site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Pharma companies held back the release of their vaccines to not give any perceived benefit to Trump.

Citation? I thought the bottleneck was FDA approval, with mass production starting alongside Phase 2 success.

He didn't do much about global warming. I'm happy about that. Honestly worrying about something with consequences 20 years out feels a little silly at this point. It was nice when we had such long time horizons.

Do you smoke? (Or purposely do something else that can ruin your body on a roughly 20 year time scale.) I don't find this argument persuasive - even accepting "consequences 20 years out" at face value, "consequences 20 years out" isn't dispositive of "prevention best done now."

Citation?

Steve Sailer is the one who keeps harping on the vaccine delay most, including a retrospective recently. Not the most persuasive source to cite, but he does cite his own sources and doesn't seem to be making up any facts, just adding speculative but more-plausible-than-the-official motives. The official story is that pharma companies did hold back the analysis of their vaccines until right after the election, but only because it's okay to violate experiment protocols when you're kinda feeling super nervous.

I thought the bottleneck was FDA approval, with mass production starting alongside Phase 2 success.

Pfizer announced 90% effectivity in a preliminary analysis of their Phase 3 trials on November 9, announced the analysis was finished on November 18, applied for FDA approval on November 20, and got the Emergency Use Authorization on December 11.

Certainly the FDA taking 3 weeks to approve was as unhelpful than Pfizer delaying for 2 weeks, but both decisions probably killed thousands in the end.

Of course, the real bottleneck was the FDA, because we could have saved tens or hundreds of thousands more lives if not for decisions like "Forbidding the human challenge trials we could have done in April", "Not jailing the people who did the forbidding and then doing human challenge trials in May", etc. But letting people die in large numbers because of mindless authoritarianism is part and parcel of modern society, whereas letting people die in less-large numbers because you want to hide information from voters feels like a new low.

COVID-19 vaccines: history of the pandemic’s great scientific success and flawed policy implementation The FDA and companies delay vaccine trial until after the US election

Further discussion 25:35 from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Covid Vaccine (with Vinay Prasad)

Multiple companies announced the completion of their vaccines immediately after the election.


This feels like the health equivalent of street racing, motorcycle driving, skydiving, and shooting up heroin. And then worrying about smoking as a health risk. I'd tell someone with those problems to go ahead and smoke if it gets rid of any of their other terrible habits.

I'm also aware that we can basically do massive climate change on the cheap whenever we want. Sulfur dioxide seeding in the upper atmosphere or a massive sun shade in space are orders of magnitude cheaper than carbon emissions reduction.

Multiple companies announced the completion of their vaccines immediately after the election.

Which ones? Weren't Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all in Phase 3 by the time the election happened?

I'm also aware that we can basically do massive climate change on the cheap whenever we want. Sulfur dioxide seeding in the upper atmosphere or a massive sun shade in space are orders of magnitude cheaper than carbon emissions reduction.

And it'd be better to begin geoengineering now than to wait 20 years, wouldn't it?

Assume that it works, why would it? It's not as though the climate has become intolerable, or will be 20 years from now?