We Don’t Know What We’re Talking About. Decision-Making and Covid Vaccines.

The Box Score

  • I suggest a two-step decision-making process to think about complicated issues:  

  1. Admit we don’t know what we’re talking about.

  2. Play the odds.       

  • For example, only a handful of Americans can evaluate the science behind mRNA vaccines. The rest of us have to rely on two heuristics (i.e., mental shortcuts):

  1. the consensus heuristic

  2. the source cue heuristic

  • Both the consensus among the experts and the reputation of the sources strongly suggest Covid vaccinations are safe and effective. 

  • There is a chance, however, that the experts are wrong or we’ve put our trust in the wrong folks.  

  • Absent other compelling information, however, we should play the odds and go with the experts.

The Complete Game 

Should you get a Covid vaccination?  Is climate change real?  Is there widespread voting fraud in America?  Most of us have thought about these questions.  How we should think about them is usually a different matter.

This is the first in a series of articles on how we make sense of complicated issues.  Here, I propose a two-step process that can improve our thinking.  In the next few articles, I’ll explain why this process is so hard to follow. 

It is always presumptuous to tell others how to think, especially from someone (me) who is guilty of a lot of bad thinking.  But at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I propose a simple two-step orientation to dealing with complex problems:  

1.     Admit we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

2.     Play the odds.        

This sounds easy, but it is not.  None of us wants to admit ignorance, and humans are notoriously bad at calculating odds.  Yet, knowing our limitations and acting like a Vegas bookmaker is not only liberating, it is the key to good thinking. 

Let’s see how this works. 

Pivotal Politics

Imagine you are in my upper-division course on the U.S. Congress.  Your assignment for the week was to read Keith Krehbiel’s Pivotal Politics, an excellent, albeit dense, study of congressional policy-making.  But the sun was shining, the surf was good, and you could not stomach reading 300-pages of social choice theory.  Now, you’re sitting in my class looking at a quiz that might as well be written in Sanskrit.   

The first question is: 

How do you answer?  You could make a random guess, or you might slightly improve your odds by using a heuristic (i.e., a mental shortcut that helps us make decisions).  Two heuristics might help you decide on an answer:

1.     History.  After a semester of taking Prof. Knecht’s quizzes, you might notice his propensity to select C as the correct answer. 

2.     Familiarity.  Perhaps it is reasonable to select a word you know, and, out of this list, the most familiar word is “veto.” 

Neither heuristic is great, but both are better than a random guess. 

But what if I gave you an additional piece of information?

For some reason, the question above shows the distribution of student responses from a previous class.  Now, here is a good heuristic: general consensus.  After all, 98% of the class can’t be wrong, can they?  All things being equal, the consensus heuristic says to go with the crowd.  [Note: I use the term “consensus” to mean the preponderance of opinion, not unanimity.] 

But all things are rarely equal.  To complicate matters, let’s say I showed you how each student answered the question and their corresponding GPA.  

You’ve had enough classes with Andrew and Kathryn to know they are the smartest students at the College; seeing their G.P.A. proves it.  A source cue heuristic—i.e., judging information based on the source—says to go with the smart kids. 

Now you’re in a pickle.  Do you go with the consensus heuristic and choose “B,” or do you go with the source cue heuristic and choose “C”?  There are good arguments either way, but, either way, you’ve dramatically improved your chances over random chance. 

Vaccines

Now let’s look at something that matters: are mRNA COVID vaccines safe and effective?  (By the way, “safe” and “effective” are two different things, but let’s ignore that for the moment.)

One of the most important studies on mRNA Covid vaccines is Stamatatos et al.’s “mRNA vaccination boosts cross-variant neutralizing antibodies elicited by SARS-CoV-2 infection.”  Here is the abstract of their paper:

“Emerging severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants have raised concerns about resistance to neutralizing antibodies elicited by previous infection or vaccination.  We examined whether sera from recovered and naïve donors, collected before and after immunizations with existing messenger R.N.A. (mRNA) vaccines, could neutralize the Wuhan-Hu-1 and B.1.351 variants.  Prevaccination sera from recovered donors neutralized Wuhan-Hu-1 and sporadically neutralized B.1.351, but a single immunization boosted neutralizing titers against all variants and SARS-CoV-1 by up to 1000-fold.  Neutralization was a result of antibodies targeting the receptor binding domain and was not boosted by a second immunization.  Immunization of naïve donors also elicited cross-neutralizing responses but at lower titers.  Our study highlights the importance of vaccinating both uninfected and previously infected persons to elicit cross-variant neutralizing antibodies.” Stamatatos et al. (2021), “mRNA vaccination…” Science, v. 372, no. 6549

Now, read this article in full and complete the following quiz: 

Quiz Prompt.  In a 500-word essay, evaluate the methodology and findings of Stamatatos et al.  Do you agree or disagree with their conclusions?

If you are anything like me, you resigned yourself to failing the quiz halfway through the abstract.  For the handful of you who could understand the article, you still lack the resources to replicate Stamatatos’s study, so you have to trust the authors and the peer-review process. 

This brings us to the first point in evaluating Covid vaccines:

1.     Admit that we don’t know what we’re talking about. 

Let’s admit that we don’t understand how mRNA vaccinations work and are unwilling or unable to find out.  No amount of causal research can get us up to speed.  If we really wanted to understand mRNA vaccines, we would quit our jobs, get a Ph.D., and become a leading virologist so we could conduct our own experiments.  I, for one, have neither the time nor the intellect for such an endeavor.  

Recognizing that we don’t know what we’re talking about is a game-changer because it means that we have to…

2.     Play the odds. 

Because we don’t know how mRNA vaccines work, we have to make the best decision possible with limited information.  We are, in essence, gambling that we’re right about vaccines.  Fortunately, two mental shortcuts can help increase our odds: the consensus and source cue heuristics. 

All things being equal, a betting person should side with the consensus in the scientific community if one exists.  Fortunately, there is a scientific consensus that vaccinations are safe and effective.  But “consensus” does not mean “unanimity,” and there are heterodox scientists who cast doubt upon the safety and efficacy of vaccinations.  The fact that the dissenting position is extremely rare among scientists strongly suggests it is wrong, but does not guarantee it is so. 

Source cues can then help us decide whether to stick with the majority or roll the dice by going with the minority.  Here, reputation is the best cue we can use.  After all, would you rather have open-heart surgery by a world-renowned cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic or a two-half-star doctor at a hospital in Blythe?  So, who can best evaluate Stamatatos’s study: Dr. Florian Krammer, Professor of Vaccinology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and author of more than 100 papers on viruses and vaccinations, or Bob, a 50-year-old truck driver with a GED who likes to tweet about the link between vaccines and sterility?

I did a quick search to see which organizations endorsed or opposed Covid vaccinations.  Here is a partial list:

If I were a betting person—and I am; we all are—I’d stake my money and my life on the advice of the American Medical Association over that from the World Chiropractic Alliance. 

Unlike the earlier pivotal politics example, the consensus and source cue heuristics both point in the same direction: Covid vaccinations are safe and effective.  So I got the shot, despite not really knowing how or why mRNA vaccines work. 

I should mention that while proper use of the consensus and source cue heuristics are essential to good thinking, they are also the source for most of our bad thinking.  I’ll cover this in the following articles.    

The Promise and Peril of DYOR.

Admitting that we don’t know what we’re talking about does not absolve us from educating ourselves and doing research.  It does, however, narrow the focus and scope of that research.

In heterodox and conspiracy theory circles, a popular mantra is “Do your own research” (DYOR).  DYOR sounds great, but it is usually bad advice.  Drs. Nathan Ballantyne and David Dunning, in “Skeptics Say ‘Do Your Own Research.’ It’s Not That Simple,” write,

“As psychological studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to technical and complex issues like climate change and vaccine efficacy, novices who do their own research often end up becoming more misled than informed — the exact opposite of what D.Y.O.R. is supposed to accomplish.” 

In the next few articles, I’ll explain why DYOR often gets us into trouble. 

Research is essential, however.  We need evidence to evaluate the consensus and source cue heuristics to maximize our odds.  We need to know whether there is an expert consensus and, if so, how strong it is.  And we need to know about the reputation of our sources.  This all takes time and effort, but unlike trying to understand the science behind mRNA vaccines, it is research that the average citizen can perform. 

We can also evaluate outcomes, even if we do not fully understand the underlying science.  I might not understand how mRNA vaccines work, but I can interpret data that showed that, at the peak of the Delta variant, the death rate for the unvaccinated was ten times that of the vaccinated.  Moreover, large-N data and personal experience demonstrate that vaccination does not guarantee immunity.

So, do your own research.  Figure out if there is a consensus among the experts.  Try your best to judge what is and is not a reputable source.  Evaluate the evidence when you can.  Educate yourself if for no other reason but to be an intelligent, well-rounded person. But, please, don’t act like you’re a vaccine expert when you’re not.      

I have argued that admitting we don’t know what we’re talking about and playing the odds is the only way to make good decisions on complicated issues.  This means that we must trust the experts, which can be scary.  I think there are several valid reasons why people don’t trust the experts, not least because experts are not gods and the majority is not always right.  But we have to trust someone.  Why not trust those people who do this stuff for a living?  There is no other way to maximize your chances of being right. 

So, why is it so common to engage in thinking that sabotages our odds?  That is the subject of the following article.       

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