Shocked to see a Eugene meetup! Sadly we will be out of town that week. Hoping for other excuses to hang out in the near future!

I appreciate your reply.

The government also makes cars have seatbelts and airbags; is this because seatbelt and airbag manufacturers lobbied the government? How dare they make you pay for features you don't want! If you think you're never going to need that airbag, why should you pay for it?

I was going to knee-jerk reply to this and say I'll gladly pay for that because all advanced nations agree that seatbelts and airbags should be standard, but I thought I'd look it up first. Apparently air bags aren't required by the European Commission!

https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/specialist/knowledge/vehicle/safety_design_needs/cars_en

Thanks for opening my eyes to the air bag conspiracy!!!!1

As a reader of this site, I feel like you should understand that humans are ery bad at evaluating small percentages. Under this lens, look at the risk of harm that the vaccination poses to your child, then look at the risk of harm that getting the disease may pose to your child.

As a reader of this site I expect you would pick up on the fact that I was outsourcing this to national health care systems because humans are bad at researching literature on a scientific field of study without coming to conclusions that support their preconceived notions. Even when they know they're susceptible to this kind of bias.

When it comes to needles to stick my new kiddo with, I'm not really being persuaded to do more than the intersection of vaccinations between similar nations."

You don't know enough to decide this. What is "similar" (climate, culture, disease spectrum?) Do you know the history of their immunization laws?

That's incorrect. I know that my generation was vaccinated against a more limited set of diseases and has survived pretty well.

It's not wrong to question US health orthodoxy when it's not at all a secret that pharma can influence US policy and other similar nations haven't followed these recommendations.

Seems to me you opened a bottle of righteous indignation for me that you had saved up for someone else..

I haven't digested your entire reply yet, but I'll respond to this part.

1. Avoiding the fallacy of the one-sided wager. The post talks about cost-benefit analysis, but in a complete cost-benefit analysis one has to consider the risks of both choices under offer, not just one. The post takes specific notice of the default course of action's risks (money, tears, side effects) but focuses less on the risks of the alternative (e.g. toddlers winding up in the ER because they're shitting themselves half to death from rotavirus).

[...]

So we have a mundane explanation for most of the newly introduced vaccines for healthy young children; today's vaccines weren't ready before the '80s.

The unstated (but I thought implied, my mistake) other-side of the wager was: I got many fewer vaccines growing up, and I'm fine.

Less anecdotally, I haven't found a lot of evidence that adults are suffering horribly from diseases that children today are routinely vaccinated against. Is the cost-benefit of the added vaccines as good as the cost-benefit of the 80s era vaccines? Some arrows point to the US having a lower threshold for recommending them, given the variance between nations.

Upvote for interesting and relevant links, although this part made me want to shout at my screen.

(9). Therefore, we should give up on medication and use psychotherapy instead Makes sense right up until you run placebo-controlled trials of psychotherapy ... Another study by the same team finds psychotherapy has an effect size of 0.22 compared to antidepressants’ 0.3-0.5

Even if this is true I don't agree with the cost-benefit analysis. Psychotherapy costs time and money but probably won't cause weight gain, sexual dysfunction and crippling withdrawal if you miss a dose or need to cycle off of them.

EDIT: I guess he says as much in a different article. Hmph.

Makes sense, thanks for the link and your summary.

I've taken a keen interest in soylent but am happy to let others beta test long-term effects for me before I give it a shot :)

FWIW, the way soylent people describe their results is more or less how I describe what happened to me when I adopted a whole food plant-based diet (the "china study diet"): BF% dropped/I got leaner, various body odors improved, huge reduction in acne, became a morning person, was able to stop taking ADHD meds, and felt no negative effects at all. Except for maybe I now have so much energy I just had to pick up distance running and ultimately hurt my ankle. :P

The more time I spend hanging out with rationalists the less comfortable I am making predictions about anything. It's kind of becoming a real problem?

"Do you think you'll be hungry later?" "Maybe"

: /

Separate topic!

(FWIW, I spent about 5 years as a vegetarian, followed by 1.5 years doing the paleo thing, and now subsist entirely off DIY soylent, which combines the virtues of deriving all its protein from animal sources and being processed.)

What I find alarming about soylent-like diets is the idea that you can completely capture human nutritional needs as a table of micronutrients quantities to fill, and then go out and source those individual micronutrients, combine them, and drink.

Aren't you discounting the importance of the configuration of these micronutrients as they arrive in their natural packages? That is, you can certainly decompose an apple into fructose, fiber, vitamins, minerals and water (and etc), but I find it hard to accept that shopping for these individual components, blending, and pouring down your throat is just as good (or better) than eating the apple. Surely we do not completely understand everything nature has done in building us this apple.

D'oh! I thought it meant some kind of special honor. Does it at least mean "was granted tenure and was not fired"? That's not useless information, I guess.

They have very strong incentives (ie earning money and building a career and having patients) to pretend to be certain. People don't want to pay for honest but vague guesses.

I would expect consensus (or the lack thereof) is an important signaler for exposing this kind of bias?