[HN Gopher] A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic healt...
___________________________________________________________________
A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from
1929
Author : drcwpl
Score : 110 points
Date : 2024-12-04 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (moreisdifferent.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (moreisdifferent.blog)
| mmastrac wrote:
| It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement
| here. The history of that movement is long.
|
| Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I
| think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable
| environment and resent the things that allow them to live
| mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational
| thinking.
|
| I think there's a certain amount of cherry-picking going on with
| this textbook, however, as you'd find just as many pro-science
| books today, and likely a number of "science is the devil"-type
| publications in the early 1900s.
|
| It's an interesting read, either way, with some amusing
| editorializing by the article's author in the middle (no
| spoilers).
| api wrote:
| What is it about vaccines?
|
| Lots of anti-vaxxers are fine with other kinds of drugs and use
| them liberally, even in many cases street drugs. They'll eat
| fast food, processed food, use household chemicals, do all
| kinds of other things that expose them to things they don't
| understand and may not be good for them, but vaccines are just
| the devil incarnate. The word _vaccine_ seems to provoke a
| visceral gut reaction among a lot of them.
|
| Like you said it goes way, way back. Something about vaccines
| creeps a lot of people out for reasons I don't understand.
| tedeh wrote:
| Fear of needles and having your skin pierced is my guess, at
| least for some.
| yesco wrote:
| I think it's simply the enforcement mechanisms make people
| paranoid, especially since they are usually directed at
| children (by schools), it all then snowballs from there.
|
| I agree the needles don't help though.
| anovikov wrote:
| It's about taking a drug when not sick, and doing so because
| government says you to.
| profsummergig wrote:
| RFK Jr. is such a case. Anti-vaxx, but uses something to
| boost his "jackedness". The dude is jacked for a >70 years
| old guy. Supposedly it's testosterone. If anyone knows what
| he uses to look so jacked, please share.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| That's what he says: "I'm on an anti-aging protocol from my
| doctor that includes testosterone replacement," Kennedy
| said. "I don't take any anabolic steroids or anything like
| that and the TRT I use is bioidentical to what my body
| produces."
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if he mixed in a few other
| "vitamins"
| ceejayoz wrote:
| He's been convicted of heroin possession in the past.
| aphantastic wrote:
| He is vaccinated and all of his children are as well. What
| specifically of his statements do you consider "anti-vax"?
| 9dev wrote:
| Maybe the fact that he wants to let people choose whether
| to get vaccinated. That isn't how we eradicated polio.
| It's irresponsible.
| aphantastic wrote:
| So not "anti-vax" but rather "pro-choice".
| llamaimperative wrote:
| "anti-vaccinating people at the scale required to yield
| good public health outcomes" is sufficient to qualify for
| the label, IMO.
| dekhn wrote:
| Not sure if you're "playing dumb" (sometimes people do
| that on chat boards). Kennedy isn't just "pro-choice on
| vaccines", he's repeatedly amplified nonscientific views
| about vaccine safety. For example, as recently as 2023,
| "Autism comes from vaccines". Then he pivots to a more
| useful comment, that vaccines are exempt from the normal
| requirements on drugs to go through full clinical trials.
|
| If you want to claim "autism comes from vaccines" you
| really have to put up some sort of evidence that supports
| the claim, and the reality is that there is no reliable
| evidence for the claim. Also, which vaccine? They use a
| wide range of technologies? Is it thimerosol... which
| isn't in any of the major vaccines used in the US today
| (and was unlikely to be a cause of autism in the first
| place, and is also still used in many contexts).
|
| Ultimately, what RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in
| established science. I think he's doing it because he
| thinks the established science is corrupt, but I fail to
| see how he could possibly correct that while also casting
| doubt. If he ends up in a public health leadership
| position, he's going to find very quickly just how poorly
| his approach to public health works.
| aphantastic wrote:
| Yes, people can choose to do some things without wanting
| authorities to force them to do other things. Astutely
| observed.
| svara wrote:
| So tired of this framing. We get it, you don't like the
| government. So what?
|
| If you're spreading lies about medicine because you
| distrust authority...
|
| Well, first of all, you're dumb because you believe
| falsehoods.
|
| But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my
| friends and my families' health, and to your own health as
| well.
