[FRIAM] vaccine

[David Eric Smith]

Yes, I guess this is fair, and I apologize for popping off at you.

I think that, after being doused in it for 15 years, I have absorbed some of Martin Shubik’s view (for which maybe I am even willing to claim some responsibility from my own understanding by now) that the design and implementation of institutions is hard, and that they carry enormous weight in running the society.  Getting the rules right, finding people, acculturating members, building up networks including all the habits of others in the world whom you need to influence to work with you, etc., take time and a lot of effort.

The week after Trump was elected, Shbuk wrote a hair-on-fire open letter to several of his colleagues in Econ and operations research, with the main theme “We’ve got to protect the institutions!  They will be the first thing to go under attack!”.  Part of that is the response one expected from him, from a life of worrying about these things as his main specialty, but part of it was just the kind of long-paid-for expert understanding that I was hoping to learn from working with him.

Lawyers can act as pure advocates, if you are in a country with legislators that make the laws as fair as possible.  But scientists shouldn’t do that.  They can’t help have preferences, and even advocate, but they are supposed to stop short of acting like lawyers, and act partly like judges and legislators over themselves, because there isn’t really an outside office to do that.  But scientists are not always reliable in that, and scientists in companies, especially those run by high-profit businessmen, are doubly at hazard.  An aggregator and regulator outside the corporate world can do very hard jobs that nobody else is set up to do.  When they are well run, it is remarkable how good they can be.  Conversely, when they get hijacked, they can be organized sources of bad pressure.

Yes of course, if something comes out, I will use what connections I have to try to learn about it.  We are privileged, in that we have shorter lines to people with more expertise than the vast majority of our 330M fellow citizens.  But from what I can see of the reporting, even understanding the etiology of this new disease continues to be rather hard.  Vaccine safety and efficacy are hard in general, with lots of opportunities for error or poor practice.  Vaccines for a class we haven’t vaccinated for before (no vaccines for the cold, as far as I know), give more wild-cards.  We don’t even have a long term yet, in which to have seen effects of disease or vaccine.  A don’t think our informal networks on FRIAM++ can referee that problem comparably to a well-run institution with the full support of a large national government.  

Still, I would reach into an urn full of cobras before I would take trump’s word for anything, or the word of any lackey acting on his behalf.  That makes the burden of proof from any of our large institutions in the near term that much higher.

Eric



> On Aug 24, 2020, at 2:55 PM, glen ep ropella <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
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