Leaderboard

I agree with you that this has been mishandled and politicized from the start. But also... the Democrats' shitty interpretation of the data shouldn't cause individuals to abandon data-based decision making in response. There are good data on the efficacy and safety of these vaccines from all over the world and none of it has anything to do with the lab leak, what the teachers unions are up to, or what fauci says on a daily basis. An educated person should be able to distinguish between those two things and still make a solid data-based health decision. Don't trust the CDC? Perfect, because there's 100+ other countries whose health departments have reams of encouraging data on vaccines too. But instead, we have close to 50% of the country refusing the vaccine. I don't think it's because they carefully considered all the data and made a finely calibrated personal health decision. It's because they're wrapped up in the covid narrative battle and they believe the Democrats/CDC/fauci are lying to them and trying to use covid to control them. Which, again is completely true. It just shouldn't be a factor in an individual personal health decision.

Good point. The “trust the data” position was undermined early in the pandemic. The same scientists who I’d normally trust were telling me Trump political rallies were super spreader events but then signing letters saying BLM riots were ok. Data indicates kids not statistically significant spreaders but we have to cancel schools when the teachers union edits the CDC talking points. “This definitely developed naturally” turned into a total hoax as the scientists were discovered to be behind an attempt to hide the origin in a lab in China they were donating to. These aren’t conspiracy theories, all of these events above happened. When data originates from people caught lying, their additional data is suspect. This is why Fauci’s “noble lie” approach is so damaging. We are the most advanced and scientifically minded society to have ever existed. That we’re back to telling each other anecdotes is not a sign we’re idiots, but rather the scientists should have stayed in their lane of science.

Of 20/51 worst states (& DC), Trump won 17. The 3 he lost (Nevada, Arizona, & Georgia) had a combined margin of 2.9%. This is odd to me as the vaccines were developed mostly under his administration. https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/president/

It’s not about throwing out data, it’s about not knowing the data even existed. The survivors are the ones selected for UPT. The tons of unknown data are all the ones that never went to UPT, ie the majority of the population. Granted it’s hard to find out how someone that never went to UPT would do against those who did.

It's fascinating to me that after a year and a half of this people are still bringing up anecdotal evidence in the face of the literal sea of data from around the globe on this virus and the vaccines. Maybe anecdotes carry more emotional weight which cause them to resonate with people more than hard data. I'm gradually coming to the depressing realization that a lot of people simply don't care about the data, don't understand it, or are so jaded by politics they think it's all manipulated.

My case was 5 days of getting my ass kicked completely. After that it was fine. I’m a healthy person with no real health problems and a physique that I would describe as “godlike”. Medical science would probably describe me as balding mid-30’s dude that could lose 15 lbs. I don’t know about the other people, the antecdote just stood out to me. I don’t really care to join in on either side of this but I do find it interesting the number of vaccinated folks getting sick. If I hadn’t been vaccinated, I guess I would’ve died since I was sick for so long.

Shack. More people die every day from random accidents (e.g. falling off a ladder) than Covid. Heart disease kills 6x more people daily than Covid. So why is our policy “zero cases!”-driven for something that’s not even in the top 5? Why do we continually move the goalposts on Covid, yet don’t do shit public-policy wise for heart disease prevention/cure, cancer prevention/cure, etc. Covid is a thing and kills people, got it…but the data does not remotely support the totalitarian reaction from the gov/some portions of society, expressed or implied. Get your shot, or don’t…do what’s best for you and the people you regularly interact with, then STFU about your opinion of what someone else’s personal decision should be.

