[TTDP] That's what I did

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tambo
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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by tambo » Wed May 25, 2022 1:49 am

S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
Legally, I’ll grant you, the Bill of Rights may not cover what a private company does.
And that's the difference. You cannot conflate "government censorshop" and "private censorship" into one big bucket of "censorship."

There are at least three major differences:

1) Government censorship can apply anywhere, including in completely private settings. When the government wants to censor, let's say, bomb-making instructions, it can stop you from sharing that information even within the privacy of your own home. But Facebook cannot censor someone from expressing their views anywhere outside of Facebook. It only has the power to control the content on Facebook.

2) Government censorship involves preventing people from certain expressions. Private censorship involves the private company not being forced to carry certain expressions. Facebook can't tell you not to express a certain viewpoint; it can only refuse to use its servers to transmit that viewpoint to others.

3) Government censorship can be enforced with the criminal justice system - sharing bomb-making instructions can get you sent to prison. Facebook's power is limited to banning you from Facebook.

For at least those reasons, we have very strong concerns about government censorship and the Constitution places strict limits on it. Concerns about private censorship are much more limited, and the Constitution says nothing about them. On the contrary, "freedom of expression" has been interpreted in exactly the opposite way - by preventing the government from forcing private entities to carry certain expressions of others that they don't want to express.
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
You can’t pretend banning Trump from Facebook and Twitter hasn’t made a difference to Trump’s reach.
Of course it did. And Trump was welcome to reclaim that reach by (a) finding other channels, including other social networks, to carry his message and/or (b) founding his own communication channels. He has in fact tried both, rather earnestly since the insurrection, and no one has stood in his way. His inability to regain the volume that he had is due to the grotesque unpopularity of his message (in addition to the fact that he's no longer POTUS), not because of "censorship."
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
It typically takes at least 11 years of medical training to become a doctor, including completing their residency. I would consider pretty much any doctor to qualify as a medical expert.
Again, you are painting with far too broad a brush. Would you trust a "scientist" to teach you how to mix chemicals together? What if their expertise is in the science of biology? Or psychology? Or computer science?

We're talking about the science of immunology, vaccines, and epidemiology. Medical school covers these topics only briefly and superficially. Doctors in epidemiology and public health certainly study the science of vaccines and epidemiology in extensive depth. Doctors in heart surgery don't. Nor do doctors in radiology, otolaryngology, or podiatry. Their brief encounter with immunology in medical school may be 20 or 30 years out of date. And yet, lots of these "I'm a doctor" types have relied on the letters at the end of their name to bolster their personal opinions with expertise that they do not have.
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
(2) Scientific disagreement sparks growth.
Scientific disagreement sparks growth. That's why medical journals conduct an extensive peer-review process before publishing thousands of articles per year.

Facebook and Twitter are not forums for "responsible scientific disagreement." Nothing about either medium is conducive to extended discussion. And the people spreading antivaxx theories on social media aren't interested in disagreement or discussion; they are there to push their viewpoint... The End.
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
(3) Covid is a new disease, particularly when it was first striking the US in 2020. There *can’t* be a settled method of treatment when we’re learning new things about the disease all the time. The fight against misinformation started right at the beginning of lockdowns, and made no logical sense.
"The fight against misinformation" did not include peer-reviewed journals, where actual science is conducted and discussed. "The fight against misinformation" was limited to social media, where science is not being done. That's the difference.
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
One example of disinformation that was fought against was using hydroxychloroquine.
... the NIH did ban an emergency authorization to use it for Covid after some faulty studies seemed to show that it caused harm. Even before that though, the media was sounding an alarm about how it was an unsafe drug. False. It’s been used for prophylaxis of malaria for decades.
"False?" Pharmaceuticals, by definition, are unsafe when used irresponsibly. That's why they are regulated and available only by prescription.

Many drugs are "safe" in some patients, at some doses, when taken under certain conditions. That certainly doesn't make them "safe" for the general public to use with zero knowledge or controlled conditions. Drinking too much water can kill you, ffs.
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
Later it was shown that hydroxychloroquine is indeed helpful in the early stages of Covid.
Oh? Because here's what the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control has to say about it:

The dangers of using hydroxychloroquine (HCQ)
  • High quality research data show the use of HCQ for treating COVID-19 can be dangerous and has no medical benefit. In fact, the FDA has revoked emergency use authorization for HCQ in COVID-19 patients based on these dangers and because it does not help people recover faster.
  • HCQ should not be taken for COVID-19 infection because it can cause serious heart rhythm abnormalities, severe liver inflammation, and kidney failure.
  • Taking HCQ on your own outside the hospital is dangerous.
That doesn't sound like "safe and helpful in the early stages of COVID" to me.
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
All or most those countries that locked down must have had epidemiologists advising them. I haven’t had as much medical education as a doctor, only 4 years for a B.S. in nursing, but as soon as I read about how contagious Covid was, I knew that lockdowns weren’t going to work to stop the disease.
I'm not an epidemiologist. Neither are you. Neither one of us has any qualification to make these kinds of statements.
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
…That’s not what I’d call a study.
I find it interesting that you can so lightly cast aside research by a recognized, respected public health organization with a 70-year track record in this field - but you grant so much credibility to the casual medical opinions on Facebook of Joe-Bob Smith, Doctor of Dermatology, that you want to force Facebook to carry them.

There is an apparent skew in your method of assigning credibility, and it's based on whether or not you agree with the content. That is not how science works. And that very skew is the heart of the misinformation problem we have today.

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mistersaxon
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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by mistersaxon » Wed May 25, 2022 4:37 am

Well that's a solid post @Tambo - good job on being clear and calm. HCQ is grim stuff and best avoided if at all possible - it can affect your eyesight too and, though that is not fatal of course, it can seriously degrade your quality of life...

I think of Facebook et al as being like a megaphone - it's then obvious that you don't have a right to one unless you buy it yourself, and you certainly don't have a right to demand the use of someone else's if they have decided they don't want you to use it.
Yea, verily: Who is that, running on the steppes! It is Sax, clutching buzzsaw hand extensions! He howls homicidally:
"I'm seriously going to pound you into the fast lane!!!"

Oh, yeah, I wrote Ping some backstory once.

