logicp_writings/Book/Being_Right.md

Being Right

We all have a desire to be right, as this greatly simplifies the perceptual frame, allowing us to enjoy reduced anxiety, more permissibile focus and facilitated entry into flow states - necessary to make necessary progress towards our goals (the increased complexity from suspecting or realizing that our assumptions are wrong lead to a necessary remapping of our frame and environment wherein the potential for dangers and proportion of unexplored territory increase).

With this in mind, it's important to be deliberate in continuously referencing this predisposition towards bias, which cannot be consolidated with title or confirmation of asserted belief as fact - these mechanisms are important for deducing correctness of assertions, but they do not rectify one's biases and instead, on the contrary, confirm one's belief which reinforces them.

How does this phenomenon present itself in the COVID era? Well, first, we acknowledge that the narrative and most everyone's opinion was initially that we knew very little about the newly found the threat, did not know precisely how or when it would be solved, and did not understand precisely how it would affect each of us, personally. There was a period of mass agreement where we accepted that our reality could drastically change, and that we were prepared to cooperate in order to yield the greatest potential for:

• survival
• maintained rate of progress
• maintained expectations of eventual future outcome

This rapidly changed, however, as we began to be told that the demands placed on each of us, as members of society, must continue to increase. For some, the demands lead to immediate negative impact on survivability. And for others, such impacts might have been abstracted such as to be less clearly deducible. For yet others, th perception may have been exactly the opposite - an increased lkelihood of survival and success (economic, personal, social, etc).

It is fairly obvious how restrictions in society might lead to negative impacts on survivability, but the issue here is that this obvious aspect of the circumstance means that anyone can proclaim that this is how they are affected, and it is perfectly believable. But how are people affected in the opposite?

Increased survivability and improved social/economic success are actually extremely common attributes in the COVID era, regardless of the threat of disease, and particularly if we focus on perception rather than absolute long term impact, which is very much incomputible.

1. Job Security

In many circumstances, someone's expectation of job security may have actually increased. If one performed a role in systematic distribution of resources for a state entity, or a large organization that is expected to mitiate the effects of SARS-CoV2, then the value of tehir position would have increased.

2. Comfort

If the experienced level of comfort were to have changed such that particular stresses or inconvenience might have been reduced, then this would easily be perfeived as improved survivability

3. Free Money

Nothing affects one's sense of personal freedom quite like the utility of currency, as it can directly yield precisely whatever material resource befits the context of any individual.

4. Boundaries of Reality

The effect of the COVID measures certainly affects people's perception of the boundaries of reality, for it was obvious that productive efficiency was expected to reduce and the narrative alway maintains that this loss of productivity can be recovered from, indicating a sufficient degree of redundancy and resilience in our corresponding systems.

5. Fantasy

The perception of universal change is inherent in any global phenomenon, and, thus, it gives opportunity to ENVISION, or at least suspect that what might have previously been impossible could now have become possible. This includes everything from small achievements or enablements which could present themselves without any required action of one's own, to more extravant or extraordinary and mystical events being more likely to occur in our new version of reality.

Being Right about Society-level Medical Mandates

It takes a special level of concern or threat in order to even present the proposition that human freedom be reduced.

The debate of freedom to do "as we please" vs freedom "to be safe" is rather silly in any but the most extreme circumstances, because if there is any general contention as to the general significance of the threat, then you are effectively also making a case for reducing the threshold for loss of human freedom in exchange for safety, and you should be prepared to argue for the logical conclusion of such a standard

If, indeed, the proposed action is a good one, it should be made self-evident.

For all those who agree with it, or at least offered the least resistance to it, it was evident-enough. Given that there is a significant proportion of them, they will automatically serve as evidence to convince more, as their experience should prove the success of the therapy. This does not mean that they have not died, but rather that they thrive at the levels seen before, that they navigate the worst seasons and that th product has a sufficient period of action. Allowing for this doesn't only prove something is safe and effective, but also proves the intent for which something is being pursued.

