Lurker > ItsKaljinyuTime

Cacciato posted...

Goddamn youre dramatic.

I don't think so. Developers from the games industry and beyond are really leaning into this with seemingly no concern for the ramifications. None of them seem to have any answers to questions like "What if you ChatGPT yourself out of a job someday?"

People say that AI isn't creative because it relies on pre-existing works. Humans rely on pre-existing works. How creative is a human, anyway? How creative is a published and profitable author, anyway?

Undertale relies on Mother/Earthbound. Pizza Tower relies on Wario and Rayman. Undertale was so beloved that Toby Fox is Nintendo's new boyfriend. Could an AI really not be fed lots and lots of Wario and Rayman and be told "Now pitch me a concept for a game like this, but with different characters?"

adjl posted...

Based on what, exactly?

Based on it being three years so far. Maybe I underestimate just how much modern medicine sucks at discovering things, but I thought we'd be further along by now.

LinkPizza posted...

We already know some of the factor. But not all of them But without knowing all the factors, you can only get a higher or lower risk due to certain things Even with ALL the factors, it would be the same And there will always be luck There will never not be luck Because the body does different things every time Thats why its not always exactly the same every time you get sick Sometimes, you body handles it better or worse, for example Things change in you body that you dont even know about sometimes When we get checks up at the doctor, they check a lot of things we dont check in the daily So, you wont always know something changed And even then, youre always rolling the dice You need to understand that higher and lower risk arent exact numbers because health and people in general dont work like that Luck always plays a part, whether you like it or not And what we said was what you were asking wasnt a mystery Those things have been answered But there is always more to find The way you were posting sounded like you thought they knew next ton nothing about COVID, when thats far from the truth

Again, I know we know some of the factors. I've already said I'm pretty sure we should know more.

And if we did somehow have all the factors, ALL of the factors? Then there wouldn't be luck. Because we would know everything that can possibly happen to risk/prevent an infection. And then we can compare that to each case to narrow down what happened. Even factors like the different things the body does from time to time. If we know what those different things are, if we know what meaningful changes the body can go through that affect the likelihood of infection, and if we can determine that a person went through one of those changes, we can say "This affected your likelihood of infection."

But we don't know that yet. Like you said, there's still more to find. So no, these things have not been answered yet.

We will always be scratching our head a little because nothing is exact So people have better responses against the virus That could just be his genetics Or when he got treated Or a smaller viral load, or he was vaccinated You assume that dont know how the 65 year old patient survived But maybe they do But since they cant just give out a persons medical history to random people, youd probably ever know If were talking about hypotheticals, it doesnt really help since anything can happen. How do you know they dont understand why the 65 year old cancer patient survived? You dont The doctors may know he had a high chance for many reasons And they are trying to figure out this stuff z you keep talking like they arent doing it This is why people dont understand what you want You say they should be finding out this stuff But thats exactly what they are doing So, if you agree them at they are still researching, then there was no actual point on you making this topic except to troll Research doesnt happen overnight Research takes a long time Just because you dont hear every discovery made doesnt mean they arent researching

I made this topic to say that I expected us to not be asking why glaringly risky cases are surviving the virus. I thought we'd know that by now. So if we don't, I think we should do more to figure that out.

And then came all that talk about how there was nothing to figure out and how everything's been answered. It clearly hasn't been answered.

We do know more More than we knew when we first started. So, what do you mean by we should know more They can only do so much research at a time

Not more than what we knew when we first started, we should know more than we currently know. I expected us to know more about this by now.

sveksii posted...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfYJsQAhl0

You're vastly underestimating the complexity of biology. Hell, we're still trying to fully understand something as "simple" as the flow of water.

If we weren't able to learn what factors affect how you'll respond to the virus, we'd know literally nothing about risk factors. So clearly biology isn't so complex that we can't learn anything. We've learned some things. I just think we should know more things.

adjl posted...

We can empirically say that all vaccine-related cases have been mild enough that zero deaths have occurred. That means the risk of death from vaccine-related myocarditis is vanishingly low.

If you roll a die and get 1 three times in a row, do you assume that all subsequent rolls will be 1 because you can't assume that trends will apply to you perfectly? Or do you recognize that a small sample deviating from what the odds would tell you to expect does not mean the odds are incorrect?

For that matter, how far do you take that? Do you refuse to go outside because the stated risk of being struck by lightning could be much higher for you? Do you spend all your money on lottery tickets because the odds of losing might not be as high for you as for everyone else? Where do you draw the line of concluding that trends don't apply to you perfectly because this one unlikely thing happened?

"Low" doesn't mean "zero." But as far as how far I take it, it's like this: I look at what probability says should happen. If it doesn't happen, then I ask "Okay, now how do I feel about the odds? What do I think will happen? Because the experts turned out to be wrong."

I didn't ask "why should people try to figure things out?". I asked "why do you feel they should have already figured out everything there is to know about Covid?", which is a very different question.
It's about answering as many questions as possible, but there will always be limits to how many questions can be answered (and they're still only going to be answered by the best available guesses). Heck, in most cases, answering one question reveals dozens more, because that's just the nature of our infinitely complex universe. That doesn't mean nobody should try, but it does mean you sometimes have to accept that time, manpower, and funding are all finite and temper your expectations accordingly.

Research is ongoing, and likely will be for the rest of our lives. I'm not saying there's nothing to figure out, I'm saying that it will never be figured out as comprehensively as you seem to be demanding.

I didn't say everything, I said we should be doing more and knowing more than we do now.

And that was luck. That was the product of countless factors like the movement of people, where you went and when you went there, the air currents and conditions wherever you were, the hygiene, PPE practices, and vaccination status of those around you... The risk of infection did not manifest for you not because it wasn't there, but because you were lucky enough that it wasn't realized.

"Luck" is a reductive term, it's not a "mystery" what happened. Those "countless factors" are still identifiable. I didn't come in contact with the virus because I did this thing and that thing, other people did this thing and that thing, and so on.

You also come into contact with countless viruses every single day, yet are not infected by them. Infection is not so simple as a binary "contact virus-->get sick." Your immune system is constantly working to beat down would-be infections before they can cause you harm. If you do become infected, it's because something has made it past those early lines of defense. That can be the result of any number of possibilities, including a larger pathogen load, an impaired immune response (which in turn has many potential causes), or a pathogen that's particularly good at getting in.

Then that means my immune system was too strong for the virus. That's not luck either, that's something science can figure out. If an immune system can be too strong for the virus.

Oh, blood pressure has already been considered. That's an easy one, given that hypertension is usually pretty well-documented for patients and BP is monitored constantly for as long as you're in the hospital. Hypertension has been identified as significant risk factor for becoming seriously ill with Covid, though as with any risk factor, that doesn't guarantee severe illness.

I'm not talking about broadly associating blood pressure with Covid, I'm talking about that hypothetical minute variation in blood pressure (which no machine would detect) triggering a butterfly effect that ultimately worsens the infection. That will never be researched, because it's far too obscure and has too little predictive value to be worth investing in.

That's the blood pressure factor I'm talking about. If such a butterfly effect is possible, science should be aware of it.

All I need from other people is the Big List Of Factors.

Virologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, and anyone else involved in the field can and do write literal PhD theses on that subject that barely scratch the surface of the tip of the iceberg that is that question. You will not find a comprehensive answer to it anywhere, let alone on a video game message board. A comprehensive answer does not and will not ever exist. It's just too complex a question.

Alternatively, just say that everything is a factor. Absolutely everything which you, your ancestors, and everyone that is or has ever been around you have done and experienced has had some impact on who you are now and how the finer nuances of your body work. As I mentioned earlier, if the 45,818,169th nucleotide on your third chromosome is an A instead of a G because you're related to a human that got busy with a neanderthal 60,000 years ago, your risk of severe illness/death is doubled. That's the kind of scale you need to look at to get a comprehensive picture of your risk (and you need to do this for every disease if you're going to hold them all to the same standard), and it just isn't feasible to cover everything on such a scale.

You don't need to say "Everything is a factor" and close the book on it. You can further research by looking into these outlier cases and figuring out what went right/wrong. Get actual concrete answers instead of saying "Well it could've been anything."

LinkPizza posted...

Science does know some ways to handle the virus. For example, the vaccine that you refuse to take even though its about as dangerous as the other vaccines, as far as anyone knows No vaccine works 100%, or is 100% safe for everyone The same goes for this one Some people will have adverse reactions Thats normal But you refuse to get one of the things that helps And again, some of it comes to random luck Just because you dont believe it doesnt make it any less fact Thats just how the body works, sometimes Also, in you post, you mentioned knowing about as much medically as anyone else If thats true, then knowing all those factors wouldnt help as much as you think And even then, the factors arent exact numbers They will never be for any disease, AFAIK The factors will usually be things like higher risk, lower, risk, etc No exact numbers, though Thats goes for pretty much anything, though Doctor dont deal in absolutes, because there are none when it comes to health People can get better or worse at the flip of a switch And for you example, science can only figure that out if they do a study with hundreds of people, where some used the shampoo and others didnt And even then, it can only say if one had higher or lower risk, if anything changed at all But again, those wont give you exact results Maybe using it gives you lower risk of catching it That doesnt mean you still cant catch it Just because some factors have higher or lower risks doesnt mean it will always work in favor of one or the other

I'm not asking for "ways to handle the virus." I'm asking for what factors affect how an individual will handle the virus. If we can know that, like, actually know all those factors, then there is no "luck." We'll know why some things happen and why other things don't happen. To this you might say "Well that's an incredible amount of research that isn't practical to undertake," but again, the initial conflict of this thread was the idea that there was nothing left to figure out. There's clearly this.

Again, ideally we should not be scratching our heads over how the 65 year old cancer patient survived the virus. We should, after figuring out all of the things can have an effect, be able to go through what we know about this individual cancer patient and discern what likely happened. We should be able to eliminate things here and there until we come to "Ah it was... likely the viral load, or something. Plus he has an unusually strong immune system."

And you assume that they are always looking at one specific thing in research But thats not always the case. Some researchers may study exact things in diseases Some look at it more broadly They are still studying it. For all we know, next week, they may come out with results on how a specific food can affect it COVID They are still studying it and finding out new things But that doesnt mean we dont know a lot already Why do you assume they arent researching it? Science is uncovering facts

I never said they weren't researching it, I said I think we should know more by now.

agesboy posted...

gigantic amount of hubris and assumptions here

I know about myself medically as much as anyone else knows about themselves medically, I mean. I'm saying I don't need you personally to tell me how I tanked the virus, I mean I need you to tell me all the ways someone CAN tank the virus, and from that I'll figure out which one I probably used.

LinkPizza posted...

You can work you way to those answers. It just like LITERALLY EVERY OTHER DISEASE, we wont know everything. You do understand that, right? There is NO DISEASE where we know 100% about that, right? And you do understand that they are still researching COVID, right? They havent stopped

You keep acting like everybody is the same. You think you can read an article that will explain why you dont have it as bad But an article like that wont exist because some of the reasons you dont have it as bad is unique to you You are different from other people, so an article cant tell you all those reasons If you want the articles, look them up We have already mentioned some things that are different between people Im not going to do research for you to ignore it and not read it Your problem is you havent even tried to look up the information Or you would know this stuff Its stuff weve even shared in other topics before For example, COPD, asthma, and diabetes are some of the things that can make COVID worse for some people Having any, all, or none of those are differences between humans that can change that. On article has all. It what disease has an article that talks about 100% everything about a disease? The answer is none Because you want something done to COVID that hasnt been done for any disease The problem is, you may not know if it all applies to you. People can have I diagnosed issues. You know that, right? Another problem is people dont always have s constant up-to-date analysis of their immune system If you know so much, then what was your viral load? Thats another important factor. Do you even know how to find out?

