4 ms·

Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation cam

Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that brainwash people into harming their children with anti-vaccine beliefs. We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.

vkou 9mo ago
Who is we, who will pay for it, and how will such informational inoculation benefit the rich? The current media status quo, and its consequences does, which is why we get to enjoy it.
tjpnz 9mo ago
As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.
- epistasis 9mo ago
  Canada and the UK have a ton more measles than even the US's completely unacceptable level of measles. Thinning this is a US problem completely misunderstands the nature of the misinformation problem. And I hope there's vaccination requirements for travel, according to how public health officials determine threats.
  - Aurornis 9mo ago
    Canada already lost their measles elimination status and had several times higher measles rate than the US. At this point, anyone pushing anti-vaccine thinking as an American problem is just pushing anti-American bias. Vaccine misinformation and hesitancy is an almost worldwide problem.
- nathan_compton 9mo ago
  > you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful if you are still alive.
jfengel 9mo ago
I admire your optimism. I genuinely wish I could share it. I hope that you are right.
- epistasis 9mo ago
  Russia is close to falling, which is the true source of many of the mental viruses that are destroying democracies. And now, Russia's biggest win, the US, is proving that instead of heading towards fascism, that the people will actually stand up and fight back. Six months ago, the outlook was far more uncertain and if the US had not resisted, or Trump had picked a softer target than Minnesotans (never invade a winter people in winter), I would probably be feeing far different. Things in the US are going to get far worse from here, and there will be a political war, but at least there will be a political war against the fascism. A lower bound has been established for badness that at least allows saving democracy in the US. I have not been this hopeful since October 2024.
DangitBobby 9mo ago
How does a public that derives its knowledge from authority (For example, how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Would they be able to reach those conclusions if school books taught something else?) stand a chance at resisting misinformation spread by trusted authorities?
- aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
  > how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Pun intended?
  - DangitBobby 9mo ago
    Oops
somenameforme 9mo ago
People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice. There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin. But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it. --- FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either. [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-rate https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-r...
- jfengel 9mo ago
  I think that if people observed what a 1 in 1,000 chance of a dead child looked like, they'd have a much easier time making the decision.
  - somenameforme 9mo ago
    A friend's favorite Wiki page is on the micromort. [1] I found it kind of banal, but perhaps that's my more casual attitude towards death. I suspect the average person doesn't realize, or doesn't accept, how brief life truly is. One micromort is something with a 1 in a million chance of death. So with measels, we're talking about 1000 micromorts, if you're infected - which is also extremely unlikely. So if you give yourself a 1% chance of ever being infected with measels (which would be quite high) then not vaccinating would be down to a 1% * 1000 = 10 micromorts of risk. All non-natural cause of death in the US, excluding suicide, is about 1.3 micromorts per day. So it's the same all non-natural cause risk you'll be exposed to over the next week. The page offers a lot of other comparables - traveling 100 miles by biking, 2500 by car, or 10k by airplane, and so on. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

vkou 9mo ago

Who is we, who will pay for it, and how will such informational inoculation benefit the rich? The current media status quo, and its consequences does, which is why we get to enjoy it.

tjpnz 9mo ago

As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.

epistasis 9mo ago
Canada and the UK have a ton more measles than even the US's completely unacceptable level of measles. Thinning this is a US problem completely misunderstands the nature of the misinformation problem. And I hope there's vaccination requirements for travel, according to how public health officials determine threats.
- Aurornis 9mo ago
  Canada already lost their measles elimination status and had several times higher measles rate than the US. At this point, anyone pushing anti-vaccine thinking as an American problem is just pushing anti-American bias. Vaccine misinformation and hesitancy is an almost worldwide problem.
nathan_compton 9mo ago
> you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful if you are still alive.

jfengel 9mo ago

I admire your optimism. I genuinely wish I could share it. I hope that you are right.

epistasis 9mo ago
Russia is close to falling, which is the true source of many of the mental viruses that are destroying democracies. And now, Russia's biggest win, the US, is proving that instead of heading towards fascism, that the people will actually stand up and fight back. Six months ago, the outlook was far more uncertain and if the US had not resisted, or Trump had picked a softer target than Minnesotans (never invade a winter people in winter), I would probably be feeing far different. Things in the US are going to get far worse from here, and there will be a political war, but at least there will be a political war against the fascism. A lower bound has been established for badness that at least allows saving democracy in the US. I have not been this hopeful since October 2024.

DangitBobby 9mo ago

How does a public that derives its knowledge from authority (For example, how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Would they be able to reach those conclusions if school books taught something else?) stand a chance at resisting misinformation spread by trusted authorities?

aleph_minus_one 9mo ago
> how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Pun intended?
- DangitBobby 9mo ago
  Oops

somenameforme 9mo ago

People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice. There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin. But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it. --- FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either. [1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-rate https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-r...

jfengel 9mo ago
I think that if people observed what a 1 in 1,000 chance of a dead child looked like, they'd have a much easier time making the decision.
- somenameforme 9mo ago
  A friend's favorite Wiki page is on the micromort. [1] I found it kind of banal, but perhaps that's my more casual attitude towards death. I suspect the average person doesn't realize, or doesn't accept, how brief life truly is. One micromort is something with a 1 in a million chance of death. So with measels, we're talking about 1000 micromorts, if you're infected - which is also extremely unlikely. So if you give yourself a 1% chance of ever being infected with measels (which would be quite high) then not vaccinating would be down to a 1% * 1000 = 10 micromorts of risk. All non-natural cause of death in the US, excluding suicide, is about 1.3 micromorts per day. So it's the same all non-natural cause risk you'll be exposed to over the next week. The page offers a lot of other comparables - traveling 100 miles by biking, 2500 by car, or 10k by airplane, and so on. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort