9 ms·

“You're not allowed science any more”

127 points by thisjepisje 12y ago

lotsofmangos 12y ago
"You're not allowed sarcastic metaphors any more." "Why not?" asked the scientist. "Because you haven't learned to employ them in a way that doesn't alienate the very people you are trying to help. Now please send in Dawkins on the way out, we need to discuss internet memes with him."
- sebular 12y ago
  The sarcastic metaphor and the exasperation that motivates it comes after centuries of scientists being ridiculed, persecuted, and even killed by ignorant people.
  - cix 12y ago
    That isn't limited to Scientists my friend.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    Right, which is all the more reason to take the high road. To set a better example. Also, because trading vitriol with religious fanatics and ignorants accomplishes nothing. Knowledge is the antidote to ignorance. Not smugness, defensiveness, or indignation (well-justified though all of those things might be).
    - autokad 12y ago
      A+
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    I know where it comes from, with my scientists hat on, I completely agree with the piece. But from a literary perspective, it is like being repeatedly bashed round the head by a moron with a length of 2x4. This conceit can be done well. Mitchell and Webb's little old lady job-justification hearings are a particularly good example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXTBPN1HhA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXTBPN1HhA
    - tormeh 12y ago
      Oh wow, that's pretty funny. These "gamblers" on the stock market do actually make the system work better and moves investment to places where it's likelier to have a good return. So they do help, although in a very abstract way and maybe not as much in practice as in theory but still. A better question than whether they help is how much and how much they should be rewarded for that help.
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  You're right, but you're wrong. You're right - we shouldn't celebrate alienating people who need help. You're wrong, because there is no argument that can convince someone who doesn't care about evidence. So, please forgive us our gallows humor about this. After all, these people are content in risking the health of MY child on their Jenny McCarthy-inspired HUNCH that vaccines are bad. If anti-vaccine folks were only risking the health of their own children, their anti-science stance (or selective-science stance) would be tolerable. As it is, they're a menace.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    You're wrong, because there is no argument that can convince someone who doesn't care about evidence. That sounds reasonably falsifiable, especially with some nice biscuits.
  - gloob 12y ago
    > So, please forgive us our gallows humor about this. Apologies for my pedantry, but dreaming about harming people is actually pretty much the opposite of gallows humour. A more appropriate phrase might be "power fantasy."
    - VikingCoder 12y ago
      Warning: This response is for pedantic purposes only. This is someone who is putting a gun to my daughter's head. They don't want to vaccinate their child, which increases my daughter's chance of getting seriously ill or dying. This is a fantasy about retaliating against the people who threaten lives. That's gallows humor.
  - DigitalJack 12y ago
    My main issue with "science," which I put in quotes because there is the ideal of science and the reality of science which are unfortunately not the same. It is purported that science is objective, and that is the admirable goal, but it hasn't been successful. For every study purporting one thing, one can find an equal an opposite study purporting the opposite (or nearly opposite). Now, that is hyperbole, as usually one of they studies is inferior in some way that is not obvious to the lay person, but it won't stop them from taking an overly strong stance based on an inferior study. I believe a lot of the "vaccines are bad crowd" fall into a few categories: 1) the group that is very susceptible to confirmation bias 2) the group that has seen some studies that weren't conducted very well and were possibly informed by the first group. 3) those that fall victim to circular references in their proof (e.g. wikipedia article citing a magazine citing the wikipedia article, with possibly a few steps in between) 4) those who choose to believe something because the alternative is terrible for them. I see this one a lot. If you are discussing with someone of some modicum of intellect, you'll detect the situation when "slippery slope" starts being mentioned. I'm sort of friends with a "vaccines are bad" person. I've cited numerous studies, which, while I'm no expert at interpreting studies, seemed to have rigor. Didn't phase her in the slightest, and we just don't talk about that subject anymore. Or at least I don't, and I don't take the bait. I believe she has an autistic grandson, and if she didn't have vaccines to blame, she'd have to believe that God caused the autism and that's too terrible for her.
spindritf 12y ago
I have spotted this totalitarian streak among some of my friends who went to med school. We should ban smoking, force everyone to do this or that. As bad as they can be, we're probably better off with lawyers in charge.
- lazyant 12y ago
  People die because some idiot parent didn't vaccinated their children, so I say yes, enforce it or don't live in society, go to some isolated island because you are causing harm, it's as totalitarian as allowing people to play Russian roulette with other people's children (actually you'd go to jail so I think we're too lenient with these parents).
  - autokad 12y ago
    your child has more chance of dying by going to the morning bus stop than their child does of dying from not being vaccinated. in fact, i'd bet your child has a better chance of dying by catching the flu from a vaccinated child than some other child not vaccinated by MMR. i understand if someone doesn't want their child vaccinated and they can't go to public school, but forcing people is another thing, even if it is 'for their own good'.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      in fact, i'd bet your child has a better chance of dying by catching the flu from a vaccinated child than some other child not vaccinated by MMR. Oh good, argument based on conjecture.
      - autokad 12y ago
        Do you want a gold star because someone on the internet, who said something you didn't agree with on a post, did not publish citations? you failed human.
        sliverstorm 12y ago
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- wmeredith 12y ago
  You're being reductive, The refusal to read the pamplet while demanding impossible assurances is symbolic of the willfull idiocy of the scientific illiterate making impossible demands on society.
  - sbhere 12y ago
    The mother in the narrative is requesting to be informed. A pamphlet does not inform, although it may. Face-to-face conversation has the opportunity for an asker to ask questions for an authority on the matter to answer. However, more to the point: is this pamphlet science or marketing? Many such pamphlets about medicine blur that line quite well...