But I'm not saying everyone is the same. I'm not saying the way I tank the virus is the same way someone else will tank the virus. But what I am saying is that all of the ways that a virus CAN be tanked should be known by science, or that science should be researching that. I am different in many ways from other people, but not all of those differences matter. For instance, I probably didn't survive the virus because I, uhh... use a particular shampoo. But if I did survive the virus because I use a particular shampoo, that's something science can uncover through research.

Same way they uncover things like "Blood pressure likely has an effect on immune system response. So if your blood pressure is different in a way that matters from someone else's blood pressure, that's a point for/against you as far as surviving the virus. Now we count all of the other factors for/against you to get your full likelihood." It's just there are clearly more factors beyond blood pressure and respiratory health. Science should be uncovering those factors. Science still has that to figure out.

adjl posted...

I think you're underestimating just how much random chance is involved in biology and medicine. In truth, there's a certain amount of determinism and it's not true randomness, but that deterministic outcome is the product of so many seemingly-unrelated factors that identifying them all is impossible. Even the simple act of "virus infects cell" is a result of the virus floating aimlessly around until it randomly bumps into the right receptor in the right orientation to latch on and inject its genetic payload, then it's a matter of waiting until a ribosome randomly bumps into the start codon on that strand of genetic material (we're just going to look at mRNA viruses here, for simplicity's sake), then randomly bumping into the corresponding tRNA-amino acid complexes to assemble the required proteins. Similarly, the immune response relies on the appropriate immune cells bumping into the viral particles in a way that allows them to detect antigens against which antibodies can be generated.

Now, all of this happens on such a large scale that all of these random events do still end up happening despite the very high odds that any given individual interaction doesn't (you roll 400,000 d20's, you're going to get plenty of 20's), but in the case of infectious diseases, you usually are starting out with a relatively small pathogen load and it's well within the realm of possibility that you end up with half as many of those viral particles successfully infecting your cells as somebody else with an identical pathogen load gets, or that your immune system detects the virus 3-4 rounds of replication earlier than somebody else's. If you really dug into it, you might be able to say that that's because you didn't put salt on last night's dinner and that meant your blood pressure was 0.005% lower and that meant the B cell that kicked off your immune response was moving slightly slower and got to the infection site just as the first virus did and that meant you mounted a response before the rest of the load could reproduce, but determining that is going to be absurdly difficult and largely useless, so nobody's going to fund the research needed to do so.

Within the next decade, I expect it will be possible to narrow down the identified risk factors for Covid and explain some of their specific mechanisms, but there will never come a point when random variation is completely eliminated from the equation. Risk factors for adverse outcomes do not guarantee those adverse outcomes. You've seen this on a macroscopic scale: You've presumably engaged in behaviours that would be considered risk factors for Covid infection, but you haven't been infected until now. Why are you willing to accept "I was lucky" as an explanation for that, but not for what happens once the virus is inside your body? The human body is no less chaotic than the world outside. Sometimes, the only reason you will ever be able to find for the outcome of a disease is "I got (un)lucky," and that's not a failure on science's part.

I don't accept "I was lucky." I'm pretty sure I didn't catch the virus up until now because I didn't come in contact with the virus up until now. If I had, I would've caught it. And I'm pretty sure catching vs. not catching is as simple as that.

I'm not saying research funders care, but research funders don't care about a lot of things they should. Maybe they should care more about whether or not and to what extent blood pressure has an effect on whether or not you survive the virus.

LinkPizza posted...

They have literally mention some of the underlying problem in many articles. Things like diabetes, for example Or even asthma Lots of different things that people may not have know they had. And there are others You can easily look them up I just gave you a few to get you started But those are just other factors like all the other factors Just a piece of the puzzle And again, just because someone else has the same things as you doesnt matter. People are different. A slight difference in genetics or how your immune system works cause make things very different between the two of you People arent exactly the same. So, you may not find someone whos run in with COVID is exactly like yours. No illness (COVID or otherwise) works like that Some people with the Flu feel like their dying, where its a mild inconvenience for others. Same with pretty much all illnesses In that case, are you saying we know nothing about any other illness?

The reason some people die just because they avoid the risk factors we know about They are many were still finding out about Not to mention, sometimes we find out that they actually did have risk factors that no one knew about Like undiagnosed diabetes or something Who says science ISNT researching these things The only person who thinks that is you And in the end, no matter how much research is done, they wont ever know everything Just like literally every other disease out there. There isnt even one disease where they know everything about it They may know a lot, but theres always more to learn

They mention some, but very few. That's why we're still asking questions like 'How did this 65 year old cancer patient survive the virus?" We should be working towards not having to ask questions like that.

And of course people are different, when did I say they weren't? That's why I'm saying "Show me the article with the list of all the differences between people that matter. The differences that affect how you'll handle the virus. And, knowing myself, I will read it and see what likely applies to me." If I'm a 65 year old cancer patient, I should be able to read an article and come to some understanding of why I'm going through this virus the way I am. Not to say that all 65 year old cancer patients will go through it the same way, I'm talking about one very specific cancer patient with a specific health background.

LinkPizza posted...

We would need to know about you medically. If you had read literally anything we said, you would know we said things like genetics and immune system functions And viral load is important, too We dont know that, either These are things weve already mentioned before But you arent even reading our posts or something The factors arent about the illness, but about the people that catch them (i.e. you, in this case) So, again, you cant do that Not with any disease Even the ones theyve been studying for decades I dont get whats so hard to understand

You guys don't need to know. I know about myself medically. All I need from other people is the Big List Of Factors. Then I, knowing myself medically, would go through it to know why I feel a certain way when I'm suffering from the virus.

