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Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
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1 Dec, 5 tweets, 1 min read
I'm unambiguously pro-vaccine, but this articulates very precisely something I have found deeply concerning, and that I think everyone should find concerning.
It's very bad to countenance propaganda, even if you think it's for a good cause, because propaganda has a deeply corruptive effect on the public debate that is never limited to the issue at hand.
But more fundamentally, I think that even if the effects could be contained, it would still be wrong to tolerate propaganda in the public forum. It seems to me that it degrades us in a way. This is the sort of cases that have led to me to reject consequentialism in recent years.
Every time I feel like I'm forced not to say something I believe to be true, let alone say something I believe to be false (although this I never do), I can't help but feel very strongly that I have been debased and humiliated in some way.
I have all sorts of consequentialist arguments in favor of a very robust conception of freedom of expression, and I think they are good arguments, but fundamentally the reason why I'm fanatically in favor of such a conception is because I feel that way.

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Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
1 Dec
Cette affaire est devenu mon nouveau détecteur à cons. Dès que j'entends quelqu'un défendre Bouleau au motif qu'il n'avait pas à faire preuve de complaisance vis-à-vis de Zemmour, j'en conclus immédiatement qu'il est débile, car seul un débile peut sortir un argument aussi con.
Débile ou tellement aveuglé par sa haine pour Zemmour qu'il est incapable de reconnaître l'évidence, ce qui est aussi une forme de connerie 🤷‍♂️
Exactement, on peut éviter de faire preuve de complaisance sans pour autant poser uniquement des questions débiles et sans intérêt, même si les journalistes et les cons d'une façon générale ont du mal à le comprendre.
Read 5 tweets
Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
28 Nov
What are those "smart, comprehensive measures" people are talking about exactly and what purposes would they serve? Those are just empty slogans that people keep using to perpetuate the myth that policy could save us from COVID-19. Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing.
She's talking about containment measures to "buy us time". But buy us time for what exactly? I've read some people talk about using that time to make a vaccine tailored against Omicron and inject people with it, but this is a fantasy. How can people not see this?
Even if regulatory agencies didn't get in the way, which they almost certainly would, it would take months before it could even be produced in large volumes. And then what? After almost a year, we still haven't managed to convince a lot of people to get the original vaccine!
Read 10 tweets
Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
28 Nov
It's pretty insane that, with a paltry TFR of 1.8, France is nevertheless ahead of any other developed nation with the exception of Israel. I hadn't realized that it had fallen so much in the US, which used to be another developed country where it was holding up decently.
Along with France and the US, Ireland and the Nordics used to be another exception, but it looks as though it's slipping over there as well. It's also going down in France, but more slowly.
By the way, many people think that France's relatively high TFR is due to immigration, but this is not true. Other countries with lots of immigrants are losing ground much faster and, if you disaggregate, you see that immigrants only increase France's TFR by about 0.1 point.
Read 7 tweets
Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
27 Nov
I wrote this last winter and, not only does the basic argument still applies (it's impossible to know exactly what effect restrictions have but it's not huge and they are not worth it), but now that most people are vaccinated it applies even more 🤷‍♂️ cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…
By the way, I know that the impact of restrictions on well-being is subjective, but as I explain in the post, it doesn't mean that you can't know that they don't pass a cost-benefit test, because you can show that, *even if you make ridiculously generous assumptions about how
much they affect transmission*, the upper bound on how large the impact of restrictions on well-being can be before they no longer pass a cost-benefit test is so small that nobody can seriously deny their actual impact on well-being is higher.
Read 5 tweets
Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
27 Nov
I expect that existing immunity will continue to protect well against severe disease with Omicron, but I’m not going to start accepting claims made by public health officials without any data just because they validate my priors, so let’s just wait a little before celebrating.
If you’re wondering why I expect that immunity will continue to protect well against severe disease, you should read this post, where I argued that new variants were going to keep emerging but that they wouldn’t take us back to square one. cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…
The good news is that, if Omicron really is more transmissible than Delta (which it may be, though of course it’s not 6 times more transmissible), we should know very soon whether I was right. Unless I was actually wrong, in which case this is the bad news 😅
Read 6 tweets
Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
26 Nov
Lmao, I told you this was going to happen, but they aren't going to say that B.1.1.529 has a R0 of 45 so hopefully people will stop making those ridiculous claims now. cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie… Image
In this case, incidence was so low when this new lineage started to expand that it could easily just be a founder effect (though genomic data suggests it's more than that), so inferring the transmissibility advantage from the transmission advantage is even more risky than usual.
Moreover, this analysis suggests that a lot of this transmission advantage might reflect immune evasion rather than a transmissibility advantage, but as I argued before even without that population structure alone could be doing a lot of work here.
Read 5 tweets

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