I’m gathering a long term professional gambler is horses mainly given Australian? If so, makes sense, the several people I know who bet (mostly) horses professionally are completely ignorant to virtually everything else going on in the world. Don’t understand covid, politics, medicine or really anything else. It’s quite astonishing because they are clever, analytical people although much much younger than your guy who may just study the form intently.
Has the “death rate” conversation not happened yet? What’s the hold up?
Trying to frame death rate as per entire UK population is the type of argument someone who didn’t go to college would try to make. It’s not the expectation of what death rate means in this scenario and would be similar to trying to apply a non-standard definition of a word or something. Also would have laid odds that this was some dumb Facebook meme like the one suzzer’s guy fell for. Wait for it…
A video shared on social media and viewed thousands of times features American writer Alex Berenson saying that most people who died from COVID-19 in the United Kingdom in September were fully vaccinated.
LOL
The 30-second clip (here) was taken from the Oct. 12 Joe Rogan Experience podcast (here), on which Berenson was a guest.
LMFAO
The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
The data Berenson cited are based on real numbers from the government agency. But the office that issued the data told PolitiFact that the numbers don’t support Berenson’s claim about vaccine-caused mortality.
Hahahaha
Berenson is public with his critical stance on vaccines (here) and has been banned from Twitter for repeatedly spreading COVID-19 misinformation (here).
This is so easy because it’s always the same: do-your-research big brainer was on teh Facebookz, Twitterz, and Joe Rogan podcastz and couldn’t be bothered to do the (literally) 30-second search required to debunk.
Also, to be clear, this guy isn’t making some super nuanced point about the definition of death rates here. If he circles back around to that, it’s because he’ll realize he’s been eating too much horse paste while watching Joe Rogan. That’s not the actual meaning of death rate in the specific comparison (i.e., using entire country as denominator) of these populations, so thinking there is some kind of legitimate angle there is not only disingenuous but objectively wrong in context. It’s a pretty easy thought experiment: imagine that instead this dude wanted to bet on TOTAL DEATHS. There’s no way @ChrisV ever goes for that even though total deaths and death rate are equivalent if you remove the scalar.
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I disagree a little, or maybe I’m misinterpreting your point. I think the falsity of the Berenson claim is more subtle than the stupid “I’m going to calculate rate as the number of vaccinated/unvaccinated people dying per day, rather than as a percentage of the number of vaccinated/unvaccinated people” angle-shoot that I came up with.
He’s actually comparing per capita death rates and it seems to be true that the per capita death rate is higher for vaccinated individuals than for unvaccinated individuals for that particular age band. So if you made a specific bet that the death rate for the 10-59 group was higher for the vaccinated population than for the unvaccinated population, I’m not even sure it’s an angle shoot to say that Berenson’s claim is correct.
It’s just incredibly misleading because most of the youngest part of that distribution is both unvaccinated and at low risk, while the oldest part of the distribution is more vaccinated and also more at risk. (Simpson’s paradox) And the health office is obviously correct that the seemingly-counterintuitive comparison is because of the coarseness of that 10-59 age band, and that if you properly age adjusted the mortality rates, you get the right inference. (i.e., age-adjusted mortality risk is lower for vaccinated people)
Edit: again, may have misinterpreted your post. Also, Berenson is a complete shitbag.
He did indeed produce the Berenson data. Here’s the graph:
This was nothing like what he’d originally claimed. Obviously the explanation here is differing vaccination rates by age, as others have said. In fact vaccination is only open to 12+ in the UK, so including 10-11 year olds is a pretty nice tactic to get this result.
He’s more or less conceded defeat but he has a week to produce the data, which I think he will take basically just to troll. I’m not the only one taking this side of the bet, all of us are in a gambling syndicate together and this whole bet process is public on one of our chat channels, so he is definitely paying. He actually doesn’t have a choice because our accounting guy will just transfer the money from him to me internally.
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I was talking specifically about @ChrisV 's guy’s argument, not Berenson’s. I only brought up Berenson because quick search and reading multiple articles tagging it as “a link being shared on Facebook” practically guaranteed that vaccinated death rate > unvaccinated death rate in the UK is a prominent gotcha meme reverberating in the derposphere.
However, one thing I know is that the people citing this stuff usually can’t even get the details of the fake news they read correct, which obv is a big surprised Pikachu, but I never assume they’ll be on the same plane as the thing they’re citing. Their consumption and understanding of news is like a Fake News Edition of Telephone Game that you play in school, so not only do you have to parse bullshit, you usually have to do it twice and then try to see which part of the Fake News they encoded poorly to fully understand what’s happening. What stuck out to me was that the age band argument (10-59) can’t possibly be the thing @ChrisV’s guy was betting on initially:
Right, it makes absolutely no sense because the 10-59 group isn’t “older people.” They are specifically not the older people in this data. The way I read the OP was basically the opposite of this, i.e., 65+ or however older was defined.
