IronGoober
Interfector Viris Spurii
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...and now, No. 1, the larch...
Posts: 1700
California
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From my perspective, manipulation to a degree that was nefarious was not present. More that manipulation that is present in most information that is shared with the public was present. Yes, experts didn't expect the vaccine to be 100% effective, and they knew its effectiveness would wane with time. But as an extreme example, one doesn't write an abstract to a scientific paper with all of the caveats of one's discovery. "We discovered this new method to improve X (caveat: it doesn't work in when its raining outside, and since it is for areas of the South eastern US, this makes it useful only in certain cases). One would just write about the usefulness of the new method to advertise it. Why would you try and tell people about all of the problems with the vaccine when it wouldn't have changed any of the facts that it would decrease in effectiveness? There was the hope that it would turn the pandemic around, sharing the bad news wouldn't likely have affected most people's decision to take it. Again, from my perspective any lack of information wasn't manipulation beyond what occurs in any other forms of public information such as news, advertisements, etc.
Ok, I understand. On that note, a problem with talking about "Truth" in science, is that science itself is an just an interpretation of data. There is no "Truth" there is just what we haven't proven to be false. Theories cannot be proven, only shown that they are not false. That is a fundamental problem with science. You have to have some level of trust of the "experts". Even when you are learning something new, you have to trust that what you are being taught is actually true and that someone before you figured out what is true (or at least that it hasn't been proven false). You can test it yourself, but there is just too much in the universe to test if you ever want to make progress. It seems that it is very easy to go down that rabbit hole deeply (i.e. of distrust) if trust in experts is lost (take the flat earth theory for example).
The fatality probability I was using is just deaths/known cases. Known cases vs real cases is underestimated, so yes, the actual death rate is lower, but I'm dubious that it's 5x lower.
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