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Wildly anecdotal, but I ask a lot of people in my daily life whether they got/will get the vaccine, and I've noticed a relationship between lower (apparent) int

Wildly anecdotal, but I ask a lot of people in my daily life whether they got/will get the vaccine, and I've noticed a relationship between lower (apparent) intelligence and refusing to get the vaccine. There's definitely a conformist/"uncritically accept the consensus" mentality you sometimes see among some pro-vaccine people, but the anti-vaccine people just make spectacularly bad arguments. One taxi driver told me she didn't like the vaccine because of overpopulation and maybe we should cull the herd of older people anyway; another said he "heard somewhere it was made from aborted fetal tissue." I don't think this would be enough to account for the effect sizes described in the article; it also wouldn't explain the correlation between disease severity and lower IQ (although maybe that starts to come in when you compare the severity of breakthrough cases vs. the severity of cases among people who didn't have the vaccine at all). But maybe it contributes. One reason to doubt the idea is that a huge share of your chance of refusing the vaccine has to do with your alignment in the whole left/right culture war thing that is going on. And the IQ difference between conservatives and liberals has been found to be pretty small if any.

jimmygrapes 5y ago
> One taxi driver told me she didn't like the vaccine because of overpopulation and maybe we should cull the herd of older people anyway I don't agree with the taxi driver, but I fail to see how this response could be viewed as a sentiment stemming from lowered intelligence, especially given how often the same or similar sentiment comes up (albeit masked in nicer words) in virtually every discussion about global population as relates to climate change, and often from people who are clearly intelligent.
- normac2 5y ago
  > I don't agree with the taxi driver, but I fail to see how this response could be viewed as a sentiment stemming from lowered intelligence, especially given how often the same or similar sentiment comes up (albeit masked in nicer words) in virtually every discussion about global population as relates to climate change, and often from people who are clearly intelligent. I agree to a certain extent; you could even argue that less intelligent people are less likely to pay attention to big geopolitical issues like overpopulation, so they wouldn't even go far enough as to have a position on that. The main reason I took it as poor intelligence is that she seemed to think this justified her personally not getting the vaccine. Which would make her the personal deliverer of justice to anyone in her cab who happens to be older, or then transmits it to people who are older (if she happens to get COVID and someone catches it). I pointed this out and she was like, "hmn... that's a good point." That's a pretty easy leap of logic that had never occurred to her at all.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  But killing old people, past their reproductive years, has no long-term effect on population, except maybe through extremely weak high-order effects like "the availability of grandma to watch the kids may subtly affect reproductive decisions" or "old people come from an old culture which is more productivist, and may influence their descendents ideologically".

jimmygrapes 5y ago

> One taxi driver told me she didn't like the vaccine because of overpopulation and maybe we should cull the herd of older people anyway I don't agree with the taxi driver, but I fail to see how this response could be viewed as a sentiment stemming from lowered intelligence, especially given how often the same or similar sentiment comes up (albeit masked in nicer words) in virtually every discussion about global population as relates to climate change, and often from people who are clearly intelligent.

normac2 5y ago
> I don't agree with the taxi driver, but I fail to see how this response could be viewed as a sentiment stemming from lowered intelligence, especially given how often the same or similar sentiment comes up (albeit masked in nicer words) in virtually every discussion about global population as relates to climate change, and often from people who are clearly intelligent. I agree to a certain extent; you could even argue that less intelligent people are less likely to pay attention to big geopolitical issues like overpopulation, so they wouldn't even go far enough as to have a position on that. The main reason I took it as poor intelligence is that she seemed to think this justified her personally not getting the vaccine. Which would make her the personal deliverer of justice to anyone in her cab who happens to be older, or then transmits it to people who are older (if she happens to get COVID and someone catches it). I pointed this out and she was like, "hmn... that's a good point." That's a pretty easy leap of logic that had never occurred to her at all.
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
But killing old people, past their reproductive years, has no long-term effect on population, except maybe through extremely weak high-order effects like "the availability of grandma to watch the kids may subtly affect reproductive decisions" or "old people come from an old culture which is more productivist, and may influence their descendents ideologically".