    - deleted 12y ago
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    - untothebreach 12y ago
      The mother in the narrative is not asking to be informed, she is asking for a specific guarantee that the doctor cannot give. It would be like a client saying, "give me a guarantee of 100% uptime or I'm going with someone else," and refusing to read your literature about how many "9s" you can provide.
      - gretful 12y ago
        nah, the doc is equivocating because he CAN'T give the woman a 100% guarantee (would make a nice malpractice suit if something did happen to the child).
cowbell 12y ago
I feel this way about non-technical management calling the shots on software projects :)
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lnanek2 12y ago
Pretty funny wish fulfillment where someone forces their own views on others. I fully support vaccination, but don't support this.
- bnejad 12y ago
  Don't support what? Mandatory vaccination?
  - danielweber 12y ago
    I could see the case where I support vaccinating someone against their will. I couldn't see doing that because the person, once, made a bad argument in the doctor's office.
  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    I don't support mandatory vaccination for the same reason I don't support the drug war. No government has the right to tell me what I can or cannot put into my body. Simple as that.
    - bnejad 12y ago
      But vaccination is a public health issue. You endanger others by not getting vaccinated, which is why for instance kids have to be vaccinated before they are allowed to go to school. I am much in agreement with personal liberty but part of the social contract is to take these preventative steps to improve the quality of life in our society.
      - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
        Not letting kids into school is already a good way to handle this issue. It ensures that the majority will decide to be vaccinated. I'm fine with the way it is.
ErikRogneby 12y ago
I wonder if the "producer at the BBC" reference was from the BBC not giving air time to climate change skeptics in debate anymore?
- capnrefsmmat 12y ago
  No. This article is from 2012.
kstenerud 12y ago
This is so telling. The sheer arrogance is plainly visible, as is the doctor's complete lack of empathy. There are plenty of ways to motivate people, and this is most certainly not a good one. You don't get a mule to move by pushing it.
- falcolas 12y ago
  Arrogance, which I'd call exasperance in this case, in the face of repeated ignorance of reality, is justified. You can only deal with willingly ignorant people for so long before giving up on the human race. And the doctor in the tale did try and educate the mother before she was cut off. She just didn't want to listen.
  - kstenerud 12y ago
    It's fine to feel exasperated. It's not fine to treat people in such a condescending manner. People are rational, and want to understand, but unless you make the information properly accessible in the UX sense, your exasperation is due to your own fault. The doctor did not try to educate the mother. He tried to lecture her. He offered her a bad user experience, which she naturally rejected. People are not machines. You don't just feed the same information format in and expect the same result from everyone.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      So when it comes to anti-vaxxers, the problem is simply that the scientific community simply hasn't been accommodating enough? It's good to know that, yet again the fault does not lie with the common man. It is always someone else's fault.
      - kstenerud 12y ago
        It's not a question of accommodation; it's about accessibility. The anti-vaxxers offered better UX for many who felt shut out from scientific knowledge. The fault does technically lie with the common man in the sense that he behaves the way he does. But we KNOW that he behaves a certain way, and further we have the knowledge necessary to mitigate the effects of those deleterious behaviors and grant the people knowledge despite them. And yet many in the scientific community still refuse to take those psychological lessons to heart, preferring to blame it on "the willful ignorance of the masses". When you continually run up against failure, blaming the object of failure is not a path towards solving the problem.
jebus989 12y ago
A more computational crowd might enjoy "You're not allowed bioinformatics anymore": http://biomickwatson.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/youre-not-allowed-bioinformatics-anymore/ http://biomickwatson.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/youre-not-allo...
pasquinelli 12y ago
i don't care if it expresses a totalitarian view, it's just not very good writing.
vonklaus 12y ago
If only there was a way to outsource all decision making to an over-arching centralized authority to make all decisions for us. That entity would have all our best interests at heart and make the tough decisions for us. It would be auch a weight off my shoulders of I didn't have to think anymore. I would even be willing to pay 20-30 percent of my paycheck to it, just so it could help me stay safe. What would we call such authority?
- darkstar999 12y ago
  Big Brother
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
  A bad religion?
- Terr_ 12y ago
  Cue Deus Ex quotes: "The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government."
- nemo 12y ago
  You can give a medically informed body that understands the issues much more deeply some authority over public health policy, while still being able to think about those issues if you're interested. They wouldn't make all decisions for you, just those that have such a broad and important impact to society as a whole that irresponsible individuals wouldn't make choices that could have a net effect of significantly harming others like skipping vaccinations does. Perhaps we could call that authority "civilization."
  - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
    Personal freedom, to me, is worth the price of possible death or illness due to large swaths of the population not being vaccinated.
ddalex 12y ago
This is beyond stupid. You can't explain something, so you ban the person from having a say so. I'm terrible afraid of people thinking that this is the way to go. As a doctor, which I am not, I would've said: the danger of your children dying or being crippled by a preventable disease is about 1000 times the risk of having an adverse reaction to the vaccine. Furthermore, I can guarantee that the vaccine will not cause autism. This is what I tell my "anti vac" acquittance, because I can't say I'm friends with morons. But being a moron doesn't preclude the right to understand what's actually happening and what the risks are when making a decision, even if you refrained in the past to educate yourself. But it's hard to educate, so the author would just ban the discussion altogether. You, the author, are no better than the ones to which you would ban explanations and discussion.
- avmich 12y ago
  I think you didn't get the story.
- mpweiher 12y ago
