Merry Christmas, everyone!
Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 25, 2022
- 163
- 4
What is this place?
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
If in doubt, please post it!
Rules
- Courtesy
- Content
- Engagement
- When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
- Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
- Accept temporary bans as a time-out, and don't attempt to rejoin the conversation until it's lifted.
- Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
- Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
- The Wildcard Rule
- The Metarule
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Has anyone read the new ig4 vaccine study + theorizing, described in these articles?
https://www.rintrah.nl/the-trainwreck-of-all-trainwrecks-billions-of-people-stuck-with-a-broken-immune-response/
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/booster-caused-immune-tolerance-explains
More effort than this please.
Its the small scale thread
My mistake! Warning rescinded.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You know how every week there's a new "racist, homophobic hate crime", or "beloved tv star Guy Dickinson accused of disgusting sex crimes", or "latest: republicans literally genociding poor refugees to own the libs", but if you look into it for a few hours, or just wait a month, it was just not true - that hydra head crumbles to dust, only to be replaced by five more when you turn around?
The same is true of "vaccine sterilizing your ovaries with lipid nanoparticles", "blood clots killing millions", or "covid destroying the immune system", or a thousand others. The first dozen times I saw something, I looked into it, but that was two years ago. And it's from both sides! Unvaxxed sperm's left-wing mirror is amateur virologists on twitter speculating about virus-induced organ-failure because the hateful neoliberal right-wing won't let us enter our third year of lockdowns.
More options
Context Copy link
tl;dr I’m not worried
The simple reason vaccination correlates with mortality is that vaccination correlates with age. (Insert caveats about youth vaccination tradeoffs here.) Last I heard vaccination was still protective against hospitalization and mortality from C19, which seems the most relevant metric here, tho I’m happy to update if you have new data.
Vaccine protection has been fading since V1, but my priors are that immune evasion is more important than diminishing immune response. But… mRNA vaccines are brand spanking new, so we don’t know fully understand their limitations and possibilities fully. If mRNA approaches linger and cause a different type of immune response than traditional vaccines then maybe we can’t use them for longer term protection. Or, maybe we can use this vector to inhibit certain types of autoimmunity; a cure for rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis would be tremendous. It’s still very early days so I take quite seriously the possibility that mRNA vaccines have serious problems, but the stuff I’ve seen to date, including the links above, have yet to convince me of this thesis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link