7 ms·

The scary thing about anti-vaxxers, at least to me, is how susceptible educated people can be to essentially baseless fear mongering. So when I worked at Googl

• OldFatCactus 8y ago
  I feel this way about college-educated adults that I meet that believe in Astrology. So nuts how many I've met since moving to New York
  • wrsh07 8y ago
    One of these things is not like the other Astrology outbreaks are not a concern of mine Even when the moon is in retrograde
    • dmitryminkovsky 8y ago
      Eh something about astrology is really unsettling. Yes, not like antivaxers, but I’m with GP.
      • wrsh07 8y ago
        Honestly, for most people, an effective model is to think of it like a sport. It's something people obsess over, can impact their emotions and otherwise is pretty harmless
        • dmitryminkovsky 8y ago
          I appreciate what you’re saying but I don’t know... I’ve come to terms with sports. Not so with astrology. Something about it...
        • inflatableDodo 8y ago
          To me astrology seems like just a load of old bunk, but that's probably because I'm a pisces.
          • dmitryminkovsky 8y ago
            Gemini here, I’m all over the place...
            • inflatableDodo 8y ago
              You are right to be wary though. I think programmers should be professionally leery of astrologers. And if asked for a reason they should reference this - http://www.thedailyparker.com/post/2011/10/06/c5f28bae-4b9c-41ea-b7b7-8891ad63c938 http://www.thedailyparker.com/post/2011/10/06/c5f28bae-4b9c-...
          • TheAnvil 8y ago
            I see what you did there.
    • unfunco 8y ago
      Cancer is worrying though.
  • derekp7 8y ago
    So here's one thing to consider about Astrology -- it is essentially a natural calendar. And there is the phrase that history repeats itself, or at least it rhymes. So putting those two together, I can see how people can look to the stars for answers. Well, that and confirmation bias whenever a coincidence happens.
    • isostatic 8y ago
      I wouldn’t be surprised if there were statistically similar traits based around the time of year you were born / entered school
      • zrobotics 8y ago
        For the kind of statistical significance (read: confirmation bias) that astrology relies upon, anything will work. Horoscopes could be written based not on astrological sign, but on the first letter of street name of a person's first address and apply. Search hard enough, and some sort of correlation can almost always be found. Astrology has some value, in the same way alchemy has value: it helped start serious scientific inquiry into astronomy. Sadly, while there are now vanishingly small amounts of people who take alchemy seriously, astrology is a relatively common belief to hold, even among people who are scientifically-minded. It puts me in mind of the first 9/11 truther I knew, who was a close friend who should have known better. However, at the time she was willing to buy into it, simply because it played into her anti-GWBush sentiments. This is after I explained how the statements were false, and backed it up w/ evidence (having queried my father, who was a mining engineer and had done building implosions in his career as a blasting contractor). Unfortunately, "smart people" can just as easily fall prey to these types of delusions, it seems to be a common human trait (like all the logical fallacies). Thinking that one is immune paradoxically makes one more susceptible to these types of errors, rather the best defense is to recognize that no, nobody is immune. Much in the same way as ignoring advertising's effect on decision-making. Edit:typo
        • isostatic 8y ago
          https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15490760 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15490760 It links to an ifs report > Those early formative years influence attitudes and expectations about success, academically and socially, and that can possibly stay with an individual. Maybe there’s no measurable difference by adulthood, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was.
  • tjr225 8y ago
    I don't necessarily believe or put any faith in Astrology, but I do find it fun- perhaps some of the people you meet feel the same way?
    • jamesrcole 8y ago
      > I don't necessarily believe... To be honest, when someone puts it that way, it sounds like they do actually believe it, to some extent at least. No one who doesn't believe it would phrase things that way.
      • tjr225 8y ago
        > No one who doesn't believe it would phrase things that way. And why do you say that? Do you have any reason to think I'm not being earnest other than your "hunch"? Is that really the quality of discussion you want to have with complete strangers who are otherwise saying nothing offensive whatsoever- to question their sincerity? Seems pretty whack to me.
        • jamesrcole 8y ago
          I believe you're being earnest. I'm taking what you're saying as what you mean. When someone says "I don't believe X" it means they don't believe it. When someone says "I don't necessarily believe X" it means they kinda do believe it. Not one person who believes the world is spherical would ever say (or agree that it correctly captures their view) the statement "I don't necessarily believe the world is flat". [EDIT: I thought this example might help make things clearer. version 1: - wife to husband: you're spending a lot of time with that new co-worker. Do you find her attractive? - husband: no, I don't find her attractive. & version 2: - wife to husband: you're spending a lot of time with that new co-worker. Do you find her attractive? - husband: no, I don't necessarily find her attractive. A husband that genuinely did not find the co-worker attractive would never express things in the second way. It's clear in that second way that he does find her attractive to some extent but doesn't want to say it] Sometimes "I don't necessarily believe..." is used when the person feels awkward admitting that they have some belief, or when they haven't consciously realised that they do. It can be when they haven't fully admitted it to themselves.