  You didn't get the point at all. "You can't explain something," That's exactly not it. The doctor wanted to explain the facts, with the leaflet. Sacha wanted a simplistic assurance that wasn't possible, and refused point blank to have it explained to her.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Those were the words she used, which could be entirely different from her actual reasoning that she didn't feel like talking about. And if this were any kind of world where doctors overrule you because "your argument is invalid" then she will of course not be forthcoming with her doctor ever. She will instead learn the magic words "oh, Johnny had a bad reaction to a vaccine at his previous doctor in Canada." The doctor's office is not a courtroom or an arrest where everything you say can and should be used against you. I'm reminded of people who think it would be awesome to bug lawyer's offices or doctor's offices or confessionals to ferret out crime. It will work the first time, but after that you have totally destroyed trust so you haven't gained yourself anything and the public has lost a place to sensitive discuss issues with people they trust.
suprgeek 12y ago
I think we should be making a financial/societal incentive to do the right thing if the science is settled enough. The trouble with the view presented here is that sure the children get the vaccine due to this hypothetical rule. what happens when later the children get a severe cold (say) and the mom who remembers the previous visit thinks - bloody doctors I will just keep my kid home and pray for him to get better? Much better approach: "Ok Sacha since you declined the vaccination now I have to report it to all medical insurers. Your family insurance just doubled." At school: "Sacha your kids are not vaccinated and we do not admit any students not vaccinated." Apartment: "Ok Sacha your kids are not vaccinated (per this website where we can query); we will need to charge you a fee that is contributed to our residents' medical fund to cover the risk of housing you." If you really truly start to hurt in the pocketbook, I bet there will be much more incentive to really read up on the Science.
- JumpCrisscross 12y ago
  > At school: "Sacha your kids are not vaccinated and we do not admit any students not vaccinated." I thought this would perpetuate social stratification. But my hypothesis, that poor families are less likely to vaccinate their children than rich families, was incorrect. The National Network for Immunisation Information finds that "compared to fully immunized children, unvaccinated children were more likely to be non-Hispanic white and live in larger households. Educational levels, family income and other factors did not differ" [1]. Removing the philosophical exemption, at the federal level, seems a prudent first step. "States that allowed philosophical exemptions to immunization laws in schools had many more unvaccinated children than states that do not have philosophical exemptions." [1] http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/demographics-unvaccinated-children http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/demographics-unvacci...
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    Alternate theory: "Poor families" are more likely to be aware (either directly or "institutionally") of the impact of the various preventable diseases or conditions. Reminds of of a Bujold quote. The character is referring to how over time people forget how hard things were: > "They like to play dress-up and pretend being [noble-class] ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic [noble-class] youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'." > "Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control."
mhb 12y ago
Roald Dahl: Vaccines, Measles and his Daughter https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=8080516 https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=8080516
micro_cam 12y ago
Things like this makes me ashamed to have my name on papers in Nature. First, lets set aside the hypocrisy of a non open access journal publishing this[1]. (What happens if Sacha wants to inform her self by reading a few old nature papers?) I am pro vaccine but far too many doctors have this fantasy that they should have unlimited control and articles like this just serve to validate that view point. Medicine is an inexact and continually evolving science and a good doctor should always be willing to talk over the options with you and engage with you on a level beyond just parroting the current recommendations. As someone who is one of the people contributing to the body of often-vague statistics we call medicine it is continuously annoying to have to get doctors to explain their (often subjective) judgment calls they are making and actually present their reasoning analytically. Additionally, many doctors choose to forgo recommended treatments themselves due to side effects [2]. [1] In fact you can pay extra to make your nature paper open access but it is by no means fully open access. [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/your-money/how-doctors-die.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/your-money/how-doctors-die...
- ISL 12y ago
  This is a Nature Future, the story printed at the back of the magazine as food for thought. Perhaps only twenty percent of them present a future in which we'd like to live. If the Future has driven HN to active discussion of an ethical topic, then it has succeeded in its purpose. Unlike most of Nature, the Futures are free to read (and ~10% of them are compelling enough to make reading them all worthwhile). (just scroll down to see the complete archive) http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/arts/futures/ http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/arts/futures/
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    I posted this Mitchell and Webb sketch further down, as an example of how to do this well - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXTBPN1HhA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXTBPN1HhA Now reflect on your reaction to that piece. Even when on the side of the trader, it is still funny. You can be a trader and find that funny. This is because of how the characters are treated in the piece. Essentially, it is ridiculing ideas while remaining sympathetic to the character that holds them, which is difficult to do well, but makes for a much more persuasive piece of satire that will be appreciated by a wider range of people. The piece in Nature however is just preaching to the converted, and doing it in a way that will just entrench the views of anyone who identifies with the mother. Frankly, if they want to publish satirical sci-fi, they should pay someone who can do it well rather than embarrassing themselves like this. It reads like a teenage first attempt at short-story writing.
swayvil 12y ago
I like a consensus of experts as much as the next guy, but let's not get carried away. Today's airtight methodology is tomorrow's tragic myopia.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
  Does that mean phrenology is not coming back?
logfromblammo 12y ago