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Zandra
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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by Zandra » Wed May 25, 2022 2:04 pm

Yeah a problem with peer review has become known recently. ALOT of them know how each writes a paper and can guess who it is by their style. So this leads to alot of peer review being dishonest so they can get a paper reviewed in turn with a favorable review.

HCL has been a drug fro 50 plus years and has had no ill effects until now it seems(when properly perscribed). When big pharma,and the FDA are practically the same organization these days due to former FDA employees getting nice jobs from Big pharma you cannot just take them at their words.

Oh and I was vaxxed too btw.
I WAS the Owner of Wolfboys 800th post but SOMEBODY had to go and get a new Forum lol!

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mistersaxon
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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by mistersaxon » Thu May 26, 2022 5:23 am

Zandra wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 2:04 pm

HCL has been a drug fro 50 plus years and has had no ill effects until now it seems(when properly perscribed). When big pharma,and the FDA are practically the same organization these days due to former FDA employees getting nice jobs from Big pharma you cannot just take them at their words.
I'm talking from personal experience of HCQ and also from the drug fact-sheet - it does have a number of side effects and some are pretty serious, and some people will get those side effects - it definitely is not a drug you want to take unless you are at serious risk of exposure to malaria and even then you'd pick one of the alternatives unless there is resistance to them in the area you are visiting. The idea that you would take it *on the off-chance* it helped reduce the risk of an effectively unknown disease (as Covid was at that time) is honestly quite strange*, especially if you would then go on to, say, refuse a vaccine...

*My guess is that people advocating for HCQ to prevent Covid had never read the drug warning sheet for HCQ or they were advocating that *other people* would take it. Or maybe they were advised to by the voices on their phone (or their hearing dampers) [look ma - back on topic!]

I'm also vaccinated BTW - who wouldn't be, given the choice?
Yea, verily: Who is that, running on the steppes! It is Sax, clutching buzzsaw hand extensions! He howls homicidally:
"I'm seriously going to pound you into the fast lane!!!"

Oh, yeah, I wrote Ping some backstory once.

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S1arburst
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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by S1arburst » Thu May 26, 2022 9:38 am

tambo wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 1:49 am
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
Legally, I’ll grant you, the Bill of Rights may not cover what a private company does.
And that's the difference. You cannot conflate "government censorshop" and "private censorship" into one big bucket of "censorship."

There are at least three major differences:
That's what I was trying to explain. I was never attempting to address government censorship. It's a matter of philosophy.
tambo wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 1:49 am

Again, you are painting with far too broad a brush. Would you trust a "scientist" to teach you how to mix chemicals together? What if their expertise is in the science of biology? Or psychology? Or computer science?
I would trust a psychologist to tell me how to mix chemicals together if their instructions got me the results I was after, and the chemist's instructions consistently produced a mixture that blew up in my face. Perhaps a doctor of podiatry should not be developing new treatments for Covid, but I think a general practitioner who sees COVID patients, or an internal medicine doctor might have some good ideas. I don't think the difference between them and an epidemiologist are as great as between a chemist and a psychologist.
tambo wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 1:49 am
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
(2) Scientific disagreement sparks growth.
Scientific disagreement sparks growth. That's why medical journals conduct an extensive peer-review process before publishing thousands of articles per year.

Facebook and Twitter are not forums for "responsible scientific disagreement." Nothing about either medium is conducive to extended discussion. And the people spreading antivaxx theories on social media aren't interested in disagreement or discussion; they are there to push their viewpoint... The End.
Right, there's an extensive peer-review process for medical journals, so if it were an established disease, doctors suggesting new treatments be adopted just based on what they'd observed in their own practice would have been irresponsible. As it was, there were no careful large-scale studies to peer review at the beginning. The feds were shooting in the dark as much as anyone.
tambo wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 1:49 am

Oh? Because here's what the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control has to say about it [hydrochloroquine]:

The dangers of using hydroxychloroquine (HCQ)
  • High quality research data show the use of HCQ for treating COVID-19 can be dangerous and has no medical benefit. In fact, the FDA has revoked emergency use authorization for HCQ in COVID-19 patients based on these dangers and because it does not help people recover faster.
  • HCQ should not be taken for COVID-19 infection because it can cause serious heart rhythm abnormalities, severe liver inflammation, and kidney failure.
  • Taking HCQ on your own outside the hospital is dangerous.
That doesn't sound like "safe and helpful in the early stages of COVID" to me.
If you read the article (written by a veteran virologist) that I linked to after my statements on HCQ, he includes an analysis of mortality rates in countries that used HCQ in the early stages of COVID, stopped, and then started again. At the end, he also included some impressive results of clinical trials that have now been conducted.

The government agencies in the US are being pretty slow to adapt to new therapeutics for COVID. The Feds were also sounding the alarm against Florida introducing widespread use of monoclonal antibodies for COVID as unsafe, until it became blindingly obvious that it was a treatment that dramatically improved early outcomes.
tambo wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 1:49 am
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
All or most those countries that locked down must have had epidemiologists advising them. I haven’t had as much medical education as a doctor, only 4 years for a B.S. in nursing, but as soon as I read about how contagious Covid was, I knew that lockdowns weren’t going to work to stop the disease.
I'm not an epidemiologist. Neither are you. Neither one of us has any qualification to make these kinds of statements.
If you check below the phrase "it didn’t help against Covid," I included two links, to an analysis and an expert statement. I have the right to say I foresaw what later turned out to be true, and so have you.
tambo wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 1:49 am
S1arburst wrote:
Sun May 22, 2022 10:36 pm
…That’s not what I’d call a study.
I find it interesting that you can so lightly cast aside research by a recognized, respected public health organization with a 70-year track record in this field - but you grant so much credibility to the casual medical opinions on Facebook of Joe-Bob Smith, Doctor of Dermatology, that you want to force Facebook to carry them.