  • cletus 8y ago
    New York in general is a very superstitious place. There are a lot of people here who came from the Old World a century ago and those superstitions came with them. Psychic readings, crystal balls, crystals, Tarot cards, all that. But this kind of thing tends to also serve as a psychological aid. People with anxiety being told things they want to hear. For some psychics serve as de facto therapists. This isn't to say there aren't charlatans and scammers who take advantage of the vulnerable and impressionable. But on the whole, Astrology and the like are "harmless", at which point I personally don't care. People are entitled to their personal foolishness.
• stone-monkey 8y ago
  >>it's mind-boggling how removed from reality people can get, even people with a supposed science education. There's an old adage that science advances one funeral at a time - The scientific community is far from immune to this problem. People who are trained and employed full time to apply critical thinking and empirical testing still fall for superstition. It's an unsolvable problem until we reach a point where we can replace human brains with cold, unfeeling robots.
  • orange8 8y ago
    >> It's an unsolvable problem until we reach a point where we can replace human brains with cold, unfeeling robots. That would be a gigantic step back. You under-estimate just how powerful that organ between your ears is.
  • apocalypstyx 8y ago
    I'll probably stand with Hume on this one: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
• Waterluvian 8y ago
  That also tells me another story too: being a Google engineer doesn't mean you're smart. This further reminds me of all the people who got degrees with me who weren't all that bright either.
  • grahamperich 8y ago
    I think it just means that not all intelligence is "general intelligence". Humans are weird and complex creatures.
  • CydeWeys 8y ago
    Plenty of really smart people believe in religion, too. It's a lot more complicated than just saying "Someone believes in X irrational belief, thus they can't be smart", especially since they easily could be really smart in other areas. Your views on vaccines, religion, and any number of other things really have very little bearing on how good of a software engineer you are.
    • Waterluvian 8y ago
      Fair point. But that's a pretty misguided understanding of what religion is to scores of people.
      • CydeWeys 8y ago
        How? I didn't say anything about what religion means to anyone.
    • zrobotics 8y ago
      Trouble is, people tend to forget they are domain experts. I trust my doctor for medical advice, but I don't consider them any more competent to dispense legal advice than a random acquaintance. However, it is common for highly-competent people in a domain to feel they are more qualified than average in other domains (which is a trait I actively work to control myself). Software devs seem very susceptible to this, since a large part of the field involves being able to quickly learn enough about a subdomain of knowledge to implement a required solution. I'm no expert statistician, but I have implemented multiple projects that required knowledge of statistics. However, I'm just at the point of "knowing what I don't know", while I haven't studied enough classical mechanics to truly grasp how much I don't know. So while I feel I have a good working knowledge of statics, asking me to design a bridge would be foolish. Sure, I may think I 'could' design a bridge, but that is just folly.
• draw_down 8y ago
  It’s not clear to me why “educated” people should be free of ideology; they just have different kinds.
• throwaway251463 8y ago
  Your argument would be more effective if you don't state it in such absolutist terms. Do you really believe that vaccines are so safe that anyone who has any doubts about their safety is anti-science? The science of immunology itself does not give you that level of certainty. Here is a book on Vaccines and Auto-Immunity written by highly credentialed immunologists. https://www.amazon.com/Vaccines-Autoimmunity-Yehuda-Shoenfeld/dp/1118663438 https://www.amazon.com/Vaccines-Autoimmunity-Yehuda-Shoenfel... Would you call them anti-science?
• dejawu 8y ago
  > how susceptible educated people can be to essentially baseless fear mongering If I were to wager a guess, I'd say this is because people who feel like they're very good at logic/rational thought underestimate the effect emotions can have on motivating a belief?
• sbov 8y ago
  There's many that believe that educated people are above having baseless beliefs. There's plenty of evidence showing that that belief itself is baseless too. Funny that. You can see this mistaken belief whenever people decry that there are "smart" people that believe dumb things outside their profession. Well, "dumb" people believe dumb things outside their profession too. When it comes to believing this stuff, people tend to just be people. The "smart" get special attention because some of us incorrectly assume they should be immune to it. But they're obviously not.
• joecool1029 8y ago
  > The scary thing about anti-vaxxers, at least to me, is how susceptible educated people can be to essentially baseless fear mongering. Argh, it sucks... it sucks so friggin much. I've been trying to articulate my feelings on this for the past few weeks. There is a breakdown of thinking throughout our society. It's not just that critical thinking is impaired, but rather the ability to endure any sort of criticism of one's belief structure is gone. So we know you can't throw facts down at a person when they state an immediate falsehood. You must combat it, but the tactic to combating such a falsehood requires an emotional component. Seeing videos of iron lungs terrified me as a kid, I had remembered seeing a few elders with shriveled arms from polio. These emotional experiences burn upon you far more than the impersonal fact: that diseases maim and kill. But we just want to develop fantasies and live inside our filter bubbles because of course it's easier to believe the distrust that vaccines are just a delivery mechanism for the government's nanomachines.
  • tiltedmood 8y ago
    Start by calling then lies.