Look, science, you can't have it both ways. You can't release knowledge into the wild and also keep it caged up under your control. It is no more possible than setting the barn afire then ordering the flames to go back into the lamp. If you cannot tolerate the idea that everyone benefits from science done well, even including those who behave destructively towards scientific progress, then why are you doing science in the first place? Screaming from the mountaintops, "No! No! You're doing it wrong! All wrong! You idiots! You morons! Stop what you're doing immediately and do as I say!" is not likely to help your cause. That is, after all, what people have been yelling at each other for centuries, even long prior to the development of modern scientific inquiry. There may even be a branch of science that deals with social norms and cultural shifts, and perhaps the intentional guidance of groups towards given institutional goals. You could probably take the socio- prefix and append an -ology to it. Maybe ask a sociologist what usually happens when you strip a person of the ability to make their own choices, even if you are certain they are making those choices based upon flawed premises. Applying force or coercion does little but change the portion of the behavior of a person that is visible to you. You cannot use it to change someone's mind, no more than you can make a person love you by smashing their ankles with a sledgehammer. You have to coax them to it, convincing them to change their own minds. But you can't do it for a non-rational person using only rational argumentation. It does not compile. You have to use other means to even get them close enough that argument will work. You have to advertise. Use rhetoric. Flash some sideboob. Blow dragon smoke from your nose using cookies dipped in liquid nitrogen. Write a catchy jingle. Go viral. Write a hoax about cool teenaged kids getting electrotetanized by their musical Tesla coils. Get Bill Nye slimed on Nickelodeon's Kid Science Awards Show as he introduces the new Mr. Wizard, wingsuiting down to the venue from an orange zeppelin. You have to make people want science to like them. And you're not going to get there by acting like a condescending know-it-all prick--even if you do actually know it all, and the other person is a clueless, drooling moron.
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TallGuyShort 12y ago
Ok, fine, then you're not allowed individual sovereignty.
danielweber 12y ago
This sat poorly with me. I thought "you're not allowed science any more" would mean that no one has to ever listen to her in any scientific debate. Instead, it meant that she got overruled about a medical decision. Congratulations, you've amazingly found a way to be even worse than the antivaxxers. I didn't think it was possible.
- epistasis 12y ago
  I wouldn't be so quick to assume that the article is advocating for forced vaccinations, but I do think that your reaction to the forced vaccination does hint at what the article really was suggesting.
prestadige 12y ago
This is a fantasy of course, which is a defence mechanism for frustrated minds. However, the quasi-religious defence of Science as a settled body of knowledge which people must be forcibly 'educated' about is becoming depressingly common. Becoming more like a religion isn't a good way to counter superstitious falsehoods. The patient-doctor relationship has waned, IMO. Here in the UK for most ailments I see a GP for about 10 minutes. I never see her again. No follow up, no chat, etc. Different GP next time. Perhaps social media could help build trust within practices.
tokenadult 12y ago
There are a lot of comments here about the issue of how to communicate risk of different personal medical choices to patients who do not themselves have medical training. It is a tough problem. Professional stage magicians, and avid skeptics, Penn and Teller had an episode of their cable television series Bullshit report on the issue of risks and benefits of vaccination. Maybe a clip from their TV show (with language that many families would find inappropriate for viewing with their children) will help communicate the risk and benefit ratio of vaccination more clearly than documents written in a more clinical tone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo (short clip above, long clip below) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLcOz4EKrxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLcOz4EKrxg
mynewwork 12y ago
I'm confused by the awkward grammar in the title. Is it intentional for humor (like xkcd's 'going to try science') or is that wording acceptable use in British dialects? I'm parsing it as "You're not allowed <to use> science" or "You're not allowed <to know> science", but it's right on the line of believable that I could see that sentence being used genuinely in another dialect.
- CanSpice 12y ago
  They're using science as a noun. Think of it like "You're not allowed oxygen any more."
  - mynewwork 12y ago
    Which still sounds wrong to me. I'd expect "You're not allowed to breathe oxygen" or "You're not allowed to have oxygen". So I guess it's "allowed" which is being used in a way I'm unfamiliar with.
chris_mahan 12y ago
It's this reasoning that gave us the 401K.
- Jtsummers 12y ago
  Aren't 401Ks mostly voluntary programs? I'm not aware of anyone being compelled to invest into them.
gretful 12y ago
So here you have a Doctor trying to be Lawyer. There is a chance, however small, of a bad reaction to the vaccine. The Doctor knows this, therefore he cannot give this woman her 100% guarantee that nothing will go wrong because of the vaccination. He knows that if he tells this woman it will be OK and nothing will happen, that if something DOES happen he will be sued for medical malpractice.
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gretful 12y ago
Quick question: how many of you are against the flood of illegal immigrants making their way into the US? If you're worried about killing herd immunity, you should really be voicing your discontent over both the GOP and Democrat parties encouraging this with their amnesty plans. Here's just one incident of an illegal bringing disease into the US: http://news.yahoo.com/arrest-warrant-issued-man-tuberculosis-192756320.html http://news.yahoo.com/arrest-warrant-issued-man-tuberculosis...
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
  - gretful 12y ago
    A beautiful poem, one that many a legal immigrant saw upon entering the US as they began inprocessing through the Ellis Island immigration station. One that the illegal aliens will not see as they illicitly cross our border, seeking to evade what agents we have stationed there.
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- thatjoist 12y ago
  Nice strawman, "if you're against X you MUST be against Y". What really matters is the cost-to-benefit ratio. A jab in the arm vs denying someone immigration, decide whatever you want but it's a sliding scale, not black-and-white.
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hasler 12y ago
> You've had the opportunity to read the facts and the education to be able to analyse them, yet you have consistently chosen not to. Perhaps if doctors understood the facts better, and could explain them better, this wouldn't be a problem: http://jsfiddle.net/SamHasler/c22eR/embedded/result/ http://jsfiddle.net/SamHasler/c22eR/embedded/result/