There is an apparent skew in your method of assigning credibility, and it's based on whether or not you agree with the content. That is not how science works. And that very skew is the heart of the misinformation problem we have today.
What I meant is, it's an analysis, not a study. It doesn't produce new data, it's analyzing data already in existence. Sorry, apparently I was expecting you to read my mind. A bad practice. The analysis may be fine as far as it goes, but it does not address what you said it addressed (misinformation effects). I'm quite impressed with Kaiser, and their philosophy of healthcare, although I haven't specifically been following their studies on COVID versus studies by other organizations.
mistersaxon wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 5:23 am
I'm talking from personal experience of HCQ and also from the drug fact-sheet - it does have a number of side effects and some are pretty serious, and some people will get those side effects - it definitely is not a drug you want to take unless you are at serious risk of exposure to malaria and even then you'd pick one of the alternatives unless there is resistance to them in the area you are visiting. The idea that you would take it *on the off-chance* it helped reduce the risk of an effectively unknown disease (as Covid was at that time) is honestly quite strange*, especially if you would then go on to, say, refuse a vaccine...
All drugs have side effects. HCQ has a lower rate of serious ones than many other drugs. Covid does have the potential to kill, especially among the elderly, so it was desirable to develop treatments (like vaccines). In this day and age, experimentation is still required to find what treatments work and what don't, although I hear that people are working on computer models to find out ahead of time how drugs will affect people. I certainly wouldn't recommend taking drugs on your own, but allowing doctors to prescribe them, yes, or as a patient saying, "Have you heard about this treatment another doctor is using? What do you think?"
mistersaxon wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 4:37 am

I think of Facebook et al as being like a megaphone - it's then obvious that you don't have a right to one unless you buy it yourself, and you certainly don't have a right to demand the use of someone else's if they have decided they don't want you to use it.
But it's not nice to let half the kids in town use it, but not the other half. It probably wouldn't matter as much if the degree of amplification was as much as speaking versus a toy megaphone, or if it were easier to buy your own megaphone.
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tambo
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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by tambo » Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm

S1arburst wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 9:38 am
I would trust a psychologist to tell me how to mix chemicals together if their instructions got me the results I was after, and the chemist's instructions consistently produced a mixture that blew up in my face.
The problem with a "try it and see" approach is that if your experimentation with a COVID homebrew treatment doesn't work, you don't get a mulligan. You're just dead.

This factor creates a serious confirmation-bias problem among the antivaxx crowd. A large number of conservative broadcasters spent a year preaching about using Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine instead of getting vaccinated - but then contracted COVID and died. They can't use the bully pulpit to correct the error because they're dead. Meanwhile, the conservative broadcasters who COVID hasn't killed keep spreading their message.
S1arburst wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 9:38 am
Perhaps a doctor of podiatry should not be developing new treatments for Covid, but I think a general practitioner who sees COVID patients, or an internal medicine doctor might have some good ideas.
Primary care doctors are in a terrible position to ascertain the effectiveness of vaccines because they only see sick people. They don't get calls from people who aren't sick. They cannot provide any informed speculation about the preventive effectiveness of vaccines.

Their experience likely biases their opinions in a way that is unscientific. If a primary care doctor sees 20 patients, and 10 of them were vaccinated, they're likely to conclude that vaccines don't work. But if 70% of the local population is vaccinated and 30% of the population isn't, then their limited, anecdotal experience has led them astray.

The same is true of hokey, unauthorized treatments like Ivermectin. If a primary care doctor prescribes Ivermectin to COVID patients and 90% of them recover, then that looks like a good solution. But if the recovery rate from untreated COVID is 90%, then Ivermectin did nothing to improve their survival.

Do you see the problem? Anecdotes from doctors in the field do not count as science. Science counts as science - the kind published in journals, with carefully drawn comparisons and statistical analysis.
S1arburst wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 9:38 am
Right, there's an extensive peer-review process for medical journals, so if it were an established disease, doctors suggesting new treatments be adopted just based on what they'd observed in their own practice would have been irresponsible. As it was, there were no careful large-scale studies to peer review at the beginning. The feds were shooting in the dark as much as anyone.
COVID wasn't a brand-new, wholly unstudied contagion, like an alien life form that arrived on an intergalactic meteor. COVID - better known as SARS-CoV-2 - belongs to a family of coronaviruses that has been studied since the 1960's, including SARS (2002-2003) and MERS (2012).

That doesn't mean that tests and therapies that were known to work on SARS or MERS would have been effective with COVID. It does mean that the CDC had a good head start on figuring out if what we knew about coronaviruses also applied to COVID. Some of it did (such as masks) and some of it didn't (such as the importance of handwashing).

My point is that it's not like doctors needed to rush into the fray with all sorts of recklessly formulated concoctions because the CDC was clueless. Rather, it means that the CDC issued the best guidance that we had - collectively - and doctors who followed the current protocol provided meaningful data for refinement or change.

Renegade doctors who just decided to try out their homebrew remedies were gambling with their patients' lives. And, again, the patients who died couldn't register their complaints because they were dead.
S1arburst wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 9:38 am
If you read the article (written by a veteran virologist) that I linked to after my statements on HCQ, he includes an analysis of mortality rates in countries that used HCQ in the early stages of COVID, stopped, and then started again. At the end, he also included some impressive results of clinical trials that have now been conducted.
And in response, this peer-reviewed study concludes (in part): "The number of lives saved by the spring-summer lockdowns and other COVID-19-mitigation was greater than the number of lives potentially lost due to the economic downturn."

Of course, lockdowns are an extremely complex question that isn't amenable to a single yes-or-no answer. For instance, many Asian countries relied on lockdowns in lieu of vaccination and are now suffering from breakthrough infections that wreak havoc on their unvaccinated populations. On the other hand, countries like Germany and the UK, which implemented both lockdowns and strong vaccination programs, aren't experiencing those results.

Given the complexity of the question and the high volume of research publications, it is impossible for lay people - like you and me - to synthesize the ongoing research into any informed opinion about these kinds of questions. At best, all we can do is latch onto the studies that fit our confirmation bias. At worst, dishonest conservative commentators deliberately cherry-pick their evidence to push a narrative and an agenda.

Here's a better idea: Let's assemble a body of experts with decades of experience in immunology to synthesize it for us and develop a public health policy.

Luckily, we already have such an organization. It's called the CDC. Do you see where I'm going with this?
S1arburst wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 9:38 am
If you check below the phrase "it didn’t help against Covid," I included two links, to an analysis and an expert statement. I have the right to say I foresaw what later turned out to be true, and so have you.
Tarot card readers and fortune tellers are also, sometimes, accurate in predicting the future. Their successes are the product of coincidence, not clairvoyance.

Predictions about complex questions are only valid if they have a strong scientific basis - i.e., expertise in epidemiology and public health. You already admitted that you don't have any such expertise, right? Neither do I, which is why neither you nor I should be speculating based on our anecdotal observations.
S1arburst wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 9:38 am
What I meant is, it's an analysis, not a study. It doesn't produce new data, it's analyzing data already in existence.
But that is a perfectly valid type of research - it's called research synthesis or a scientific literature review. It is not only appropriate for a topic like COVID public policy; it is absolutely essential for aggregating individual, focused research studies into a more comprehensive, big-picture view.

This type of study is precisely how a field like epidemiology works. Comprehensive, carefully-controlled studies of the population at large can take multiple years - which we couldn't afford! - so it is instead necessary to aggregate smaller-scale studies to extrapolate larger conclusions. The studies typically list all of their assumptions and limitations, but those acknowledgments make them more credible rather than less.

So, contrast that with the typical Facebook post: Dr. Joe-Bob Smith, Doctor of Dermatology, quotes provocative snippets from one or two cherry-picked articles and says, "PROOF! VACCINES DON'T WORK! TRUST ME, I'M A DOCTOR!"

The general masses of Facebook readers, most of whom don't have any post-high-school science background, were easily misled to follow that opinion. And many of them, as a result, died of COVID - instead of following the CDC's guidance, getting vaccinated, and living. Kaiser estimates the 234,000 unnecessary deaths from COVID for exactly these reasons.

In the U.S., drunk driving kills about 12,000 people per year. COVID misinformation killed nearly 20 times that number since vaccines became widely available a year ago. If you don't believe that that metric requires some kind of societal response, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.

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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by Crimsonsplat » Thu May 26, 2022 7:35 pm

An artist with an endless litany of excuses.
Moderators that do not perform their duties due to bias.
Useless, divisive threads that don't belong in a story discussion thread (see above), full of misinformation.

I'm done with Fred and I'm done with this forum. I'm treating it the same way I treated Twitface and Foolbook many years ago. Don't try to draw me into a pointless discussion -- I'm out of here and no, the door ain't hitting my ass on the way out.

Edit: FYI, my ID is a new one, but I've been here since way back on the old forums under the name Ubu Roi.

tambo
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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by tambo » Thu May 26, 2022 10:59 pm

Crimsonsplat wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 7:35 pm
Useless, divisive threads that don't belong in a story discussion thread (see above), full of misinformation.
1) It's not like this thread is interrupting meaningful conversation.

The last Megatokyo comic was on April 2nd. That was 54 days ago.

The last TTDP comic was on May 5th. That was 21 days ago. And it didn't generate a lot of discussion.

We're talking about this because there's nothing. else. to discuss.

2) I disagree that the conversation is divisive. On the contrary, I think that this is substantive and engaging.

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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by Invisigoth » Fri May 27, 2022 12:44 pm

Crimsonsplat wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 7:35 pm
An artist with an endless litany of excuses.
Moderators that do not perform their duties due to bias.
Useless, divisive threads that don't belong in a story discussion thread (see above), full of misinformation.

I'm done with Fred and I'm done with this forum. I'm treating it the same way I treated Twitface and Foolbook many years ago. Don't try to draw me into a pointless discussion -- I'm out of here and no, the door ain't hitting my ass on the way out.

Edit: FYI, my ID is a new one, but I've been here since way back on the old forums under the name Ubu Roi.
In the past there were moderators who would have gleefully entered this thread issues bans left and right for periods of time determined by some whim.

Notice I said whim because that's exactly what most all of it came down to.

So, a boring discussion? Don't read it

However if you or anyone else want to engage in petty personal attacks then just fuck around and find out

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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by S1arburst » Sat May 28, 2022 9:13 am

tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 10:59 pm
2) I disagree that the conversation is divisive. On the contrary, I think that this is substantive and engaging.
Why, thank you! :D

See, this is why I still check by the Megatokyo forums once in a while. Not only are the people who frequent these forums quite intelligent and are often good at debate, many even enjoy the discussion.

I learned most of my internet debate skills in the old Megatokyo forums, how to explain my viewpoints and back them up, first in Story Discussion, then in Central and the Political Discussion forum. I loved the wrangling, much of it good-natured or at least fairly polite and reasoned, and reading the conversations of others sparked my interest in current events and news.

I was aware that in addition to “teh rulz,” many people in Story Discussion didn’t enjoy current events discussions, even those who were skilled at spinning theories and debating them about the story. At the time I joined, there was little overlap between those who frequented Central and the Political Discussions forum, and the Story Discussion dwellers. I apologize to those whose toes I’m stepping on in this thread, but I’ve missed the old discussions. I’d be happy to take them to Central, but traffic is so low that no one would see posts there. There’s like one or two posts a year in Central, so the activity there is even deader than the near-dead activity level here. I don’t intend to take discussions off the tracks frequently though.

You’re correct, tambo, that Facebook is a poor forum for extended discussion. I spent years learning that. After participating in a number of lengthy discussion on current events in the Megatokyo forums, I made some posts on similar topics on Facebook, and invited my friends to discuss what they thought. The response varied from nothing to a discussion with only one or two people. At the time you could get at least half a dozen engaging on an interesting topic on the Megatokyo forums. Part of the reason I didn’t get much response on Facebook was doubtless because I had a small friends list, but I believe part of it was the general environment. So I gave up making my own posts on controversial topics and only responded to posts others made, assuming that signaled a willingness to discuss and encounter opposing viewpoints. While I enjoyed those discussions, I eventually realized others did not, and I was unfriended by quite a few people who I liked in real life. You are right that in general people only post on Facebook to push their viewpoint, not to invite discussion (well, you were referring to anti-vax people, but my observations are that it's a widespread attitude). So now I don’t check Facebook often, just to see family pictures sometimes, and generally don’t engage in anything else.

So again, I enjoyed the debates I used to participate in on the Megatokyo forums, and was grateful that people didn’t tend to take disagreement too personally.

(P.S., I'll probably get back to the previous discussion later)
Just call me prissywings

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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by mistersaxon » Sat May 28, 2022 5:36 pm

S1arburst wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 9:38 am
But it's not nice to let half the kids in town use it, but not the other half.
Depends very much on your definition of "nice" but "fairness" is an illusion, not a right. Is the situation legal? Yup. Is it Justifiable by the rules under which the megaphone is lent out? Yup. Just because it's a big megaphone doesn't make it a national resource, rightly or wrongly - though this does get much closer to the real heart of this argument I think. Twitter, FB, etc do represent a lot of power, concentrated in a few hands, with little oversight - and I doubt Musk will change that much for the better (depending on how you define "better" of course). Should they exist? Too late, though they are a predictable consequence of global connectivity I think. Should they be regulated? Also a fair bit too late (but not irretrievably so maybe).

