DPiepgrass

• DPiepgrass 23 Jul 2021 22:18 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: mukashi’s comment on: Covid 7/​8: Delta Takes Over

  I don’t see how policies that are barely adequate...can result in an excellent outcome

  Because spread is exponential? “barely adequate” sounds slightly exaggerated to me, but if a country acts early and quickly, quarantining every case, they can mess up in other ways (so that R0 is well above 1) but still not have any Covid cases. I figured this was how Covid was controlled in Australia, NZ and SK (I still don’t get what happened in Japan tho).

• DPiepgrass 23 Jul 2021 22:03 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Covid 7/​8: Delta Takes Over

  I wonder what the correct labels would have been. Was “Joe Biden inaugurated” supposed to be the local minimum?

• DPiepgrass 23 Jul 2021 17:34 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Matt Grieser’s comment on: In­ten­tion­ally Mak­ing Close Friends

  Interesting. I’m pretty sure that for me, with the right person, I’d have a strong friendship after a few hours or days. I wonder if I ought to do something differently to meet others’ seeming desire for slow-cooking friendship.

• DPiepgrass 23 Jul 2021 17:28 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Different’s comment on: In­ten­tion­ally Mak­ing Close Friends

  Mainly because it is meaningful and important to me, and fun to share with others (it also reflects my love of freedom, which I forgot to mention). I was extremely ashamed of my body in my early life, but nudism was how I accepted the weirdness of being human and tamed my sexuality, and it turns out that I also really enjoy it. I’ve often felt that I was born on the wrong planet — but one look at me and you can see, I’m the most human darned alien you ever saw.

• DPiepgrass 23 Jul 2021 15:00 UTC

  3 points

  on: In­ten­tion­ally Mak­ing Close Friends

  Before seeing this I was just thinking about why I didn’t have any close friends of the sort I wanted, and I figured the reason is that I need someone who is mostly like me, and such people are extraordinarily rare — one in a million, I guessed. No typical mind fallacy for me! I know I’m different, but I don’t know what to do with this information: the differences in other people are mysterious and so non-actionable.

  Maybe I’m only 1-in-10,000 or so, but regardless, I can’t figure out how to find the others. I already frequent sites filled with vaguely similar people (LW, EA forums, ACX) but by design, these sites don’t bring the closeness and intimacy I want. Plus, I live in Calgary — I know the Bay Area and NY will have more me-like people, but I failed last time I tried to get a job in the Bay.

  Anyway, I may as well put down what I’m looking for:

  • Close friendship, preferably sharing a house

  • Rationalist-appeciating epistemology; a love of accuracy and precision to the extent it is useful or important (but not excessively pedantic)

  • Geeky, curious, and interested in improving the world

  • Liberal/​humanist values, such as a dislike of extreme inequality based on minor or irrelevant differences in starting points, and a like for ideas that may lead to solving such problems. (OTOH, minor inequalities are certainly necessary and acceptable, and a high floor is clearly better than a low ceiling: an “equality” in which all are impoverished would be very bad)

  • Utilitarian/​consequentialist-leaning; preferably negative utilitarian

  • High openness to experience: tolerance of ambiguity, low dogmatism, unconventionality, and again, intellectual curiosity

  • I’m a nudist and would like someone who can participate at least sometimes

  • Agnostic, atheist, or at least feeling doubts

• DPiepgrass 21 Jul 2021 16:45 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Marve Flexnes’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  [Citation needed]

• DPiepgrass 21 Jul 2021 14:53 UTC

  1 point

  on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  The claim that the concentration of LNP (lipid nanoparticles) is highest in the ovaries after 48 hours appears to be not only false, but a “pants on fire” kind of lie: the linked source shows the concentration as being 259 times higher at the injection site, and 170 times higher in the liver.

  The chart showing the concentration as being highest in the ovaries simply leaves out the data for the injection site, for the liver, and for the spleen (which has over 10x higher concentration than the ovaries).

