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Prof David West

vaccine

How many people on this list would take an approved (assume all standard procedures predated the approval) COVID vaccine if one were available?

I'll hazard a guess that it would be close to 90%.

A recent survey showed the percentages of those who would refuse a free government approved vaccine:

19% — of Democrats
24% — of 18-29 year olds
30% — of people 65 and older
33% — white Americans
35% — large-city residents
41% — non-white Americans
44% — rural/farm residents
53% — Republicans

Comments about how this proves the intelligence of Democrats over Republicans are not very interesting, even if the urge is overwhelming. Nor, comments about youth feeling invulnerable.

Why so many old people?

Why so many non-white people?

Why so many large-city residents?

How can the claim continue to be made that a vaccine is the only way to "return to normal?"

How many of you that sheltering-in-place will be happy to emerge into a world where maybe a third of the population declines to be vaccinated?

How many of you would be in favor of mandatory vaccinations?

Full disclosure: I would decline a vaccination, just as I have never had a flu shot and just as I would never take a statin drug.

davew

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Jochen Fromm-5

Re: vaccine

In Russia you are not choosing to take a vaccine, you are chosen (if you are not poisoned or shot before). And they skip trial phases to be the first on the market, which is a bit like Russian roulette. Have you heard of Sputnik V ?

I guess most people here in Europe would take an officially approved vaccine which has successfully passed all three trials.

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: Prof David West <[hidden email]>

Date: 8/23/20 17:33 (GMT+01:00)

To: [hidden email]

Subject: [FRIAM] vaccine

Frank Wimberly-2

Re: vaccine

In reply to this post by Prof David West

One is tempted to say, "Evolution at work" but I won't.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 9:33 AM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

How many people on this list would take an approved (assume all standard procedures predated the approval) COVID vaccine if one were available?

I'll hazard a guess that it would be close to 90%.

A recent survey showed the percentages of those who would refuse a free government approved vaccine:

19% — of Democrats
24% — of 18-29 year olds
30% — of people 65 and older
33% — white Americans
35% — large-city residents
41% — non-white Americans
44% — rural/farm residents
53% — Republicans

Comments about how this proves the intelligence of Democrats over Republicans are not very interesting, even if the urge is overwhelming. Nor, comments about youth feeling invulnerable.

Why so many old people?

Why so many non-white people?

Why so many large-city residents?

How can the claim continue to be made that a vaccine is the only way to "return to normal?"

How many of you that sheltering-in-place will be happy to emerge into a world where maybe a third of the population declines to be vaccinated?

How many of you would be in favor of mandatory vaccinations?

Full disclosure: I would decline a vaccination, just as I have never had a flu shot and just as I would never take a statin drug.

davew

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David Eric Smith

Re: vaccine

In reply to this post by Prof David West

If one had time to do a good study design (which sounds hard), it would be nice to create measures of social trust (what can you count on other people to do for you) and responsibility (what you believe you owe to others and feel compelled to provide). Then divide into the same cohorts, and find out how much of this response is explained by the trust and responsibility dummy variables. (I know there are studies of that kind that exist, and there is lots of editorial writing invoking it as a cause; I don’t know whether this kind of regression has been done.)

The trust variable really should have two aspects: what trust you have in people-at-large, and what trust you have in institutions. The latter could be further subdivided, into what trust do you have in institutions even in principle or as a concept, and what trust do you have in them as-instituted just now. That third level of division is not something I would actually want to do, because the artifacts of study design would get so severe and the signal so questionable that I wouldn’t want to draw any conclusions from it anyway. However, for me, if Redfield is directing the CDC, and Azar is directing whatever he directs, and a month before Election Day there is a declaration that there is a vaccine available, I would not take it. In the earlier eras of the CDC — say, when the public health officials of Taiwan came to visit CDC to learn how to design a pandemic response, because it was universally seen as the gold standard world-wide — I would probably have taken it. I am told, through a friend who Is a working epidemiologist within the agency, that both of them are regarded as trouble, Redfield more through incapability than malice, Azar the more typical trumpish combination of both.

A problem with social trust, both in relation to individuals and institutions, is that it is the poster-child feature of a culture for lock-in. Lack of trust makes people grasping and selfish, even if they aren’t mean-spirited (or don’t “mean to be” so), making it rational for others to not expect much support from them. All these things change on the long timescales of human social/psychological development and also of institutional implementation, with the asymmetry that breaking tends to be faster than building (in both directions).

