[FRIAM] Collective sensemaking

[David Eric Smith]

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 <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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