127 points by thisjepisje 12y ago

"You're not allowed sarcastic metaphors any more." "Why not?" asked the scientist. "Because you haven't learned to employ them in a way that doesn't alienate the very people you are trying to help. Now please send in Dawkins on the way out, we need to discuss internet memes with him."

sebular 12y ago
The sarcastic metaphor and the exasperation that motivates it comes after centuries of scientists being ridiculed, persecuted, and even killed by ignorant people.
- cix 12y ago
  That isn't limited to Scientists my friend.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  Right, which is all the more reason to take the high road. To set a better example. Also, because trading vitriol with religious fanatics and ignorants accomplishes nothing. Knowledge is the antidote to ignorance. Not smugness, defensiveness, or indignation (well-justified though all of those things might be).
  - autokad 12y ago
    A+
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I know where it comes from, with my scientists hat on, I completely agree with the piece. But from a literary perspective, it is like being repeatedly bashed round the head by a moron with a length of 2x4. This conceit can be done well. Mitchell and Webb's little old lady job-justification hearings are a particularly good example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXTBPN1HhA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXTBPN1HhA
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Oh wow, that's pretty funny. These "gamblers" on the stock market do actually make the system work better and moves investment to places where it's likelier to have a good return. So they do help, although in a very abstract way and maybe not as much in practice as in theory but still. A better question than whether they help is how much and how much they should be rewarded for that help.
VikingCoder 12y ago
You're right, but you're wrong. You're right - we shouldn't celebrate alienating people who need help. You're wrong, because there is no argument that can convince someone who doesn't care about evidence. So, please forgive us our gallows humor about this. After all, these people are content in risking the health of MY child on their Jenny McCarthy-inspired HUNCH that vaccines are bad. If anti-vaccine folks were only risking the health of their own children, their anti-science stance (or selective-science stance) would be tolerable. As it is, they're a menace.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  You're wrong, because there is no argument that can convince someone who doesn't care about evidence. That sounds reasonably falsifiable, especially with some nice biscuits.
- gloob 12y ago
  > So, please forgive us our gallows humor about this. Apologies for my pedantry, but dreaming about harming people is actually pretty much the opposite of gallows humour. A more appropriate phrase might be "power fantasy."
  - VikingCoder 12y ago
    Warning: This response is for pedantic purposes only. This is someone who is putting a gun to my daughter's head. They don't want to vaccinate their child, which increases my daughter's chance of getting seriously ill or dying. This is a fantasy about retaliating against the people who threaten lives. That's gallows humor.
- DigitalJack 12y ago
  My main issue with "science," which I put in quotes because there is the ideal of science and the reality of science which are unfortunately not the same. It is purported that science is objective, and that is the admirable goal, but it hasn't been successful. For every study purporting one thing, one can find an equal an opposite study purporting the opposite (or nearly opposite). Now, that is hyperbole, as usually one of they studies is inferior in some way that is not obvious to the lay person, but it won't stop them from taking an overly strong stance based on an inferior study. I believe a lot of the "vaccines are bad crowd" fall into a few categories: 1) the group that is very susceptible to confirmation bias 2) the group that has seen some studies that weren't conducted very well and were possibly informed by the first group. 3) those that fall victim to circular references in their proof (e.g. wikipedia article citing a magazine citing the wikipedia article, with possibly a few steps in between) 4) those who choose to believe something because the alternative is terrible for them. I see this one a lot. If you are discussing with someone of some modicum of intellect, you'll detect the situation when "slippery slope" starts being mentioned. I'm sort of friends with a "vaccines are bad" person. I've cited numerous studies, which, while I'm no expert at interpreting studies, seemed to have rigor. Didn't phase her in the slightest, and we just don't talk about that subject anymore. Or at least I don't, and I don't take the bait. I believe she has an autistic grandson, and if she didn't have vaccines to blame, she'd have to believe that God caused the autism and that's too terrible for her.

spindritf 12y ago

I have spotted this totalitarian streak among some of my friends who went to med school. We should ban smoking, force everyone to do this or that. As bad as they can be, we're probably better off with lawyers in charge.

lazyant 12y ago
People die because some idiot parent didn't vaccinated their children, so I say yes, enforce it or don't live in society, go to some isolated island because you are causing harm, it's as totalitarian as allowing people to play Russian roulette with other people's children (actually you'd go to jail so I think we're too lenient with these parents).
- autokad 12y ago
  your child has more chance of dying by going to the morning bus stop than their child does of dying from not being vaccinated. in fact, i'd bet your child has a better chance of dying by catching the flu from a vaccinated child than some other child not vaccinated by MMR. i understand if someone doesn't want their child vaccinated and they can't go to public school, but forcing people is another thing, even if it is 'for their own good'.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    in fact, i'd bet your child has a better chance of dying by catching the flu from a vaccinated child than some other child not vaccinated by MMR. Oh good, argument based on conjecture.
    - autokad 12y ago
      Do you want a gold star because someone on the internet, who said something you didn't agree with on a post, did not publish citations? you failed human.
      - sliverstorm 12y ago

