This morning a friend bet me $1,000 that the death rate for vaccinated older people in the UK was higher than the death rate for unvaccinated older people.
I made a G today.
TR? How did you resolve it? He didn’t just accuse your sources of being fake news and link you a youtube video?
Obviously that’s a great bet. But I can’t imagine anyone who would make it would be convinced by readily available evidence. Otherwise they would never make the bet in the first place.
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He actually paid - when we all know there is no such thing as objective truth anymore? Weird.
Yeah, what kind of friend actually pays off a $1k bet while simultaneously believing anti vax propaganda?
Note that’s $700 USD.
He hasn’t paid yet but I’m very confident he will - in fact I’ll bet one of you another grand that he pays if you like ;) He’s wealthy and not an unreasonable guy. He says he has a source for this information, he’ll dig it out and show me, I’ll show him what’s wrong with it, he’ll pay. I was able to take the bet without checking the internet because I was so sure that couldn’t be true, so he thought he had an informational advantage over me.
To me he’s like the archetypal example of what happens to a pretty smart but somewhat naive guy who has bad heuristics for filtering through the firehose of bullshit that is the internet. He tends to be suspicious of institutional motives and his modus operandi is to find an expert in a field with a lot of on-the-ground experience in something and then buy what they say about that thing. This is a good strategy in real life, but a bad strategy when you’re on the internet, the expert’s name is Dr. Pierre Kory, and you only know about them because you’re plugged into a network of professional contrarians who sift through the 8 billion people on the planet looking for experts who will give you contrarian takes.
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Please keep the thread updated on how the bet plays out.
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Hopefully you were able to nail down a precise definition of “death rate”.
Well, this is the thing. Like this guy is a long-time professional gambler. I’m not going to have to explain base rate fallacy to him or anything like that. But… I don’t know whether to blame age (he’s in his mid-50s), his drinking issues or brain-rot caused by long term exposure to the internet, but it seems like he’s kind of lost the ability to put information through critical filters before tossing it on the pile.
I don’t think he would have thought that the vaccine was making COVID worse. To the extent he thought about it at all, he would have assumed there were cohort differences which explained it. You know, like maybe people who don’t bother getting vaccinated are in amazing health, or maybe they had COVID already and natural immunity is more effective, or maybe they live under circumstances with a low risk of COVID exposure. You and I know that these things are insufficient to counteract the effect of vaccines, but that’s because we have a coherent mental picture of how all this works. His personal Overton window on what he’s prepared to countenance believing, if I can put it like that, is a lot… fuzzier. He seems to have lost the ability to accurate diagnose when something looks fishy and needs to be fact checked.
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Just to follow up, you can look at a recent report from the UK and see in Table 5 that in the older age groups (50 and above) substantially more vaccinated people are dying than unvaccinated.
Obviously the reason for this is that the underlying population of older vaccinated people is much larger than the population of unvaccinated people. And if you adjust for the population in each group (as Table 6 does), you see that the relation flips - per capita vaccinated deaths are much lower than unvaccinated. (Although not to the extent I would have predicted - in the >=80 group, it’s 142 to 65).
But if I were an angle shooter, I’d say that the “death rate” I was talking about was “number of people dying per day”, and I’d argue that I win. So I hope you were able to pin down an agreed-upon definition of “death rate”.
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So he’s like 90% of American boomers?
“Pretty smart” guy doesn’t sound like most boomers.
Chris is quite possibly getting welched here imo, by the method posted by spidercrab. Unclear definitions
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Stupid to not have a clearly defined metric for a bet like that.
Rates have denominators though. Not that that would stop a welcher just trying to justify it to themselves. Also if the terms weren’t in writing he could just say he never used the word rate.
Vaccinated death rate = vaccinated deaths/country population
Unvaccinated death rate = unvaccinated deaths/country population
EZ game
Right, that’s why I specified “number of people dying per day”.
Or what suzzer said.
This. I don’t see how Chris is getting paid.
@ChrisV please post all discussions of the definition of “death rate” with your betting partner. This should be fun.
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You still taking action on this?
Well I would, but I don’t know how I would prove that he paid me.