[FRIAM] IS: "...useful". WAS:: whackadoodles go mainstream!

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Glen, 

If ever you wanted to explore what you meant by "useful" in your message below, I am your man.  

Such a discussion would get at the soul of pragmatism,  the war between Peirce and his benefactor William James, and my war with Eric Charles concerning whether we should talk not about the practical consequences of our conceptions but about their "practicial" consequence, i.e., their consequences for practices of discovery.  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2020 12:20 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] whackadoodles go mainstream!

Re: the statistical wash -- yes, eventually. But for those of us who tend to over-react to everything and demand immediate access to knowledge that will only come a year or years later, it might help to think of COVID-19 as merely a complicating factor and retain the focus on your *current* diseases. And age isn't a disease. But diabetes is, COPD is, etc. If you have any of those, *they* are what you should focus on.

Re: designing SARS-Cov-2 -- These arguments sound a lot like "intelligent design" arguments, to me. You see a pocket watch laying on the ground next to a wild flower and intuitively feel like there must be a God. Sure, is it *logically* possible that a God designed the wild flower? Yes. But is that the most useful explanation? No.

The worst conspiracy theory I've seen is this TL;DR, which uses TL;DR as a *weapon* to blind the audience with "science":

  https://project-evidence.github.io/
  https://github.com/Project-Evidence/project-evidence.github.io

I'd be curious if anyone in this forum prioritizes that as something to slog through. 8^) It's pretty funny that, when their name "Project E.P.S.T.E.I.N." was too strong of a hint to demonstrate they were bullshitters, they changed their name to seem less conspiratorial.

On 4/20/20 11:03 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> With HIV there are people that can control the virus and have immunity for practical purposes. [1]   Whether or not there are co-morbidities, if one has a strong signal like B*5701 for HIV, it should come out in the statistical wash.  Not everyone with a particular HLA will have the same co-morbidity.    Anyway, back to the whackadoodle topic:  If that is the case, and one had a detailed knowledge of the genetics (e.g. ethnicity) of a target population,  one could design a virus to hurt some more than others.   But if one is a fascist, it is very easy as you point out:  You make everyone sick and the people with health care or he means to stay isolated will tend to survive.    I'm not saying that is  the case here, I'm just saying maybe it isn't actually impossible.  


--
☣ uǝlƃ

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