LinkPizza posted...

If you want this answer, you go to a doctor We know nothing about you medically Why its not worse could be for a number of factors Like genetics or your immune system Which are things we wont know about you specifically We only know what you post

You shouldn't need to know anything about me medically. Science should have, or work on getting, a collection of factors that affect how you'll handle the virus. I should then be able to read about all those factors in an article and discern which ones apply to me so I know why I'm handling the virus in the way that I am.

LinkPizza posted...

And hes also gone into more explanation on there are things to figure out. The nothing to figure out was probably about something exact. Had you read his posts, you probably would know that he has also said that theres always more to learn But it really doesnt seem like youre actually reading other peoples posts, tbh And weve literally have given you some of your answers. You just refuse to believe what we are saying. And if you dont want out answers, then look them up. They are online. You just refuse to for whatever reason Sid you want to know why people we thought would live die, thats not even a mystery. Its how illnesses work. Sometimes, they mutate. Meaning they change in a new way. Sometimes, people had an underlying problem that no one knew about. Sometimes, viruses become more aggressive. Sometimes, treatment doesnt work for many reasons Sometimes, the body just doesnt fight back. The reasons vary person to person But the doctors can usually tell you what happened Just because they cant stop it every time doesnt mean its a mystery Thats your answer. But Im sure youll ignore it like every other answer weve given you

So then what are the underlying problems? I should be able to read an article that says "Here Are The Underlying Problems That Keep You From Surviving This Virus, Even Though You've Avoided Other Risk Factors." That way if I am healthy but am having a hard time witht he virus, I can read that article and say "Oh, I'm suffering because I likely have this thing wrong with me."

I never asked "Why haven't the eradicated the virus," I just asked why it is certain people die when they avoid the typical risk factors? There should be articles about all of the exact potential reasons. Science should either know these things, or be researching them.

ZangsBeard posted...

Oh look, he cherry picked something I didnt say to make it look like it was what I said.

pssst. I never said Id didnt call you anti vax. But youre so good at understanding scientific literature obviously its affecting your ability to follow a basic conversation.

Pssst, hint; I was responding to the

Try less next time. You might actually get something right.

Edit: why is it the people who are wrong in every fashion always telling others they cant read? Lolol

They're literally your words. I quoted your post. By what stretch of the imagination is that "something you didn't say," let alone cherrypicking?

ZangsBeard posted...

Oh cool, I never said that.

Your own words...

ZangsBeard posted...

So Tc is an antivax who doesnt actually listen to medical professionals and is surprised they got an infectious airborne disease.

#ShockeredPikachu

Nothing you've said here is correct. And you can't read.

adjl posted...

And how many deaths have been reported (credibly, not on OpenVAERS, since I could go on OpenVAERS right now and say that I grew extra penises out of my ears after being vaccinated) as being correlated with those cases of myo(peri)carditis? And of those correlated deaths, how many are believed to have been causally linked?

Yes, myocarditis is a potential side effect of the mRNA vaccines, especially in younger males (for reasons that are yet unknown). Nobody's really disputing that. Attributing deaths to that side effect, however, is just not true. The myocarditis cases in question are easily treatable and cause no lasting harm.

On the other hand, there have indeed been deaths associated with blood clots from the A-Z and Janssen vaccines (particularly younger women), as I mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, that risk is lower than the risk of dying of blood clots from Covid itself, even without considering the option of getting an mRNA vaccine instead.

It's credible that myocarditis is a lethal disease. We're just gonna say that the myocarditis that these vaccines cause can't possibly kill you? Again, damned if I do and damned if I don't. So I have to pick which path I'm gonna gamble on.

Traditional odds said I should've caught the virus years ago. But I didn't. So clearly I can't just assume trends will apply to me perfectly.

Why should you be able to do that? What precedent is there for that being possible with any disease, let alone a brand new one? Do you have any idea how short three years actually is in the grand scheme of scientific research?

The medical community is trying to pin down risk factors, but that's a very, very complicated analysis due to just how many different variables there are. Even once a risk factor is identified (and many have been), studying it well enough to fully understand the mechanism behind it takes a very long time and is very challenging, especially where we don't have the option of actually experimenting on people by infecting them with the disease in a controlled trial (because that would be mean). Those analyses are ongoing around the world, but there's no reason to ever expect results as conclusive as you seem to be expecting, let along to expect them so soon.

Quite simply, this is the best science can do. It's always been the best science can do, and in many ways is actually better than usual because those working on this subject have had a much easier time getting funding and public support than those working on lower-profile issues. People are absolutely working on understanding it better, but the information you're asking for will likely never exist. You're just going to have to come to terms with that and accept that that doesn't mean nobody is trying to improve.

Why? Because you're supposed to try and understand diseases like this. In fact, science is about leaving no mysteries on the table. Like I said early, you don't just give up and say "No one knows."

If you're saying "Well we aren't giving up," then that would mean we still have things to figure out. It's not true that there's nothing to figure out.

ZangsBeard posted...

Oh look. More bad faith arguments from the diarrhea kid.

It's the same question I've been asking all thread long. You'd know that if you actually read the thread, but you clearly didn't because you think I'm an "antivaxxer" who's "surprised" that I caught the virus. I never claimed the virus wasn't out there. This thread isn't me saying "But how could this happen to me?"

ZangsBeard posted...

Yes. I do know actually which is why I can confidently saying youre refusing professionals statements on the situations when you dont actually have any valid knowledge to dispute them. Youre just spewing nutty diarrhea in the form of bad faith arguments and infectious airborne disease all over the people around you in the name of just asking questions

I haven't been given any professional statements in response to my question because my question is "Why wasn't this worse for me?" Science should be able to tell me what went right with me that I'm managing this so well.

wpot posted...

