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There's a substantive discussion to be had about a tradeoff between individual control, institutional biases, and echo chambers, but setting the thread on fire is not the way to have it.
We've had to ask you this kind of thing more than once before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436536 (Feb 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30432761 (Feb 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28948081 (Oct 2021)
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit here more to heart? We want curious conversation across differences, not name-calling and enemy-bashing.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31838508.
> But it's cool because it will be a "conscious" choice
Exactly. You probably meant it to be sarcastic, but it's actually true.
A search engine is bias. If you wanted unbiased results, you would sort the results randomly. Maybe even return random URLs without regard for what was in the search query.
A tool that has one primary purpose but also does no evil is an insanely complex, corruptible, expensive, and ineffective tool.
I'm happy to avoid "fact-checkers".
On the plus side, it may mean less vitriol in the comments section.
People get applied unrepresentative negative labels because they ask questions, challenge points, have different opinions or simply take principled stances.
So they get called terms that squash conversation and have a purpose to see them shunned.
This is a common conspiracy red herring because anti-vaxxers by definition have already made a choice to be anti-vaccine.
Very few people are still genuinely debating the merits of vaccines (or the covid vaccine), and those who choose against vaccines try to nobilize their opinion as being some unsung investigators. UFO enthusiasts, big foot hunters, and other conspiricists shine themselves in the same light.
- 40-year old with no health conditions. Suspects of having contracted Covid back in February of 2020 (symptoms were high-fever, a really bad sore throat, anosmia) but due to lack of tests at the time could not confirm it.
- Inclined to oppose vaccine mandates. Doesn't believe that any vaccine in particular is "dangerous", but that mass-vaccination brings systemic risks. (Black swans)
- Got the vaccine anyway as soon as they were available in Spring 2021. Got the booster in end of 2021.
- Has two kids of school age, all of them received the commonly scheduled vaccines for "traditional" diseases.
- Opposes vaccination of healthy children for Covid. Prefers the policy of frequent testing instead.
- Supports the eventual decision to have scheduled Covid vaccinations like the flu: for older people and those with health conditions, or anyone recommended by a doctor.
- Despite triple-shot, got infected (this time confirmed by rapid tests and a PCR) in February 2022. Symptoms were again high-fever and a bad throat. No anosmia. Kids also got infected, only one of them with symptoms of fever for one day and two days of coughing.
- Not planning to get the fourth booster, unless required for practical reasons.
So... What's your verdict? Anti-vaxxer? Conspiracy theorist?
You think of vaccines purely in terms of their impact on the injected individual. You don’t seem to generally consider the value of population level vaccination rates in preventing the spread or impact of diseases on people other than you or your family members.
It’s a reasonable position, and I’m casting no moral judgement on you for it.
But, consider: Polio is a disease which is like the flu for the vast majority of cases. Child mortality rates are less than 5% of the 0.5% of cases who develop a central nervous system infection. Given those numbers, why should we vaccinate healthy kids against polio? The answer is not because vaccinating everyone ensures we prevent those cases from developing - it’s because vaccinating everyone wipes the disease out.
That same individualist perspective probably inclines you to think that other people’s vaccination decisions don’t have much impact on you, so you don’t particularly care if other people are antivax.
I would just encourage you to consider that vaccination is not entirely an individual choice and that the existence of a vocal antivax community reduces the value to our collective health that your family’s participation in regular vaccine schedules is supposed to buy. Your kids took the risk of those vaccines to help us maintain a herd immunity to measles, mumps, rubella and polio - but antivaxers who don’t participate in those programs and discourage such participation make that immunity more fragile.
The polio vaccine is administered only in a segment of the population. If there is risk of, e.g, a "bad batch" of vaccines that could be fatal, we would be potentially causing harm to kids of a very-specific age. If we are talking about mass-vaccination every six months for everyone, the risk of a "bad batch" would lead to potentially everyone being harmed.
The polio vaccine has been administered for decades already. Its safety is not just measured by a bunch of lab tests. Its safety is proven in the field.
Polio is a disease that is somewhat stable. Covid started with high fatality rates (as it usually happens with any new virus entering a population) but will tend to become endemic and mutate to be less harmful, like other seasonal respiratory diseases. Again, I totally supported and encouraged high vaccination rates when its risks were unknown, but now we have more information and I don't see why we should treat it any differently than what we do with the flu.
This implies you lack a critical understanding of how vaccines (covid in this case) work, so yes, you are inclined to being anti-vaxx.
