It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here. The history of that movement is long.
Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.
I think there's a certain amount of cherry-picking going on with this textbook, however, as you'd find just as many pro-science books today, and likely a number of "science is the devil"-type publications in the early 1900s.
It's an interesting read, either way, with some amusing editorializing by the article's author in the middle (no spoilers).
Lots of anti-vaxxers are fine with other kinds of drugs and use them liberally, even in many cases street drugs. They'll eat fast food, processed food, use household chemicals, do all kinds of other things that expose them to things they don't understand and may not be good for them, but vaccines are just the devil incarnate. The word vaccine seems to provoke a visceral gut reaction among a lot of them.
Like you said it goes way, way back. Something about vaccines creeps a lot of people out for reasons I don't understand.
I think it's simply the enforcement mechanisms make people paranoid, especially since they are usually directed at children (by schools), it all then snowballs from there.
RFK Jr. is such a case. Anti-vaxx, but uses something to boost his "jackedness". The dude is jacked for a >70 years old guy. Supposedly it's testosterone. If anyone knows what he uses to look so jacked, please share.
That's what he says: “I’m on an anti-aging protocol from my doctor that includes testosterone replacement,” Kennedy said. “I don’t take any anabolic steroids or anything like that and the TRT I use is bioidentical to what my body produces.”
I wouldn't be surprised if he mixed in a few other "vitamins"
To be fair, vaccinating all humans, dogs, cats and other animals that can carry COVID-19 was never going to happen before the virus mutated, so you could also apply the label to reality itself.
To be fair, that’s not required to yield extremely strong public health outcomes, as evidenced by the extremely strong public health outcomes we saw in reality.
(If you’re about to go on some statistically illiterate sidebar about how the COVID vaccines weren’t actually that effective, you can save your breath)
Not sure if you're "playing dumb" (sometimes people do that on chat boards). Kennedy isn't just "pro-choice on vaccines", he's repeatedly amplified nonscientific views about vaccine safety. For example, as recently as 2023, "Autism comes from vaccines". Then he pivots to a more useful comment, that vaccines are exempt from the normal requirements on drugs to go through full clinical trials.
If you want to claim "autism comes from vaccines" you really have to put up some sort of evidence that supports the claim, and the reality is that there is no reliable evidence for the claim. Also, which vaccine? They use a wide range of technologies? Is it thimerosol... which isn't in any of the major vaccines used in the US today (and was unlikely to be a cause of autism in the first place, and is also still used in many contexts).
Ultimately, what RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science. I think he's doing it because he thinks the established science is corrupt, but I fail to see how he could possibly correct that while also casting doubt. If he ends up in a public health leadership position, he's going to find very quickly just how poorly his approach to public health works.
> he's repeatedly amplified nonscientific views about vaccine safety. For example, as recently as 2023, "Autism comes from vaccines".
I've heard this said in the NYT and elsewhere, but have yet to read any actual quotes of his __in context__.
> RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science.
the first rule of science is that it is never "established". This is especially true in health sciences, where thing that we were pretty sure were one way turn out not to be that way, or are much more nuanced than we thought. So challenging established thought is what scientists should be doing.
Now if RFK is a public health official then that is probably counter-productive and not really the place to be doing that. But he hasn't been a public health official to my knowledge so far.
I don't know that much about RFK but one thing I do like about him is that he's speaking out against the unhealthy processed food industry, which I don't hear hardly anyone else doing. (Lots of people say "eat healthy" but there's not that many people saying "these large multinationals are feeding you garbage for profit".
When you say that science is never "Established", that's horse pockey. Established means we have a high level of confidence (not absolute). Yes, things get updated, for example we now don't go around saying that "stress causes ulcers". And when it comes to vaccines, multiple high quality studies have failed to find a relationship between vaccines and autism, while the original work has been discredited (shown to be false) and retracted. Yet the news cycle about that caused large numbers of people in the US to not get their kids vaccinated for many different things (and also blame the vaccines for their children's autism). (to be realistic, vaccines do have side effects and there is an entire program detected to detecting those problems).
As for whether he's been a public health official: no, but he has worked on environmental and public health problems before (I don't recall if this is before or after he ate so much fish he got mercury poisoning).
I don't think many people are complaining about him speaking against processed food, but again, the policy he promotes should be thoughtful, not knee-jerk.
He’ll head the Department of Health and Human Services soon, little use debating what his position is here when we will see it play out soon.
I do recommend you read his book, https://lfpl.overdrive.com/media/6093658, it seems you are of the misconception that a paper being retracted is a statement that it is false. In reality, it’s a statement that state officials (sponsored by big pharma) have threatened the livelihood of the author and/or publisher. It’s extortion, not science.
I would LOVE it if there were reliable studies about whether specific vaccines cause specific conditions, how common those conditions are, etc. The CDC does not share my interest. Instead, they mostly just publish information-free booklets that attempt to guilt trip me into getting the vaccine. My experience as a parent is pediatricians attempting to coerce me to allow the vaccination of my child AND accept legal responsibility for any side effects. That is fucked up.
I was predisposed to be favorable towards vaccines when I first became a parent. But experience has taught me that those who push vaccines are simply uninterested in a convincing me, they are only interested in coercing me.
At this point if the CDC has a LOT of work to do to rebuild trust. I don't see it happening anytime soon.
In that case, you should read the book RFK Jr. published with Dr. Brian Hooker that provides a treatise on the topic, referencing 100+ published, peer reviewed studies on the topic. A free sample of the first few chapters is a available here: https://lfpl.overdrive.com/media/6093658
So tired of this framing. We get it, you don't like the government. So what?
If you're spreading lies about medicine because you distrust authority...
Well, first of all, you're dumb because you believe falsehoods.
But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my friends and my families' health, and to your own health as well.
Why would we have any patience for this?
Your rugged self-important individualism is not worth more than any of that.
You appear to be thinking that you're taking some heroic stand on principle. Your principle is leading you astray. It makes you antisocial, a danger to your neighbors.
>We get it, you don't like the government. So what?
Well, if you don't trust the government, then the likelihood that you'll be willing to follow their "orders" is pretty low.
> But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my friends and my families' health, and to your own health as well.
And __this__ response is exactly why people can become anti-vaxx without having a problem with medicine or science in general (which is the question being put forward by the OP). You're coming at it from a "the gov said its safe, so it's safe, and you're an idiot for not trusting the gov" (even though governments have shown themselves to be un-trustworthy many many times -- not in the area of vaccines necessarily -- but in other domains.
So this type of urging to "do it because we're all doing it because Uncle Sam said so" is highly counter productive.
> I don't need a government to make up my mind on scientific topics, and neither should you
of course, but you're missing the point being discussed here, which is "why are (some) people vaccine resistant but not resistant to medication in general?"; it becomes an issue when vaccines are _mandated_ (or quasi-mandated through heavy social pressure), because that's when the trust issue comes into play.
A person who adapts their beliefs just so that they are in opposition to what some official institution is saying is not an independent thinker, but the exact opposite.
It's like when I was thirteen and suddenly thought my parent's interests were really uncool.
The reasons for why immunity to certain diseases is mandated is transparent and easy to understand.
Talk to someone with education in the field, like your doctor, rather than playing the edgelord.
In the abstract I can find the empathy in me to understand the childlike logic behind it, but like I said, zero patience for this bullshit.
Come on, not with killing the parents, that's not that close to the human experience of reproduction. Raising a baby is really fascinating and fulfilling albeit tiring and really I feel other people should be just a tiny bit more helpful. But maybe if they might catch the baby fever from helping it would be even more on existing parents to help each out than it is - or more on grandparents (maybe you can only catch it if you are younger).
Your right to bodily autonomy must always be balanced with your impact on others' rights. You can drink, but you can't drive drunk. You can shoot guns, but not at someone. Example abound in our society.
Bodily autonomy for free adults of sound mind is absolute. There is no "right" to be protected against infectious disease. I am absolutely pro-vaccine and getting vaccinated is the best option for the vast majority of patients but let's not distort the discussion by inventing fake rights that appear nowhere in the US Constitution.
I think a lot of the recent backlash was based on false claims by politicians and public health officials that COVID-19 vaccine mandates were necessary to protect others. But in reality the scientific evidence indicated that the vaccines had little or no benefit for reducing the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. That discrepancy in messaging eroded public trust and made some people believe that authorities had ulterior motives.
> Bodily autonomy for free adults of sound mind is absolute.
There's no jurisdiction on the planet in which this is true. Certainly not the USA.
> let's not distort the discussion by inventing fake rights that appear nowhere in the US Constitution
The Constitution itself openly and clearly shoots down this idea in the Bill of Rights, in the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
So where do we have vaccine mandates today? I understand some employers mandate it, esp in government or healthcare settings, but I've never worked at a place that has. I didn't get the covid vaccine and nothing changed with my life - I was still able to go to restaurants, movies, and fly internationally. Nobody asks me for my immunizations from the 1980s when I was in k-12.
"All 50 states and Washington D.C. have laws requiring certain vaccines for students to attend school."
Employers, as a result, tend not to have their own requirements, for the same reasons they don't ask you to demonstrate you can count to ten if you have a high school diploma.
A perfect example of modern-day discourse. Not even taking a stance or making a point, just the least-generous interpretation of someone else's words turned into an attacking question.
-- Nobody suggested that only women get autonomy
-- Communicable diseases are obviously different than pregnancy in there health impacts on broader society
-- Lots of women in lots of places don't have bodily autonomy (there was a lot of discussion/reporting about it leading up to the recent US election)
Of course, in the pandemic we saw extreme versions of this. Anything to avoid vaccination, but ivermectin and other risky drugs were no problem. If vaccination would be alternative medicine and ivermection government mandated, we might see the reverse.
So I don't think its vaccination perse, at least not on its own, but vaccines have various things going against them. Like someone else in this thread said, government mandate + preventative medicine has the right ingredients to form a conspiracy theory with, religious doctrine has historically amplified that as well. Additionally, there's also a distrust of 'big pharma' in general, and especially with minority groups a history of dubious or even malevolent medical experimentation by the government.
A big part of the antivaxxers are now also anti 5G, advocate against the use of sunscreen, are against wind energy and EV, sometimes pro-russia, anti-deepstate, etc. Some of this is fossil lobby, some of it is the result of Russian propaganda and other parts are just organic whackyness, like the flat earthers.
Other items on the "essential medicine" list include propofol, morphine, and fentanyl. Each can very easily kill if incorrectly used, and each has serious dangers if used for the wrong conditions.
Ivermectin is specifically listed in the "anthelminthics" section, i.e. for worms. It's an essential medicine because it's good at killing worms, which widely affect billions of people in developing nations.
It didn't win the Nobel prize and hasn't been used for decades to treat COVID-19.
Water is essential, too, but that doesn't mean a tsunami is good for you. Hydrating a sick person can save a life; waterboarding them can be a war crime. Context matters.
> Anything to avoid vaccination, but ivermectin and other risky drugs were no problem.
This sort of language makes problems worse and even further decreases trust.
Casting a wide net and calling ivermectin a "risy drug" when a quick search engine query will show it is used safely in humans as an antiparasite drug. When someone who is skeptical about vaccines reads these sorts of blatant falsehoods why in the world would they believe anything else you say?
If you wanted to warn people against using forms formulated for animal consumption then you could've just said that, instead you painted with a wide brush which justifies someone to not trust you.
> a quick search engine query will show it is used safely in humans as an antiparasite drug
That just means it's safer than being infested with untreated parasites.
It doesn't mean someone without worms should take it for funsies.