* There are very many possible factors
* We DO know many factors that appear quite significant beyond simple age
* Even if you have all known risk factors it doesn't mean you will die. They have just increased your odds of dying from (making up numbers) 0.1% to 58.7%.

I can't decide if you are asking legitimately, wanting us to declare you superman and study you (perhaps I should have listened to Judgmenl), or simply trolling. Done for real this time, though.

But if I do have all known risk factors and survive, there should be a more substantial answer beyond "You just got lucky." That is what I want science to figure out.

wpot posted...

Oh dear I've been @ summoned. :) Very well...

In regards to why some people are dying and others are living there 'isn't anything to figure out' in the sense that isn't a surprise statistically: variation in case severity is the nature of disease. There will always be anecdotal stories about surprising differences between cases. We should not hear those anecdotes and assume that something baffling is occurring.

There is of course more to learn about all diseases and COVID, which is still relatively new, in particular. That work will never end and there will always be more to figure out. And the best infectious disease scientists in the world are doing exactly that.

There are no "surprise differences," if someone is affected by a disease in some way, they're affected for a reason. And that's what's left to figure out. The reasons we don't yet understand for why certain people are affected in certain ways by certain diseases when we thought they wouldn't be.

I am an example of someone who should've died from this based on the trends, but I didn't. So why didn't I?

LinkPizza posted...

Except were not saying theres. I thing to figure out. Youre the one acting like we know next to nothing about COVID when we actually know a good amount. Just because we dont know everything doesnt mean we dont know quite a bit. We know some of why it affects other differently. But not everything. The same is for every other disease or illness out there. We can know a lot about all of them. But we dont know everything about any of them. And weve even given answers to some of your questions. But you ignore them, and claim we havent given you anything

The exact words from @wpot were "There's nothing to figure out." As if all the mysteries of this virus had been solved. No one here has answered my questions because the actual answer to my questions is "Science hasn't figured it out yet." I'm not asking whether the immunocompromised are more susceptible than the immuno-doing-alright. What I'm asking is "How come these people we thought would live are dying? These healthy people with strong immune systems? Tell me what went wrong there."

ZangsBeard posted...

This... this isnt a mystery and it fucking hasnt been for years. Holy shit do antivax find the most fallacious arguments to shit all over the rest of society, but this might just be the one with the least digested amount of peanuts.

What isn't a mystery? Are you even reading my posts? Do you even know what I'm asking?

FrozenBananas posted...

Oh look, some random dude on the internet who thinks he knows more than the worlds best scientists

That's not what I'm saying, I'm saying the world's best scientists should be doing more to figure out why these so called "anomalies" in our limited understanding of the virus are happening. If we understand the virus more, they won't be "anomalies."

LinkPizza posted...

So, TC gets mad that he doesnt know anything about COVID, even though there are many articles talking about it. But instead of reading the articles to learn about it, continues to not read them, and complains he doesnt know anything about COVID Including the things most people do know about it

wpot posted...

Isn't there a Simpsons bit that goes like this?

Homer or whoever: I'm just saying that someone should look into it.
Other person: evidence of looking into it
Homer or whoever: I'm just saying that someone should look into it.
Other person: evidence of looking into it
Homer or whoever: I'm just saying that someone should look into it.
Other person: evidence of looking into it
...etc.

I'm done, anyways!

That's also not what I said. You were the one who said "There's nothing to figure out." But then you said "There's stuff we don't know, but the scientists are working on figuring it out."

wpot posted...

Which is why medical science is trying to figure that out using their best tools, which include bulk data and statistics.

So three years in and all we know is "The young and healthy tend to live, the old and infirm tend to die, and here are the strains that tend to kill more than others?" So many other factors to consider and we don't anything about them?

There's been case after case of people dying of this that surprised people. You'd think by now someone would've looked into those cases and figured something out.

wpot posted...

I think the main thing we aren't connecting on is the difference between doing a study for one case (which is usually not terribly useful for the individual, usually not very interesting scientifically, and frankly not possible to do for anything close to every difficult case due to the resources needed) and doing a study that covers many people in relation to a specific factor (which is being done constantly). We cannot do a large number of detailed studies of individuals to address their individual issues. We CAN do large studies of many individuals to address the issues that are regularly seen in them. Statistics can't be removed from the process in a world of eight billion people.

In most cases science, even now - three years in to a pandemic - can give a good answer in most cases. They can - even now - warn people who are at high risk. Will we ever be able to do so with near certainty for ALL cases? No, that's impossible given the near infinite numbers of causal interactions. That is true of both COVID and any other disease. The more we study the better we will know and the quicker we'll be able to identify causes, but expecting diagnosis perfection isn't reasonable.

That is the medical mystery that we need to solve. In most cases the old will die and the young will live. But in those cases where the opposite happens, we need to know why.

Yellow posted...

That's great except these vaccines are empirically not killing anyone and anyone who tells you they are is manipulating you

I feel like I don't need a PHD to explain this, you unfortunately live in a post-reality world.

Have you not heard about the myocarditis/pericarditis cases cropping up, particularly from the Moderna vaccine?

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346

Those who have argue "Well, it's very rare." But "very rare" doesn't mean "Won't ever happen." Because it clearly happened to those people. I don't want myocarditis. I'm trying to make choices that will keep myocarditis out of my way.

wpot posted...

That might be the silliest thing you've said yet. The infectious disease organizations have studied little other than this for the past three years. What makes you think they aren't trying to know all that they can? They have identified many strong casual factors, but there is always more to know.

You were the one who said "They could do this study, but there's little reason to." I'm saying this should be paramount, this should be the main thing we're trying to figure out.

adjl posted...