The covid vaccine mandates were about lowering the viral R0 to keep ICUs from overflowing, not to prevent you from becoming infected.
Good job at proving OP's point.
But I suspect you know that, which is why you're not addressing my comment.
IOW, you destroy all chance of a nuanced conversation and you will not accept anything except total submission to your line of thinking. This is the pure essence of Fascism.
This bad-faith pattern of behavior here is more to my original point about antivaxxers seeking to nobilize their own opinion as a matter of their identity, rather than being genuinely interested in discussing or investigating facts.
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Herd immunization was estimated to be reached with 60-70% of vaccination. I'd be totally in favor of as much campaigning as possible to get to those levels. I was rushing to get the vaccines whenever I could just to contribute to this number.
At the same time, I don't think it is morally justifiable to force anyone to inject a substance in their bodies.
Even if the number was higher, I was still encouraging people to get the vaccine. Even when it was clear that vaccine was not that effective to stop infection or reduce spread, I would still tell people "at least it can help you to build up your own immunity". But I would never defend the idea that people should be forced or compelled to get the vaccine.
You need to re-read what was said before because your comment is not relevant.
Your "argument" (or whatever passed for one) was "you lack a critical understanding of how vaccines work, so you are inclined (sic?) to be anti-vaxx"
The issue of both the sibling comment and your own is that they assume that any two people with the same information can only reach the same "logical" conclusion. My response was an attempt to show that this is not true.
- It is possible to simultaneously (a) understand the concept of herd immunization, (b) take the vaccine and campaign for others to do the same and (c) still be against vaccine mandates.
- It is possible to simultaneously (a) understand the importance of keeping R0 low, (b) take the vaccine and campaign for others to do anything possible to reduce spread and (c) still be against vaccine mandates.
- It's not because someone is against vaccine mandates, that the person is anti-vax.
Does it help if I lay everything out like this, or would you need me to pre-chew it a bit for you?
Grandstanding and pretending you're under house arrest or had a gun to your head is bordering on a persecution fetish. Intentional motivation or not, the actions of rejecting the covid vaccine for non-medical reasons is definitely pro-plague.
> Grandstanding and pretending you're under house arrest or had a gun to your head is bordering on a persecution fetish
I think your reading comprehension is lacking. Please try to read on the concept of "analogy". I gave you one more above as an exercise. To make it easier for you, I will reveal now that I did not actually claim people are getting robbed when vaccinated, and people are not actually getting shot when they refuse to get vaccinated. The point of the "analogy" thing is to emphasize a certain structure of the situation by imagining some other situation - "other" is the key word here, meaning the situation is not the same - which shares some structural element with the situation being illustrated. In this case, something being a "free choice" seemingly, but due to very grave consequences attached to one of the choices, not being choice at all but rather an exercise in coercion - which in both cases btw nobody is really intending to hide, the coercive element is there precisely because only one result is considered acceptable by the coercing power. Hope this helps you with understanding the concept behind the "analogy" device.
To quote the GGP: People get applied unrepresentative negative labels because they ask questions, challenge points, have different opinions or simply take principled stances.
Your comment: Q.E.D.
> Their individual effects are far less potent without the herd effects.
Herd immunization was estimated to be reached with 60-70% of vaccination. I'd be totally in favor of as much campaigning as possible to get to those levels. I was rushing to get the vaccines whenever I could just to contribute to this number.
At the same time, I don't think it is morally justified to force anyone to inject a substance in their bodies.
Even if the number was higher, I was still encouraging people to get the vaccine. Even when it was clear that vaccine was not that effective to stop infection or reduce spread, I would still tell people "at least it can help you to build up your own immunity". But I would never defend the idea people should be forced or compelled to get the vaccine.
And of course, for each new vaccine, its merits must be debated, and its risk-reward profile (no medication is ever without risks) needs to be discussed on merits. Saying it can not and should not happen only paints you as a quasi-religious zealot who would refuse to even look at facts and consider them - that's not how science is or should be done.
Such a reductionist opinion on HN not flagged already. Unfortunately, reality doesn't pick sides on the reason why someone chooses some tool. It may be due to right-wingism, sure. But it may also be caused by, focusing on brave, feeling sick by being fed low-quality SEO sites, quora articles (or even clones tbereof) and more.
And in my opinion, your apparent cure (censoring and filtering) makes things worse, at least from my POV the divide between reason and extremism got way worse since we're trying to "correct" opinions by censoring stuff.
In a world progressively more controlled by proprietary technologies and big corporations this feature is such a breath of fresh air