Completely agree. I'm sure the vast majority of Democrats made the decision to get the shot with little to no knowledge or consideration of the underlying data. They're just doing the thing that's in vogue for their side as well. I attribute the vaccination rate differences to two things: 1) people are driven by narratives and they want to join a team so they can hate on the other team 2) the average American has a terrifyingly poor grasp of math and statistics. Neither of these are a good basis for personal health decision making

My opinion (not stating as fact) is there are more people in certain regions who are more willing to think on things, dig into the information, are skeptical, etc. than others. To talk out of the other side of my mouth for a moment, I am surrounded by people who made a decision based on what a political figure told them to do on TV, without any question or thought…pure 100% faith in the idea that the politician would never steer them wrong and surely has their personal best interest in mind 100% of the time. Other people are not willing to do that, and will ask questions/expect a certain level of credible/backed up answers before accepting something. Not saying either is wrong/wright, but those are both the simplified versions of the COAs I’ve seen a lot of people execute. Skepticism and asking questions is not a bad thing, thought many like to try and paint them as such.

Doesn't matter. We aren't talking about MMR, polio or small pox. We are talking about COVID. I mean, small pox is far more infectious that COVID and had a 30% mortality rate. I sure as hell more likely to take chances on a new small pox drug than I am COVID because the risk now seems a lot more necessary. Point being none of your case examples or really relevant to the conversation. We have to evaluate each crises individually with their own nuances. A major nuance of COVID is the vast majority of people in society aren't at risk to lose anything more than a week of work from it. Now you have to convince them that getting a vaccine that likely won't do much for them is necessary for them.

Survivorship bias doesn't have anything to do with the criteria being used in an evaluation - it has to do with the "subset" of data points included in the analysis. See the small section about "missing bullet holes" in the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias. It's an interesting and counter-intuitive discussion about how our intuition works and how easily our "reasoning" can be led astray by invisible and incorrect assumptions. In that situation, the mistake the military made was to only look at bombers that returned from combat - not bombers that didn't make it back (i.e. the ones that were shot down). That led them to draw wildly wrong conclusions about where to armor up the bomber fleet. By way of analogy, this study includes UPT graduates (bombers that "make it back") and UPT washouts (bombers that "don't make it back") - it doesn't include intel school washouts and/or AFIT graduates because that isn't going to tell you anything about graduating from UPT. It didn't make sense to include data where P-38s were or weren't getting shot up because it was a study focused on bombers. It's not survivorship bias, you're advocating for using more dimensions of data - which is fine. A few things. First, any prediction that is going to be made, will by definition, be "backwards looking" since there's no such thing as future data. And while there definitely may potentially be better predictor variables out there, the difficulty will be to capture them in a consistent and reliable way across a large population which is distributed across multiple communities and multiple time spans - not an easy challenge. Maybe if we could somehow capture those students who used to "bullseye womprats back on Tatooine" we could enhance our process...it's challenging to get to that level of fidelity though. Already, the fact that > 85% of UPT candidates make it through provides a high level of confidence that UPT selection criteria are pretty good - squeezing out the last few percent becomes increasingly hard in any endeavor. Any average high school varsity basketball player is in the top 1% of all basketball players on earth. Though we all know there is an enormous difference between that kid and Michael Jordan... And finally, this is not like saying women can't be pilots. No scientific researcher looking at that data and looking at how people were selected for pilot training back in the 80s would ever draw that conclusion. I get your point about the insight gained being limited by the data, but then so is everything else because we don't have perfect measurement for anything. In any case, all the data used in this study included women. Correct. Though I would say the model "includes" the unsuccessful events in order to learn from them. Not emphasizes. So is your suggestion to include people not selected for UPT and then measure how the do in UPT? Or is it to just lump random people into the study who didn't go? I'd pay to see the first executed. If you're suggesting the second, then I think all that study will conclude is that being selected for UPT is the most important data point in determining who graduates from UPT - not exactly a ground-breaking research. The point is that a study like this is not the same as a vaccine trial. You are already selecting from a group that self-selected and there is nothing you can do as the researcher to affect the outcome you want to examine (UPT graduation) from a group of people that doesn't want to be military pilots.

