569: Anecdotes Trump Data
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KMO talks with Dr. Steven Vannoy about the psychological effects of extended mask wearing, particularly on children, and the neurological rewards that mask shaming produces. It feels really good to think we're in the right. Later, KMO reads and responds to an email from Bob Brown about dangers of taking a vaccine that has been rushed to market without the usual battery of clinical trials.
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I do wish the downside of cars showed up in the media as vividly as the downside of guns. I don’t think it’s a matter of the convenience of cars, though. Convenience didn’t prevent the 24-hour scary news cycle from totally ruining parenting, for example. I’d suspect that our mutual friend Jim would have an answer: Car advertising is big, and “the drapes must not clash!”
I don’t think it’s irrational to mitigate very small risks of infection during a pandemic. Small mitigations over large numbers of encounters have effects in aggregate, there are a lot of opportunities to be very unlucky, and infection is a compounding risk.
I don’t think Bob is running the numbers reasonably on vaccine risk, even if viewed all in terms of individual risk and not considering the prevention of transmission. Maybe-get-COVID risk seems orders of magnitude worse than definitely-get-vaccine risk, even for young adults. I know Bob thinks the medical establishment is off by orders of magnitude in potential effectiveness of treatment over what he could arrange himself, but that’s a steep claim.