You can, actually. I can't be bothered to fish out exact numbers, but if memory serves, Alpha was somewhere on the order of 50-70% more dangerous than the wild type, Beta was ~20% more dangerous than Alpha, Delta was ~150% more dangerous than Beta, and Omicron dropped back to about 20-30% more dangerous than the wild type (while being 6 or 7 times more contagious). It's hard to pin down exact figures on that because treatment improved so much from the early days of dealing with the wild type to when Omicron became the dominant variant, but it's fairly easy to at least rank them, if not quantitatively compare them.

That information, however, is generally useless for laypersons because identifying a specific strain requires a more in-depth PCR test than the typical one (let alone the rapid tests that comprise the vast majority of Covid tests these days), so a given patient isn't likely to ever know anything beyond "I'm Covid positive." That really only comes up in doing things like wastewater testing to determine the relative incidence of a given strain in the population, which in turn informs public health agencies so they can (try to) respond accordingly.

That information is also only useful for determining relative risk: You cannot say that, because a patient has Omicron and not Delta, they will not die. Only that they're less likely to. Omicron being a less severe disease does not preclude it from being severe enough to kill the patient, which is going to be based on other factors. Those rankings are based on broad statistical analyses with large enough sample sizes to (hopefully) eliminate random variation in other factors (or at least reduce it to insignificant levels).

But what you should be able to do is look at that person who died of a particular strain and answer why. Or catch them before they die and figure out why they're having such a bad reaction to it.

I'm not talking about just one factor, I know the strain type is one factor. That's why I'm presenting questions like "Okay but this person is young and they exercise and they're only suffering from a supposedly weak strain, so why are they having such a hard time of it? What specifically is going wrong with them?"

wpot posted...

If they did an in-depth study of a young person who died (initial viral load, genetics, risk factors, treatment history, etc) science is likely to give you a decent, if imperfect, answer regarding which factors caused a particular case to became severe. However, there is usually not the time to do all of that while a person is being treated (nor a reason in some cases as the treatment is the same regardless of the causal factors) and there is no reason to do to go through all of that effort in an autopsy. Sure, it wouldn't be a complete answer (as adjl points out the number of possible factors is effectively infinite) but it is largely sufficient for our scientific understanding. There is and always will be more to know, but the simple fact that it is severe in one person and negligible in another is not a great mystery.

If it weren't a great mystery, then science could tell me right now why a particular case became severe for a particular person.

But like you said, they're not even doing these studies. And that's my point. This is what we need to be spending our time on. Figuring out exactly why these infections go down the way they do. So we can know exactly why some people die but I don't.

LinkPizza posted...

I literally just have them to you. Are you even reading the posts? Because it doesnt seem like you are. Ill copy and paste them again Ill even bold them for you

there are a lot of factors that go into it, from strain to viral load to genetics to vaccination status to immune functions.

Science can tell you If you ask about them and have rights to their medical files The problem is you probably dont know who to ask about. And they can share peoples medical files without permission. But you can easily look up why people die from it Or what happens to some peoples bodies when they have it And a variety of factors is answers All it takes is knowledge of science to know how each factor contributes to it

Again, those aren't the answers.

I should be able to read an article that says "Here's All The Strains And Which Ones Are Deadly And Which Ones You Don't Have To Worry About Provided You Have This Particular Immune System." I should be able to read an article that says "Even If You're Young And Healthy, Here's What's Likely Wrong With You If You Die From This Particular Strain Of The Virus." I should be able to read an article that says "Here's Where Your Immune System Failed You In The Battle Against This Particular Virus."

Yellow posted...

I'm not interested in your walls of text, but if you're thinking that the vaccine is bullshit please pull your head out of your ass. There are like 5 different vaccines. The entire world uses them. Vaccines have eliminated horrible diseases in the past and you can't deny it. Stop trying to undermine medicine/science out of some misconceptions, because you can and will have an impact... It only works as far as people trust it.

This is worse than a person thinking there's a Colgate conspiracy because he doesn't brush his teeth and none of his teeth fell out. Great, but your breath smells like death and you've got gingivitis.

I never said vaccines were bad. Just that I don't trust these particular vaccines. I have the other vaccines. The ones that aren't killing people because they've gone through decades of refinement. The ones that aren't a last minute book report that, shortly before they were available, reliable authorities were saying "You can't rush a vaccine."

LinkPizza posted...

Just because young people are less likely to die from it doesnt mean they cant die from it. As adjl explained, there are a lot of factors that go into it, from strain to viral load to genetics to vaccination status tk immune functions. Just like pretty much every other illness Sometimes, people die of the flu or pneumonia Sometimes, they live Its not some big mystery So, no. They is nothing to figure out If you dont understand, thats on you. But science does understand already People in this topic do, as well

So then what are the factors? I should be able to point out someone who died, and science should be able to tell me why they died. Science should be able to tell me why I didn't. "A variety of factors" is not an answer.

LinkPizza posted...

Are we reading the same posts. Both adjl and wpot explain that we already know why some people get affected more. Which is the same reason why other illness will affect people more of less

And whos throwing their hands up at the medical mystery and saying Idk. Both of them actually explained things in detail, from what I read

He also didnt suggest older people would die. He said its clear they would And the reason he knows that is science Which he said. Which means they already did enough testing tk figure that out. More testing is always welcome, but they have figured it out

And the vaccine can protect the older people. By getting the vaccine, it lessens your chance or getting it or passing it along And lowers you viral load You can catch it or pass it, but the chance is lower

And while some people had reactions to the vaccines, its usually certain medicine that can either react with the person, or other medications they take. But the vaccine itself is pretty harmless

But young healthy people are also dying from this. While old, not-as-healthy people are surviving. Why is that happening? He said "There's nothing to figure out," but there clearly is.

wpot posted...

Right, there's nothing to figure out. From the beginning an infectious disease expert would have told you any result from being asymptomatic to death was possible. It's all statistics regarding how bad it is in comparison to other diseases amongst the general public. Also, it's now clear that age is a strong factor: it doesn't affect most young people nearly as much as it affects older people. It's also clear that the Omicron/recent strains are not as potent as the earlier strains.