Your same Google search will reveal ivermectin carries (as with almost any intervention) potential serious side effects. Doctors prescribing medication balance those risks with the potential benefits; it's why you don't get fentanyl (safe! effective! widely used!) for a papercut, even if it would be very helpful for the pain.
I'm not promoting the consumption of ivermectin without a good reason. I've never had it myself, nor have I encouraged anyone else to take it for "funsies".
Tylenol overdoses are relatively common and can even be deadly, but it would be a gross over-generalization to classify Tylenol as a "risky" drug. If you want people to take a drug in a proper setting, in proper amounts, to treat the relevant disease you should /just say that/ instead of trying to get people to think a generally safe drug isn't generally safe.
If someone has a serious bacterial infection and thinks they just need Tylenol, I wouldn't tell them that "You shouldn't take Tylenol! It's risky!" instead I'd tell them that Tylenol won't help treat their disease.
> But the FDA says acetaminophen carries a special risk. About a quarter of Americans routinely take more over-the-counter pain relief pills of all kinds than they are supposed to, surveys show. That behavior is "particularly troublesome" for acetaminophen, an FDA report said, because the drug's narrow safety margin places "a large fraction of users close to a toxic dose in the ordinary course of use.”
> Taken over several days, as little as 25 percent above the maximum daily dose – or just two additional extra strength pills a day – has been reported to cause liver damage, according to the agency. Taken all at once, a little less than four times the maximum daily dose can cause death. A comparable figure doesn't exist for ibuprofen, because so few people have died from overdosing on that drug.
> From 2001 to 2010, annual acetaminophen-related deaths amounted to about twice the number attributed to all other over-the-counter pain relievers combined, according to the poison control data.
> Acetaminophen overdose sends as many as 78,000 Americans to the emergency room annually and results in 33,000 hospitalizations a year, federal data shows. Acetaminophen is also the nation’s leading cause of acute liver failure, according to data from an ongoing study funded by the National Institutes for Health.
> In fact, the FDA has still not completed the review of the drug that began back in the 1970s, as part of the agency’s larger mandate to assess the safety and efficacy of older medicines.
> As the panel’s work was going on, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals weighed in on acetaminophen. The London-based Lancet declared in a 1975 editorial that if the drug “were discovered today it would not be approved” by British regulators. “It would certainly never be freely available without prescription.”
> Doctors prescribing medication balance those risks with the potential benefits
except for the thousands of doctors who overprescribed opioids due to either ineptitude or their own benefit, or perhaps lack of alternatives
yeah, the Sacklers are primarily at fault, but I think people forget that they weren't handing out these pills themselves on street corners, but that __doctors__ were handing them out, triggering the biggest health crisis in America
I agree, which is why someone should say "unsafe dosages of ivermectin" or "ivermectin in formulations unsafe for human consumption" instead of speaking of a widely used drug as per itself "unsafe" without qualification. Making over-generalized statements will lead to people rightly reject what you're saying, leaving room for them to be misinformed about the actual reality of the situation.
> A big part of the antivaxxers are now also anti 5G, advocate against the use of sunscreen, are against wind energy and EV, sometimes pro-russia, anti-deepstate
Sure, some of these might be the same people, but I disagree that there's a big overlap between anti-vaxxers, which are not uncommon (I know quite a few who "vaccine resistant" which in many people's minds == anti-vaxxers), and anti-5G which is very niche (I've never met or interacted with a single person who thinks that), or anti-EV which is again a different demographic ("I want to drive my gas guzzling F-150 because Amerika is #1")
> Something about vaccines creeps a lot of people out for reasons I don't understand.
I think it's the fact that vaccines are heavily pushed on everyone, which is very different than a medication that you choose to take, or your doctor specifically prescribes for you, to address a medical condition. Taking chemicals to cure some disease is different than taking chemicals when you're healthy simply to decrease a risk that you may or may not consider relevant to you. Also, often vaccines are administered not for your own sake but to protect the community, and so again it's a different calculation where you're injecting chemicals (or injecting your kids with chemicals) not because you think you need them but to potentially protect others should you become ill.
Also there often isn't as much explanation around vaccines (besides COVID) as to their makeup, etc., compared to some medication that your doctor prescribes to you (i.e., if my Dr prescribes a blood thinner I'm going to get a pretty thorough explanation of it and can ask questions, whereas with vaccines it feels mandatory without much explanation other than "the surgeon general said to".
So it's not at all surprising to me that there is strong resistance to vaccines from some people who have no problem with medications in general.
It's the privilege of growing up in a society where most people are vaccinated. People have forgotten (or never seen) how horrifying some diseases can be.
Can you explain what you mean by "people who aren't against vaccine technology?" I'm not sure I follow given that RFK has explicitly said he is against vaccines and that no vaccines are safe and effective. [0]
===In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.===
===“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.===
===That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”===
==guilt by association to mislead: "appeared onscreen next to"==
It was something produced by his own non-profit. Do you not think it is fair to associate him with the non-profit he founded and ran? He has had no trouble associating himself with the organization. I feel like we can make the same association without misleading anyone.
This is still just a deflection from the question of what "people who aren't against vaccine technology" even means. Can you please define it? I am having trouble seeing the difference between being anti-vaccine and being anti-vaccine technology.
NOTE: The comment I originally responded to has since been edited.
Anything that people are forced to do is going to cause this sort of visceral response.
A lot of things that we were forced to do during COVID still stick with me and have basically made me intensely distrustful of authority to a degree that wasn't present before.
It was just bullshit after bullshit enacted in law and forced on people. Walking in certain directions in the supermarket, going outside for only X minutes per day to exercise, only X people allowed at your table at the pub, etc. Just endless totally unscientific bollocks.
It's like getting into a heated debate with someone. You start out and actually listen to what people are saying, but then eventually it's just like, come on man, fuck off, I don't even care if you're right, I'm tuned out.
Fast food doesn't force me to eat it under penalty of imprisonment.
- Vaccines are usually injected, injection makes most people uncomfortable. Most of them get over it, but it can be panic inducing for a small number. Among street drug users, injection is usually considered extreme, as in, the thing only true addicts do.
- When you get vaccinated, you are fine, and then you get a few unpleasant side effects. That's the opposite of the usual drugs you take when you are sick and make you feel better.
- Sometimes, vaccination is made mandatory, many people don't like to be told what to do with their bodies, even if there are good reasons for it.
- You never know when a vaccine have saved someone. Someone didn't get sick, but is it because of the vaccine, natural immunity, luck, or simply a lack of exposure, maybe he will get sick eventually, you can't really tell, and you don't really notice when something doesn't happen. However, when a vaccine hurt someone, or failed to prevent the disease it should protect against, that's very noticeable.
- The most successful vaccines are now often considered useless, because the disease they protect against is so rare, why go through the discomfort of the vaccination when it is so unlikely for you to get sick either way? It is a tragedy of the commons, as the reason the diseases is so rare is because of widespread vaccination.
>Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.
And yet science says the opposite. The prevailing evidence suggests that humans are generally better suited to stable and safe environments, with danger and chaos typically leading to detrimental effects on mental health.
The safest and richest societies are also the most highly medicated, so I would question to what prevailing evidence you refer. For an extreme example one might consider soldiers / warfighters. Very high rates of trauma and suicidality after returning from war, and this is only anecdotal not first hand but I would be interested to know what the mental health of deployed soldiers looks like in comparison (certainly there is a range of environments between 'deployed at a desk in japan' vs combat units living in 'danger, chaos and instability', so it might be a good context to study within)
Privileged societies are more medicated because the most pressing issues to them are (somewhat) soluble using medication. Because they are not imminently worried about housing and sustenance or violence.
Would be odd to consider medicating for fibromyalgia or depression when you're starving and/or being bombed / shot at.
The word "generally" is the important one in your sentence. Genes don't know what environment they will be born into, and so they include various strategies to cope with the unknown in the hope that some will survive.
Generally, humans are better suited to stable and safe environments. But it would be irresponsible of genes not to include, occasionally, humans who did better in chaos because chaos frequently happens.
I believe there was a study that showed a mix of behaviors because populations with cooperative individuals out-compete in plentiful times and selfish individuals out-compete in scarce times. Hard to Google now because of selfish gene theory.
> Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.
I have a little theory I like to tell at pubs that all of the intelligence comminities exist just because it attracts people who can't stand being bored. Advancing national security could be a thrilling entertainment.
> I have a little theory I like to tell at pubs that all of the intelligence comminities exist just because it attracts people who can't stand being bored. Advancing national security could be a thrilling entertainment.
That's probably Special Circumstances in the Culture novels, but those novels are just a mashup of Iain Banks's imagination and biases, and I think they're poor approximation of anything resembling reality under any set of conditions.
Personally, I think your theory would be a fun conversation topic, but I doubt it reflects real life.
> Our politics has become all about hurting other people, instead of trying to create something positive. We used to go to the polls and say, here’s what I’m voting for. Now we go to the polls to vote against something and we hope it makes others really mad.
This feels like a really uncharitable interpretation on what is going on.
To me it feels more like you have two sides, the two sides have viewpoints that feel very alien to the other side, so extreme that they feel like attacks but actually it's just a clash of worldview.
Also, the loudest voices being amplified online today, along with a political strategy to pursue divisiveness, because it motivates the base to vote, while making unreliable independent votes less likely to vote.
When one side has a repeatedly-stated policy goal like sending the military against "the enemy within" while specifically calling-out political opponents as belonging to said group, it's difficult to interpret that as a mere clash of worldview, even when assuming it's mere bluster to gin up engagement at rallies.
Right, I don't doubt that, but it's clear to me that this isn't the nexus of all of this.
What you're looking at is the later stages of a disagreement. It didn't start out that way, it started as something like, hey can we put the ketchup in the fridge, nah I'd rather leave it out, I prefer it warm. (I'm obviously deliberately being silly here).
You move on in time and suddenly blows are being exchanged because everyone loses patience.
That was the thing that broke my family. The older generation became way more openly racist after that. I didn't want to accept that it was happening, but I finally gave up denying it. And then Trump came along and all rationality went out the window. Distinguished people with engineering degrees, PE some of them just lost their minds. Wealthy boomers with no care in the world just couldn't handle that (I know not all are that way, but half my family became that).
Looking back there were some racist tendencies in that generation but it wasn't openly talked about with me or more likely I just missed it.
I guess it shouldn't be as surprising as it was. You basically just need to be a non-zero amount of racist/sexist/whatever to think that [category x] shouldn't hold the presidency, given that it's the highest office in the world. Any tiny amount of x-ism will do. Turns out a whole lot of apparently normal people are at least a tiiiny bit racist, and it absolutely broke an entire political party.
I think its as simple as the fact that "we" won the Cold War, and that was the only thing putting any leftward pressure at all on US politics. The psycho right wing didn't materialize in 2008 out of nothing (think about LaRouchism, the "moral majority", Pat Buchanan, and on and on). Yes, Republicans are racist, but so are Democrats and Obama did actually win twice so somebody must have voted for him.
Rather, Obama's election was the just the last time that the New Deal coalition was strong enough to hold together, having deteriorated over the course of the 90s and 2000s because it had no clear purpose. Capital no longer feels any need to throw scraps (like limited NLRB-disciplined union organizing, Social Security, Medicare, consumer surplus) to workers to prevent 1918 happening here, which had been the Democratic Party's entire purpose since FDR. It had seemed increasingly ludicrous that revolution would come to America over the course of midcentury, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought the farce to light.