• aeternus 8y ago
  From the anti-vaxers I've talked to, it's not so much the fear mongering, it's their distrust of scientific studies due to economic incentives. Smart people especially know that it's relatively easy to lie with statistics and to generate studies with subtle selection bias. If your premise is that most/all modern scientific studies are funded by drug companies and therefore cannot be trusted, then being anti-vax is still a stretch but you can at least see how it could be rationalized. Especially given the rich history of money suppressing/biasing scientific studies in the past: smoking, asbestos, j&j baby powder, round-up, etc.
  • bitL 8y ago
    Ask any pro in their profession what do they think about newspaper articles from their own area of expertise. Now where do most people get information about areas they aren't working in? If it's that bad in paid journalism, how much worse is it when you expand your source of information to Reddit, YouTube autoplay etc.?
    • guelo 8y ago
      I hear this a lot but this website right here is full of professionals reading news articles about their area of expertise and besides the occasional accusation of sensationalism most articles are treated as accurate.
      • manicdee 8y ago
        Because we have been conditioned to accept that journalists use the wrong facts or incorrect values when reporting about something and we automatically correct the context and semantics.
      • wtallis 8y ago
        Mainstream press gets details wrong all the time; when I read newspaper and magazine articles about a subject I'm very familiar with, I can usually identify some misunderstanding or oversimplification or other mistake. But I can't recall any instance of encountering mainstream media getting something so egregiously wrong as to be comparable to mixing up "vaccinate" vs "don't vaccinate". Nor have any of the health care professionals I know ever disputed the pro-vaccination consensus as reported by the press.
• jancsika 8y ago
  I wonder if technology could be used to push back against this problem. For example-- what if there were a hub for videos that would analyze an anti-vaxxer's viewing habits and recommend level-headed, reliable scientific content in the sidebar?
• briantakita 8y ago
  > is how susceptible educated people can be to essentially baseless fear mongering The same argument is being used against the pro-vax community. The article by the ahem "esteemed" journalism that is Buzzfeed is an example that seems to be pandering to a certain audience. The kind of audience that is quick to insult anti-vaxxers as being some sort of stupid degenerate or other over the top propaganda. Propaganda being another reason not to trust the message. > it's mind-boggling how removed from reality people can get, even people with a supposed science education Same accusation going the other way. I'm don't want to get into the particulars (this will be a long thread), however, there are a number of pro-vax advocates who don't make a good impression with their obvious sophism. I can provide links to videos of debates involving highly reputable pro-vaccine advocates to back this up, but I want to keep this first post more at a meta level. I understand that you are preaching to a certain choir & I will suffer the wrath because I dare question the orthodoxy, but that's the rub; our own presuppositions affect how we perceive the matter. > giving baseless medical exemptions Many people see forced medication as being a baseless intrusion by the state onto a population. For example, have you read "A Brave New World"? Injections were used to create the caste system. Forced inoculation & diet has been used to create an underclass in many societies. Many people also oppose Fluoride & Lithium being added to the water supply. For how long was Glysophate deemed "proven safe", yet we find out later it's highly toxic. Note that there were people who were opposed to the usage of Glysophate for a long time & many of those same people oppose vaccines. There's also a lack of studies of the individual compounds & even less research into the combination of said compounds. Yet vaccine proponents are uncomfortably eager to deem vaccines as safe despite a lack of research. So safe, as safe or safer than saline solution it seems...It makes the pro-vaccine crowd sound delusional & religious at worst, or rash in judgement due to fear of the global pandemic apocalypse at best. Not saying there aren't good arguments, but much of the rhetoric being thrown around is hostile bullying, tbh. I recommend that proponents of vaccines strongly discourage bullying from their side, because it completely discredits their argument of forced vaccination & makes them look like proponents of totalitarianism. > In New York we've had cases of immunization records being falsified Does this imply the validity of some studies are in doubt? New York, for being such a large population, seems to have a lack of outbreaks since the Spanish Flu.
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• _bxg1 8y ago
  Fear warps cognition. It doesn't matter how smart or educated you are, fear will reshape the way you think, and in a way that's really hard to be aware of even if you're a generally self-aware person. The only way to break out of it is to distrust fear itself and postpone decisions about fearful topics until you've released the emotion itself. I almost think mindfulness should be a part of standardized education.
• cat_plus_plus 8y ago
  So the argument in question was about a technical matter which is not appropriate to share externally. The software engineer with "strong anti-vax opinions" believed that vaccines are net beneficial, but not that they should be absolutely forced by pulling a child out of parent's arms. In return, you and "many others" threatened to report their kids to authorities. Or maybe it was another debate, can't tell from limited context. In any case, either it was work-related, in which case engineer in question had full right to express an opinion. Or, it was pure idle chit chat, in which case it seems unprofessional to pile on, let alone share externally years later. Are you also in the habit of posting office gossip from Facebook on this site? As for personal belief exemptions, Trump declared a national emergency on Southern border. If civilians are somehow deputized to build the wall, do you want to be forced into it or to be able to declare a personal belief exemption?
• dzhiurgis 8y ago
  5G is the new anti-vax
• masonic 8y ago
  I'm glad California has started clamping down on personal belief exemptions ... but CA has a high propensity of foreign travelers and entrants. The big North Bay school infection stemmed from travelers returning from Vietnam, where all the kids in the family were infected.