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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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But they said all mandates would be lifted, and the US still has a mandate for healthcare workers to be vaccinated against covid.

Isn't that to be expected, though, don't they have the same for the flu?

The Pentagon also has a vaccine mandate

But the military has had vaccine mandates for a variety of vaccines for centuries?

In general, if something mandates a flu vaccine, mandating a covid vaccine too is expected. So that'd also explain colleges.

Anyway, his mistake was taking a bet saying 'all mandates' (what criteria) when he meant 'most mandates', there are many cities / states / countries / institutions, and many of them have very slow bureaucracies or processes, so even if all of them intended in some sense to repeal something, one might stick around for a while.

Healthcare workers, in fact, are not mandated to take influenza vaccine in most states. Neither is military required to get a flu shot, for that matter.

Isn't that to be expected, though

I mean, yeah, that was kind of my point back in January.

As I've said before, if you have good reason to be confident in a proposition, losing a bet made about that proposition will be dominated by the cases where you didn't phrase the bet properly. This is one of the reasons bets are a bad idea.

Hardly anyone is going to phrase the bet properly. It's as if the bet is a computer program, and you are forced to make sure the program runs perfectly the first time you try it.

Sure, but it's a relatively simple computer program. And you can write those to run perfectly the first time if you are very careful, and if the stakes are high enough to incentivize you to double check your work before submitting.

Importantly, the ability to do this is a skill which can be learned, and is important to actually use when making predictions. When I see

90% All mask and vaccine mandates in all Western countries will lift by September.

a red flag goes up in my mind. Because "all" is an extremely ambitious condition, and 90% seems way too high for that. And part of the point of being rational (or rational-adjacent) is to recognize and avoid the exaggeration and hyperbole that everyone else uses in common speech. You might casually say "all of mandates will be gone by September" and, when someone calls you out and questions that as being unrealistic, and asks for a concrete prediction, you should think about it more deeply and walk back the exaggeration. "Well, not literally all, they'll probably keep some for healthcare workers, and maybe one or two nations will keep most of them, but I predict at least 8 out of these 10 specific nations will lift mandates for 90% of the population" or something like that. The fact that this person didn't walk back their bold and unrealistic claim when making a bet is an actual mistake that deserves a loss, not a technicality. The term "all" didn't set off a red flag in their mind, and it should have.

It's a technicality. The proposition it's trying to prove is not "literally all", it's "substantially all". That proposition was proven true by reality,.

The fact that he literally said X doesn't mean that the intent of the bet was to prove X.

"All" means "all". "Substantially all" just invites arguing over "substantially" after the fact. Perhaps you can quibble about rules from subnational entities (since the bet was about "Western countries"), but there are still national mask mandates and national vaccine mandates in place.

"All" means "all".

My whole point is that, no, it doesn't, except literally, and literally is not the intent.

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