Would they be better if users generally had to identify themselves or face a restriction on their degree of amplification (to prevent anonymous fake news generators working click farms that generate fake engagement which currently leads to amplification by the algorithms)? I kind of think this is how it is supposed to work already (?) but less anonymous users (and fewer of them) plus more accountability should be better for almost all users. How that would be managed is a different question, and not one being considered by the wider public as yet... Should content be fact-checked and filtered? Well "quis custodiet..." and all that and see Q2. It's a big subject and the internet (and the users of it) have a chunk of growing up to do. I can't see where it will go frankly but a number of young people I know are fully aware of the issues with privacy and so on and carefully grade what they share and how.
Yea, verily: Who is that, running on the steppes! It is Sax, clutching buzzsaw hand extensions! He howls homicidally:
"I'm seriously going to pound you into the fast lane!!!"

Oh, yeah, I wrote Ping some backstory once.

tambo
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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by tambo » Sat May 28, 2022 7:21 pm

S1arburst wrote:
Sat May 28, 2022 9:13 am
Why, thank you! :D
No problem. You've done an excellent job in keeping up the discussion. It's a big part of why I keep responding!
S1arburst wrote:
Sat May 28, 2022 9:13 am
I learned most of my internet debate skills in the old Megatokyo forums, how to explain my viewpoints and back them up, first in Story Discussion, then in Central and the Political Discussion forum.
Funny - my own interest in these in-depth discussions on a web forum for DVDs. The threaded nature of the discussion is really conducive to a point-by-point response.

I've also found good discussion on Reddit from time to time, but the signal-to-noise ratio is higher, given the larger user base.
S1arburst wrote:
Sat May 28, 2022 9:13 am
I’d be happy to take them to Central, but traffic is so low that no one would see posts there. There’s like one or two posts a year in Central, so the activity there is even deader than the near-dead activity level here.
Completely right. There has to be a critical mass of visitors - enough to keep the discussion flowing, but not enough to drown it in chitchat. I kinda think this thread is a "flash in the pan" that's unlikely to recur here, but I hope I'm incorrect.
S1arburst wrote:
Sat May 28, 2022 9:13 am
Part of the reason I didn’t get much response on Facebook was doubtless because I had a small friends list, but I believe part of it was the general environment.
It's impossible
to have detailed
discussion on a
social network
that renders
content as a
tiny column, as
if scrawled on
toilet paper.

(And I think that that's entirely by design, much the same as Twitter's character count. Social media actively discourages lengthy discussion and actively encourages trivial small talk.)

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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by Zandra » Sat May 28, 2022 11:42 pm

mistersaxon wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 5:23 am
Zandra wrote:
Wed May 25, 2022 2:04 pm

HCL has been a drug fro 50 plus years and has had no ill effects until now it seems(when properly perscribed). When big pharma,and the FDA are practically the same organization these days due to former FDA employees getting nice jobs from Big pharma you cannot just take them at their words.
I'm talking from personal experience of HCQ and also from the drug fact-sheet - it does have a number of side effects and some are pretty serious, and some people will get those side effects - it definitely is not a drug you want to take unless you are at serious risk of exposure to malaria and even then you'd pick one of the alternatives unless there is resistance to them in the area you are visiting. The idea that you would take it *on the off-chance* it helped reduce the risk of an effectively unknown disease (as Covid was at that time) is honestly quite strange*, especially if you would then go on to, say, refuse a vaccine...

*My guess is that people advocating for HCQ to prevent Covid had never read the drug warning sheet for HCQ or they were advocating that *other people* would take it. Or maybe they were advised to by the voices on their phone (or their hearing dampers) [look ma - back on topic!]

I'm also vaccinated BTW - who wouldn't be, given the choice?
I would had prefeered to not been vaxxed,because i had immunity afte rhaving it,but i had to get it or i was going to be cut off from foodstamps and doctors visits. Afterwards i seem to have more gout flares and weakness in my legs.

At to HCQ the japanese were using it and had alot of success. I ALSO SAID IT HAD TO BE PROPERLY PRESCRIBED,not taken willy nilly. Taking anything off label without a prescription is bad.
I WAS the Owner of Wolfboys 800th post but SOMEBODY had to go and get a new Forum lol!

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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by mistersaxon » Mon May 30, 2022 4:02 am

Zandra wrote:
Sat May 28, 2022 11:42 pm

I would had prefeered to not been vaxxed,because i had immunity afte rhaving it,but i had to get it or i was going to be cut off from foodstamps and doctors visits. Afterwards i seem to have more gout flares and weakness in my legs.
You're right. I mean, these are effects of vaccines generally if you have gout I understand - and one reason to avoid vaccines I guess if it is safe to do so (though mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna are not thought to have this side effect, according to one study I read) but also, significantly, these are symptoms of Covid itself - appearing as so-called "long Covid". https://www.the-rheumatologist.org/arti ... s-persist/
At to HCQ the japanese were using it and had alot of success. I ALSO SAID IT HAD TO BE PROPERLY PRESCRIBED,not taken willy nilly. Taking anything off label without a prescription is bad.
Again, not arguing with you - we are saying the same thing about prescribing it, doctor supervised, etc etc - but "willy-nilly" is what happened once Trump told people to do it - although some people also thought he was talking about taking chlorine so maybe some of his audience don't have the highest listening/reading comprehension?

If I was going to misunderstand him I'd hope he said "quinine" and just drink lots of gin & tonic :)
Yea, verily: Who is that, running on the steppes! It is Sax, clutching buzzsaw hand extensions! He howls homicidally:
"I'm seriously going to pound you into the fast lane!!!"

Oh, yeah, I wrote Ping some backstory once.

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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by S1arburst » Sun Jun 12, 2022 12:07 am

tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm
The problem with a "try it and see" approach is that if your experimentation with a COVID homebrew treatment doesn't work, you don't get a mulligan. You're just dead.