|
| Why would we have any patience for this?
|
| Your rugged self-important individualism is not worth more
| than any of that.
|
| You appear to be thinking that you're taking some heroic
| stand on principle. Your principle is leading you astray.
| It makes you antisocial, a danger to your neighbors.
| Lutger wrote:
| Of course, in the pandemic we saw extreme versions of this.
| Anything to avoid vaccination, but ivermectin and other risky
| drugs were no problem. If vaccination would be alternative
| medicine and ivermection government mandated, we might see
| the reverse.
|
| So I don't think its vaccination perse, at least not on its
| own, but vaccines have various things going against them.
| Like someone else in this thread said, government mandate +
| preventative medicine has the right ingredients to form a
| conspiracy theory with, religious doctrine has historically
| amplified that as well. Additionally, there's also a distrust
| of 'big pharma' in general, and especially with minority
| groups a history of dubious or even malevolent medical
| experimentation by the government.
|
| A big part of the antivaxxers are now also anti 5G, advocate
| against the use of sunscreen, are against wind energy and EV,
| sometimes pro-russia, anti-deepstate, etc. Some of this is
| fossil lobby, some of it is the result of Russian propaganda
| and other parts are just organic whackyness, like the flat
| earthers.
| TheFreim wrote:
| > Anything to avoid vaccination, but ivermectin and other
| risky drugs were no problem.
|
| This sort of language makes problems worse and even further
| decreases trust.
|
| Casting a wide net and calling ivermectin a "risy drug"
| when a quick search engine query will show it is used
| safely in humans as an antiparasite drug. When someone who
| is skeptical about vaccines reads these sorts of blatant
| falsehoods why in the world would they believe anything
| else you say?
|
| If you wanted to warn people against using forms formulated
| for animal consumption then you could've just said that,
| instead you painted with a wide brush which justifies
| someone to not trust you.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > a quick search engine query will show it is used safely
| in humans as an antiparasite drug
|
| That just means it's _safer_ than being infested with
| untreated parasites.
|
| It doesn't mean someone _without_ worms should take it
| for funsies.
|
| Your same Google search will reveal ivermectin carries
| (as with almost any intervention) potential serious side
| effects. Doctors prescribing medication balance those
| risks with the potential benefits; it's why you don't get
| fentanyl (safe! effective! widely used!) for a papercut,
| even if it would be _very_ helpful for the pain.
| TheFreim wrote:
| I'm not promoting the consumption of ivermectin without a
| good reason. I've never had it myself, nor have I
| encouraged anyone else to take it for "funsies".
|
| Tylenol overdoses are relatively common and can even be
| deadly, but it would be a gross over-generalization to
| classify Tylenol as a "risky" drug. If you want people to
| take a drug in a proper setting, in proper amounts, to
| treat the relevant disease you should /just say that/
| instead of trying to get people to think a generally safe
| drug isn't generally safe.
|
| If someone has a serious bacterial infection and thinks
| they just need Tylenol, I wouldn't tell them that "You
| shouldn't take Tylenol! It's risky!" instead I'd tell
| them that Tylenol won't help treat their disease.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Tylenol is absolutely a risky drug.
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-
| use-on...
|
| > But the FDA says acetaminophen carries a special risk.
| About a quarter of Americans routinely take more over-
| the-counter pain relief pills of all kinds than they are
| supposed to, surveys show. That behavior is "particularly
| troublesome" for acetaminophen, an FDA report said,
| because the drug's narrow safety margin places "a large
| fraction of users close to a toxic dose in the ordinary
| course of use."
|
| > Taken over several days, as little as 25 percent above
| the maximum daily dose - or just two additional extra
| strength pills a day - has been reported to cause liver
| damage, according to the agency. Taken all at once, a
| little less than four times the maximum daily dose can
| cause death. A comparable figure doesn't exist for
| ibuprofen, because so few people have died from
| overdosing on that drug.
|
| > From 2001 to 2010, annual acetaminophen-related deaths
| amounted to about twice the number attributed to all
| other over-the-counter pain relievers combined, according
| to the poison control data.
|
| > Acetaminophen overdose sends as many as 78,000
| Americans to the emergency room annually and results in
| 33,000 hospitalizations a year, federal data shows.