  Edit: I had been investigating the claim about ovaries on Austin G. Walters’ blog, which is the first thing Steve Kirsch links to his own post. It claims “after a 48 hour period, the Pfizer mRNA vaccine will have the highest concentration in the ovaries and bone marrow”. However, although Steve himself shows the same chart as Austin, and the same chart was also featured in the Bret W /​ Steve K video, Steve’s blog post shows another chart that includes Liver and Spleen (but still excludes injection site!) Oddly, this chart shows only 2x concentration in liver and spleen after 48 hours (rather than 170x). Note that in both cases the data is from rats.

  So, why the difference? Well it turns out that both numbers are correct, and I used incorrect wording above. While the amount of LNPs is 259x higher at the injection site, 170x higher in the liver, and 10x higher in the spleen, the concentration of particles is only 13x higher at the injection site and 2x higher in the liver and spleen. The liver is way bigger than the ovaries, so a 2x higher concentration translates to a 170x higher total amount of LNPs.

  Something else that I noticed is that Austin’s and Steve’s posts each link to the other, each one giving readers the impression that the link to the other is evidence for a claim. Which is… pretty weird.

  What links here?

  • Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions? by DPiepgrass (13 Jun 2021 3:08 UTC; 42 points)

• DPiepgrass 19 Jul 2021 20:41 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  mRNA vaccines use lipid nanocoating. That same technology is used in other context to get drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier.

  I’m no biologist, but I know all kinds of things have lipid membranes (including bacteria), so I doubt that simply being lipid-covered is all you need to cross the barrier.

  I haven’t read about the J&J vaccine side-effects specifically

  Well, it’s important to Kirsch’s position. After all, J&J has 568 deaths attributed to it according to OpenVAERS even though J&J is not mRNA-based (curiously, OpenVAERS is now reporting dramatically higher death numbers for Pfizer over Moderna, whereas they were ~equal one month ago).

  I calculated that according to the latest numbers, 3.9% of vaccines injected were J&J vaccines (which is 8% of people “fully vaccinated” since you only get one dose of J&J).

  Now, if my thesis is correct that the VAERS deaths are ordinary deaths that would have happened anyway, then approximately 3.9% of the deaths should be attributed to J&J. In fact, OpenVAERS (updated July 9) assigns 5.2% of deaths to J&J. Does this mean that actually there is a greater chance of death associated with non-mRNA vaccine shots? (well, the numbers are probably 2-3 weeks out of sync with each other, as the VAERS data lags behind. Perhaps this could account for the difference. Historical data is available, but not in an easy-to-read form. So I used the Wayback Machine instead, and found that … er, 3.8% of vaccine shots had been J&J on July 1. No significant difference.)

  The same sort of hypothesis can be applied to non-death VAERS reports, of course, but I leave that analysis for someone else who cares enough to do it.

  Yes and that would be pretty stupid in a world where people might be willing to take a vaccine with less side-effects then the one’s already on the market but not those already on the market.

  Perhaps… but if I’m right, Novavax would end up getting VAERS death reports at roughly the same rate as other vaccines. If most people who are reluctant to take a vaccine are (like my father) getting their beliefs from people like Kirsch who harp on VAERS, Novavax might not end up being perceived as safer even if it is. So a relevant question, I think, is whether we could expect right-wing news outlets to effectively communicate “Novavax has less side effects /​ is safer” (because I don’t think an article in The Atlantic would sway the likes of my dad. edit: so I just Googled “side effects” Novavax site:foxnews.com and the first result is a video subtitled “Kurt ‘The CyberGuy’ Knutsson tells ‘Fox and Friends Weekend’ how he accidentally joined the Novavax trial coronavirus vaccine and what side effects surprised him the most.” The side effects weren’t bad, but the anecdotal approach being taken is not encouraging.)

  Edit: btw, I totally agree that FDA needs reform, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to deploy small amounts of Novavax to test demand.

• DPiepgrass 19 Jul 2021 5:10 UTC

  3 points

  on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  One of the Ivermectin-supporting studies included in Lawrie’s metastudy has been retracted due to glaring issues. This study (Elgazzar et al 2020) was the 5th largest study on Ivermectin by sample size (N=200) listed in the Bryant & Lawrie metastudy. Based on Figure 3 it looks like Elgazzar et al was one of only two studies that favored ivermectin without including the no-benefit line in the confidence interval.