This factor creates a serious confirmation-bias problem among the antivaxx crowd. A large number of conservative broadcasters spent a year preaching about using Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine instead of getting vaccinated - but then contracted COVID and died. They can't use the bully pulpit to correct the error because they're dead. Meanwhile, the conservative broadcasters who COVID hasn't killed keep spreading their message
I really don’t see why vaccines and complementary therapeutics have to be one-or-the-other. Vaccinate people, and work on developing other therapeutics as well, so that if someone already vaccinated catches COVID anyway, you stand a greater chance of saving their life. Because vacated people can still catch COVID, especially with the new variants. Politicizing medicine is dumb, pardon my French.
(link talking about Covid deaths in vaccinated people) https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19 ... sing-in-us

If you don’t try developing treatments and just let COVID take its course, you have a chance of winding up dead as well. One thing about drugs like HCQ and Invermectin is that they’re not just witch-doctor brews. They’ve already been approved for certain diseases, so if taken appropriately, they are unlikely to kill you. Prescribing doctors have a greater grasp of pharmacology than perhaps you realize. Even when not dealing with new diseases, in the US a high percentage of prescriptions are given for what is known as off-label applications, uses for which the drug was not originally approved. From an article I just came across:

The process of repurposing existing drugs for new uses has been practiced informally by physicians for years. Doctors can prescribe any FDA-approved drug to a patient for any condition, even “off-label” for an illness the drug is not technically approved to treat. In fact, it’s estimated that up to nearly 40% of prescriptions written today are for off-label use. The practice is especially common in cancer treatment, because a chemotherapy drug approved for one type of cancer may actually target many different types of tumors. https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/giving-ol ... ave-lives/
tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm
Primary care doctors are in a terrible position to ascertain the effectiveness of vaccines because they only see sick people. They don't get calls from people who aren't sick. They cannot provide any informed speculation about the preventive effectiveness of vaccines.
Woah, dude. You keep on talking about vaccines, but what I’ve primarily been addressing in this discussion so far is complementary therapies to vaccines. I agree that primary care doctors in modern times aren’t equipped for developing and studying vaccines. What I was talking about was drugs and other therapies. Like HCQ. Or monoclonal antibodies. There’s a bunch of other treatments that have been worked out for COVID as it’s been studied more in the past two years too. And I’m not saying that if you’re going to use the other therapies you shouldn’t get vaccinated.
tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm
The same is true of hokey, unauthorized treatments like Ivermectin. If a primary care doctor prescribes Ivermectin to COVID patients and 90% of them recover, then that looks like a good solution. But if the recovery rate from untreated COVID is 90%, then Ivermectin did nothing to improve their survival.
True. Primary care doctors do need to work with researchers who have the time and experience to analyze the data. I read how monoclonal antibodies for COVID were developed. Clinical researchers ran a retrospective study on patients given plasma from people who had recovered from COVID, i.e. Some doctors decided to try it, and then afterwards researchers compared results with patients not given plasma. The researchers’ analysis indicated that when given early, patients given plasma seemed to do better than patients without plasma treatment. So they said, “hey, we might have something here,” and threw together a quick properly constructed double-blind study to see if the preliminary analysis held up. The FDA actually did issue emergency use authorizations for both HCQ and monoclonal antibodies for COVID treatment (later revoked for HCQ). So those drugs wound up being authorized, while not approved, since to get full approval from the FDA for a new drug typically takes about 10 years.
tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm
COVID wasn't a brand-new, wholly unstudied contagion, like an alien life form that arrived on an intergalactic meteor. COVID - better known as SARS-CoV-2 - belongs to a family of coronaviruses that has been studied since the 1960's, including SARS (2002-2003) and MERS (2012).

That doesn't mean that tests and therapies that were known to work on SARS or MERS would have been effective with COVID. It does mean that the CDC had a good head start on figuring out if what we knew about coronaviruses also applied to COVID. Some of it did (such as masks) and some of it didn't (such as the importance of handwashing).

My point is that it's not like doctors needed to rush into the fray with all sorts of recklessly formulated concoctions because the CDC was clueless. Rather, it means that the CDC issued the best guidance that we had - collectively - and doctors who followed the current protocol provided meaningful data for refinement or change.

Renegade doctors who just decided to try out their homebrew remedies were gambling with their patients' lives. And, again, the patients who died couldn't register their complaints because they were dead
Wouldn’t doctors in general be aware what virus family COVID was from, and hence also be aware of possibly effective treatments? For instance, that one drug we keep on harping on, HCQ was in widespread use in many countries early on in the pandemic, including China, Turkey, South Korea, India, Morocco, and Algeria. The doctors must have some reason to think it would be effective against COVID. Do you think that those who work at the CDC have a monopoly on epidemiological knowledge in the US?

I think maybe my objection to your idea of the CDC as the fount of all valid treatments is the thought that this is backwards. General practice doctors may not see enough patients to definitively say if their treatments are resulting in a better-than-average survival/hospitalization rate, but epidemiologists in their ivory tower of the CDC can’t test treatments at all. They see NO patients. In a rapidly developing situation, clinical doctors and researchers working together should develop and test treatments, possibly some of the researchers specializing in epidemiology. Then they should inform the CDC, which if it’s doing its job, should spread the word about promising treatments, not denigrate them.
tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm
And in response, this peer-reviewed study concludes (in part): "The number of lives saved by the spring-summer lockdowns and other COVID-19-mitigation was greater than the number of lives potentially lost due to the economic downturn."
The study my article was discussing was peer-reviewed too, but good job on linking to your actual study! I often have trouble finding those and get stuck with articles discussing the studies. Some differences: Your study was lumping all covid mitigating measures together, mandatory lockdowns plus voluntary things like handwashing, and comparing that with no change in behavior. Mine was comparing lockdowns to voluntary behavior modifications. Your study compared the effects of mitigating measures in the US to a hypothetical scenario in which no extra safety measures were taken by anyone. My study was compared actual differences in mortality from COVID between countries that did not lock down (Sweden and South Korea) to countries that did. Sweden and South Korea still issued recommendations about things like handwashing and social distancing, and the voluntary measures made enough of a difference that countries with locked down populations didn’t show a clear gain in lives saved. People aren’t stupid. If you have a pandemic going on, and you’re sick, you won’t be going to see Grandma.