| Acetaminophen is also the nation's leading cause of acute
| liver failure, according to data from an ongoing study
| funded by the National Institutes for Health.
|
| > In fact, the FDA has still not completed the review of
| the drug that began back in the 1970s, as part of the
| agency's larger mandate to assess the safety and efficacy
| of older medicines.
|
| > As the panel's work was going on, one of the world's
| most prestigious medical journals weighed in on
| acetaminophen. The London-based Lancet declared in a 1975
| editorial that if the drug "were discovered today it
| would not be approved" by British regulators. "It would
| certainly never be freely available without
| prescription."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| On the doses people were recommending it's very clearly
| unsafe, known to have killed a few people, and marked so
| on the usage instructions.
| TheFreim wrote:
| I agree, which is why someone should say "unsafe dosages
| of ivermectin" or "ivermectin in formulations unsafe for
| human consumption" instead of speaking of a widely used
| drug as per itself "unsafe" without qualification. Making
| over-generalized statements will lead to people rightly
| reject what you're saying, leaving room for them to be
| misinformed about the actual reality of the situation.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oh, I do agree with this.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Something about vaccines creeps a lot of people out for
| reasons I don't understand.
|
| I think it's the fact that vaccines are heavily pushed on
| everyone, which is very different than a medication that you
| choose to take, or your doctor specifically prescribes for
| you, to address a medical condition. Taking chemicals to cure
| some disease is different than taking chemicals when you're
| healthy simply to decrease a risk that you may or may not
| consider relevant to you. Also, often vaccines are
| administered not for your own sake but to protect the
| community, and so again it's a different calculation where
| you're injecting chemicals (or injecting your kids with
| chemicals) not because you think you need them but to
| potentially protect others should you become ill. Also there
| often isn't as much explanation around vaccines (besides
| COVID) as to their makeup, etc., compared to some medication
| that your doctor prescribes to you (i.e., if my Dr prescribes
| a blood thinner I'm going to get a pretty thorough
| explanation of it and can ask questions, whereas with
| vaccines it feels mandatory without much explanation other
| than "the surgeon general said to".
|
| So it's not at all surprising to me that there is strong
| resistance to vaccines from some people who have no problem
| with medications in general.
| niceice wrote:
| A lot of is the abuse of the label anti-vaxxer. It's being
| misapplied to people who aren't against vaccine technology.
|
| RFK, who is vaccinated along with his children: "I've been
| fighting 40 years to get mercury out of fish. Nobody calls me
| anti-fish."
| mmastrac wrote:
| I don't think quoting RFK is a good example of showcasing a
| rational view of vaccines.
| supplied_demand wrote:
| Can you explain what you mean by "people who aren't against
| vaccine technology?" I'm not sure I follow given that RFK
| has explicitly said he is against vaccines and that no
| vaccines are safe and effective. [0]
|
| ===In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that
| "There's no vaccine that is safe and effective" and told
| FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked
| idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he
| urged people to "resist" CDC guidelines on when kids should
| get vaccines.===
|
| ==="I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby
| and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated," Kennedy
| said.===
|
| ===That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine
| sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared
| onscreen next to one sticker that declared "IF YOU'RE NOT
| AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN'T PAYING ATTENTION."===
|
| [0] https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-
| election-2024-preside...
| niceice wrote:
| He should be more careful with his words, but they're
| resorting to cherry picked quotes and guilt by
| association to mislead:
|
| "appeared onscreen next to"
|
| It's unserious. To get his actual opinion, which is
| nuanced, you have to go long form.
| supplied_demand wrote:
| ==guilt by association to mislead: "appeared onscreen
| next to"==
|
| It was something produced by his own non-profit. Do you
| not think it is fair to associate him with the non-profit
| he founded and ran? He has had no trouble associating
| himself with the organization. I feel like we can make
| the same association without misleading anyone.
|
| This is still just a deflection from the question of what
| "people who aren't against vaccine technology" even
| means. Can you please define it? I am having trouble
| seeing the difference between being anti-vaccine and
| being anti-vaccine technology.
|
| NOTE: The comment I originally responded to has since
| been edited.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| Anything that people are forced to do is going to cause this
| sort of visceral response.
|
| A lot of things that we were forced to do during COVID still
| stick with me and have basically made me intensely
| distrustful of authority to a degree that wasn't present
| before.
|
| It was just bullshit after bullshit enacted in law and forced
| on people. Walking in certain directions in the supermarket,
| going outside for only X minutes per day to exercise, only X
| people allowed at your table at the pub, etc. Just endless
| totally unscientific bollocks.
|
| It's like getting into a heated debate with someone. You
| start out and actually listen to what people are saying, but
| then eventually it's just like, come on man, fuck off, I
| don't even care if you're right, I'm tuned out.
|
| Fast food doesn't force me to eat it under penalty of
| imprisonment.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Some reasons I can think of:
|
| - Vaccines are usually injected, injection makes most people
| uncomfortable. Most of them get over it, but it can be panic
| inducing for a small number. Among street drug users,
| injection is usually considered extreme, as in, the thing
| only true addicts do.
|
| - When you get vaccinated, you are fine, and then you get a
| few unpleasant side effects. That's the opposite of the usual
| drugs you take when you are sick and make you feel better.
|
| - Sometimes, vaccination is made mandatory, many people don't
| like to be told what to do with their bodies, even if there
| are good reasons for it.
|
| - You never know when a vaccine have saved someone. Someone
| didn't get sick, but is it because of the vaccine, natural
| immunity, luck, or simply a lack of exposure, maybe he will
| get sick eventually, you can't really tell, and you don't
| really notice when something doesn't happen. However, when a
| vaccine hurt someone, or failed to prevent the disease it
| should protect against, that's very noticeable.
|
| - The most successful vaccines are now often considered
| useless, because the disease they protect against is so rare,
| why go through the discomfort of the vaccination when it is
| so unlikely for you to get sick either way? It is a tragedy
| of the commons, as the reason the diseases is so rare is
| because of widespread vaccination.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| >Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I
| think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable
| environment and resent the things that allow them to live
| mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational
| thinking.
|
| And yet science says the opposite. The prevailing evidence
| suggests that humans are generally better suited to stable and
| safe environments, with danger and chaos typically leading to
| detrimental effects on mental health.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| The safest and richest societies are also the most highly
| medicated, so I would question to what prevailing evidence
| you refer. For an extreme example one might consider soldiers
| / warfighters. Very high rates of trauma and suicidality
| after returning from war, and this is only anecdotal not
| first hand but I would be interested to know what the mental
| health of deployed soldiers looks like in comparison
| (certainly there is a range of environments between 'deployed
| at a desk in japan' vs combat units living in 'danger, chaos
| and instability', so it might be a good context to study
| within)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The safest and richest societies are also the most highly
| medicated...
|
| That, alone, could point to two very obvious but very
| different conclusions.
|
| One is that people in those societies _need_ medications
| more.
|
| Alternatively, people in these societies _get_ needed
| medications more.
|
| I suspect the average American gets more therapy than the
| average Afghan, but I suspect the Afghans would still
| benefit from it.
| pksebben wrote:
| I think Maslow would have a point to make, here.
|
| Privileged societies are more medicated because the most
| pressing issues to them are (somewhat) soluble using
| medication. Because they are not imminently worried about
| housing and sustenance or violence.
|
| Would be odd to consider medicating for fibromyalgia or
| depression when you're starving and/or being bombed /
| shot at.
| wussboy wrote:
| The word "generally" is the important one in your sentence.
| Genes don't know what environment they will be born into, and
| so they include various strategies to cope with the unknown
| in the hope that some will survive.
|
| Generally, humans are better suited to stable and safe
| environments. But it would be irresponsible of genes not to
| include, occasionally, humans who did better in chaos because
| chaos frequently happens.
| jon_richards wrote:
| I believe there was a study that showed a mix of behaviors
| because populations with cooperative individuals out-
| compete in plentiful times and selfish individuals out-
| compete in scarce times. Hard to Google now because of
| selfish gene theory.
| wussboy wrote:
| D.S. Wilson did a lot of work in that area.
| drcwpl wrote:
| Yes, especially his A theory of group selection
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC432258/
| davidw wrote:
| > Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability.
| I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable
| environment and resent the things that allow them to live
| mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational
| thinking.