  Meanwhile, 6 other studies appeared to favor ivermectin but included the no-benefit line in their confidence interval, 1 study favored the control group and 2 studies sat in the middle. One of those, Fonseca 2021, had an especially narrow confidence interval centered around zero effect. This was not achieved via large sample size (N=167), but Fonseca 2021 was one of the few studies that ticked all the boxes for avoiding bias in Figure 2.

  Now, it’s well known that there is often a positive publication bias in science, but Dr. Malone put his weight behind the claim that in this case there’s a negative publication bias. So, it’s still plausible that ivermectin helps, but it hardly looks like a slam dunk based on the metastudy’s Figures (I don’t have time to read the text so much).

• DPiepgrass 19 Jul 2021 4:32 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  I haven’t seen Kirsch advocate for Novavax, does he? Might U.S. officials be thinking to themselves “we bought plenty enough vaccines for everyone already, no need to buy more”? How do you conclude that the mRNA vaccines cross the blood-brain barrier? Do you have safety concerns with the J&J vaccine?

• DPiepgrass 18 Jul 2021 1:52 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: gilch’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  Yes, particularly this bit:

  Austin Walters issued a correction to his blog post, after seeing this problem. Steve Kirsch took 25 minutes of debate before giving some half-hearted concession that his claim probably isn’t true. He still hasn’t updated his own writing or videos, and continues to tell people that the vaccine is causing mass casualties.

  I have been criticizing Kirsch (and Lawrie) for not considering more than one hypothesis that could explain the data. But it’s likely to be much worse: that people are going to him with better explanations and he chooses to ignore them. Classic denier: one who does not respond to evidence (unless confirmatory).

  But charitably, maybe nobody’s going to him with good arguments. Like, I randomly listened to a little of that 5-hour debate with Avi. At 36:11 Steve asks Avi what caused those deaths in VAERS and Avi’s first thought is to suggest that maybe there’s lots of false reports, based on just one example of a false report? ugh. (I looked at 37 reports elsewhere in this thread and didn’t suspect any of them were simply made up. I did wonder if sometimes multiple reports sometimes happened for the same person, but didn’t try to check.) Edit: or extra charitably, Steve’s totally found good answers to the issues I raised and I just never happened to see evidence of that.

• DPiepgrass 7 Jul 2021 22:07 UTC

  1 point

  on: Lo­cal Val­idity as a Key to San­ity and Civilization

  Lord Kelvin’s careful and multiply-supported lines of reasoning arguing that the Earth could not possibly be so much as a hundred million years old, all failed simultaneously in a surprising way because that era didn’t know about nuclear reactions.

  I’m told that the biggest reason Kelvin was wrong was that, for many years, no one thought about there being a molten interior subject to convection:

  Perry’s [1895?] calculation shows that if the Earth has a conducting lid of 50 kilometers’ thickness, with a perfectly convecting fluid underneath, then the measured thermal gradients near the surface are consistent with any age up to 2 billion or 3 billion years. Recognizing that heat transfer in the mantle cannot be perfectly efficient, Perry subsequently modeled the deep interior as a solid with high “quasi-diffusivity.” His results agreed with the original simple calculation in suggesting that the Earth could be several billions of years old. Full calculations of convection in the mantle (which were impossible until the advent of computers) confirm that Perry’s reasoning was sound.

  In other words, Perry was able to reconcile a physical calculation of Earth’s thermal evolution with the great age that geologists required. Perry needed nothing more than to introduce the idea that heat moved in the deep interior of the Earth more readily than it moved in the outermost layers. Yet to this day, most geologists believe that Kelvin’s (understandable) mistake was not to have known about Earth’s internal radioactivity.

  Of course, 2-3 billion is also too young, and with radioactive decay we can raise the age to ~4 billion years.

  But wait, shouldn’t convection also increase the cooling rate, so that the Earth in Perry’s model should be cooler even if it were the same age as Kelvin’s Earth? I am confused.

  P.S. I find this piece abstract and hard to decipher, especially the discussion of law/​Law; your early works were easier. More examples and detail are needed to connect the words to reality.