Amid the cross-fire and shit-storm of blame, by somebody against almost any group I can bring to mind, I have been struggling to decide whether there is some common thread of “American culture” that is a bigger principle component than other ones, for explaining why we are such an outlier in being unable to solve problems that many other countries consider challenging but manageable in some degree. My current guess is that uncommonly low social trust and responsibility would be the variable that breaks us away from properly called “developed nations” and puts us somewhere on the continuum between them and failed states.

Eric

> On Aug 24, 2020, at 12:32 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> How many people on this list would take an approved (assume all standard procedures predated the approval) COVID vaccine if one were available?
>
> I'll hazard a guess that it would be close to 90%.
>
> A recent survey showed the percentages of those who would refuse a free government approved vaccine:
>
> 19% — of Democrats
> 24% — of 18-29 year olds
> 30% — of people 65 and older
> 33% — white Americans
> 35% — large-city residents
> 41% — non-white Americans
> 44% — rural/farm residents
> 53% — Republicans
>
> Comments about how this proves the intelligence of Democrats over Republicans are not very interesting, even if the urge is overwhelming. Nor, comments about youth feeling invulnerable.
>
> Why so many old people?
>
> Why so many non-white people?
>
> Why so many large-city residents?
>
> How can the claim continue to be made that a vaccine is the only way to "return to normal?"
>
> How many of you that sheltering-in-place will be happy to emerge into a world where maybe a third of the population declines to be vaccinated?
>
> How many of you would be in favor of mandatory vaccinations?
>
> Full disclosure: I would decline a vaccination, just as I have never had a flu shot and just as I would never take a statin drug.
>
> davew
>
>
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gepr

Re: vaccine

There's the key point, right? That diversity fosters openness, facilitating the entrance, maintenance, and extinction of all sorts of wild-type rationale. Writing in stone an authority figure like the CDC, or Fauci, or [who|what]ever dampens that openness ... stunts our ability to reason. I spend a lot of energy denigrating the denial of expertise. But appeal to authority is arguably worse.

If Redfield or Azar suddenly announced a vaccine, the process is open enough that you could email the clinical trial PIs and find out whether you might trust it. Normalizing/unifying trust into any single app, org, or person will always be a mistake.

On August 23, 2020 4:42:42 PM CDT, David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
>if Redfield is directing the CDC, and Azar is directing whatever he
>directs, and a month before Election Day there is a declaration that
>there is a vaccine available, I would not take it. In the earlier eras
>of the CDC — say, when the public health officials of Taiwan came to
>visit CDC to learn how to design a pandemic response, because it was
>universally seen as the gold standard world-wide — I would probably
>have taken it. I am told, through a friend who Is a working
>epidemiologist within the agency, that both of them are regarded as
>trouble, Redfield more through incapability than malice, Azar the more
>typical trumpish combination of both.

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

David Eric Smith

Re: vaccine

Well, if that’s “the key point”, then we should all get up on high horses and enjoy blaming everyone who ever gets angry at the loss of anything that was good, or useful, or valuable. After all, any one thing wasn’t everything, and therefore it wasn’t diverse. It was just itself. It was just some good, or useful, thing that we put a lot of work into building because it was all we could do to produce one of it. And now some saboteurs have injured or destroyed it, and we don’t have any one of it at all.

I cannot recreate everything in life in its best form out of my own self. I am not that big. I depend on things in the world and in society that take decades or centuries of work by thousands or tens of thousands of people to assemble, and that have no replacements when they are gone.

> On Aug 24, 2020, at 8:36 AM, glen ep ropella <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> There's the key point, right? That diversity fosters openness, facilitating the entrance, maintenance, and extinction of all sorts of wild-type rationale. Writing in stone an authority figure like the CDC, or Fauci, or [who|what]ever dampens that openness ... stunts our ability to reason. I spend a lot of energy denigrating the denial of expertise. But appeal to authority is arguably worse.
>
> If Redfield or Azar suddenly announced a vaccine, the process is open enough that you could email the clinical trial PIs and find out whether you might trust it. Normalizing/unifying trust into any single app, org, or person will always be a mistake.
>
> On August 23, 2020 4:42:42 PM CDT, David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> if Redfield is directing the CDC, and Azar is directing whatever he
>> directs, and a month before Election Day there is a declaration that
>> there is a vaccine available, I would not take it. In the earlier eras
>> of the CDC — say, when the public health officials of Taiwan came to
>> visit CDC to learn how to design a pandemic response, because it was
>> universally seen as the gold standard world-wide — I would probably
>> have taken it. I am told, through a friend who Is a working
>> epidemiologist within the agency, that both of them are regarded as
>> trouble, Redfield more through incapability than malice, Azar the more
>> typical trumpish combination of both.
>
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gepr

Re: vaccine

Of course we get angry when some part of our toolchain breaks! The important attribute, though, is the extent to which we can debug and rebuild it. My point is the CDC isn't a monolith. And I argue the processes upon which it's built are transparent enough that its breakage shouldn't be that hard to recover from. Its composing members are deeply committed people, committed to doing the right thing, trying to help the world. While I agree incompetence and malfeasance can be damaging, I have faith in the overwhelming majority of those people to continue the work they do. And to whatever tiny extent I can, I'll help them do that work.