The other aspect of this might be those who don't expect themselves or anyone else to be thriving. They see a demand for sacrifice and have interpreted it as a means to demonstrate their virtue. They have seen their own worldview presented in the proposed demand, and all who respect that view must oblige, for refusal is a moral failure as per that world view - a failure which harms universally, systemically and the nature of humanity itself.

Once such baggage and expectation has been bound to a proposal which invites authority into the very bodies and minds of individuals, it becomes a demand to validate one's existence. It becomes necessary to demonstrate a proof that one is worthy of existing, as it is no longer sufficient to simply not observe or record a forbidden action from the person in question. Their very existence is now forbidden, and a judge and jury await the inputs necessary to make a condemnation over that person. Validate yourself through prescried action or own up to your disgraceful nature of being.

You would be hard-pressed to find any reasonable case of inaction which can be rogorously agreed upon as being unethical. A good candidate would be inaction whil ebearing witness to deliberate actions of others which cause direct harm to others, such as being bystandarder to the rape and murder of a woman in public, or being a bystandard to crimes against humanity in the form of officials committing and compelling genocide during a period of tyrannical rule. In all such cases, the inaction can be rationalized as being a reluctance to act for fear of harm to one's person. But what of inaction in the face of the threat of infectious disease?

And here is really the crux of the argument. Though, to be fair, if a right is universal then it should make no difference, but let us examine it anyway.

The case of inaction with respect to infectious disease proposes that there is an infectious agent:

1. whose transmission is more likely to occur if you are not vaccinated
2. whose severity of disease is extraordinary and
3. whose preventative vaccine is safe and effective

1. More likely to be transmitted

Some reports show that severe disease/hospitalization/death are higher in unvaccinated, and this might be true for certain cohorts in certain localities, but it only concerns itself with a shallow temporal range. We have not used the vaccine for long enough to understand:

• The effect of mass vaccination on selection of more infectious variants
• If the use of short-acting antibody production targetting a narrow antigenic range might result in reduced immunity in general over longer time scales

It also ignores many other factors, such as if the eradication of pre-existing immunity in the convalescent might mean net-reduction in SARS-CoV2 immunity (and observational/reinfection data suggest this), and what happens when you lose the virus sinks from the community?

Virus Sinks

If the virus is still replicating in the vaccinated, who supposdly don't get as many symptoms from it, then:

1. The only virus that is replicating is a virus that is evading the Ab which have been produced in those bodies
2. Is a virus that will only stop replicating in an unvaccinated host. Such a host would have to kill the virus off, as they would experience more severe symptoms otherwise.

Now, if we actually look at the data and take it at face value, and recognize that this is just epidemiological data, and not hard data showing immunological assay with expanded T-cell differentiation, or full range of innate and adaptive immunity, then we see that the vaccine does not do a better job than no treatment in those cohorts who are most in need of being protected. Furthermore, we see it allegedly working best in those cohorts for whom it is least necessary. This is all without having yet looked at the data classification itself.

Data Classification Standards

What do we mean by data classification standards?

• Generating of input data
• Qualification of emergency status
• Classification of Health Events which transpire

1. Generation of Input Data

This is perhaps the simplest to begin examining, because you need to simply ask people if they previously would have taken an RT-PCR test in the past when they had no symptoms of disease, and the answer will almost certainly be no. The other question to ask is if the deceased loved ones who died for reasons associated with their known morbidity, such as cancer, were examined for respiratory pathogens post-mortem, or if it ever was an issue consolidated at the final phase of their life. The vast majority will not have had the experience that their sick parent was consistently being tested for RSV or Influenza towards the end of their life, thus we can reason that their deaths were less likely to be contributing to a respiratory death statistic.

We can easily conclude that the generation of input data is based on newly implemented mechanisms that have been adopted at a global scale, and knowing this, we shouldn't disregard the complications which might result from assuming this is a drop-in replacement for previous standards.

2. Qualification of Emergency Status

This is a very simple distinction. A global pandemic can now be declared regardless of the number of dead. Observing evidence that a pathogen is spreading is now enough, and for that reason, we should assume that it could always be a pandemic, even if the threat level is unremarkable compared to periods before the declaration was made.