• DPiepgrass 7 Jul 2021 20:06 UTC

  1 point

  on: The Loud­est Alarm Is Prob­a­bly False

  Hmm. My biggest alarm is that I don’t have enough friends and am not social enough. But this is accurate; I have not one single intellectual friend of the sort I want, and people ignore my writing. I think the reason I don’t act to rectify the situation is that I don’t know how.

  Okay, but what about other alarms, ones I don’t notice so much? Well, I have an intense desire to be right (and not just appear to be right in the eyes of anyone else), and be knowledgeable… and so I frequent LW. I spend an unusual amount of time fretting over the accuracy and fairness of things I’ve posted earlier and often edit them days, weeks, or years afterward to provide more nuance and accuracy. I do this even at the risk of sounding boring and producing less writing, even though I think one needs a lot of writing to gain a following; might this interfere with my social life? Could be. Another alarm says I took a wrong turn to end up working on oil & gas software. I donate to clean energy efforts as a form of “offsetting”, but this has the disturbing opportunity cost of reducing my donations to other efforts. That alarm seems reasonable and I’m open to different opportunities.

  But, maybe this post has exactly the problem you linked to: offering good advice to those who least need it.

• DPiepgrass 7 Jul 2021 17:39 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Jonathan_Graehl’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  This is possibly outdated, but I saw a publication by “National Research Council (US) Division of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention” from 1985 stating that “A manufacturer who produces and sells a defective vaccine that creates a risk of significant injury to the recipient is liable to any person injured by that defect under the principles stated in section 402A of the Restatement of Torts. This is thought to be the law in every American jurisdiction”.

• DPiepgrass 27 Jun 2021 20:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ndr’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  Well, Moderna and Pfizer’s are both mRNA-based, but presumably different in some ways because they were made by different teams (and I thought I saw Bret or Dr. Malone say he would have preferred Pfizer over Moderna, though it’s not in my summary). But AstraZeneca and J&J are “adenovirus vector vaccines”, using chimpanzee adenovirus ChAdOx1 and serotype 26 (HAdV-D26) respectively; the latter was “under investigation as [a] protective platform against HIV, Zika, RSV infections and are in Phase-III clinical trials for Ebola” in early 2019. Now, adenovirus vector technology is pretty new. Even so, it would be an impressive coincidence if the risks were both substantial and the same for a ChAdOx1-based vaccine, a HAdV-D26-based vaccine and both RNA vaccines. Sure, they all use the spike protein in some way — probably it’s necessary for the immune system to recognize the spike protein — but (i) eventually our bodies will encounter the spikes, either via SARS-Cov-2 or via vaccine, and I’ve seen no one make a case that a live, replicating virus is safer, and (ii) the evidence/​argument for the protein itself being dangerous hasn’t been made clear in any of the stuff I’ve seen.

  But my main point is the seeming lack of interest from Lawrie, Dowswell, Kirsch et al. in the question of relative safety, because this is a known failure mode of anti-vaxxers all the way back to the Wakefield study. That infamous paper apparently linked the MMR vaccine to autism, yet many anti-vaxxers acted like there was some fully general link between all vaccines and autism.

• DPiepgrass 27 Jun 2021 4:30 UTC

  2 points

  on: War on Cancer II

  Suggestion: before theorizing why “survival rates” diverge from not-dying rates, explain the difference between the two metrics.

• DPiepgrass 27 Jun 2021 3:40 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: [Pre­dic­tion] What war be­tween the USA and China would look like in 2050

  2021 man forgot “finding info about almost anything, instantly, for free, from home.”

  Now imagine if, in 2050, we could find/​view books & scientific datasets as easily as we read the web… (in fact, why would it take until 2050? Oh right: copyright law and entrenched practices)

• DPiepgrass 27 Jun 2021 3:32 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Why did no LessWrong dis­course on gain of func­tion re­search de­velop in 2013/​2014?

  That doesn’t ring true to me. I’m curious why you think that, even though I’m irrationally short-termist: “100% is actually much worse than 90%” says my brain dryly, but I feel like a 90% deadly event is totally worth worrying about a lot!

• DPiepgrass 27 Jun 2021 1:59 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: dachamian’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  I may not have time to read through all of that, but thanks for the links. I quickly learned some new things by following a few links there + googling around.

