Rationality Quotes October 2014

Tyrrell_McAllister

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

That article about the flu "forgets" to mention a rather important fact: the effectiveness of the flu vaccine is only about 60%.

In particular, with this effectiveness there will be no herd immunity even if you vaccinate 100% of the population.

I believe this is incorrect. The required proportion of the population that needs to be immune to get a herd immunity effect depends on how infectious the pathogen is. Measles is really infectious with an R0 (number of secondary infections caused by a typical infectious case in a fully susceptible population) of over 10, so you need 90 or 95% vaccination coverage to stop it speading - and why it didn't much of a drop in vaccination before we saw new outbreaks.

R0 estimates for seasonal influenza are around 1.1 or 1.2. Vaccinating 100% of the population with... (read more)

11DanielLC12y

So? A 60% reduction in the chances of getting the flu is still orders of magnitude better than a 100% reduction in the chances of getting ebola. Also, herd immunity isn't all-or-nothing. I'd expect giving everyone a 60% effective flu vaccine would still reduce the the probability of getting the flu by significantly more than 60%.

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Rationality Quotes October 2014

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