In other words, we're still eating the leftovers of anticommunism, the 20th Century's original sin (to mix a metaphor).
Yeah, that checks out. It's exactly the type of over-intellectualized rationale someone in a Democratic stronghold would come up with.
The left wing didn't aimlessly move left away from labor. Biden was dramatically more pro-labor ("New Dealy") than Obama. The right wing lost their fucking minds because we elected a black man. Trump himself is a one-man microcosm of this: loosely Dem-aligned until... Obama.
Spend some time with the GOP base. They're actually broadly racist, ranging from slightly (and ashamedly) to loudly and unabashedly. The left obviously also has various problems with race, so don't take this as some implicit categorical exoneration.
Biden was more "new dealy" and won. Harris had nothing of the sort to sell and lost. I'm not saying Obama's skin color isn't a factor in our politics since 2008 but it's not the Rosetta Stone.
There were a lot of unusual things about Harris that combined to make it harder to be elected. The vibe of the economy is worse, the reality that the economy is worse than it was 10 years ago for low-income people. The very short time she had to run, how she was kind of part of the Biden administration and tried to push new ideas.
And she's a woman and she's black, again. Then there was the issue that one side of the Democratic party wanted to support Israel more strongly or something, and the other side wanted to protect gazaans and the Palestinians. I think many people wanted to do both at the same time, but there is a fair number of people that picked one side or another. Some of those people voted against her. Some people in my family thought the biggest problem facing America was dei.
hard to tell which side you are talking about here TBH, because while one side has talked up a big game about what they may or may not do, the other side has been actively weaponizing our institutions against aforementioned side.
The growing movement is the one that views vaccines as a categorical good and wants to unperson those who see each individual treatment as a an engineered tool with its own risks and benefits.
If you know anything about marketing you know that for such messaging to be culturally pervasive is a result of years of effort and organizing.
> It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here.
Not surprising. I look at vaccines the same way as I look at any new medication: has it been tested long enough to know what the long-term effects of it are, and do the benefits outweigh the risks. I don't have a problem with MMR, TB and other common vaccines, that have been around for decades. If I'm traveling to East Africa I'm going to get a yellow fever vaccine. I also don't have a problem with the COVID vaccine because it was clear that the risk of not getting vaccinated was significant. But I have never gotten a "flu shot" in my life because the benefit of it is rather low relative to the risk of influenza given my demographics and health. If that makes me an anti-vaxxer, so be it. Don't really care.
That's the rational response, but in practice what we saw is that anyone who questioned the Covid vaccine was instantly labeled anti-vax. It didn't matter if they were fine with all other vaccines. It didn't matter if they just had Covid or had a complicating pre-existing condition. Anything less than full acceptance was shut down as anti-vax. They ruined the anti-vax label which was previously useful.
I think anti-vaxxer is painted with a much wider brush than that, and somehow become automatically equivalent to "anti-science"; there is overlap but there's also a lot of non-overlap. Somehow vaccines have become an "all or nothing" proposition which is just as stupid as saying that all medications are created equal.
But in any case, I'm not going to live my life by what labels others put on me.
> But I have never gotten a "flu shot" in my life because the benefit of it is rather low relative to the risk of influenza given my demographics and health. If that makes me an anti-vaxxer, so be it.
That seems like reasonable risk assessment to me. It’s a minor chore to get but the benefit to you is also pretty minor. Lots of people skip the flu vaccine for those reasons.
But some folks skip the flu vaccine because they are convinced that the vaccine itself will harm them. I hate the term “anti-vaxxer” but if I were to apply the concept, it’s mostly to that unbalanced risk assessment.
It’s an interesting question why some folks develop such an unbalanced assessment. And I dislike “anti-vaxxer” because I think is dismissive and derogatory, and leads away from trying to understand each other.
It's not just that. I generally avoid taking medications unless I need to (when prescribed), which so far in my life has been extremely rare. It may not be "harmful", but I don't want to put any chemicals in my body if I don't have to. Most medications come at some cost, in that besides doing what they are designed to do, they also interact with other cells or systems in ways that may not be desirable. Vaccines are no different in that respect.
This encapsulates a misunderstanding of how vaccines work. They do not float around in our bodies for years. They work by (hopefully) training an immune response from our own bodies. The vaccines themselves rapidly breakdown. They do not last because there's no need for them to. As a result, vaccine testing - for all vaccines - pretty much only needs to cover that period. While side-effects (ranging from minor to serious and rare to common) from the vaccines themselves do occur, what's not clear to me is how well we understand/appreciate the second order effects of an altered immune system response e.g. "my body now knows to attack X, but in attacking X, it also impacts Y" - kind of thing. Where Y may be something that only becomes apparent much later.
Speaking for myself, having lived and worked in SE Asia for a while, I've had almost every vaccine known to man (the only one I'm sure I haven't had is the HPV). I've had 5 COVID shots (got COVID once in 2021) and get an annual flu-shot. The only side-effect I've ever had (that I'm aware of), is a sore arm at the injection site. I have no idea what that says about me. My mum reacts badly to most (not all) vaccines - especially the flu shots. People vary and I suspect our immune system (which I believe is poorly understood) has complex effects on the response to some vaccines.
I didn't say that the vaccine itself persists. But the effects of its interactions with the body, do persist by design.
I had 3 COVID shots; no issues with the first two. But 2 years later, my arm is still quite sore to the touch where I got my shot (and I can feel mild discomfort there even without touching it). So obviously a long-term change there.
> It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here. The history of that movement is long.
> Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.
No, I don't think that's true. Humans are built to learn from experience, and one thing that vaccines do is eliminate the experiences that justify their use. That also makes the experience/knowledge of smaller dangers more prominent. For instance, a kid getting his arm paralyzed from the (now discontinued) live oral polio vaccine, looks a lot different if people are commonly getting worse paralysis from wild polio than if no one is getting wild polio at all anymore.
The other thing you should probably take into account when regarding a book from 1929, is the experiences people had back then with (often dangerous) quack cures promising miracles. For instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and_Drug_A...):
> By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products which had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, the mascara Lash lure, which caused blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law was unable to get through Congress for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.
I had forgotten about the Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, great reminder, thank you.
Humans are adaptive learners, shaped by both individual experience and cultural memory. The rise of anti-vax sentiments might be better explained by psychological and sociological factors. Like mistrust of institutions, the amplification of fringe views via social media, or the cognitive biases that prioritize visible risks over abstract ones.
Those sociological factors aren't complex, and don't require an explanation of any real depth.
The entire problem is this: Fifty four percent of Americans read below the 6th grade level, which means that the simple majority of Americans don't understand the world they live in and never will.
why is this the case? From what I know, it's a lot tougher to tease out the cause of this malfunction in our society. Do we have an undereducated populace because of poverty? Lack of school funding? (if so, why do we underfund schools? is it because we don't have the money? greed? is there a concerted effort to suppress an educated populace for political reasons?) Is there a cultural reticence built into us that resists scientific thought?
My kneejerk analysis boils down to "it's the economy, stupid" and that a substantial portion of our population lives below the poverty line (which itself isn't defined particularly well and probably misses a bunch of folks who ought to qualify for 'living under distressed economic conditions'). It's tough to care about education when you struggle to keep a roof overhead.
It's the old dream of the information era. We were going to cure all of the worlds ills by fixing the problem of unequal access to information. Surely people would all perform equally, when given equal opportunity?
Not only didn't it work, it made the world a far worse place. I think Occam's razor tells us why: Forty nine percent of people will always be of below average intelligence.
Average intelligence currently seems to mean understanding the world at the 6th grade level. Maybe we can raise that to the 7th grade level with a concentrated effort, but that will also raise the performance of the top fifty percent.
There will always be a bottom half and they will always struggle to understand the world the top half build.
> Forty nine percent of people will always be of below average intelligence....
> There will always be a bottom half and they will always struggle to understand the world the top half build.
Before you spend too much time patting yourself on the back for being so superior, it's important to keep in mind that "intelligence" isn't all it's cracked up to be. "Intelligent" people do a lot of stupid shit, not listen, get deceived, and deceive themselves, etc. Hell, I've even heard "intelligence" describe as effectively a superior ability for post-hoc rationalization.
When you find yourself trying to understand the world by dividing it into dumbasses and "smart people like me," you should stop and remember to count yourself with the idiots.
> Before you spend too much time patting yourself on the back for being so superior... dividing it into dumbasses and "smart people like me,"
I didn't say anything like that, or even adjacent to it. I didn't imply any judgement at all, other than to acknowledge that we're not all born the same.
That said, tall people will always be better at basketball on average than short people. Raising the average height doesn't really change that, and trying to pretend that if everyone were provided with the same opportunities they would achieve the same outcomes in basketball, or in intellectual pursuits, is dishonest and actively harmful to those born at a disadvantage.
> ...and trying to pretend that if everyone were provided with the same opportunities they would achieve the same outcomes in basketball, or in intellectual pursuits, is not only dishonest, it's actively harmful to those born at a disadvantage.
Cultivating an us/them distinction is also actively harmful, more harmful I'd say. But if you can't help yourself, count yourself with them and do your best to avoid condescension.
I can appreciate your perspective, but I also think the populist notion that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" (to paraphrase Asimov) has already done even greater damage to our society.
It must be stopped, and that can't happen if we're pretending that all people being worthy of respect also implies that all opinions are.
He's right though. People have cultural knowledge which can lead to better outcomes than "correct" reasoning even when those cultural beliefs are factually wrong. The scientific approach has blind spots where it hasn't reached, especially regarding sociology which is something long-lived cultures excel at but modern science falls flat. "intelligent" understanding has blind spots where things are too complicated to study so we pretend they don't matter. For example, do you count all religious people in your ignorant group? Even when they're having happier lives than comparable atheists?
Here's a thought. Animals often kill their own unhealthy babies but educated people much less so, and even demand that parents use technology to save them otherwise they're bad uneducated unintelligent people. Are those animals doing it wrong because they're too stupid to use medicine? Or are people doing it wrong? I'd say people have a non-scientific culture of minimizing of death even if it harms long-term evolutionary success of the species.
We're really far off topic here, but I'll bite because I'm bored.
Firstly though, we need to agree on what "good" and "bad" mean, in a moral sense. To me "good" is anything that helps humanity thrive, and bad is when something does the opposite. If you have a different definition, this conversation will be a waste of both our time.
> He's right though.
He is not only wrong, he is dangerously wrong. Reason is mans only natural defense. We were born without tooth and claw or even fur thick enough to survive a winter. We must use our minds to survive in this world, or perish as a species. To reject that isn't just a rejection of our nature, it is a form of suicide for our species.
Are you aware that the vast majority of the humans on this planet would not exist today without science? For example, the Haber-Bosch process allows for something like 90% of the worlds food to be grown. Much of the remaining 10% couldn't exist without genetic manipulation, or at the very least selective breeding. To reject science would be to accept a world where at least 90% of us starved and the remaining 10% led short, violent lives filled mostly with unending misery and toil. I'm deeply opposed to that and consider it "bad."
> The scientific approach has blind spots
Yes, that's how science works. We form hypotheses and test them. If those theories turn out to match the evidence we keep them, if they don't we abandon them. That's the truly great thing about science, science can be wrong, but it can never STAY wrong when done properly.
> Religion, euthanasia, etc...
All of those questions depend on culturally defined norms and taboos that may change from person to person or region to region. As long as a persons cultural, spiritual, or philosophical thinking is still "good" (based on my earlier definition) it can coexist with reason, and it's irrelevant. Science does not demand that you put no other god before it, that's religion.
I object only when another system becomes "bad", and in this context that happens whenever someone decides that their ignorance should be valued more than the science that keeps us all alive. It should not, and there are very good reasons for that.
> bad uneducated unintelligent people
I never said, or implied this, or many of the other things you insinuate here. Stating it yourself, and then arguing against it is a form of logical fallacy called a "strawman argument", and it's not just irrational, it's more than a little rude.
You don't actually know that, because you keep missing the point. How do you know I'm wrong if you can't seem to grasp what I'm talking about?
I don't think you're as clever as you seem to think you are. Maybe you should consider the possibility that the advice I gave up-thread is literally true in your case, and not just a reminder to take a position of humility.
> To me "good" is anything that helps humanity thrive, and bad is when something does the opposite.
I agree with that definition. However, it leads to a trade-off between short term thriving of individuals and long term thriving of humanity. We could pour all our resources into supporting every living person but would cripple our future development. Or we could go the other extreme and violate all the human rights to develop a more resilient long term society. Islam, for example, is very robust for thriving of humanity (no population collapse happening there) but very poor for thriving of all individuals within it (severe penalties for seemingly harmless "crimes", women's rights, etc.).
> We know that proofs and reading are required. They do not.
In the context of you saying this after sharing a link to an article around difficulties at HBCUs, I'm trying to find some charitable way to interpret your statements as something other than horrendously racist. Can you please expound on this, or am I taking this correctly?
You do notice that it is the HBCU student who drags race in ("white male professor teaching at an all women’s HBCU").
Math education in large tracts of the country is not good, more so in areas plagued by rural and urban poverty, but that's no excuse to continue in the same way at college. It's sadly common that incoming students have no clue what a proof is and that mathematics isn't plugging numbers into formulas, but there's no excuse continuing that at college level, especially when it's an elite college.
But the kid who wrote the article disagrees, she demands spoonfeeding. Give me my economics degree, but it mustn't have math in it!
Interestingly, the experiences that people are rallying around (for better or worse) are more going _against_ negative effects (perceived or real) of the scientific / technological world:
* Climate Change (caused by the tech of "burning lots of fuels")
* PFAS, pesticides, endocrine disruptors, etc...
* Opiods crisis, nartotics, etc...
* Impact of GAFAM on privacy, social discourse, etc...
In a sense, the "white coats in their labs" and "nerds with glasses" have been repeatedly found (lately) to be on the "wrong side of the issue". (There are usually scientists on both side of the issue, which is the saving grace for science: self-correction is built in.)
Maybe it's relevant that the book is dated from 1929, that is, right before a time where "white coats" started being involved into very shady stuff (eugenics, mass-media propaganda, global-scale destruction weapons, and of, course, industrialized death.)
The COVID crises could have been a time for science in general to earn trust again - in some sense it did, but this time people were overexpecting, and got disappointed at least (and downright enraged at worst, if they were on the wrong side of the politico-scientifict decisions.)
And the pendulum will keep swinging, but hopefully still rise.
This is mistakenly attributing the destructive consequences of profit-motivated mega-industries to "nerds with glasses", thereby creating more cover for the ruthless profit-maximizers to continue destroying the world while deflecting all blame.
Well, in part it's the age-long debate about scientists being held responsible for the effects of their research.
In other part, it's also that the bad consequence of what the "suits" ask the "nerds" to do are becoming increasingly more visible and obvious than before.
Of course science is still helping. But it's also hurting. And I would argue that for lots of folks, the hurting is more obvious and tangible than the help.
I really don't like how often I have to read/hear "Humans are built to X" type arguments.
I don't think the lack of a challenge is the root cause of science denialism. It's a cultural thing, coming from a lack of confidence in the elites. Elites are distraught when inequality become larger and things get tougher for the poorest.
Could you expound on this a little more? I think I've totally misunderstood you.
Like, who would you consider an 'Elite'? AFAICT, someone who's 'an Elite' thrives off of inequality, by definition. Without said inequality they wouldn't be 'Elite'.
Is it possible that your definition for Elite is similar to my definition for Specialist? Like 'Subject Matter Expert'?
Sorry, I wrote my previous comment after I just woke up, it's a bit messy now that I take a second look at it.
I guess the way I used "elites" in my previous comment refers more to a certain perception of society some people hold, rather than to a definite group of people.
If we take the policies implemented during the COVID pandemic as an example, those came from the government, oftentimes backed by academia. Since a lot of people think the government is doing a bad job overall, they don't trust the legitimacy of those policies and oppose the scientific reasoning that led to them being adopted.
When the economy is doing well, people put more trust into their government, or the "elites".
Therefore, my thesis is that distrust into the institutions/science comes from a general discontent of the population, and is not a natural state of humanity.
> humans go insane in a safe and stable environment
Weird that people still get raped and murdered in your "safe and stable" environment. Sometimes the perpetrators don't even see justice and get away with their crimes. How do you account for that?
> a certain amount of cherry-picking
Without a doubt. I don't trust authority because I've been abused by it before. I'm sure you didn't mean to punch down but that's how many of us would rationally perceive it.
Science has delivered a standard of living to most of the developed world that is greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor in numerous ways: health, food, availability of information, ease of travel, physical comfort, etc.
Yet visit social media and it's absolutely overflowing with gloom and doom and histrionic political rage and fear bait. Saw a thread recently on Reddit about how many young people in the USA are contemplating suicide because the present or the future looks so bleak to them.
We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II.
It's convinced me that the human brain is just not wired for abundance. Our brain keeps searching and searching for the immediate existential threats that millions of years of evolution have programmed us to know absolutely must be there. If we don't see them it actually makes us panic more since it means the lion is hiding so well we can't spot it and it's about to jump out and get us.
I think people are extremely sensitive to the first derivative of things happening to them, with a very short time window. Even if your life is objectively better (by any measurement you want) than it would have been 500 years ago, is it better than it was a week ago?
You also tend to compare yourself to others. For example, I am not happy when CEO gets a 20% raise while telling the rest of us that money is tight and no raises can be given. We all want some level of fairness.
People don't set their standard of a good life against a 3000 year old kingdom they've never seen or think about. Nor are they impressed when people resort to mining the ancient past or far-off countries for the deepest pits of misery they can find to make things sound good by comparison.
Nor are they impressed when people resort to mining the ancient past or far-off countries for the deepest pits of misery they can find to make things look good by comparison.
Practicing gratitude is a pretty common strategy for combating depression. If young people today in developed nations don't even understand how bad humans used to have it (and still do, in some places), how can they possibly be grateful for what they have?
Maybe AI-generated, historical influencers should be a thing. "Walked two miles to the river to fill my clay jug. Set my baby down and a croc took her."
It's entirely rational to be upset when things get worse, such as housing prices. IMHO housing prices are the big one for most young people in the developed world today... dig into why they're so upset and you get to housing prices pretty fast.
I'm talking about deep existential despair and doomerism though, like people discussing suicide or refusing to have children because they're convinced the world is ending because of online discourse and/or paranoia.
Edit: speaking of perspective: one of my favorites is to go find a global salary comparison calculator and input my first world tech salary. If you are on this site chances are you are at least in the global 5% if not the global 1%.
Maybe having a better view of human history would help combat the largely false narrative that things are overall getting worse, and there's little hope for future generations?
You do realize that many people in America live paycheck to paycheck and work more than full time in demanding jobs and still need foodstamps to afford enough food? Its not exactly a stress free life of leisure.
If you live in the USA or other developed countries then your opportunity to have all of those things is greater than at any other time or place in human history. Of course, not everyone chooses to seize that opportunity. Some people would rather complain or blame others rather than grinding and delaying gratification to improve their circumstances.
That comment is just totally disconnected from reality. Sure, some people have it rough through no fault of their own and we should implement public policies to expand their opportunities. But the vast majority of people are doing pretty well by historical standards. The unemployment rate is 4.1%! The Consumer Confidence Index is 111!
If you pay attention to the whining losers on Reddit and other social media then you get a distorted view of the state of the country. The silent majority are doing fairly well.
Not too many years back I was doing well in tech, but not extraordinary. But I was constantly facing challenges related to finances, crime, healthcare, etc. Then one day I got a better job and moved to a high cost of living area, with extremely educated high achievers. All those problems magically went away. My neighbors were nice upstanding people, I had money, my employer had better healthcare, etc.
The point is there is a massive class divide socially, also physically segregation. You can be completely unaware of what it's like to be on the wrong side of it.
The cracks in our society are growing, and the level of sophistication required to navigate our system is increasing.
My circle of friends and family is middle class and college educated. I don't know anyone under the age of 35 who owns more than a town house in a low cost area. What does your peer group look like?
I have large extended family scattered all over the country, and very few of them live in high cost areas. Only two household are in the top 1%. Out of the rest, almost all are working regular jobs outside the tech industry and living regular middle class lives. Most who have been out of school for a few years own their own homes. They haven't been victims of any major crimes. I've met some of their neighbors, too, and they generally seem like nice upstanding people.
Well whatever demographic differences we have are isolating our experiences so that you see this as a Reddit phenomenon and I see it as real life. Age gap?
No one cares that our lives are better than humans who lived thousands of years ago or even 100 years ago. And why should we? The benchmark is other humans living today and how they are faring.
> We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II.
Not most people in America. Sure, Ramses didn't have a car, phone or modern medicine; but he could get whatever he wanted _that was available at the time_. That's the yardstick.
I'm not even in the US and I have multiple friends who have expressed to me that they'd be afraid to holiday there due to reproductive rights stuff. For say, two, three weeks.
It's like some sort of extreme anxiety that has no basis in reality.
- "...greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor..."
I agree it's a thought-provoking comparison. It's a remarkably distorted lens, the one modern humans apply to interpret pre-industrial civilization. Should we glamorize a patrician of ancient Rome? Their lifestyle would be a mediocre, low-prestige one, if faithfully translated into the modern world. The vaunted villas of the aristocrats were farmhouses—go look up farm prices in rural Georgia or Kansas: that is ancient aristocracy. If you owned a herd of goats, that was a measure of wealth and success; we'd interpret the same thing as poverty. A chickenwire fence isn't a signifier of blight, but a delineation of land, and a sigil of an authentic land owner—an elite.
The wealth of a great empire, the trade routes of rare spices and fruits from thousands of leagues away? That's Wal-Mart.
It's a provocative idea! The life of the Roman upper aristocratic class is fully accessible to probably a full majority of contemporary Americans. You could replicate practically every part of it, if you liked*. And you're right that that's no longer a benchmark for self-actualization today; we want—need?—so much more than that.
*(The only large difference, and this is much more than a footnote, is the total abscence of slavery. Iron-age farms needed large numbers of slaves—something with the social impact that they'd label the farm owner, the aristocrat, as a high-status invidual. A human ranking above many others. The industrial revolutions replaced most of this with machines. You don't acquire social status by being superior to a tractor).
(The part where the humans alive today aren't 99% farmers has wildly rewritten the human experience, and we're still far from adjusted to that).
> Science has delivered a standard of living to most of the developed world that is greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor in numerous ways: health, food, availability of information, ease of travel, physical comfort, etc.
It also created lifestyles which aren't sustainable, destroyed our ecosystem, made gluttony and sloth our main cause of death.
If you look for the signs they're already visible, it's just that our system has a gigantic inertia. Look at things like ocean acidification and other climate feedback loops, massive wildlife extinction, loss of nutrients in veggies/fruit, PFAS in rain water, micro plastics polluting virtually every living organisms.
Humans work on hope, when things are continuously getting better we're thriving, when things start to fall apart ever so slightly it's much less fun, and we're slowly getting to that point. It doesn't matter how high you start, what matters is the general trend
The author might be wrong. It can actually be racist in ways beyond "African people are genetically inferior."
I didn't find the author to be particularly deeply invested, they seemed to want to score some points over "social justice warriors" and then backed off pretty quickly with an "it's complicated" footnote.
When I read that part I also thought they were just trying to pwn the libs, but the rest of the article was so good, and what they said isn’t inaccurate, so now I think I was just projecting that.
Not being super invested and having it just be a small part of the article actually seems right to me so idk.
I’ve hit my fair share, but this article alone in no way makes me think this person is one.
> Now, imagine the uproar that might ensue from some corners today if a textbook made this sort of direct comparison between two groups, with one group happening to be white and the other black. Some social justice warriors would no doubt raise an outcry. The book would be branded as Eurocentric, racist, and white supremacist, since it doesn’t give equal space to describing the intellectual achievements of the Zulu or to recognizing the validity of indigenous ways of knowing. The picture of the African witch doctor might be described as a “culturally insensitive caricature”. The book would also be criticized for not describing ways in which Zulu society is more healthy than contemporary American society.
This textbook is from 1929 and was probably being written at the exact same time as the Snopes monkey trial (1925). You're reading science hype because science was under attack; and not from "social justice warriors" but from conservative Americans. Notice that the single most transformative discovery in all of biology, evolution, isn't mentioned.
That attack on evolution is still taking place. In Texas there was an attempt to strike all references to evolution and climate change from the curriculum, along with other attempts to introduce biblical references. When did that take place? That was this year; oh, and in 2023:
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/texas-education-board-...
Getting mad at "social justice warriors" for an imagined reaction while ignoring the actual attacks on science is... well, it's what I've come to expect.
Both things can be true, and there are real world examples of attacking western science as eurocentrist and what not. The imagined reaction is based on those criticisms.
I still thought that passage was interesting. It is a totally reasonable prediction of how much of public health would read it.
The post and your comment emphasize how the impact of science depends more on the public than the handful of scientists who create it. Roughly ~0% of people understand any given scientific topic. It will always be completely asymmetric. It will always involve stuff like belief in an ideology, struggles for political power, (relatively blind) trust in a movement or leader, etc. As a result, there is no world in which scientists don't regularly harm whoever follows them, the same as any leader in an uncertain/asymmetric environment (by getting stuff wrong accidentally, or actively abusing their power for personal gain).
The part about social justice warriors is actually interesting because that view will come across as "we hate science!" to some people but the real idea is somewhere between "successful science requires exerting some political power over other people" (obviously true) and "western science was built on a foundation of coercion and oppression, making lots of technological progress and causing some unavoidable tragic effects." Whatever the "truth" is, it's really complicated ethically.
Interesting point RE the Snopes trial. You are right, evolution is not mentioned in the book as far as I can tell. Even though it is foundational to understanding the human body (in particular some weird features it have which any half-good creator would never design that way.)
The SJWs / woke cult are a bit of a personal hobby horse for me. I think it is important to mention, since woke ideology comes from academics at top universities, as well as journalists at top media outlets -- people who have a lot of power to shape the public discourse and influence public policy. The power of Christian fundamentalists over society and culture, on the other hand, has been waning, if one looks over the past few decades. Yes, they are in the ascendancy at the moment with the 2024 election and whatnot, but overall their influence is waning. Of course, both anti-science from the left and from the right are issues we should worry about -- I'm just giving an argument why we might want to be a bit more worried about anti-science from the left. How much either issue is discussed probably greatly depends on what circles you run in.
Note I did mention how there is no discussion of sexual health or women's health in the book. That is an issue with health textbooks that has been improved a lot but still exists to some extent today due to Christian conservatives.
When will you feel like you all have won the war here? What is it that you need to happen? Is it simply a matter of removing academics you deem too woke from their positions, or is it more a matter of public opinion becoming less woke? Just really at this point trying to get a gauge for how long we have to live inside this particular discourse.. Because it just structurally is such that it cant last forever, for I hope at least to you somewhat obvious reasons... (Although I wouldn't be too surprised if this is truly a gnostic battle against darkness for you personally. There are some variants here.)
I just miss when yall were simply libertarian and talked about taxes! We can go back to that one day right?
> When will you feel like you all have won the war here? What is it that you need to happen?
I was involved in a previous iteration of the culture war (religion vs atheism) pretty heavily. If this is anything like that, it'll start fading once people feel like the cultural dominance of the group is broken.
If you want a rule of thumb, hollywood being considered non-woke and universities not requiring diversity statements (cultural conservatives consider these to be roughly isomorphic to the old loyalty oaths) would be generally what to look for.
Edit: These institutions losing their influence would probably also be sufficient. There's nothing inherently important about hollywood, so if another locus of entertainment gains prominence, and it has different cultural views, that would also qualify.
Ok the diversity statement thing seems pretty actionable. Hard to say about hollywood I guess bc its feels very subjective: one guy's "woke" is always going to be another's "fun/wholesome" or whatever.
But for the universities ok, this is at least a thing we can hold onto. It's a little rough to implicitly associate the "diversity" considered in hiring/enrolling at a school with the evil professors, because the entire argument then quite easily contracts down to: "there are too many non-white academics, and that is the real problem." But I guess the whole point is to free ourselves from such silly concerns like racism, institutional or otherwise.
Either way, I just hope they/you get what you want. I used to be worried that this whole thing would spiral too much into violence, but its easy to see now that all the people who care about the "wokeness" are, yeah, exactly like creationists: they just want to feel represented, they just want the blurb in the textbook; its not so much about the world outside, but just how they feel about it; that its ok for them to be angry about the kids sports team or whatever. People want to be principled!
I am truly hopeful at this point they will eventually find some peace while still allowing everyone to live with some self-determination and everything else. Its a little long in the tooth now, but hopefully the recent political ascendency will temper it a bit.
> Hard to say about hollywood I guess bc its feels very subjective
It definitely is. But so was my iteration. A good chunk of the previous iterations of the culture war have been as well. A lot of my generation really didn't like how conservative the small towns we grew up in "felt", it felt oppressive and dumb.
> Either way, I just hope they/you get what you want.
Yeah, I'm not participating in this one. I missed a few years of the culture war during a raging alcoholic phase and both sides feel really foreign nowadays and kinda confusing. But I do occasionally like to pop a bag of popcorn and watch people fight.
> I used to be worried that this whole thing would spiral too much into violence
My guess is probably not much more than the 70s (and we're still a long way from that, there were ~2500 bombings in an 18 month period in 71 and 72), but it seems really unlikely to advance to civil war levels.
What far-end conservatives learned and what sjws are starting to discover is that mainstream exposure is a trap. You can get Walmart to say "Merry Christmas" (instead of happy holidays) or "Black Lives Matter", but that doesn't actually translate to any material church attendance or racial equity. All it does is create the illusion that your side is more of an oppressive force than it actually is, which alienates moderates like the author who can potentially be allies.
>Now, imagine the uproar that might ensue from some corners today if a textbook made this sort of direct comparison between two groups, with one group happening to be white and the other black.
I read a better analogy; they compared the life table of humans with the life table of Chimpanzee or Bonobo. The change between before and after the introduction of modern medicine is obvious.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadHumans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.
I think there's a certain amount of cherry-picking going on with this textbook, however, as you'd find just as many pro-science books today, and likely a number of "science is the devil"-type publications in the early 1900s.
It's an interesting read, either way, with some amusing editorializing by the article's author in the middle (no spoilers).
Lots of anti-vaxxers are fine with other kinds of drugs and use them liberally, even in many cases street drugs. They'll eat fast food, processed food, use household chemicals, do all kinds of other things that expose them to things they don't understand and may not be good for them, but vaccines are just the devil incarnate. The word vaccine seems to provoke a visceral gut reaction among a lot of them.
Like you said it goes way, way back. Something about vaccines creeps a lot of people out for reasons I don't understand.
I agree the needles don't help though.
I wouldn't be surprised if he mixed in a few other "vitamins"
(If you’re about to go on some statistically illiterate sidebar about how the COVID vaccines weren’t actually that effective, you can save your breath)
If you want to claim "autism comes from vaccines" you really have to put up some sort of evidence that supports the claim, and the reality is that there is no reliable evidence for the claim. Also, which vaccine? They use a wide range of technologies? Is it thimerosol... which isn't in any of the major vaccines used in the US today (and was unlikely to be a cause of autism in the first place, and is also still used in many contexts).
Ultimately, what RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science. I think he's doing it because he thinks the established science is corrupt, but I fail to see how he could possibly correct that while also casting doubt. If he ends up in a public health leadership position, he's going to find very quickly just how poorly his approach to public health works.
I've heard this said in the NYT and elsewhere, but have yet to read any actual quotes of his __in context__.
> RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science.
the first rule of science is that it is never "established". This is especially true in health sciences, where thing that we were pretty sure were one way turn out not to be that way, or are much more nuanced than we thought. So challenging established thought is what scientists should be doing.
Now if RFK is a public health official then that is probably counter-productive and not really the place to be doing that. But he hasn't been a public health official to my knowledge so far.
I don't know that much about RFK but one thing I do like about him is that he's speaking out against the unhealthy processed food industry, which I don't hear hardly anyone else doing. (Lots of people say "eat healthy" but there's not that many people saying "these large multinationals are feeding you garbage for profit".
When you say that science is never "Established", that's horse pockey. Established means we have a high level of confidence (not absolute). Yes, things get updated, for example we now don't go around saying that "stress causes ulcers". And when it comes to vaccines, multiple high quality studies have failed to find a relationship between vaccines and autism, while the original work has been discredited (shown to be false) and retracted. Yet the news cycle about that caused large numbers of people in the US to not get their kids vaccinated for many different things (and also blame the vaccines for their children's autism). (to be realistic, vaccines do have side effects and there is an entire program detected to detecting those problems).
As for whether he's been a public health official: no, but he has worked on environmental and public health problems before (I don't recall if this is before or after he ate so much fish he got mercury poisoning).
I don't think many people are complaining about him speaking against processed food, but again, the policy he promotes should be thoughtful, not knee-jerk.
I do recommend you read his book, https://lfpl.overdrive.com/media/6093658, it seems you are of the misconception that a paper being retracted is a statement that it is false. In reality, it’s a statement that state officials (sponsored by big pharma) have threatened the livelihood of the author and/or publisher. It’s extortion, not science.
Further, I'm not going to read RFK's book. I place it in the same category as 9/11 Truthers- not even worthy of inspection.
I was predisposed to be favorable towards vaccines when I first became a parent. But experience has taught me that those who push vaccines are simply uninterested in a convincing me, they are only interested in coercing me.
At this point if the CDC has a LOT of work to do to rebuild trust. I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Of course, you should additionally read the various counter arguments that have been published, for instance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5789217/, and likely more beyond.
If you're spreading lies about medicine because you distrust authority...
Well, first of all, you're dumb because you believe falsehoods.
But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my friends and my families' health, and to your own health as well.
Why would we have any patience for this?
Your rugged self-important individualism is not worth more than any of that.
You appear to be thinking that you're taking some heroic stand on principle. Your principle is leading you astray. It makes you antisocial, a danger to your neighbors.
Well, if you don't trust the government, then the likelihood that you'll be willing to follow their "orders" is pretty low.
> But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my friends and my families' health, and to your own health as well.
And __this__ response is exactly why people can become anti-vaxx without having a problem with medicine or science in general (which is the question being put forward by the OP). You're coming at it from a "the gov said its safe, so it's safe, and you're an idiot for not trusting the gov" (even though governments have shown themselves to be un-trustworthy many many times -- not in the area of vaccines necessarily -- but in other domains.
So this type of urging to "do it because we're all doing it because Uncle Sam said so" is highly counter productive.
What makes you think so? I don't need a government to make up my mind on scientific topics, and neither should you.
Ironically, it's the person who believes the opposite of what some government says that is doing so.
of course, but you're missing the point being discussed here, which is "why are (some) people vaccine resistant but not resistant to medication in general?"; it becomes an issue when vaccines are _mandated_ (or quasi-mandated through heavy social pressure), because that's when the trust issue comes into play.
It's like when I was thirteen and suddenly thought my parent's interests were really uncool.
The reasons for why immunity to certain diseases is mandated is transparent and easy to understand.
Talk to someone with education in the field, like your doctor, rather than playing the edgelord.
In the abstract I can find the empathy in me to understand the childlike logic behind it, but like I said, zero patience for this bullshit.
If being pregnant was contagious, we'd treat it as a very different issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(film)
And what would the anti-vax position here be?
Childbirth used to be one of the key killers of women.
(Also, depends on the kids...)
> And what would the anti-vax position here be?
Our ancestors didn't get eaten by xenomorphs, you'll be fine!
I think a lot of the recent backlash was based on false claims by politicians and public health officials that COVID-19 vaccine mandates were necessary to protect others. But in reality the scientific evidence indicated that the vaccines had little or no benefit for reducing the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. That discrepancy in messaging eroded public trust and made some people believe that authorities had ulterior motives.
There's no jurisdiction on the planet in which this is true. Certainly not the USA.
> let's not distort the discussion by inventing fake rights that appear nowhere in the US Constitution
The Constitution itself openly and clearly shoots down this idea in the Bill of Rights, in the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
George Washington himself instituted a vaccine mandate. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/smallpox-inoculation-revolu...
https://www.ncsl.org/health/state-non-medical-exemptions-fro...
"All 50 states and Washington D.C. have laws requiring certain vaccines for students to attend school."
Employers, as a result, tend not to have their own requirements, for the same reasons they don't ask you to demonstrate you can count to ten if you have a high school diploma.
(And don't worry, they've got folks from other countries who might not have gone through our school system covered; https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...)
> Nobody asks me for my immunizations from the 1980s when I was in k-12.
Because you are virtually guaranteed to have had them. They will also not ask you if you're potty trained.
-- Nobody suggested that only women get autonomy
-- Communicable diseases are obviously different than pregnancy in there health impacts on broader society
-- Lots of women in lots of places don't have bodily autonomy (there was a lot of discussion/reporting about it leading up to the recent US election)
So I don't think its vaccination perse, at least not on its own, but vaccines have various things going against them. Like someone else in this thread said, government mandate + preventative medicine has the right ingredients to form a conspiracy theory with, religious doctrine has historically amplified that as well. Additionally, there's also a distrust of 'big pharma' in general, and especially with minority groups a history of dubious or even malevolent medical experimentation by the government.
A big part of the antivaxxers are now also anti 5G, advocate against the use of sunscreen, are against wind energy and EV, sometimes pro-russia, anti-deepstate, etc. Some of this is fossil lobby, some of it is the result of Russian propaganda and other parts are just organic whackyness, like the flat earthers.
Ivermectin is specifically listed in the "anthelminthics" section, i.e. for worms. It's an essential medicine because it's good at killing worms, which widely affect billions of people in developing nations.
It didn't win the Nobel prize and hasn't been used for decades to treat COVID-19.
Water is essential, too, but that doesn't mean a tsunami is good for you. Hydrating a sick person can save a life; waterboarding them can be a war crime. Context matters.
This sort of language makes problems worse and even further decreases trust.
Casting a wide net and calling ivermectin a "risy drug" when a quick search engine query will show it is used safely in humans as an antiparasite drug. When someone who is skeptical about vaccines reads these sorts of blatant falsehoods why in the world would they believe anything else you say?
If you wanted to warn people against using forms formulated for animal consumption then you could've just said that, instead you painted with a wide brush which justifies someone to not trust you.
That just means it's safer than being infested with untreated parasites.
It doesn't mean someone without worms should take it for funsies.
Your same Google search will reveal ivermectin carries (as with almost any intervention) potential serious side effects. Doctors prescribing medication balance those risks with the potential benefits; it's why you don't get fentanyl (safe! effective! widely used!) for a papercut, even if it would be very helpful for the pain.
Tylenol overdoses are relatively common and can even be deadly, but it would be a gross over-generalization to classify Tylenol as a "risky" drug. If you want people to take a drug in a proper setting, in proper amounts, to treat the relevant disease you should /just say that/ instead of trying to get people to think a generally safe drug isn't generally safe.
If someone has a serious bacterial infection and thinks they just need Tylenol, I wouldn't tell them that "You shouldn't take Tylenol! It's risky!" instead I'd tell them that Tylenol won't help treat their disease.
https://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-use-on...
> But the FDA says acetaminophen carries a special risk. About a quarter of Americans routinely take more over-the-counter pain relief pills of all kinds than they are supposed to, surveys show. That behavior is "particularly troublesome" for acetaminophen, an FDA report said, because the drug's narrow safety margin places "a large fraction of users close to a toxic dose in the ordinary course of use.”
> Taken over several days, as little as 25 percent above the maximum daily dose – or just two additional extra strength pills a day – has been reported to cause liver damage, according to the agency. Taken all at once, a little less than four times the maximum daily dose can cause death. A comparable figure doesn't exist for ibuprofen, because so few people have died from overdosing on that drug.
> From 2001 to 2010, annual acetaminophen-related deaths amounted to about twice the number attributed to all other over-the-counter pain relievers combined, according to the poison control data.
> Acetaminophen overdose sends as many as 78,000 Americans to the emergency room annually and results in 33,000 hospitalizations a year, federal data shows. Acetaminophen is also the nation’s leading cause of acute liver failure, according to data from an ongoing study funded by the National Institutes for Health.
> In fact, the FDA has still not completed the review of the drug that began back in the 1970s, as part of the agency’s larger mandate to assess the safety and efficacy of older medicines.
> As the panel’s work was going on, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals weighed in on acetaminophen. The London-based Lancet declared in a 1975 editorial that if the drug “were discovered today it would not be approved” by British regulators. “It would certainly never be freely available without prescription.”
except for the thousands of doctors who overprescribed opioids due to either ineptitude or their own benefit, or perhaps lack of alternatives
yeah, the Sacklers are primarily at fault, but I think people forget that they weren't handing out these pills themselves on street corners, but that __doctors__ were handing them out, triggering the biggest health crisis in America
Sure, some of these might be the same people, but I disagree that there's a big overlap between anti-vaxxers, which are not uncommon (I know quite a few who "vaccine resistant" which in many people's minds == anti-vaxxers), and anti-5G which is very niche (I've never met or interacted with a single person who thinks that), or anti-EV which is again a different demographic ("I want to drive my gas guzzling F-150 because Amerika is #1")
I think it's the fact that vaccines are heavily pushed on everyone, which is very different than a medication that you choose to take, or your doctor specifically prescribes for you, to address a medical condition. Taking chemicals to cure some disease is different than taking chemicals when you're healthy simply to decrease a risk that you may or may not consider relevant to you. Also, often vaccines are administered not for your own sake but to protect the community, and so again it's a different calculation where you're injecting chemicals (or injecting your kids with chemicals) not because you think you need them but to potentially protect others should you become ill. Also there often isn't as much explanation around vaccines (besides COVID) as to their makeup, etc., compared to some medication that your doctor prescribes to you (i.e., if my Dr prescribes a blood thinner I'm going to get a pretty thorough explanation of it and can ask questions, whereas with vaccines it feels mandatory without much explanation other than "the surgeon general said to".
So it's not at all surprising to me that there is strong resistance to vaccines from some people who have no problem with medications in general.
RFK, who is vaccinated along with his children: "I’ve been fighting 40 years to get mercury out of fish. Nobody calls me anti-fish."
===In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.===
===“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.===
===That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”===
[0] https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-preside...
"appeared onscreen next to"
It's unserious. To get his actual opinion, which is nuanced, you have to go long form.
It was something produced by his own non-profit. Do you not think it is fair to associate him with the non-profit he founded and ran? He has had no trouble associating himself with the organization. I feel like we can make the same association without misleading anyone.
This is still just a deflection from the question of what "people who aren't against vaccine technology" even means. Can you please define it? I am having trouble seeing the difference between being anti-vaccine and being anti-vaccine technology.
NOTE: The comment I originally responded to has since been edited.
So I guess you can take your pick.
A lot of things that we were forced to do during COVID still stick with me and have basically made me intensely distrustful of authority to a degree that wasn't present before.
It was just bullshit after bullshit enacted in law and forced on people. Walking in certain directions in the supermarket, going outside for only X minutes per day to exercise, only X people allowed at your table at the pub, etc. Just endless totally unscientific bollocks.
It's like getting into a heated debate with someone. You start out and actually listen to what people are saying, but then eventually it's just like, come on man, fuck off, I don't even care if you're right, I'm tuned out.
Fast food doesn't force me to eat it under penalty of imprisonment.
- Vaccines are usually injected, injection makes most people uncomfortable. Most of them get over it, but it can be panic inducing for a small number. Among street drug users, injection is usually considered extreme, as in, the thing only true addicts do.
- When you get vaccinated, you are fine, and then you get a few unpleasant side effects. That's the opposite of the usual drugs you take when you are sick and make you feel better.
- Sometimes, vaccination is made mandatory, many people don't like to be told what to do with their bodies, even if there are good reasons for it.
- You never know when a vaccine have saved someone. Someone didn't get sick, but is it because of the vaccine, natural immunity, luck, or simply a lack of exposure, maybe he will get sick eventually, you can't really tell, and you don't really notice when something doesn't happen. However, when a vaccine hurt someone, or failed to prevent the disease it should protect against, that's very noticeable.
- The most successful vaccines are now often considered useless, because the disease they protect against is so rare, why go through the discomfort of the vaccination when it is so unlikely for you to get sick either way? It is a tragedy of the commons, as the reason the diseases is so rare is because of widespread vaccination.
And yet science says the opposite. The prevailing evidence suggests that humans are generally better suited to stable and safe environments, with danger and chaos typically leading to detrimental effects on mental health.
That, alone, could point to two very obvious but very different conclusions.
One is that people in those societies need medications more.
Alternatively, people in these societies get needed medications more.
I suspect the average American gets more therapy than the average Afghan, but I suspect the Afghans would still benefit from it.
Privileged societies are more medicated because the most pressing issues to them are (somewhat) soluble using medication. Because they are not imminently worried about housing and sustenance or violence.
Would be odd to consider medicating for fibromyalgia or depression when you're starving and/or being bombed / shot at.
Generally, humans are better suited to stable and safe environments. But it would be irresponsible of genes not to include, occasionally, humans who did better in chaos because chaos frequently happens.
That's part of what Tom Nichols has been saying: https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/09/10/democracy-di...
That's probably Special Circumstances in the Culture novels, but those novels are just a mashup of Iain Banks's imagination and biases, and I think they're poor approximation of anything resembling reality under any set of conditions.
Personally, I think your theory would be a fun conversation topic, but I doubt it reflects real life.
This feels like a really uncharitable interpretation on what is going on.
To me it feels more like you have two sides, the two sides have viewpoints that feel very alien to the other side, so extreme that they feel like attacks but actually it's just a clash of worldview.
What you're looking at is the later stages of a disagreement. It didn't start out that way, it started as something like, hey can we put the ketchup in the fridge, nah I'd rather leave it out, I prefer it warm. (I'm obviously deliberately being silly here).
You move on in time and suddenly blows are being exchanged because everyone loses patience.
Looking back there were some racist tendencies in that generation but it wasn't openly talked about with me or more likely I just missed it.
I guess it shouldn't be as surprising as it was. You basically just need to be a non-zero amount of racist/sexist/whatever to think that [category x] shouldn't hold the presidency, given that it's the highest office in the world. Any tiny amount of x-ism will do. Turns out a whole lot of apparently normal people are at least a tiiiny bit racist, and it absolutely broke an entire political party.
Rather, Obama's election was the just the last time that the New Deal coalition was strong enough to hold together, having deteriorated over the course of the 90s and 2000s because it had no clear purpose. Capital no longer feels any need to throw scraps (like limited NLRB-disciplined union organizing, Social Security, Medicare, consumer surplus) to workers to prevent 1918 happening here, which had been the Democratic Party's entire purpose since FDR. It had seemed increasingly ludicrous that revolution would come to America over the course of midcentury, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought the farce to light.
In other words, we're still eating the leftovers of anticommunism, the 20th Century's original sin (to mix a metaphor).
The left wing didn't aimlessly move left away from labor. Biden was dramatically more pro-labor ("New Dealy") than Obama. The right wing lost their fucking minds because we elected a black man. Trump himself is a one-man microcosm of this: loosely Dem-aligned until... Obama.
Spend some time with the GOP base. They're actually broadly racist, ranging from slightly (and ashamedly) to loudly and unabashedly. The left obviously also has various problems with race, so don't take this as some implicit categorical exoneration.
And she's a woman and she's black, again. Then there was the issue that one side of the Democratic party wanted to support Israel more strongly or something, and the other side wanted to protect gazaans and the Palestinians. I think many people wanted to do both at the same time, but there is a fair number of people that picked one side or another. Some of those people voted against her. Some people in my family thought the biggest problem facing America was dei.
I can think of a couple of things that rank higher on the 20th Century's original sin list.
If you know anything about marketing you know that for such messaging to be culturally pervasive is a result of years of effort and organizing.
Not surprising. I look at vaccines the same way as I look at any new medication: has it been tested long enough to know what the long-term effects of it are, and do the benefits outweigh the risks. I don't have a problem with MMR, TB and other common vaccines, that have been around for decades. If I'm traveling to East Africa I'm going to get a yellow fever vaccine. I also don't have a problem with the COVID vaccine because it was clear that the risk of not getting vaccinated was significant. But I have never gotten a "flu shot" in my life because the benefit of it is rather low relative to the risk of influenza given my demographics and health. If that makes me an anti-vaxxer, so be it. Don't really care.
I'm pretty sure setting a personal bar/risk tradeoff that lets you take a significant number of vaccines doesn't make you an anti-vaxxer.
But in any case, I'm not going to live my life by what labels others put on me.
That seems like reasonable risk assessment to me. It’s a minor chore to get but the benefit to you is also pretty minor. Lots of people skip the flu vaccine for those reasons.
But some folks skip the flu vaccine because they are convinced that the vaccine itself will harm them. I hate the term “anti-vaxxer” but if I were to apply the concept, it’s mostly to that unbalanced risk assessment.
It’s an interesting question why some folks develop such an unbalanced assessment. And I dislike “anti-vaxxer” because I think is dismissive and derogatory, and leads away from trying to understand each other.
It's not just that. I generally avoid taking medications unless I need to (when prescribed), which so far in my life has been extremely rare. It may not be "harmful", but I don't want to put any chemicals in my body if I don't have to. Most medications come at some cost, in that besides doing what they are designed to do, they also interact with other cells or systems in ways that may not be desirable. Vaccines are no different in that respect.
Speaking for myself, having lived and worked in SE Asia for a while, I've had almost every vaccine known to man (the only one I'm sure I haven't had is the HPV). I've had 5 COVID shots (got COVID once in 2021) and get an annual flu-shot. The only side-effect I've ever had (that I'm aware of), is a sore arm at the injection site. I have no idea what that says about me. My mum reacts badly to most (not all) vaccines - especially the flu shots. People vary and I suspect our immune system (which I believe is poorly understood) has complex effects on the response to some vaccines.
The effects of the vaccines linger, by design. (Granted, in a generally productive way.)
I had 3 COVID shots; no issues with the first two. But 2 years later, my arm is still quite sore to the touch where I got my shot (and I can feel mild discomfort there even without touching it). So obviously a long-term change there.
> Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.
No, I don't think that's true. Humans are built to learn from experience, and one thing that vaccines do is eliminate the experiences that justify their use. That also makes the experience/knowledge of smaller dangers more prominent. For instance, a kid getting his arm paralyzed from the (now discontinued) live oral polio vaccine, looks a lot different if people are commonly getting worse paralysis from wild polio than if no one is getting wild polio at all anymore.
The other thing you should probably take into account when regarding a book from 1929, is the experiences people had back then with (often dangerous) quack cures promising miracles. For instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and_Drug_A...):
> By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products which had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, the mascara Lash lure, which caused blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law was unable to get through Congress for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.
Humans are adaptive learners, shaped by both individual experience and cultural memory. The rise of anti-vax sentiments might be better explained by psychological and sociological factors. Like mistrust of institutions, the amplification of fringe views via social media, or the cognitive biases that prioritize visible risks over abstract ones.
The entire problem is this: Fifty four percent of Americans read below the 6th grade level, which means that the simple majority of Americans don't understand the world they live in and never will.
why is this the case? From what I know, it's a lot tougher to tease out the cause of this malfunction in our society. Do we have an undereducated populace because of poverty? Lack of school funding? (if so, why do we underfund schools? is it because we don't have the money? greed? is there a concerted effort to suppress an educated populace for political reasons?) Is there a cultural reticence built into us that resists scientific thought?
My kneejerk analysis boils down to "it's the economy, stupid" and that a substantial portion of our population lives below the poverty line (which itself isn't defined particularly well and probably misses a bunch of folks who ought to qualify for 'living under distressed economic conditions'). It's tough to care about education when you struggle to keep a roof overhead.
Not only didn't it work, it made the world a far worse place. I think Occam's razor tells us why: Forty nine percent of people will always be of below average intelligence.
Average intelligence currently seems to mean understanding the world at the 6th grade level. Maybe we can raise that to the 7th grade level with a concentrated effort, but that will also raise the performance of the top fifty percent.
There will always be a bottom half and they will always struggle to understand the world the top half build.
> There will always be a bottom half and they will always struggle to understand the world the top half build.
Before you spend too much time patting yourself on the back for being so superior, it's important to keep in mind that "intelligence" isn't all it's cracked up to be. "Intelligent" people do a lot of stupid shit, not listen, get deceived, and deceive themselves, etc. Hell, I've even heard "intelligence" describe as effectively a superior ability for post-hoc rationalization.
When you find yourself trying to understand the world by dividing it into dumbasses and "smart people like me," you should stop and remember to count yourself with the idiots.
I didn't say anything like that, or even adjacent to it. I didn't imply any judgement at all, other than to acknowledge that we're not all born the same.
That said, tall people will always be better at basketball on average than short people. Raising the average height doesn't really change that, and trying to pretend that if everyone were provided with the same opportunities they would achieve the same outcomes in basketball, or in intellectual pursuits, is dishonest and actively harmful to those born at a disadvantage.
Cultivating an us/them distinction is also actively harmful, more harmful I'd say. But if you can't help yourself, count yourself with them and do your best to avoid condescension.
It must be stopped, and that can't happen if we're pretending that all people being worthy of respect also implies that all opinions are.
Here's a thought. Animals often kill their own unhealthy babies but educated people much less so, and even demand that parents use technology to save them otherwise they're bad uneducated unintelligent people. Are those animals doing it wrong because they're too stupid to use medicine? Or are people doing it wrong? I'd say people have a non-scientific culture of minimizing of death even if it harms long-term evolutionary success of the species.
Firstly though, we need to agree on what "good" and "bad" mean, in a moral sense. To me "good" is anything that helps humanity thrive, and bad is when something does the opposite. If you have a different definition, this conversation will be a waste of both our time.
> He's right though.
He is not only wrong, he is dangerously wrong. Reason is mans only natural defense. We were born without tooth and claw or even fur thick enough to survive a winter. We must use our minds to survive in this world, or perish as a species. To reject that isn't just a rejection of our nature, it is a form of suicide for our species.
Are you aware that the vast majority of the humans on this planet would not exist today without science? For example, the Haber-Bosch process allows for something like 90% of the worlds food to be grown. Much of the remaining 10% couldn't exist without genetic manipulation, or at the very least selective breeding. To reject science would be to accept a world where at least 90% of us starved and the remaining 10% led short, violent lives filled mostly with unending misery and toil. I'm deeply opposed to that and consider it "bad."
> The scientific approach has blind spots
Yes, that's how science works. We form hypotheses and test them. If those theories turn out to match the evidence we keep them, if they don't we abandon them. That's the truly great thing about science, science can be wrong, but it can never STAY wrong when done properly.
> Religion, euthanasia, etc...
All of those questions depend on culturally defined norms and taboos that may change from person to person or region to region. As long as a persons cultural, spiritual, or philosophical thinking is still "good" (based on my earlier definition) it can coexist with reason, and it's irrelevant. Science does not demand that you put no other god before it, that's religion.
I object only when another system becomes "bad", and in this context that happens whenever someone decides that their ignorance should be valued more than the science that keeps us all alive. It should not, and there are very good reasons for that.
> bad uneducated unintelligent people
I never said, or implied this, or many of the other things you insinuate here. Stating it yourself, and then arguing against it is a form of logical fallacy called a "strawman argument", and it's not just irrational, it's more than a little rude.
> He is not only wrong, he is dangerously wrong.
You don't actually know that, because you keep missing the point. How do you know I'm wrong if you can't seem to grasp what I'm talking about?
I don't think you're as clever as you seem to think you are. Maybe you should consider the possibility that the advice I gave up-thread is literally true in your case, and not just a reminder to take a position of humility.
It takes two people to communicate. If you have trouble communicating your point maybe try rephrasing it, instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks.
I agree with that definition. However, it leads to a trade-off between short term thriving of individuals and long term thriving of humanity. We could pour all our resources into supporting every living person but would cripple our future development. Or we could go the other extreme and violate all the human rights to develop a more resilient long term society. Islam, for example, is very robust for thriving of humanity (no population collapse happening there) but very poor for thriving of all individuals within it (severe penalties for seemingly harmless "crimes", women's rights, etc.).
The background is a new faculty member actually teaching at university level. We know that proofs and reading are required. They do not.
In the context of you saying this after sharing a link to an article around difficulties at HBCUs, I'm trying to find some charitable way to interpret your statements as something other than horrendously racist. Can you please expound on this, or am I taking this correctly?
Math education in large tracts of the country is not good, more so in areas plagued by rural and urban poverty, but that's no excuse to continue in the same way at college. It's sadly common that incoming students have no clue what a proof is and that mathematics isn't plugging numbers into formulas, but there's no excuse continuing that at college level, especially when it's an elite college.
But the kid who wrote the article disagrees, she demands spoonfeeding. Give me my economics degree, but it mustn't have math in it!
* Climate Change (caused by the tech of "burning lots of fuels")
* PFAS, pesticides, endocrine disruptors, etc...
* Opiods crisis, nartotics, etc...
* Impact of GAFAM on privacy, social discourse, etc...
In a sense, the "white coats in their labs" and "nerds with glasses" have been repeatedly found (lately) to be on the "wrong side of the issue". (There are usually scientists on both side of the issue, which is the saving grace for science: self-correction is built in.)
Maybe it's relevant that the book is dated from 1929, that is, right before a time where "white coats" started being involved into very shady stuff (eugenics, mass-media propaganda, global-scale destruction weapons, and of, course, industrialized death.)
The COVID crises could have been a time for science in general to earn trust again - in some sense it did, but this time people were overexpecting, and got disappointed at least (and downright enraged at worst, if they were on the wrong side of the politico-scientifict decisions.)
And the pendulum will keep swinging, but hopefully still rise.
In other part, it's also that the bad consequence of what the "suits" ask the "nerds" to do are becoming increasingly more visible and obvious than before.
Of course science is still helping. But it's also hurting. And I would argue that for lots of folks, the hurting is more obvious and tangible than the help.
I don't think the lack of a challenge is the root cause of science denialism. It's a cultural thing, coming from a lack of confidence in the elites. Elites are distraught when inequality become larger and things get tougher for the poorest.
Like, who would you consider an 'Elite'? AFAICT, someone who's 'an Elite' thrives off of inequality, by definition. Without said inequality they wouldn't be 'Elite'.
Is it possible that your definition for Elite is similar to my definition for Specialist? Like 'Subject Matter Expert'?
I guess the way I used "elites" in my previous comment refers more to a certain perception of society some people hold, rather than to a definite group of people.
If we take the policies implemented during the COVID pandemic as an example, those came from the government, oftentimes backed by academia. Since a lot of people think the government is doing a bad job overall, they don't trust the legitimacy of those policies and oppose the scientific reasoning that led to them being adopted.
When the economy is doing well, people put more trust into their government, or the "elites".
Therefore, my thesis is that distrust into the institutions/science comes from a general discontent of the population, and is not a natural state of humanity.
Weird that people still get raped and murdered in your "safe and stable" environment. Sometimes the perpetrators don't even see justice and get away with their crimes. How do you account for that?
> a certain amount of cherry-picking
Without a doubt. I don't trust authority because I've been abused by it before. I'm sure you didn't mean to punch down but that's how many of us would rationally perceive it.
Yet visit social media and it's absolutely overflowing with gloom and doom and histrionic political rage and fear bait. Saw a thread recently on Reddit about how many young people in the USA are contemplating suicide because the present or the future looks so bleak to them.
We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II.
It's convinced me that the human brain is just not wired for abundance. Our brain keeps searching and searching for the immediate existential threats that millions of years of evolution have programmed us to know absolutely must be there. If we don't see them it actually makes us panic more since it means the lion is hiding so well we can't spot it and it's about to jump out and get us.
Practicing gratitude is a pretty common strategy for combating depression. If young people today in developed nations don't even understand how bad humans used to have it (and still do, in some places), how can they possibly be grateful for what they have?
Maybe AI-generated, historical influencers should be a thing. "Walked two miles to the river to fill my clay jug. Set my baby down and a croc took her."
Anyway, I'm not sure this is gratitude so much as the gratification in having someone you can look down on.
I'm talking about deep existential despair and doomerism though, like people discussing suicide or refusing to have children because they're convinced the world is ending because of online discourse and/or paranoia.
Edit: speaking of perspective: one of my favorites is to go find a global salary comparison calculator and input my first world tech salary. If you are on this site chances are you are at least in the global 5% if not the global 1%.
And by those standards our economic system is not working for the vast majority of people and getting worse every year.
If you pay attention to the whining losers on Reddit and other social media then you get a distorted view of the state of the country. The silent majority are doing fairly well.
The point is there is a massive class divide socially, also physically segregation. You can be completely unaware of what it's like to be on the wrong side of it.
The cracks in our society are growing, and the level of sophistication required to navigate our system is increasing.
My circle of friends and family is middle class and college educated. I don't know anyone under the age of 35 who owns more than a town house in a low cost area. What does your peer group look like?
> We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II.
Not most people in America. Sure, Ramses didn't have a car, phone or modern medicine; but he could get whatever he wanted _that was available at the time_. That's the yardstick.
I'm not even in the US and I have multiple friends who have expressed to me that they'd be afraid to holiday there due to reproductive rights stuff. For say, two, three weeks.
It's like some sort of extreme anxiety that has no basis in reality.
I agree it's a thought-provoking comparison. It's a remarkably distorted lens, the one modern humans apply to interpret pre-industrial civilization. Should we glamorize a patrician of ancient Rome? Their lifestyle would be a mediocre, low-prestige one, if faithfully translated into the modern world. The vaunted villas of the aristocrats were farmhouses—go look up farm prices in rural Georgia or Kansas: that is ancient aristocracy. If you owned a herd of goats, that was a measure of wealth and success; we'd interpret the same thing as poverty. A chickenwire fence isn't a signifier of blight, but a delineation of land, and a sigil of an authentic land owner—an elite.
The wealth of a great empire, the trade routes of rare spices and fruits from thousands of leagues away? That's Wal-Mart.
It's a provocative idea! The life of the Roman upper aristocratic class is fully accessible to probably a full majority of contemporary Americans. You could replicate practically every part of it, if you liked*. And you're right that that's no longer a benchmark for self-actualization today; we want—need?—so much more than that.
*(The only large difference, and this is much more than a footnote, is the total abscence of slavery. Iron-age farms needed large numbers of slaves—something with the social impact that they'd label the farm owner, the aristocrat, as a high-status invidual. A human ranking above many others. The industrial revolutions replaced most of this with machines. You don't acquire social status by being superior to a tractor).
(The part where the humans alive today aren't 99% farmers has wildly rewritten the human experience, and we're still far from adjusted to that).
Convict labor is very much a thing in the US. That still counts as slavery.
It also created lifestyles which aren't sustainable, destroyed our ecosystem, made gluttony and sloth our main cause of death.
If you look for the signs they're already visible, it's just that our system has a gigantic inertia. Look at things like ocean acidification and other climate feedback loops, massive wildlife extinction, loss of nutrients in veggies/fruit, PFAS in rain water, micro plastics polluting virtually every living organisms.
Humans work on hope, when things are continuously getting better we're thriving, when things start to fall apart ever so slightly it's much less fun, and we're slowly getting to that point. It doesn't matter how high you start, what matters is the general trend
I didn't find the author to be particularly deeply invested, they seemed to want to score some points over "social justice warriors" and then backed off pretty quickly with an "it's complicated" footnote.
Not being super invested and having it just be a small part of the article actually seems right to me so idk.
I’ve hit my fair share, but this article alone in no way makes me think this person is one.
This textbook is from 1929 and was probably being written at the exact same time as the Snopes monkey trial (1925). You're reading science hype because science was under attack; and not from "social justice warriors" but from conservative Americans. Notice that the single most transformative discovery in all of biology, evolution, isn't mentioned.
That attack on evolution is still taking place. In Texas there was an attempt to strike all references to evolution and climate change from the curriculum, along with other attempts to introduce biblical references. When did that take place? That was this year; oh, and in 2023: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/texas-education-board-...
Getting mad at "social justice warriors" for an imagined reaction while ignoring the actual attacks on science is... well, it's what I've come to expect.
The post and your comment emphasize how the impact of science depends more on the public than the handful of scientists who create it. Roughly ~0% of people understand any given scientific topic. It will always be completely asymmetric. It will always involve stuff like belief in an ideology, struggles for political power, (relatively blind) trust in a movement or leader, etc. As a result, there is no world in which scientists don't regularly harm whoever follows them, the same as any leader in an uncertain/asymmetric environment (by getting stuff wrong accidentally, or actively abusing their power for personal gain).
The part about social justice warriors is actually interesting because that view will come across as "we hate science!" to some people but the real idea is somewhere between "successful science requires exerting some political power over other people" (obviously true) and "western science was built on a foundation of coercion and oppression, making lots of technological progress and causing some unavoidable tragic effects." Whatever the "truth" is, it's really complicated ethically.
Interesting point RE the Snopes trial. You are right, evolution is not mentioned in the book as far as I can tell. Even though it is foundational to understanding the human body (in particular some weird features it have which any half-good creator would never design that way.)
The SJWs / woke cult are a bit of a personal hobby horse for me. I think it is important to mention, since woke ideology comes from academics at top universities, as well as journalists at top media outlets -- people who have a lot of power to shape the public discourse and influence public policy. The power of Christian fundamentalists over society and culture, on the other hand, has been waning, if one looks over the past few decades. Yes, they are in the ascendancy at the moment with the 2024 election and whatnot, but overall their influence is waning. Of course, both anti-science from the left and from the right are issues we should worry about -- I'm just giving an argument why we might want to be a bit more worried about anti-science from the left. How much either issue is discussed probably greatly depends on what circles you run in.
Note I did mention how there is no discussion of sexual health or women's health in the book. That is an issue with health textbooks that has been improved a lot but still exists to some extent today due to Christian conservatives.
I just miss when yall were simply libertarian and talked about taxes! We can go back to that one day right?
I was involved in a previous iteration of the culture war (religion vs atheism) pretty heavily. If this is anything like that, it'll start fading once people feel like the cultural dominance of the group is broken.
If you want a rule of thumb, hollywood being considered non-woke and universities not requiring diversity statements (cultural conservatives consider these to be roughly isomorphic to the old loyalty oaths) would be generally what to look for.
Edit: These institutions losing their influence would probably also be sufficient. There's nothing inherently important about hollywood, so if another locus of entertainment gains prominence, and it has different cultural views, that would also qualify.
But for the universities ok, this is at least a thing we can hold onto. It's a little rough to implicitly associate the "diversity" considered in hiring/enrolling at a school with the evil professors, because the entire argument then quite easily contracts down to: "there are too many non-white academics, and that is the real problem." But I guess the whole point is to free ourselves from such silly concerns like racism, institutional or otherwise.
Either way, I just hope they/you get what you want. I used to be worried that this whole thing would spiral too much into violence, but its easy to see now that all the people who care about the "wokeness" are, yeah, exactly like creationists: they just want to feel represented, they just want the blurb in the textbook; its not so much about the world outside, but just how they feel about it; that its ok for them to be angry about the kids sports team or whatever. People want to be principled!
I am truly hopeful at this point they will eventually find some peace while still allowing everyone to live with some self-determination and everything else. Its a little long in the tooth now, but hopefully the recent political ascendency will temper it a bit.
It definitely is. But so was my iteration. A good chunk of the previous iterations of the culture war have been as well. A lot of my generation really didn't like how conservative the small towns we grew up in "felt", it felt oppressive and dumb.
> Either way, I just hope they/you get what you want.
Yeah, I'm not participating in this one. I missed a few years of the culture war during a raging alcoholic phase and both sides feel really foreign nowadays and kinda confusing. But I do occasionally like to pop a bag of popcorn and watch people fight.
> I used to be worried that this whole thing would spiral too much into violence
My guess is probably not much more than the 70s (and we're still a long way from that, there were ~2500 bombings in an 18 month period in 71 and 72), but it seems really unlikely to advance to civil war levels.
It's the Scopes trial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial
I read a better analogy; they compared the life table of humans with the life table of Chimpanzee or Bonobo. The change between before and after the introduction of modern medicine is obvious.