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wmeredith 12y ago
You're being reductive, The refusal to read the pamplet while demanding impossible assurances is symbolic of the willfull idiocy of the scientific illiterate making impossible demands on society.
- sbhere 12y ago
  The mother in the narrative is requesting to be informed. A pamphlet does not inform, although it may. Face-to-face conversation has the opportunity for an asker to ask questions for an authority on the matter to answer. However, more to the point: is this pamphlet science or marketing? Many such pamphlets about medicine blur that line quite well...
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  - untothebreach 12y ago
    The mother in the narrative is not asking to be informed, she is asking for a specific guarantee that the doctor cannot give. It would be like a client saying, "give me a guarantee of 100% uptime or I'm going with someone else," and refusing to read your literature about how many "9s" you can provide.
    - gretful 12y ago
      nah, the doc is equivocating because he CAN'T give the woman a 100% guarantee (would make a nice malpractice suit if something did happen to the child).

cowbell 12y ago

I feel this way about non-technical management calling the shots on software projects :)

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lnanek2 12y ago

Pretty funny wish fulfillment where someone forces their own views on others. I fully support vaccination, but don't support this.

bnejad 12y ago
Don't support what? Mandatory vaccination?
- danielweber 12y ago
  I could see the case where I support vaccinating someone against their will. I couldn't see doing that because the person, once, made a bad argument in the doctor's office.
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  I don't support mandatory vaccination for the same reason I don't support the drug war. No government has the right to tell me what I can or cannot put into my body. Simple as that.
  - bnejad 12y ago
    But vaccination is a public health issue. You endanger others by not getting vaccinated, which is why for instance kids have to be vaccinated before they are allowed to go to school. I am much in agreement with personal liberty but part of the social contract is to take these preventative steps to improve the quality of life in our society.
    - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
      Not letting kids into school is already a good way to handle this issue. It ensures that the majority will decide to be vaccinated. I'm fine with the way it is.

ErikRogneby 12y ago

I wonder if the "producer at the BBC" reference was from the BBC not giving air time to climate change skeptics in debate anymore?

capnrefsmmat 12y ago
No. This article is from 2012.

kstenerud 12y ago

This is so telling. The sheer arrogance is plainly visible, as is the doctor's complete lack of empathy. There are plenty of ways to motivate people, and this is most certainly not a good one. You don't get a mule to move by pushing it.

falcolas 12y ago
Arrogance, which I'd call exasperance in this case, in the face of repeated ignorance of reality, is justified. You can only deal with willingly ignorant people for so long before giving up on the human race. And the doctor in the tale did try and educate the mother before she was cut off. She just didn't want to listen.
- kstenerud 12y ago
  It's fine to feel exasperated. It's not fine to treat people in such a condescending manner. People are rational, and want to understand, but unless you make the information properly accessible in the UX sense, your exasperation is due to your own fault. The doctor did not try to educate the mother. He tried to lecture her. He offered her a bad user experience, which she naturally rejected. People are not machines. You don't just feed the same information format in and expect the same result from everyone.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    So when it comes to anti-vaxxers, the problem is simply that the scientific community simply hasn't been accommodating enough? It's good to know that, yet again the fault does not lie with the common man. It is always someone else's fault.
    - kstenerud 12y ago
      It's not a question of accommodation; it's about accessibility. The anti-vaxxers offered better UX for many who felt shut out from scientific knowledge. The fault does technically lie with the common man in the sense that he behaves the way he does. But we KNOW that he behaves a certain way, and further we have the knowledge necessary to mitigate the effects of those deleterious behaviors and grant the people knowledge despite them. And yet many in the scientific community still refuse to take those psychological lessons to heart, preferring to blame it on "the willful ignorance of the masses". When you continually run up against failure, blaming the object of failure is not a path towards solving the problem.

jebus989 12y ago

A more computational crowd might enjoy "You're not allowed bioinformatics anymore": http://biomickwatson.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/youre-not-allowed-bioinformatics-anymore/ http://biomickwatson.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/youre-not-allo...

pasquinelli 12y ago

i don't care if it expresses a totalitarian view, it's just not very good writing.

vonklaus 12y ago

If only there was a way to outsource all decision making to an over-arching centralized authority to make all decisions for us. That entity would have all our best interests at heart and make the tough decisions for us. It would be auch a weight off my shoulders of I didn't have to think anymore. I would even be willing to pay 20-30 percent of my paycheck to it, just so it could help me stay safe. What would we call such authority?

darkstar999 12y ago
Big Brother
0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
A bad religion?
Terr_ 12y ago
Cue Deus Ex quotes: "The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government."
nemo 12y ago
You can give a medically informed body that understands the issues much more deeply some authority over public health policy, while still being able to think about those issues if you're interested. They wouldn't make all decisions for you, just those that have such a broad and important impact to society as a whole that irresponsible individuals wouldn't make choices that could have a net effect of significantly harming others like skipping vaccinations does. Perhaps we could call that authority "civilization."
- WorldWideWayne 12y ago
  Personal freedom, to me, is worth the price of possible death or illness due to large swaths of the population not being vaccinated.

ddalex 12y ago

This is beyond stupid. You can't explain something, so you ban the person from having a say so. I'm terrible afraid of people thinking that this is the way to go. As a doctor, which I am not, I would've said: the danger of your children dying or being crippled by a preventable disease is about 1000 times the risk of having an adverse reaction to the vaccine. Furthermore, I can guarantee that the vaccine will not cause autism. This is what I tell my "anti vac" acquittance, because I can't say I'm friends with morons. But being a moron doesn't preclude the right to understand what's actually happening and what the risks are when making a decision, even if you refrained in the past to educate yourself. But it's hard to educate, so the author would just ban the discussion altogether. You, the author, are no better than the ones to which you would ban explanations and discussion.

