Even if no one dies from this, he and the contrarian happy clappers on lesswrong deserve a special recognition for ingenuity at the Darwin Awards. The field is crowded for 2020, what with HCQ and ivermectin truthers, statistical frauds, denialists and blind optimists, but there is a chance they'll dominate the anti-vaxxers in 2021.
This is a nice analogy to the people who in software propagate the ‘enterprise’ mindset. In their minds, their way is the only way and everyone should and will just conform to their needs.
Reality shows that’s not always true, witness for instance the death of the irreplaceable technologies Internet Explorer and Flash.
Argue all you want but these vaccines have been taken by hundreds of people with no ill effect already. So for the people in the article the risks are not worse than the people in the trials for the commercial vaccines.
I don’t know about the scarcity of the ingredients in this vaccine but if I was in government I’d have directed an institute to run a report on theoretic safety and then a trial on volunteers. That’s a better option than locking up the population for over a year while we wait for the commercial vaccines.
Except you can skip steps because volunteers have already tested the vaccine for safety and at the end of the story there’s a vaccine that you can make as much as you want of. Instead of a vaccine controlled by a single company that, surprise surprise, has production issues that according to them surely can’t be overcome by using production capacity at other facilities.
I really don't get why some people hate the "lesswrong rationalists" so much. Such people seem to use rhetorical flushes that stretch credibility a fair bit. For inatance, the parent comment is both stating this is Darwin Award worthy and that at the same level as anti-vaxxers, frauds, etc.
Given Covid's lethality, comparing not taking a vaccine at all to making a batch following expert instructions (in addition to taking the standard mass produced vaccine) seems unreasonable to me.
I'm not suprised to see this post so popular on Less Wrong/the rational community. I can easily imagine the fascination they have for crazy scientists doing experimentations on them selves, cutting all the corners and operating at fair distance of ethical concerns.
I'm not very convinced by the "Motivations" section of the article by the way, but that's a nice stunt nonetheless, and quite fascinating indeed.
This is unnecessarily dismissive. IIRC, Josiah Zayner home brewed a vaccine which led to a positive antibody test, which is in and of itself a pretty impressive outcome given the resources he had available to deploy.
That link seems to be quite incomplete. For example, it never mentions that there were two other people involved, at least one of whom didn’t have the same confounding issues. Here are the results: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WTuRBuy74KlaBzLrd0aTZl85...
There's no such thing as being too dismissive of LessWrong. It is among the more useless parts of the Internet. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker when I was younger and don't want to see anyone make the same mistakes I did.
Stay in school, kids. Or at least don't get your wisdom from a guy whose magnum opus is the world's worst Harry Potter fanfiction.
To the extent you are posting this as a warning to rationally inclined young people to not be seduced by the discourse on LessWrong, your warning is likely to be perceived as cranky by that audience and therefore ineffective. You may want to revisit your style, if that’s indeed your goal.
They've romanticised the stories of scientists self-testing and mixed it with the stories of Jenner and Fleming, misinterpreting their unethical (Jenner) and credit grabbing (Fleming) ways as brilliant contrarianism.