Exactly. One of the dangers of a backwards looking prediction is that the data is biased because selection criteria were applied already. Because there is selection criteria, other potentially causal factors or better predictor variables may have been excluded. So the best this methodology can do is say the selection criteria is adequate, but not enough information exists to say it's the best selection criteria. It's like saying back in the 80s that women can't be pilots because all the successful pilots in the past were men. Technically true and backed by data, but the data was biased because of the selection criteria used in the past. The other issue is this study used graduation from UPT as the success criteria, which may or may not be the real measure of success we want. FTU graduation might be a better success criteria (as it also evaluates if the right assignment to airframe was given)

Hong Kong is a completely different proposition than Taiwan. Much smaller, attached to the mainland, and without any military capability at all. The territory was willingly signed over to the PRC in 1997. Taiwan is a part of mainland China only in the loosest sense and is willing to and capable of fiercely defending their democracy. If you fly into Shenzhen and then into Taipei, you will be amazed by the difference in professionalism, efficiency, and general attitude between the two. Taiwan is lightyears ahead of the PRC in pretty much every category other than sheer population size. Could Beijing turn that numerical superiority into a victory in the Taiwan Strait? Probably, but Taipei would make that victory very difficult and very, very costly. Xi’s ego may eventually get the better of him but if he looks at the issue dispassionately, I don’t think a Taiwan invasion makes any sense at all.

Yeah but I think his point was survivorship bias. You are only deciding the best criteria for selecting students based on the criteria currently used to select students.

F all that… “Yeah guys perform air strikes for a foreign military with no competent representation on the ground to actually dictate the targeting cycle or call in/off air appropriate to the scenarios… Sure everything will be fine.” Do we get to just pick our own targets now? Or do we get to use the “dude had a 3rd grade education and barely spoke English, how was I supposed to know that was a school I was shooting” at a future war crimes investigation? We crushed people’s souls for doing the right thing and having stuff go bad when it was Top tier guys calling it in. No way should bubbas be flying strike lines for them without some seriously predetermined immunity for this. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Degree type vs major further down...so people with a masters likely do better than people with a bachelor's.

I didn't say they were false. Your personal experiences aren't a good way to make policy. It's like me mandating that the speed limit on the highway is 35 MPH because I know someone who got killed in a car accident doing 65 MPH. We have reams of data that show what safe speed limits for highways are...my anecdote doesn't invalidate those reams of data. Similarly, we have a dataset of over a billion people vaccinated, with a very low rate of breakthrough infections and side effects. Someone telling me their buddy had side effects doesn't undo the millions of people who didn't. Someone telling me they know a few people who got Covid after getting vaccinated doesn't undo the huge drops in cases where vaccination rates are high. Here's my data. https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-941fcf43d9731c76c16e7354f5d5e187 https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/06/14/covid-cases-vaccination-rates/ Love to see the data set on 40% of hospitalizations in the UK being vaccinated.

UK reporting 40% of COVID hospitalizations are from double vaccinated. Maybe we can at least agree that more is going on than headlines reveal, and more data with less censorship will help the public be informed. ”your actual experience means nothing because I have government figures indicating otherwise” has proven to be an unconvincing tactic. But I see you will continue using it regardless.

I’d rather use that then some of the things the uncreative types come up with. Unsolicited advice, but if you want to make an acronym for a callsign, don’t make up something that looks like an unpronounceable fix on an approach plate.

Blue Texas is like fusion power plants. Fourty years away, and probably always will be. Trump was extremely strong in the Rio Grande valley,he far exceeded the predictions of the Smart Ones. Now that Biden has thrown the border into chaos all the democrat elected officals are begging his handlers to do, something, anything, to show that they give a shit about the people who live and work down there. Harris donated a comic book. This week there was a Congressional runoff for a vacant seat near Fort Worth. There were eleven candidates. Two Republicans won and will face each in the election. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-backed-candidate-heads-runoff-texas-special-congressional-election-2021-05-02/

https://pfluger.house.gov August Pfluger. TX 11th Congressional District.

Ahh, good. The "Whatabout-ism" phase of the discussion.

https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1420047411838390272?s=20🙄

How much liability exists for flu, MMR, polio, and smallpox vaccines?