by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-08 16:22:09+00:00
> I never heard any doctors claim any of the covid vaccines were completely safe. Do you mind if I ask which doctors, exactly? Not institutions, not vibes, not headlines. Individual doctors. Medicine is not a hive mind, and collapsing disagreement, uncertainty, and bad messaging into “many doctors” is doing rhetorical work that the evidence has to earn.

There’s no data here. Many aspects of life are not covered by science because trials are expensive and we have to go with vibes.

And even on just vibes we often can get accurate judgements. Do you need clinical trials to confirm there’s a ground when you leap off your bed? No. Only vibes unfortunately.

If you ask people (who are not doctors) to remember this time they will likely tell you this is what they remember. I also do have tons of anecdotal accounts of doctors saying the Covid 19 vaccine is safe and you can find many yourself by searching. Here’s one: https://fb.watch/Evzwfkc6Mp/?mibextid=wwXIfr

The pediatrician failed to communicate the risks of the vaccine above and made the claim it was safe.

At the time to my knowledge the actual risks of the vaccine were not fully known and the safety was not fully validated. The overarching intuition was that the risk of detrimental of effects from the vaccine was less than the risk+consequence of dying from Covid. That is still the underlying logic (and best official practice) today even with the knowledge about the heart risk covid vaccines pose.

This doctor above did not communicate this risk at all. And this was just from a random google search. Anecdotal but the fact that I found one just from a casual search is telling. These people are not miracle workers.

> That is simply false. LLMs are trained on human writing, human incentives, and human errors. They can weaken certain authority and social pressures, which is valuable, but they do not escape bias. They average it. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it produces very confident nonsense.

No it’s not false. Most of the writing on human medical stuff is scientific in nature. Formalized with experimental trials which is the strongest form of truth humanity has both practically and theoretically. This “medical science” is even more accurate than other black box sciences like psychology as clinical trials have ultra high thresholds and even test for causality (in contrast to much of science only covers correlation and assumes causality through probabilistic reasoning)

This combined with anecdotal evidence that the LLM digests in aggregate is a formidable force. We as humans cannot quantify all anecdotal evidence. For example, I heard anecdotal evidence of heart issues with rna vaccines BEFORE the science confirmed it and LLMs were able to aggregate this sentiment through sheer volumetric training on all complaints of the vaccine online and confirm the same thing BEFORE that Stanford confirmation was available.

> You are entitled to that opinion, but I wanted to kiss the surgeon who removed my daughter’s gangrenous appendix. That reaction was not to their supposed prestige, it was recognition that someone applied years of hard won skill correctly at a moment where failure had permanent consequences.

Sure I applaud that. True hero work for that surgeon. I’m talking about the profession in aggregate. In aggregate in the US 800000k patients die or get permanently injured from a misdiagnosis every year. Physicians fuck up and it’s not occasionally. It’s often and all the fucking time. You were safer getting on the 737 max the year before they diagnosed the mcas errors then you are NOT getting a misdiagnosis and dying from a doctor. Those engineers despite widespread criticism did more for your life and safety than doctors in general. That is not only a miracle of engineering but it also speaks volumes of the medical profession itself which DOES not get equivalent criticism for mistakes. That 800000k statistic is swept under the rug like car accidents.

I am entitled to my own opinion just as you are to yours but I’m making a bigger claim here. My opinion is not just an opinion. It’s a ground truth general fact backed up by numbers.

> And if doctors are car mechanics, then patients are machines. That framing strips the humanity from all of us. That is nihilism.

There is nothing wrong with car mechanics. It’s an occupation and it’s needed. And those cars if they fail they can cause accidents that involve our very lives.

But car mechanics are fallible and that fallibility is encoded into the respect they get. Of course there are individual mechanics who are great and on a case by case basis we pay those mechanics more respect.

Doctors need to be treated the same way. It’s not nilhism. It’s a quantitative analysis grounded in reality. The only piece of evidence you provided me in your counter is your daughter’s life being saved. That evidence warrants respect for the single doctor who saved your daughter’s life and not for the profession in general. The numbers agree with me.

And treatment for say the corporation responsible for the mcas failures and the profession responsible for medical misdiagnosis that killed people is disproportionate. Your own sentiment and respect for doctors in general is one piece of evidence for this.