He’d also originally claimed that deaths from COVID were higher among vaccinated people, but the data eventually produced was for all deaths, which I wouldn’t have bet on (without looking up data first) because who knows, maybe there’s some weird quirk where being unvaccinated and 70+ correlates with being in good health or something. I mean almost certainly not, but I wouldn’t bet on it against someone claiming to be in possession of data which says that.
We didn’t even bother to define “older” because he didn’t know exactly what age range he was claiming and I was so sure this would not be true for any definition of “older” at all. This guy is not the type to try to rules lawyer me by being like “defined as people born between July 3 and August 27, 1923” or whatever.
Yeah what freaks me out, like I said, is that this guy is not dumb and understands how statistics can be misused etc. Maybe he’s losing mental acuity, but I tend to think it’s what happens when you mainline Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein podcasts. Like he’s by no means a committed anti-vaxxer (not vaxxed himself yet but lives in South Island NZ and thinks there’s no rush and that getting it now will mean reduced efficacy by the time he’s exposed) but he has flirted with “vaccine injury” bullshit. To him that’s an open question the way “is Omicron less severe” is to us right now. I think if you watch contrarian takes all day, you have an incredibly broad view of what might or might not be true. And I think that’s what leads to the Fake News Telephone Game, which I’ve seen from him before. Because anything could be true, you have no mental scaffolding in which to contextualise what you hear.
BUT CNN WAS MEAN AND SAID JOE TOOK HORSE PASTE!
Which is somehow much much worse than having Berenson on to spread dangerous misinformation over and over and over.
Well you could have mentioned that sooner. I thought it was just some rando like @WichitaDM’s buddy.
Also nice angle shoot trying to get people to bet you that he would pay up when you know you have a failsafe, that you fail to mention. :p
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Yeah I wasn’t actually going to take these bets. “Here is a spreadsheet row showing $$ transferred from a guy to me” doesn’t constitute proof anyway.
Yeah but me and Microbet could have vouched for you which would probably be good enough.
Also Berenson’s whole argument was based on total deaths, not just deaths from COVID? Like he really put that forward or did he try to just say deaths and let everyone assume deaths from covid?
Yeah. Berenson is a vaccine injury truther. When he presented the graph above, on Rogan I think it was, he said “I can’t imagine what the explanation for this could be other than vaccine injury”. I’ll leave it to you whether you think that’s incompetence or a lie. Berenson is making a ton of money being Anti Vaccine Guy.
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I know a lot of these people. The contrarian_bros have weak defenses against certain types of soundbytes / headlines, and Facebook-type algorithms have completely captured them.
Yeah, although hes a podcast/YooToob addict, doesn’t look at Facebook at all. He gets the same content curated for him by guys like Bret Weinstein.
I think a big part of what has happened to him is his tendency to fall back on abstract armchair reasoning rather than deal in concrete facts. Like he has this idea that there is regulatory capture of governments by pharma companies and that therefore official accounts of vaccine safety are not to be trusted, for example. This is hard to argue against because there is, in fact, regulatory capture of governments by pharma companies. That just isn’t as salient as he thinks it is in this instance.
I think this is another consequence of this lack of mental scaffolding he has. Like the more fuzzy your assessment of concrete facts is, the more you fall back on these generalities. For example, I think that the reason members of Congress have stock portfolios that outperform indexes is because of inside information and corruption. I have no concrete facts to back this up, but it makes sense to me. And up until a certain point, if you try to argue that no, actually, they had super smart people making shrewd decisions, here’s some documentation, I’m going to laugh at you and call you naive. The documentation is going to have to be super detailed and open-and-shut before I let go of my intuitive idea of what is probably happening there. And when we live in a world awash with facts and you’re not great at distinguishing between the trustworthy and untrustworthy ones, you have to fall back on these generalized heuristics more and more.
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The lesson of our age is logical thinking is all worthless confirmation bias to build our ego (e.g. Sklansky) or trick people, and data contains the actual answers (e.g. facebook engagement algos or alpha zero vs Stockfish 8). We are busy using the data for horrible purposes, but the lesson is there.
I work for a university where “data-driven” is a huge buzzword.
All I hear is “find me stats that back up the position I already have”.
They are still engaging in the same worthless confirmation bias activities. Gotta get the humans out of the loop entirely. ZERO.
Chris friend believed in his own logical thinking but it was no match for the algos. Nobody is because the algos have seen you or me a million times before.
Data-driven is great if you really want to find an answer to a question. But 99% of the time it’s just used for advocacy.
The problem is Chris’ friend thinks he’s looking at data to find an answer to a question. But he’s not aware of his emotional 3rd-way-Rogan-bro tribal pull, which will always trump reason and lead him to the same conclusions as them. Who wants to be the naive government stooge in a group? The sneer is all-powerful.
Eureka!
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