On August 23, 2020 10:29:54 PM PDT, David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

>Well, if that’s “the key point”, then we should all get up on high
>horses and enjoy blaming everyone who ever gets angry at the loss of
>anything that was good, or useful, or valuable. After all, any one
>thing wasn’t everything, and therefore it wasn’t diverse. It was just
>itself. It was just some good, or useful, thing that we put a lot of
>work into building because it was all we could do to produce one of it.
>And now some saboteurs have injured or destroyed it, and we don’t have
>any one of it at all.
>
>I cannot recreate everything in life in its best form out of my own
>self. I am not that big. I depend on things in the world and in
>society that take decades or centuries of work by thousands or tens of
>thousands of people to assemble, and that have no replacements when
>they are gone.
>
>> On Aug 24, 2020, at 8:36 AM, glen ep ropella <[hidden email]>
>wrote:
>>
>> There's the key point, right? That diversity fosters openness,
>facilitating the entrance, maintenance, and extinction of all sorts of
>wild-type rationale. Writing in stone an authority figure like the CDC,
>or Fauci, or [who|what]ever dampens that openness ... stunts our
>ability to reason. I spend a lot of energy denigrating the denial of
>expertise. But appeal to authority is arguably worse.
>>
>> If Redfield or Azar suddenly announced a vaccine, the process is open
>enough that you could email the clinical trial PIs and find out whether
>you might trust it. Normalizing/unifying trust into any single app,
>org, or person will always be a mistake.

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

David Eric Smith

Re: vaccine

Yes, I guess this is fair, and I apologize for popping off at you.

I think that, after being doused in it for 15 years, I have absorbed some of Martin Shubik’s view (for which maybe I am even willing to claim some responsibility from my own understanding by now) that the design and implementation of institutions is hard, and that they carry enormous weight in running the society. Getting the rules right, finding people, acculturating members, building up networks including all the habits of others in the world whom you need to influence to work with you, etc., take time and a lot of effort.

The week after Trump was elected, Shbuk wrote a hair-on-fire open letter to several of his colleagues in Econ and operations research, with the main theme “We’ve got to protect the institutions! They will be the first thing to go under attack!”. Part of that is the response one expected from him, from a life of worrying about these things as his main specialty, but part of it was just the kind of long-paid-for expert understanding that I was hoping to learn from working with him.

Lawyers can act as pure advocates, if you are in a country with legislators that make the laws as fair as possible. But scientists shouldn’t do that. They can’t help have preferences, and even advocate, but they are supposed to stop short of acting like lawyers, and act partly like judges and legislators over themselves, because there isn’t really an outside office to do that. But scientists are not always reliable in that, and scientists in companies, especially those run by high-profit businessmen, are doubly at hazard. An aggregator and regulator outside the corporate world can do very hard jobs that nobody else is set up to do. When they are well run, it is remarkable how good they can be. Conversely, when they get hijacked, they can be organized sources of bad pressure.

Yes of course, if something comes out, I will use what connections I have to try to learn about it. We are privileged, in that we have shorter lines to people with more expertise than the vast majority of our 330M fellow citizens. But from what I can see of the reporting, even understanding the etiology of this new disease continues to be rather hard. Vaccine safety and efficacy are hard in general, with lots of opportunities for error or poor practice. Vaccines for a class we haven’t vaccinated for before (no vaccines for the cold, as far as I know), give more wild-cards. We don’t even have a long term yet, in which to have seen effects of disease or vaccine. A don’t think our informal networks on FRIAM++ can referee that problem comparably to a well-run institution with the full support of a large national government.

Still, I would reach into an urn full of cobras before I would take trump’s word for anything, or the word of any lackey acting on his behalf. That makes the burden of proof from any of our large institutions in the near term that much higher.

Eric

> On Aug 24, 2020, at 2:55 PM, glen ep ropella <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Of course we get angry when some part of our toolchain breaks! The important attribute, though, is the extent to which we can debug and rebuild it. My point is the CDC isn't a monolith. And I argue the processes upon which it's built are transparent enough that its breakage shouldn't be that hard to recover from. Its composing members are deeply committed people, committed to doing the right thing, trying to help the world. While I agree incompetence and malfeasance can be damaging, I have faith in the overwhelming majority of those people to continue the work they do. And to whatever tiny extent I can, I'll help them do that work.
>
>
> On August 23, 2020 10:29:54 PM PDT, David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> Well, if that’s “the key point”, then we should all get up on high
>> horses and enjoy blaming everyone who ever gets angry at the loss of
>> anything that was good, or useful, or valuable. After all, any one
>> thing wasn’t everything, and therefore it wasn’t diverse. It was just
>> itself. It was just some good, or useful, thing that we put a lot of
>> work into building because it was all we could do to produce one of it.
>> And now some saboteurs have injured or destroyed it, and we don’t have
>> any one of it at all.
>>
>> I cannot recreate everything in life in its best form out of my own
>> self. I am not that big. I depend on things in the world and in
>> society that take decades or centuries of work by thousands or tens of
>> thousands of people to assemble, and that have no replacements when
>> they are gone.
>>
>>> On Aug 24, 2020, at 8:36 AM, glen ep ropella <[hidden email]>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> There's the key point, right? That diversity fosters openness,
>> facilitating the entrance, maintenance, and extinction of all sorts of
>> wild-type rationale. Writing in stone an authority figure like the CDC,
>> or Fauci, or [who|what]ever dampens that openness ... stunts our
>> ability to reason. I spend a lot of energy denigrating the denial of
>> expertise. But appeal to authority is arguably worse.
>>>
>>> If Redfield or Azar suddenly announced a vaccine, the process is open
>> enough that you could email the clinical trial PIs and find out whether
>> you might trust it. Normalizing/unifying trust into any single app,
>> org, or person will always be a mistake.
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
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gepr

Re: vaccine

I agree 100%. And I'm sorry if I sound like I'm on some kind of high horse. One of the flaws of digital media is the lack of overtones and context that would otherwise accompany meatspace discussion. I pepper my opinions with self-deprecating commentary, which is always inadequate.

Shubik is not wrong. Our institutions are under attack and it's not merely incompetence, as my point about "active measures" alludes. It's in the headlines every day:

FDA, under pressure from Trump, authorizes blood plasma as Covid-19 treatment
https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/23/fda-under-pressure-from-trump-expected-to-authorize-blood-plasma-as-covid-19-treatment/

Finding ways to doubt other people is easy. Finding ways to trust them is always difficult. That's the hard work we've been trying to do since this dumpster fire administration took office.

On 8/24/20 5:17 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:

> Yes, I guess this is fair, and I apologize for popping off at you.
>
> I think that, after being doused in it for 15 years, I have absorbed some of Martin Shubik’s view (for which maybe I am even willing to claim some responsibility from my own understanding by now) that the design and implementation of institutions is hard, and that they carry enormous weight in running the society. Getting the rules right, finding people, acculturating members, building up networks including all the habits of others in the world whom you need to influence to work with you, etc., take time and a lot of effort.
>
> The week after Trump was elected, Shbuk wrote a hair-on-fire open letter to several of his colleagues in Econ and operations research, with the main theme “We’ve got to protect the institutions! They will be the first thing to go under attack!”. Part of that is the response one expected from him, from a life of worrying about these things as his main specialty, but part of it was just the kind of long-paid-for expert understanding that I was hoping to learn from working with him.
>
> Lawyers can act as pure advocates, if you are in a country with legislators that make the laws as fair as possible. But scientists shouldn’t do that. They can’t help have preferences, and even advocate, but they are supposed to stop short of acting like lawyers, and act partly like judges and legislators over themselves, because there isn’t really an outside office to do that. But scientists are not always reliable in that, and scientists in companies, especially those run by high-profit businessmen, are doubly at hazard. An aggregator and regulator outside the corporate world can do very hard jobs that nobody else is set up to do. When they are well run, it is remarkable how good they can be. Conversely, when they get hijacked, they can be organized sources of bad pressure.
>
> Yes of course, if something comes out, I will use what connections I have to try to learn about it. We are privileged, in that we have shorter lines to people with more expertise than the vast majority of our 330M fellow citizens. But from what I can see of the reporting, even understanding the etiology of this new disease continues to be rather hard. Vaccine safety and efficacy are hard in general, with lots of opportunities for error or poor practice. Vaccines for a class we haven’t vaccinated for before (no vaccines for the cold, as far as I know), give more wild-cards. We don’t even have a long term yet, in which to have seen effects of disease or vaccine. A don’t think our informal networks on FRIAM++ can referee that problem comparably to a well-run institution with the full support of a large national government.
>
> Still, I would reach into an urn full of cobras before I would take trump’s word for anything, or the word of any lackey acting on his behalf. That makes the burden of proof from any of our large institutions in the near term that much higher.

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen