[FRIAM] vaccine

[glen ep ropella]

Of course we get angry when some part of our toolchain breaks! The important attribute, though, is the extent to which we can debug and rebuild it. My point is the CDC isn't a monolith. And I argue the processes upon which it's built are transparent enough that its breakage shouldn't be that hard to recover from. Its composing members are deeply committed people, committed to doing the right thing, trying to help the world. While I agree incompetence and malfeasance can be damaging, I have faith in the overwhelming majority of those people to continue the work they do. And to whatever tiny extent I can, I'll help them do that work.


On August 23, 2020 10:29:54 PM PDT, David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
>Well, if that’s “the key point”, then we should all get up on high
>horses and enjoy blaming everyone who ever gets angry at the loss of
>anything that was good, or useful, or valuable.  After all, any one
>thing wasn’t everything, and therefore it wasn’t diverse.  It was just
>itself.  It was just some good, or useful, thing that we put a lot of
>work into building because it was all we could do to produce one of it.
>And now some saboteurs have injured or destroyed it, and we don’t have
>any one of it at all.
>
>I cannot recreate everything in life in its best form out of my own
>self.  I am not that big.  I depend on things in the world and in
>society that take decades or centuries of work by thousands or tens of
>thousands of people to assemble, and that have no replacements when
>they are gone.
>
>> On Aug 24, 2020, at 8:36 AM, glen ep ropella <gepropella at gmail.com>
>wrote:
>> 
>> There's the key point, right? That diversity fosters openness,
>facilitating the entrance, maintenance, and extinction of all sorts of
>wild-type rationale. Writing in stone an authority figure like the CDC,
>or Fauci, or [who|what]ever dampens that openness ... stunts our
>ability to reason. I spend a lot of energy denigrating the denial of
>expertise. But appeal to authority is arguably worse.
>> 
>> If Redfield or Azar suddenly announced a vaccine, the process is open
>enough that you could email the clinical trial PIs and find out whether
>you might trust it. Normalizing/unifying trust into any single app,
>org, or person will always be a mistake.