avmich 12y ago
I think you didn't get the story.
mpweiher 12y ago
You didn't get the point at all. "You can't explain something," That's exactly not it. The doctor wanted to explain the facts, with the leaflet. Sacha wanted a simplistic assurance that wasn't possible, and refused point blank to have it explained to her.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Those were the words she used, which could be entirely different from her actual reasoning that she didn't feel like talking about. And if this were any kind of world where doctors overrule you because "your argument is invalid" then she will of course not be forthcoming with her doctor ever. She will instead learn the magic words "oh, Johnny had a bad reaction to a vaccine at his previous doctor in Canada." The doctor's office is not a courtroom or an arrest where everything you say can and should be used against you. I'm reminded of people who think it would be awesome to bug lawyer's offices or doctor's offices or confessionals to ferret out crime. It will work the first time, but after that you have totally destroyed trust so you haven't gained yourself anything and the public has lost a place to sensitive discuss issues with people they trust.

suprgeek 12y ago

I think we should be making a financial/societal incentive to do the right thing if the science is settled enough. The trouble with the view presented here is that sure the children get the vaccine due to this hypothetical rule. what happens when later the children get a severe cold (say) and the mom who remembers the previous visit thinks - bloody doctors I will just keep my kid home and pray for him to get better? Much better approach: "Ok Sacha since you declined the vaccination now I have to report it to all medical insurers. Your family insurance just doubled." At school: "Sacha your kids are not vaccinated and we do not admit any students not vaccinated." Apartment: "Ok Sacha your kids are not vaccinated (per this website where we can query); we will need to charge you a fee that is contributed to our residents' medical fund to cover the risk of housing you." If you really truly start to hurt in the pocketbook, I bet there will be much more incentive to really read up on the Science.

JumpCrisscross 12y ago
> At school: "Sacha your kids are not vaccinated and we do not admit any students not vaccinated." I thought this would perpetuate social stratification. But my hypothesis, that poor families are less likely to vaccinate their children than rich families, was incorrect. The National Network for Immunisation Information finds that "compared to fully immunized children, unvaccinated children were more likely to be non-Hispanic white and live in larger households. Educational levels, family income and other factors did not differ" [1]. Removing the philosophical exemption, at the federal level, seems a prudent first step. "States that allowed philosophical exemptions to immunization laws in schools had many more unvaccinated children than states that do not have philosophical exemptions." [1] http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/demographics-unvaccinated-children http://www.immunizationinfo.org/science/demographics-unvacci...
- Terr_ 12y ago
  Alternate theory: "Poor families" are more likely to be aware (either directly or "institutionally") of the impact of the various preventable diseases or conditions. Reminds of of a Bujold quote. The character is referring to how over time people forget how hard things were: > "They like to play dress-up and pretend being [noble-class] ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic [noble-class] youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'." > "Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control."

mhb 12y ago

Roald Dahl: Vaccines, Measles and his Daughter https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=8080516 https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=8080516

micro_cam 12y ago

Things like this makes me ashamed to have my name on papers in Nature. First, lets set aside the hypocrisy of a non open access journal publishing this[1]. (What happens if Sacha wants to inform her self by reading a few old nature papers?) I am pro vaccine but far too many doctors have this fantasy that they should have unlimited control and articles like this just serve to validate that view point. Medicine is an inexact and continually evolving science and a good doctor should always be willing to talk over the options with you and engage with you on a level beyond just parroting the current recommendations. As someone who is one of the people contributing to the body of often-vague statistics we call medicine it is continuously annoying to have to get doctors to explain their (often subjective) judgment calls they are making and actually present their reasoning analytically. Additionally, many doctors choose to forgo recommended treatments themselves due to side effects [2]. [1] In fact you can pay extra to make your nature paper open access but it is by no means fully open access. [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/your-money/how-doctors-die.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/your-money/how-doctors-die...

ISL 12y ago
This is a Nature Future, the story printed at the back of the magazine as food for thought. Perhaps only twenty percent of them present a future in which we'd like to live. If the Future has driven HN to active discussion of an ethical topic, then it has succeeded in its purpose. Unlike most of Nature, the Futures are free to read (and ~10% of them are compelling enough to make reading them all worthwhile). (just scroll down to see the complete archive) http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/arts/futures/ http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/arts/futures/
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I posted this Mitchell and Webb sketch further down, as an example of how to do this well - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXTBPN1HhA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbXTBPN1HhA Now reflect on your reaction to that piece. Even when on the side of the trader, it is still funny. You can be a trader and find that funny. This is because of how the characters are treated in the piece. Essentially, it is ridiculing ideas while remaining sympathetic to the character that holds them, which is difficult to do well, but makes for a much more persuasive piece of satire that will be appreciated by a wider range of people. The piece in Nature however is just preaching to the converted, and doing it in a way that will just entrench the views of anyone who identifies with the mother. Frankly, if they want to publish satirical sci-fi, they should pay someone who can do it well rather than embarrassing themselves like this. It reads like a teenage first attempt at short-story writing.

swayvil 12y ago

I like a consensus of experts as much as the next guy, but let's not get carried away. Today's airtight methodology is tomorrow's tragic myopia.