Here's hoping you didn't pass the disease to someone older and more vulnerable because your viral load became larger than it needed to be due your choice not to get a harmless vaccine.

Nothing to figure out? You don't just throw your hands up at a medical mystery and say "No one knows." You get to the bottom of it.

The fact that you suggest older people would probably die from this suggests that there is something to figure out. There are at the very least patterns to discern about who lives and who dies.

Also, the vaccine protects me, not the old people. I can still catch it and throw it, it's just the symptoms would be more manageable for me. And only me.

EDIT: Also the vaccine isn't harmless. Know what else is killing people? Heart complications from vaccines. In a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, I've picked the poison I believe I have the best chance of surviving.

BigOlePappy posted...

You probably had some form of it but, you were asymptomatic.

But I got regularly tested, and every time was negative.

But not 2023. My luck has run out. They didn't tell me what strain yet, but I finally caught it. And now I'm wondering what I did over the weekend to catch it.

But y'know it's not that bad? I mean it's not "good," but if you told me this would be all over in 2 weeks then this is nothing to be afraid of. I hear so many survivor tales about how this thing "kicked their ass," what we aren't spending enough time figuring out is how come I'm cruising but other people are dying?

Zareth posted...

Yeah

But how much does anyone care about my character? Am I expected to, say, have some kind of backstory for this character? Does FF14 or the culture surrounding it encourage creativity? How common is it for someone to write a fanfic about their FF14 avatar?

KJ_StErOiDs posted...

About 10,000 people play it.

Hmmm, I need it to be a little bigger.

Zareth posted...

FFXIV has absolutely zero customization when it comes to character builds. Your class is the same as everyone else who plays the same class.

Can they look wildly different? Can I dress them up in vast variety of different outfits, perhaps?

Lokarin posted...

Dwarf Fortress... it's not an online game, but you post your stories and read other people's stories... it goes deep and hard bruh

That's pretty close to what I'm looking for, but it has to be online.

Minecraft is good for crafting things out of things and building an environment, but not character customisation. You can make skins, but no one plays Minecraft for the interesting original characters.

Lokarin posted...

ya, path of exile has huge skill customization.... albeit zero character customization or housing or anything like that

For these reasons, Path of Exile wouldn't work either. I'm basically looking for a game where I can make my fanfiction character and see other people's fanfiction characters.

hypnox posted...

Final fantasy 14, you can hard-core customize your character's looks as well as interior design your house(assuming you can actually find one to buy)

Sega2k posted...

Ultima Online

Are these games still big? I remember hearing about FF14 a while ago. I would think the Final Fantasy franchise would want people to focus on newer products.

KJ_StErOiDs posted...

City of Heroes: Homecoming has immense customization, at least on character design. You can make them to look like minotaurs, catgirls, cowboys, or canines/felines running on all fours. Hell, you could make the cowboy run on all fours. There's literally no limit. People will compliment you on a good costume.

This sounds cool. How many people play it?

adjl posted...

How is that what you got from what I said?

You said that the problems aren't being solved, and that there's "propaganda" making people think the poor are just lazy. It was in response to my post talking about how "Stealing is okay" has become an acceptable argument.

So if you were responding to my saying "It's weird that this has become an acceptable argument" with "Here's how that happened," I'm saying that what you've described isn't an acceptable path to "Stealing is okay."

adjl posted...

It's ridiculous, but not that weird. People have been trying to fix the problems for as long as they've been problems. Instead, those problems keep getting worse because of greed that goes unchecked because bribing politicians is legal if you go through the right channels. "Maybe you'll be able to afford food if the right governor gets elected in three years' time and actually follows through on campaign promises to improve the cost of living, but the odds of that are pretty low because the voter base has happily swallowed propaganda telling them that the real problem is people not working hard enough" does absolutely nothing to address the problem of being hungry today.

Just because the problem isn't "People are lazy" doesn't mean the solution is "Stealing is okay." Because who then is it okay to steal from? If you have $1,000 dollars, but I have no dollars, how many dollars, if any dollars, can I steal from you?

Gaawa_chan posted...

"Sure that random starving homeless dude got shot to hell over the bread he stole, but it's not MY fault that I called the trigger-happy police on his worthless ass." Yes it is. The fact that you all care more about stolen petty goods than you do about the far more costly consequences of trying to penalize people over those petty goods suggests your priorities are wildly out of order. The taxpayer dollars you spend keeping desperate people locked up in cells will ALWAYS be greater than the value of what was taken for their survival.

You all prioritize baby level moral purity over material outcomes, sputtering with outrage over pennies when the fuss kicked up as a result is far more costly and damaging.

Is it more costly and damaging? You're talking about punishments for criminals. To not punish criminals and let them run free is a greater cost.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

You mean like the chatrooms that only show up in Youtube Horror stories now about people using those for nefarious reasons?

Never heard of that, can you share an example?

I agree that it's weird that "Theft is okay" has become something like a legitimate political argument. Just say "fuck it" and literally steal from the rich. Don't play fair. Cheat. As opposed to, say, trying to fix problems.

You might say Fortnite, but I mean a stronger focus than that. I wanna design my character, I wanna design his house, I wanna design a whole bunch of things about him. And I want a major appeal of the game to be people looking at what I've designed and saying "Wow, that's cool and creative."

Seems like that kind of game went away in the 2000s. Paper doll designing games and the like.

Count_Drachma posted...

I feel like on a global level there are only okay and bad years, where any good comes from things not being bad. But it's also easier for a global bad to happen than a global good, given that bad things can be universal whereas good things are often limited. For example, it's unlikely that there'll ever be a year when every single nation prospers, but it's not terribly hard to have a year when every single nation suffers (which we saw with COVID)

Those were pretty lousy years. And keep in mind that timeframe includes the Great Recession.

And that time-frame includes the previous recession... as well as the Great Recession. And 9/11. But, beyond that, the years were kinda okay. Far fewer race riots, anyway. The Obama years sometimes felt like things were constantly being set on fire. And the Obama administration always waited as long as possible before doing any kind of intervention.

9/11 united a nation. Even the pot smokingest hippies wanted to kill Bin Laden.

agesboy posted...

pick any of the obama years

even if you hated the guy, you probably liked the years more than what we have right now

I prefer the Bush Jr. years. But these years, like the Obama years, weren't good or bad because of who the President was.

agesboy posted...

the less controversial the year, the more people like it

trump, covid death toll, and masking inconvenience are probably the deciding factors on whether the last 5~ years sucked or not for the majority of people

Count_Drachma posted...

There's a personal and a general level. A year can be horrible on a personal level, yet unremarkable outside the personal level. Conversely, things can go a direction people dislike and it's the worst year ever in a general sense.

With the exception of people profiting from the pandemic (or somehow benefiting), the past few years have been generally terrible for that alone. However, something like a global pandemic is a pretty rare thing.

So what would a good year look like? Did we ever have one?

"That was a crazy year! In a bad way. I can't wait for the new year! Good riddance to a year that fuckin' sucked."

We say that a lot nowayears. But what goes into the substance of a year to make it notable at all? What has to happen? What would a good year look like?

Yellow posted...

I think people are attacking AI right now because for some reason it's associated with NFTs and crypto... but unlike those things, AI is only going to get more prevalent.

People will eventually drop their hate boner for AI and see it as the neutral tool that it is. AI art is popping up on the internet. You know how it's going? People are tagging it as AI art and respecting it for what it is... which is a generation that anyone could make with the click of a button and not real art. I do respect that people are making sure it stays in its place.

I don't respect the "I do not condone an AI training with my art" perspective. Yeah, but people "train" their own brains and become inspired by looking at your art. The only reason this attitude hasn't become a huge problem is that they just so happen to be a weak demographic with no political power. It's just a very... petty complaint.

The way I look at is if you're standing in between society and the inevitable future... you've got to step to the side. I don't remember artists ever really having a fair shot at a professional life anyway. For every 100 artists there's one with a job doing it, but they act like AI is going to ruin everything and take er jerbs.

But if making money as an artist is already hard, why kick them while they're down?

I'm a real life example of this conflict: I was gonna pay $10 on Patreon to have my portrait drawn in this particular artist's style. But now I can go on Lensa and have many pictures drawn of me. And if I don't factor in my feelings for the human who's losing a gig I might've offered them, it's very likely I would go for Lensa without a second thought.

BlackScythe0 posted...

Yea that is why people have been able to find their own art used in ai art *rolls eyes*

If anyone attempts to use AI art an a commercial fashion they are going to run afoul of copywrite.

It's not exactly their art. The AI learned from their art to make something new. It's a transformation of their art. All the AI did was look at it and try to make something kinda similar to it.

But even still, it's a digital image. I thought those couldn't be owned?

BlackScythe0 posted...

NFTs are a scam just plain and simple.

AI art as it stands can never be "legitimate" since it is 100% plagiarism.

Plagiarism? You can't own a digital thing. What's more, the works these AI create are, by definition, transformative. So it'd be fair use even if you could own a digital thing.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

No. If you have to connect to something or need permission to access the thing you bought you don't actually own it.

So these AIs, it's cool that they're standing on the shoulders of human artists? Do the human artists have no right to keep these AIs from learning from them?

The NFT. It's a digital asset you supposedly own, even though it's only on the Internet. And though you might be satisfied that you're the only one who owns it "officially" within the context of the ledger/whatever game this NFT is a part of, I can look at that thing and copy that thing and do everything with that thing except "own it within the context of the ledger." And I think most people would say "That's fine. Screenshot those NFTs. Let them know that digital ownership means nothing."

The text-to-image AI. You know how they train these things? They copy other people's artwork and feed it into the mind of the AI. And so egregious is this, this new Lensa app can't even scrub the artist signatures off of the images it produces. And most people are saying "Well that's not fair, you're copying other people's work you found on the Internet." But I think proponents might then throw the NFT argument at that: We didn't "steal" anything, all we did was "look at" something on the Internet and "remember" it. You have no jurisdiction to stop us from doing that.

These are the kinds of things we said before Napster and YouTube. Before we imagined that music and video could be redistributed to "large" audiences. And because those things came along, we had to come up with new rules. Between NFTs and AI, you think we're gonna have to come up with new rules?

jiffdiff posted...

Do you actually not know what the word context means?

He said them in an interview where he decided to expound on his views on #MeToo. That's it, that's the context. There's literally nothing else to this story.

adjl posted...

I don't really care what the rest of the conversation is about. I'm responding specifically to what you have explicitly said in this topic, for which that single sentence is a perfectly adequate response. I don't doubt that there's further nuance to it, but until you present that nuance as part of your position, my response to you doesn't need to respond to that further nuance.

That's what I'm saying. I could find you example after example of people talking about God of War as a new positive masculinity vs. toxic masculinity allegory, but all you'd say is "All of you are wrong, only I know what toxic masculinity is."

adjl posted...

No, I acknowledged your explanation. Your explanation just contained no semantic content that wasn't already addressed by what I'd already said, so I saw no need to create a new response.

I could just cite examples where God of War is being discussed as a "positive masculinity" counterpoint to the classic God of Wars. But that's something obvious and pervasive enough that you should've seen it by now if you don't live in a hugbox.

But because you do live in a hugbox, even if I showed these conversations to you, you'd just say "Oh those don't count. Those guys are wrong, I decide what the toxic masculinity conversation is about."

You just ignored my explanation, but that's what someone who doesn't have actual conversations about that stuff would do.

The only people saying "It's not what you think" can't even answer what it is. They only have their viewpoints to go by.