1MdJSreN59_Z-cUapaWM0gLayJor4AdoMv2EUrBWCXvqDk10LT7UA,,&typo=1
> <
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.betterskeptics.com%2flaunching-the-10k-ground-truth-challenge%2f&c=E,1,7-OR4-16G0ioUO3G_-8NQ_E5oUEjuolC6e7-otXUgJdx5miZ1Y9SJLHke3R_eCjHN_dgZkGyVxM7BLFxbvT7BXnA8TNWcqygsmiwWBNxrGasF25t757yAA,,&typo=1
> >
>
>
>
> --
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>
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