0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
Does that mean phrenology is not coming back?

logfromblammo 12y ago

Look, science, you can't have it both ways. You can't release knowledge into the wild and also keep it caged up under your control. It is no more possible than setting the barn afire then ordering the flames to go back into the lamp. If you cannot tolerate the idea that everyone benefits from science done well, even including those who behave destructively towards scientific progress, then why are you doing science in the first place? Screaming from the mountaintops, "No! No! You're doing it wrong! All wrong! You idiots! You morons! Stop what you're doing immediately and do as I say!" is not likely to help your cause. That is, after all, what people have been yelling at each other for centuries, even long prior to the development of modern scientific inquiry. There may even be a branch of science that deals with social norms and cultural shifts, and perhaps the intentional guidance of groups towards given institutional goals. You could probably take the socio- prefix and append an -ology to it. Maybe ask a sociologist what usually happens when you strip a person of the ability to make their own choices, even if you are certain they are making those choices based upon flawed premises. Applying force or coercion does little but change the portion of the behavior of a person that is visible to you. You cannot use it to change someone's mind, no more than you can make a person love you by smashing their ankles with a sledgehammer. You have to coax them to it, convincing them to change their own minds. But you can't do it for a non-rational person using only rational argumentation. It does not compile. You have to use other means to even get them close enough that argument will work. You have to advertise. Use rhetoric. Flash some sideboob. Blow dragon smoke from your nose using cookies dipped in liquid nitrogen. Write a catchy jingle. Go viral. Write a hoax about cool teenaged kids getting electrotetanized by their musical Tesla coils. Get Bill Nye slimed on Nickelodeon's Kid Science Awards Show as he introduces the new Mr. Wizard, wingsuiting down to the venue from an orange zeppelin. You have to make people want science to like them. And you're not going to get there by acting like a condescending know-it-all prick--even if you do actually know it all, and the other person is a clueless, drooling moron.

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TallGuyShort 12y ago

Ok, fine, then you're not allowed individual sovereignty.

danielweber 12y ago

This sat poorly with me. I thought "you're not allowed science any more" would mean that no one has to ever listen to her in any scientific debate. Instead, it meant that she got overruled about a medical decision. Congratulations, you've amazingly found a way to be even worse than the antivaxxers. I didn't think it was possible.

epistasis 12y ago
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that the article is advocating for forced vaccinations, but I do think that your reaction to the forced vaccination does hint at what the article really was suggesting.

prestadige 12y ago

This is a fantasy of course, which is a defence mechanism for frustrated minds. However, the quasi-religious defence of Science as a settled body of knowledge which people must be forcibly 'educated' about is becoming depressingly common. Becoming more like a religion isn't a good way to counter superstitious falsehoods. The patient-doctor relationship has waned, IMO. Here in the UK for most ailments I see a GP for about 10 minutes. I never see her again. No follow up, no chat, etc. Different GP next time. Perhaps social media could help build trust within practices.

tokenadult 12y ago

There are a lot of comments here about the issue of how to communicate risk of different personal medical choices to patients who do not themselves have medical training. It is a tough problem. Professional stage magicians, and avid skeptics, Penn and Teller had an episode of their cable television series Bullshit report on the issue of risks and benefits of vaccination. Maybe a clip from their TV show (with language that many families would find inappropriate for viewing with their children) will help communicate the risk and benefit ratio of vaccination more clearly than documents written in a more clinical tone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo (short clip above, long clip below) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLcOz4EKrxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLcOz4EKrxg

mynewwork 12y ago

I'm confused by the awkward grammar in the title. Is it intentional for humor (like xkcd's 'going to try science') or is that wording acceptable use in British dialects? I'm parsing it as "You're not allowed <to use> science" or "You're not allowed <to know> science", but it's right on the line of believable that I could see that sentence being used genuinely in another dialect.

CanSpice 12y ago
They're using science as a noun. Think of it like "You're not allowed oxygen any more."
- mynewwork 12y ago
  Which still sounds wrong to me. I'd expect "You're not allowed to breathe oxygen" or "You're not allowed to have oxygen". So I guess it's "allowed" which is being used in a way I'm unfamiliar with.

chris_mahan 12y ago

It's this reasoning that gave us the 401K.

Jtsummers 12y ago
Aren't 401Ks mostly voluntary programs? I'm not aware of anyone being compelled to invest into them.

gretful 12y ago

So here you have a Doctor trying to be Lawyer. There is a chance, however small, of a bad reaction to the vaccine. The Doctor knows this, therefore he cannot give this woman her 100% guarantee that nothing will go wrong because of the vaccination. He knows that if he tells this woman it will be OK and nothing will happen, that if something DOES happen he will be sued for medical malpractice.

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gretful 12y ago

Quick question: how many of you are against the flood of illegal immigrants making their way into the US? If you're worried about killing herd immunity, you should really be voicing your discontent over both the GOP and Democrat parties encouraging this with their amnesty plans. Here's just one incident of an illegal bringing disease into the US: http://news.yahoo.com/arrest-warrant-issued-man-tuberculosis-192756320.html http://news.yahoo.com/arrest-warrant-issued-man-tuberculosis...

lotsofmangos 12y ago
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
- gretful 12y ago
  A beautiful poem, one that many a legal immigrant saw upon entering the US as they began inprocessing through the Ellis Island immigration station. One that the illegal aliens will not see as they illicitly cross our border, seeking to evade what agents we have stationed there.
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thatjoist 12y ago
Nice strawman, "if you're against X you MUST be against Y". What really matters is the cost-to-benefit ratio. A jab in the arm vs denying someone immigration, decide whatever you want but it's a sliding scale, not black-and-white.

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hasler 12y ago

> You've had the opportunity to read the facts and the education to be able to analyse them, yet you have consistently chosen not to. Perhaps if doctors understood the facts better, and could explain them better, this wouldn't be a problem: http://jsfiddle.net/SamHasler/c22eR/embedded/result/ http://jsfiddle.net/SamHasler/c22eR/embedded/result/