Some might find this to be a welcome change. That is, why should we not have a more sensitive threshold to bring us into action? It is more proactive and serves to yield a preventative benefit for, in this case, reducing prevalence and severity of disease.

If we are to follow the logic that we can always be in a state of emergency, because there are always microorganisms which can infect humans, then it might be better to argue fro particular constraints on humans as a whole, lest the qualifier become redundant.

The question becomes, then: How did you tolerate the threat of disease before? Were you wrought with peril? Were you constantly agitated that our existence was constantly contending with the threat on every surface you touch? Likely not. It is far more likely that you became convinced that the current threat is so remarkable that you wanted something to be done about it, and that this was not a conclusion that was reached through a democratic process, but something that we were forced to accept under, presumptively, an extraordinary circumstance.

If that is so, then it makes sense to be clear about the fact of one's fear, and to recognize that fear is the enemy of reason. It is also worth understanding that fear changes everything, and that you might not be aware of the extent of its effects.

Then we must ask again - is this an imposition on others to your benefit? Did you feel fear of a threat and does the thought of limiting the movement and activity of those persons you believe most likely to spread disease case you a reduction of anxiety? Because if it does, you should be sure to understand exactly how much safer it really makes you, or even what your definition of safety is.

It has been, quite frankly, the Netflix pandemic. Partly because so much of how we are programmed to feel comes through the cues derived from our media, and partly because it has allowed so many to dramatize their concept of their life at this time. It should at least be acknowledged that, generally speaking (and on the broadest scale), we have been made to have our fear and perception of threat maximized, if even just by the media's need for clicks and hours viewed, and the ease at which it is made available to us.

Classification

There are so very many aspects of classification to elucidate. Perfect definitions seldom exist, but we can always find better definitions for things, so long as we are willing to think critically as to how terms are being used and whether they fulfill our specific needs.

So what classifications/definitions are we talking about with respect to SARS-CoV-2?

Cases, fully/partially vaccinated, un-vaccinated, risk, evidence, deaths, emergency, capacity, variants, vaccine, experimental. We need to know what these mean and how they are talked about today (or how the way in which they are talked about has changed).

1. Cases

When you talk about disease and you think of a case, what do you envision? You envision a person suffering from that disease. How do they suffer? Symptoms!. They suffer physically deducible effects. And though many discussions are to be had about the symptoms that are being experienced and why, the fact of the matter is that cases have not been qualified through symptoms, particularly not through a medical diagnostic assessment that clearly determines case of disease and quantifies the presence of the virus, its reproducivity, and its virulence. We quantify, yes, but through a crude extrapolation from PCR cycle thresholds.

Some might argue that if the cases are being diluted, that the actual severity of disease must then, in fact, be higher than what is being presented, but I would suggest that there are two problems with this line of reasoning:

• The first is that the fact of mild, asymptomatic or perhaps not-infected false positives diluting is not self evident. That someone presents without symptoms or infections does not necessarily mean that there was no case. They may have very well had their unremarkable case. And what of all the others who might not have had symptoms to remark as well? We are hard-pressed to call them all one or the other. Seroprevalence also gives us a means of estimating actual infection, but even this is not comprehensive.
• The second is that we are given a simple means of incrementing the covid deaths through non-covid channels.

This leads to scenarios such as apublic health organization declaring "disease of the unaccinated", and another onlooker bringing up conflicting epidemiological assessments from other localities.

"But different countries, states, cities and organizations might have different preferred standards, particularly during a real pandemic to which we are not accustomed -> we are doing great, considering the circumstances!"

Well, actually, that is the entire point of the criticism. We are defining the fundamental process by which we detrmine whether it is, in fact, a pandemic, which assumes we all agree that we wish to be data-driven, but which has no absolute typing system for the data upon which our computation sare being performed.

What does this lead to? Increased dynamic ranges, increased variability, increased degree of counfounding influence, undefined behaviour, and essentially anything which relates to an increased proportion of incomputability in our equations. To place the fate of the greatest number of people on a new behaviour with a lower standard of acuity is something which may never be completely understood, but that is part of the reason this book, and others, are being written.