The other thing to consider, of course, besides potential lives saved from COVID, is all the other harm lockdowns can do. Your study attempted to account for the harm of economic slowdown, which is great. Other things that need to be considered are things like deaths from not going to regular checkups and getting things like cancer in the early stages missed. Then there’s mental health problems. According to the CDC, 44% of teens felt sad or hopeless during lockdowns in the US, and close to 20% considered suicide. In another data point that shows how deeply lockdowns affected us, deaths related to alcohol in the US increased 25% in 2020 for those under 65. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/f ... le/2790491. A lot of the mental health problems in teens and children can be traced to school shutdowns. Besides the effects on their emotional state, remote learning was much less effective for kids than in person instruction. Standardized testing showed large drops in pass rates. https://www.newsweek.com/americas-child ... n-1669588
tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm
Of course, lockdowns are an extremely complex question that isn't amenable to a single yes-or-no answer. For instance, many Asian countries relied on lockdowns in lieu of vaccination and are now suffering from breakthrough infections that wreak havoc on their unvaccinated populations. On the other hand, countries like Germany and the UK, which implemented both lockdowns and strong vaccination programs, aren't experiencing those results.

Given the complexity of the question and the high volume of research publications, it is impossible for lay people - like you and me - to synthesize the ongoing research into any informed opinion about these kinds of questions. At best, all we can do is latch onto the studies that fit our confirmation bias. At worst, dishonest conservative commentators deliberately cherry-pick their evidence to push a narrative and an agenda.

Here's a better idea: Let's assemble a body of experts with decades of experience in immunology to synthesize it for us and develop a public health policy.

Luckily, we already have such an organization. It's called the CDC. Do you see where I'm going with this?
I’m currently still convinced that the CDC totally mishandled the COVID response, so that’s a no-go for me. I think I, and you, are capable enough to form some kind of informed opinion from research. A definitive opinion? No. a moderately informed opinion? Sure. You’re correct that just wandering around reading random research articles would be unlikely to turn up enough helpful information for a good analysis though. Expert opinion is valuable. I think news sources and social media can be good avenues to find experts stating those opinions. If a news source fits with your bias, it does mean you’re more likely to run into studies confirming it, but I like to think that the studies pointed to aren’t made up of whole cloth, and the experts sourced are at least half in earnest. So chose an expert you trust, and if that’s the CDC for you, cheers. I feel insulted that Facebook and Twitter take it on themselves to decide what experts people are allowed to hear from though. I do believe you should try and test any expert source from time to time. Sweeping lockdowns were a drastic, novel measure. If research can’t provide a definitive answer that they saved lives, that they were necessary? That’s… really bad.
tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm
At worst, dishonest conservative commentators deliberately cherry-pick their evidence to push a narrative and an agenda.
Do you think conservative commentators are the only side capable of pushing a narrative?
tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm
Predictions about complex questions are only valid if they have a strong scientific basis - i.e., expertise in epidemiology and public health. You already admitted that you don't have any such expertise, right? Neither do I, which is why neither you nor I should be speculating based on our anecdotal observations.
It was pretty much just common sense, and a fairly simple question. Can lockdowns eradicate COVID, or not? Early data on COVID already showed that it was shockingly contagious and fast-spreading, even before the US started lockdowns. Not data that I analyzed myself, not being an expert, but I read multiple articles presenting expert opinion stating that. If you’re going to eradicate a disease by lockdowns, you need to be able to essentially stop transmission, at least to the level where the number of people recovering in a given time frame outnumber the number of new infected people. My conclusion was, with a hyper-contagious disease to consider, it couldn’t be done. Not the way the US did it, still allowing people to go to the grocery stores and pharmacies and have contact with one another there.
tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm
But that is a perfectly valid type of research - it's called research synthesis or a scientific literature review. It is not only appropriate for a topic like COVID public policy; it is absolutely essential for aggregating individual, focused research studies into a more comprehensive, big-picture view.
I guess maybe the Kaiser analysis did synthesize the KFF tracker and CDC COVID mortality data, and several CDC studies on vaccine effectiveness to get different effectiveness rates for different times, depending on which COVID strains were predominant. In retrospect, I was probably being overly pedantic by calling it an analysis rather than a study.
tambo wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 6:02 pm
The general masses of Facebook readers, most of whom don't have any post-high-school science background, were easily misled to follow that opinion [Dr. Joe-Bob Smith saying vaccines don’t work]. And many of them, as a result, died of COVID - instead of following the CDC's guidance, getting vaccinated, and living. Kaiser estimates the 234,000 unnecessary deaths from COVID for exactly these reasons.

In the U.S., drunk driving kills about 12,000 people per year. COVID misinformation killed nearly 20 times that number since vaccines became widely available a year ago. If you don't believe that that metric requires some kind of societal response, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
I’m still interested in any data you may have quantifying how many unvaccinated people are unvaccinated because of misinformation. As I stated before, Kaiser’s analysis estimated how many people died because they were unvaccinated. Misinformation is simply not part of the study. You seem to be making the assumption that all unvaccinated are unvaccinated because of misinformation. Demonstrate the metric.
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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by mistersaxon » Sun Jun 12, 2022 7:47 am

I’m currently still convinced that the CDC totally mishandled the COVID response, so that’s a no-go for me. I think I, and you, are capable enough to form some kind of informed opinion from research. A definitive opinion? No. a moderately informed opinion? Sure.
Based on what? Common sense really won't get you far in a novel situation like this, if dismissing the expert body who study, model and design scenarios for these situations for a living counts as "common sense". It might be Dunning-Kreuger, confirmation bias or just plain old bias...

Lockdowns were "proven" effective historically - the 1918 Flu pandemic, for example, saw more deaths after the lockdown was lifted than during the whole lockdown period* - so that made them the weapon of first resort for a pandemic but the mental aspects were never considered in that historical context. It was hard - and if you lived in a flat, in a high-rise with no garden or access to public spaces, or even sufficient private spaces, if your relationship was abusive and you needed regular space just to survive it, if, if, if... then it was exponentially harder. But was even that enough of a reason not to lock down the wider population for "the greater good"? I mean, for a doctor, whose first instruction is "do no harm" then it's an almost impossible call - luckily it was decided by politicians with their own personal biases and agendas. Frankly I was astonished that there was a lockdown in the UK - it went against almost everything the Tory party believe in.

(*allegedly - might just have been new variant of course: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpoli ... -1918-flu/ )
Yea, verily: Who is that, running on the steppes! It is Sax, clutching buzzsaw hand extensions! He howls homicidally:
"I'm seriously going to pound you into the fast lane!!!"

