Hacker News Reader

Comment by uniformlyrandom | Hacker News Reader

You are right. Anti-vaxxers have some valid points - admittedly, introducing a foreign substance into human body always carries some risks.

The problem with risks and probability is that human brain does not process probability numbers well, so it is all or nothing.

Anti-vaxxers point of view: I do not understand what 0.0001 is, round it up to 0.5 - OMG vaccines kill.

Vaxxers point of view: I do not understand what 0.0001 is, let us round it down to 0. Vaccines are harmless.

Second point is way more rational, although of course also incorrect.

View on HN

Not saying you're wrong, but that's not really how people who refuse the COVID vaccine I know think. They think "I do not understand the risks of the vaccine, and I don't trust the people telling me it's safe, so I'm not getting it".

That's quite different. Most people are not Bayesian thinkers. They mostly react based on how they feel about things.

I think what people fail to understand is that this isn't a one time problem. It's not bad math being done. It's one of the first major displays of an on going collapse of trust in Western institutions.

To be honest, consider if you owned a small business, say a restaurant.

These are the same people who said two weeks to slow the spread, then proceeded to lockdown for months and put your business into flip-a-coin odds for insolvency.

It doesn’t matter how many credentials are next to their names - you are never listening to them ever again.

And neither will your family who depended on your business or saw you lose your business.

I honestly belive a 2-3 week lockdown would have slowed down the spread if we didn't have bunch of idiots doing their best to not comply.

Someone did a computer simulation of this, showing that just 1-2% running around and spreding the virus was enough to undo the effects.

So here we are now, almost 2 years later and the family business you pretend to protect have lost costumers, their business and maybe also few family members. Things would have gone so much better if we didn't have these "freedom lovers" dragging their feet, damaging the economy and in the end filling up ICU beds while waiting for their Herman Cardon award.

Then we should try our public officials for being stupid enough to think that 100% compliance was feasible.

do essential workers make up less than 2% of the population? it's hard to imagine this was ever realistic without extreme invasive tracking + quarantining of infected individuals.

What also comes to mind the Randal Munroe's "What if - Could we eliminate the common cold if we all self isolated long enough?"

In theory yes, but the severe degree of isolation and spreading required would likely not parse well with supply chain economics .. which given not everyone grows their own food, is also required to live.

edit: there's also news now of COVID spreading to deer and possibly other animals, making this scenario even less viable.

That is wrong if you don't mean a complete lockdown in a way that we shut down any infrastructure, even what is declared necessary. That would theoretically eliminate any infectious disease with a shorter lifetime.

It certainly isn't the fault of freedom lovers or any single group. This is blaming the other team and basic tribalism.

Right. And you cannot be a Bayesian thinker about COVID vaccines because the data quality is way too low for that. People are saying things in this thread like "the risk of heart damage is X%", as if that's actually a robust statistic.

Virtually no accurate, trustworthy and useful information about the safety or effectiveness of the vaccines is available. The public health and media establishment is far too biased in favour of vaccines and far too biased against anything that might discourage people from taking it. In such an environment it doesn't matter whether you understand Bayes theorem or not. You can't just do some calculations and understand the risks.

> Vaxxers point of view: I do not understand what 0.0001 is, let us round it down to 0. Vaccines are harmless.

I’m not sure where you are getting this characterization of people who are pro vaccines but it doesn’t apply to anyone I know who took the vaccine. Yes, there’s some risk of side effect as with most medicines. But you still take them because the benefits far outweigh the risks. Pretty sure the average person who took the vaccine is able to wrap their head around that concept.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com