  Most notably, some key evidence presented by Steve K that took center stage in the video, both evidence of the dangers of “the vaccines” and evidence of the effectiveness of ivermectin, comes from groups led by the same person, Theresa Lawrie.

  1. Lawrie apparently founded a web site for ivermectin advocacy (registered March 7, 2021) after presenting evidence on Ivermectin’s efficacy on January 13 (to “13 clinicians” and 7 others)

  2. Lawrie is the director of a group of 4 people calling itself “The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy” that called for “an immediate halt to the [Covid] vaccination programme” on June 9

  3. Lawrie published the meta-analysis Steve was raving about (with 6 co-authors), which found “Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin” (published June 17 but, obviously, completed earlier)

  Now, is Lawrie just one of those productivity superheroes vying for a Nobel prize? Or is there something suspicious about too much evidence and advocacy coming from the same person?

  What makes me the most suspicious is that

  1. the anti-vaccine document performs no cost/​benefit analysis before concluding that all three vaccines are too dangerous to use.

  2. it includes no analysis of base rates (the number of adverse health events that would normally occur in a large population in the absence of any vaccines).

  3. Edit 1: seriously, what are the chances that all three vaccines are both dangerous and equally so? Has that ever happened in history? I think not. (4 different vaccines are implicitly demonized by the video since it talks about US and UK data, but this document is UK-specific; the UK and US have used 3 vaccine brands each)

  4. Edit 2: I don’t say this enough, but one must also consider the reaction of other experts. Large numbers of other experts think the vaccines are safe (safe enough to deploy widely, anyway) and that ivermectin is an interesting treatment but unproven. When experts in high places thought there was a risk of rare blood clots, they were often willing to halt the use of a vaccine even when doing so would lead to a larger number of overall Covid deaths. And of course, while regulatory agencies were understandably in a hurry, separate phase-3 trials were completed on each vaccine (in multiple countries) and showed adequate safety as usual. So the idea that these same experts and agencies are ignoring a wide variety of side-effects, including death, seems preposterous. The only argument I’ve seen against these numerous other visible experts comes from my father, who claimed the media is hiding information because they are controlled by George Soros, and from this video, which explains it as groupthink & social norms. As if scientists but not conservatives do groupthink & social norms.

  I only skimmed the document, but I don’t see any lip service paid to any of these issues or objections. And these are obvious objections, aren’t they? So why wouldn’t they be considered?

  In the absence of other information, I assume that the lack of care demonstrated in this document is typical for Lawrie.

  Unfortunately, my post ended up doing something I disapprove of: it listens to a handful of outspoken scientists (one in particular, it turns out) while utterly ignoring the majority who disagree. I hoped other LessWrong users would tell me how other scientists/​experts are arguing the other side, but I got less of that than I hoped.

• DPiepgrass 19 Jun 2021 19:26 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Covid vac­cine safety: how cor­rect are these alle­ga­tions?

  Well, Google led me to the HHS VAERS FAQ which says

  Healthcare providers are required by law to report to VAERS:

  • Any adverse event listed in the VAERS Table of Reportable Events Following Vaccination that occurs within the specified time period after vaccination

  • An adverse event listed by the vaccine manufacturer as a contraindication to further doses of the vaccine

  Healthcare providers are strongly encouraged to report:

  • Any adverse event that occurs after the administration of a vaccine licensed in the United States, whether or not it is clear that a vaccine caused the adverse event

  • Vaccine administration errors

  Vaccine manufacturers are required to report to VAERS all adverse events that come to their attention.

  Covid vaccines aren’t explicitly mentioned in the PDF so the final list of reporting requirements seems to apply (“Any new vaccine recommended by the [CDC] for routine administration to children”):

  A.Shoulder Injury Related to Vaccine Administration (7 days)
  B. Vasovagal syncope (7 days)
  C. Any acute complication or sequelae (including death) of above events (interval—not applicable)
  D. Events described in manufacturer’s package insert as contraindications to additional doses of vaccine (interval—see package insert)

  Interesting, this isn’t as clear as the CDC’s statement that “FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death...” Now, if the FDA/​CDC/​HHS sent memos/​bulletins/​checklists to hospitals/​clinics, these might be the sorts of instructions that front-line staff pay the most attention to. But, don’t know how to see those.