Oh, yeah, I wrote Ping some backstory once.

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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by S1arburst » Sun Jun 12, 2022 1:31 pm

mistersaxon wrote:
Sat May 28, 2022 5:36 pm
Depends very much on your definition of "nice" but "fairness" is an illusion, not a right. Is the situation legal? Yup. Is it Justifiable by the rules under which the megaphone is lent out? Yup. Just because it's a big megaphone doesn't make it a national resource, rightly or wrongly - though this does get much closer to the real heart of this argument I think. Twitter, FB, etc do represent a lot of power, concentrated in a few hands, with little oversight - and I doubt Musk will change that much for the better (depending on how you define "better" of course). Should they exist? Too late, though they are a predictable consequence of global connectivity I think. Should they be regulated? Also a fair bit too late (but not irretrievably so maybe).

Would they be better if users generally had to identify themselves or face a restriction on their degree of amplification (to prevent anonymous fake news generators working click farms that generate fake engagement which currently leads to amplification by the algorithms)? I kind of think this is how it is supposed to work already (?) but less anonymous users (and fewer of them) plus more accountability should be better for almost all users. How that would be managed is a different question, and not one being considered by the wider public as yet... Should content be fact-checked and filtered? Well "quis custodiet..." and all that and see Q2. It's a big subject and the internet (and the users of it) have a chunk of growing up to do. I can't see where it will go frankly but a number of young people I know are fully aware of the issues with privacy and so on and carefully grade what they share and how.
I think social media is very bad for people. It's an addictive thing that hurts development of relationships in the real world, and it's divisive. As a number of users here have mentioned, rage gets a lot of clicks. That being said, it’s become an import avenue of communication, and unequal access hurts with spreading messages in today’s world.

FB doesn’t allow anonymity. Using real names doesn’t seem to help much. On these forums, people manage to be pretty cordial even when using made-up handles.

I think content should be somewhat filtered, like I don’t think a lot of people would want adult content showing up on their news feed if they weren’t looking for it. Fact checking isn’t much help, in my experience. Better to evaluate someone’s statements yourself, doing a bit of research if you feel you need to.

One thing I’m very interested in is Musk’s plan to get more paying users with premium features. For a while I was a member of an alternative right-wing social media site behind a paywall. On any given topic you could get strong disagreement between members, but the disagreement was generally very respectful. After seeing how nasty people could be to strangers on Facebook, I was shocked. Part of the positive interaction environment could have stemmed from a greater degree of shared values, but I think part of it had to do with the fact that people were paying to be there. If you pay for something, you’re more likely to value and take care of it. I think the paywall also helped to cut down on the bots, though not eliminate them, of course.
mistersaxon wrote:
Sun Jun 12, 2022 7:47 am
Based on what? Common sense really won't get you far in a novel situation like this, if dismissing the expert body who study, model and design scenarios for these situations for a living counts as "common sense". It might be Dunning-Kreuger, confirmation bias or just plain old bias...

Lockdowns were "proven" effective historically - the 1918 Flu pandemic, for example, saw more deaths after the lockdown was lifted than during the whole lockdown period* - so that made them the weapon of first resort for a pandemic but the mental aspects were never considered in that historical context. It was hard - and if you lived in a flat, in a high-rise with no garden or access to public spaces, or even sufficient private spaces, if your relationship was abusive and you needed regular space just to survive it, if, if, if... then it was exponentially harder. But was even that enough of a reason not to lock down the wider population for "the greater good"? I mean, for a doctor, whose first instruction is "do no harm" then it's an almost impossible call - luckily it was decided by politicians with their own personal biases and agendas. Frankly I was astonished that there was a lockdown in the UK - it went against almost everything the Tory party believe in.

(*allegedly - might just have been new variant of course: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpoli ... -1918-flu/ )
Do you have some good articles or books that speak about lockdowns in the 1918 flu? You're the second person I've had a discussion with who has mentioned that lockdowns were also used then, but I haven't been able to verify that yet. The article you linked to speaks about a second wave, but doesn't seem to address lockdowns. If what you say is correct, that many more deaths occurred after lockdowns ceased, that's what you'd expect from a failed lockdown. Lockdowns will slow transmission, but if the disease isn't eliminated, when lockdowns end, infection will skyrocket again, and no lives will ultimately be saved. A society can't stay on lockdown forever. People need to eat. There was one country, Australia, I believe, that kept easing lockdowns and then re-instituting them again when infection rates picked up again. Futile. I remember listening to one public health official talking about the contagiousness of COVID early on. She said. "Everyone is going catch this. I'm just waiting for when I get infected." That gave me a sinking sensation, I can tell you.

One article I did read spoke about an interesting difference between the 1918 Spanish Flu and COVID. During COVID, we were subjected to daily news about the disease fatalities, possible treatments, etc. In the US, during the 1918 pandemic, there was practically nothing about it in the news. The government didn't want the Axis powers to know of any weakness in the Allies, especially since the Spanish flu was targeting young, healthy men (soldiers). So people in the towns died, and often didn't know it was anything more than yet another local epidemic in the age before widespread vaccines.

The reasons that I'm not thrilled with the CDC that I'm discussing with tambo are lockdowns in general, and attempting to discourage new treatments (although I'm not sure how much the warnings about new treatments came from the CDC, and how much from the federal Coronavirus task force.). However, another problem is that some epidemiologists and healthcare policy experts actually consider the feds to be the greatest source of disinformation. https://justthenews.com/government/fede ... olars-tell One thing they mentioned in an article about the problem is that they counted deaths with covid as the same as deaths from COVID. Shoddy data gathering. Then they issued misleading information on how well masks and vaccines stopped virus transmission. In addition, the CDC ignored natural immunity, as well as ordered school closures despite that the fact children are practically unaffected from the virus. All of these things have been issues that have highly frustrated me as well. There's more, but any group that sets itself up as experts has to earn its trust from me. When 2020 started, I was ambivalent about the CDC, but as the COVID experience progressed, I lost more and more faith in it.
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Re: [TTDP] That's what I did

Post by Invisigoth » Sun Jun 12, 2022 7:18 pm

I've re-read this one and think it's run its course so locking it now. Things are starting to go circular and that's a bad thing

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