|
| That's part of what Tom Nichols has been saying:
| https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/09/10/democracy-di...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I wonder if that's the real reason he wanted the US to start
| a war in Iraq: to alleviate the boredom of modern life.
| freed0mdox wrote:
| I have a little theory I like to tell at pubs that all of
| the intelligence comminities exist just because it attracts
| people who can't stand being bored. Advancing national
| security could be a thrilling entertainment.
| tivert wrote:
| > I have a little theory I like to tell at pubs that all
| of the intelligence comminities exist just because it
| attracts people who can't stand being bored. Advancing
| national security could be a thrilling entertainment.
|
| That's probably Special Circumstances in the Culture
| novels, but they're just a mashup of Ian Bank's
| imagination and biases, and I think they're poor
| approximation of anything resembling reality under any
| set of conditions.
|
| Personally, I think your theory would be a fun
| conversation topic, but I doubt it reflects real life.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| > Our politics has become all about hurting other people,
| instead of trying to create something positive. We used to go
| to the polls and say, here's what I'm voting for. Now we go
| to the polls to vote against something and we hope it makes
| others really mad.
|
| This feels like a really uncharitable interpretation on what
| is going on.
|
| To me it feels more like you have two sides, the two sides
| have viewpoints that feel very alien to the other side, so
| extreme that they feel like attacks but actually it's just a
| clash of worldview.
| goatlover wrote:
| Also, the loudest voices being amplified online today,
| along with a political strategy to pursue divisiveness,
| because it motivates the base to vote, while making
| unreliable independent votes less likely to vote.
| atmavatar wrote:
| When one side has a repeatedly-stated policy goal like
| sending the military against "the enemy within" while
| specifically calling-out political opponents as belonging
| to said group, it's difficult to interpret that as a mere
| clash of worldview, even when assuming it's mere bluster to
| gin up engagement at rallies.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| Right, I don't doubt that, but it's clear to me that this
| isn't the nexus of all of this.
|
| What you're looking at is the later stages of a
| disagreement. It didn't start out that way, it started as
| something like, hey can we put the ketchup in the fridge,
| nah I'd rather leave it out, I prefer it warm. (I'm
| obviously deliberately being silly here).
|
| You move on in time and suddenly blows are being
| exchanged because everyone loses patience.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Just by happenstance, the GOP went fully off the rails
| when the US elected Obama. Curious, ain't it.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| That was the thing that broke my family. The older
| generation became way more openly racist after that. I
| didn't want to accept that it was happening, but I
| finally gave up denying it. And then Trump came along and
| all rationality went out the window. Distinguished people
| with engineering degrees, PE some of them just lost their
| minds. Wealthy boomers with no care in the world just
| couldn't handle that (I know not all are that way, but
| half my family became that).
|
| Looking back there were some racist tendencies in that
| generation but it wasn't openly talked about with me or
| more likely I just missed it.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I'm sorry to hear it...
|
| I guess it shouldn't be as surprising as it was. You
| basically just need to be a non-zero amount of
| racist/sexist/whatever to think that [category x]
| shouldn't hold _the presidency_ , given that it's the
| highest office in the world. Any tiny amount of x-ism
| will do. Turns out a whole lot of apparently normal
| people are at least a _tiiiny_ bit racist, and it
| absolutely broke an entire political party.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I think its as simple as the fact that "we" won the Cold
| War, and that was the only thing putting any leftward
| pressure at all on US politics. The psycho right wing
| didn't materialize in 2008 out of nothing (think about
| LaRouchism, the "moral majority", Pat Buchanan, and on
| and on). Yes, Republicans are racist, but so are
| Democrats and Obama did actually win twice so somebody
| must have voted for him.
|
| Rather, Obama's election was the just the last time that
| the New Deal coalition was strong enough to hold
| together, having deteriorated over the course of the 90s
| and 2000s because it had no clear purpose. Capital no
| longer feels any need to throw scraps (like limited NLRB-
| disciplined union organizing, Social Security, Medicare,
| consumer surplus) to workers to prevent 1918 happening
| here, which had been the Democratic Party's entire
| purpose since FDR. It had seemed increasingly ludicrous
| that revolution would come to America over the course of
| midcentury, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991
| brought the farce to light.
|
| In other words, we're still eating the leftovers of
| anticommunism, the 20th Century's original sin (to mix a
| metaphor).
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Out of curiosity, where were you living during the 2008
| election?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Lansing, Michigan
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| hard to tell which side you are talking about here TBH,
| because while one side has talked up a big game about
| what they may or may not do, the other side has been
| actively weaponizing our institutions against
| aforementioned side.
| liontwist wrote:
| The growing movement is the one that views vaccines as a
| categorical good and wants to unperson those who see each
| individual treatment as a an engineered tool with its own risks
| and benefits.
|
| If you know anything about marketing you know that for such
| messaging to be culturally pervasive is a result of years of
| effort and organizing.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement
| here.
|
| Not surprising. I look at vaccines the same way as I look at
| any new medication: has it been tested long enough to know what
| the long-term effects of it are, and do the benefits outweigh
| the risks. I don't have a problem with MMR, TB and other common
| vaccines, that have been around for decades. If I'm traveling
| to East Africa I'm going to get a yellow fever vaccine. I also
| don't have a problem with the COVID vaccine because it was
| clear that the risk of not getting vaccinated was significant.
| But I have never gotten a "flu shot" in my life because the
| benefit of it is rather low relative to the risk of influenza
| given my demographics and health. If that makes me an anti-
| vaxxer, so be it. Don't really care.
| mmastrac wrote:
| > If that makes me an anti-vaxxer, so be it. Don't really
| care.
|
| I'm pretty sure setting a personal bar/risk tradeoff that
| lets you take a significant number of vaccines doesn't make
| you an anti-vaxxer.
| niceice wrote:
| That's the rational response, but in practice what we saw
| is that anyone who questioned the Covid vaccine was
| instantly labeled anti-vax. It didn't matter if they were
| fine with all other vaccines. It didn't matter if they just
| had Covid or had a complicating pre-existing condition.
| Anything less than full acceptance was shut down as anti-
| vax. They ruined the anti-vax label which was previously
| useful.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I think anti-vaxxer is painted with a much wider brush than
| that, and somehow become automatically equivalent to "anti-
| science"; there is overlap but there's also a lot of non-
| overlap. Somehow vaccines have become an "all or nothing"
| proposition which is just as stupid as saying that all
| medications are created equal.
|
| But in any case, I'm not going to live my life by what
| labels others put on me.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > But I have never gotten a "flu shot" in my life because the
| benefit of it is rather low relative to the risk of influenza
| given my demographics and health. If that makes me an anti-
| vaxxer, so be it.
|
| That seems like reasonable risk assessment to me. It's a
| minor chore to get but the benefit to you is also pretty
| minor. Lots of people skip the flu vaccine for those reasons.
|
| But some folks skip the flu vaccine because they are
| convinced that the _vaccine itself_ will harm them. I hate
| the term "anti-vaxxer" but if I were to apply the concept,
| it's mostly to that unbalanced risk assessment.
|
| It's an interesting question why some folks develop such an
| unbalanced assessment. And I dislike "anti-vaxxer" because I
| think is dismissive and derogatory, and leads away from
| trying to understand each other.
| tivert wrote:
| > It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement
| here. The history of that movement is long.
|
| > Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability.
| I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable
| environment and resent the things that allow them to live
| mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational
| thinking.
|
| No, I don't think that's true. Humans are built to _learn from
| experience_ , and one thing that vaccines do is _eliminate the
| experiences that justify their use_. That also makes the
| experience /knowledge of smaller dangers more prominent. For
| instance, a kid getting his arm paralyzed from the (now
| discontinued) live oral polio vaccine, looks _a lot different_
| if people are commonly getting worse paralysis from wild polio
| than if no one is getting wild polio at all anymore.
|
| The other thing you should probably take into account when
| regarding a book from 1929, is the experiences people had back
| then with (often dangerous) quack cures promising miracles. For
| instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and
| _Drug_A...):
|
| > By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection
| organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign
| for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of
| injurious products which had been ruled permissible under the
| 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, the mascara Lash
| lure, which caused blindness, and worthless "cures" for
| diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law was
| unable to get through Congress for five years, but was rapidly
| enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937
| Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died
| after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.
| drcwpl wrote:
| I had forgotten about the Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, great
| reminder, thank you.
|
| Humans are adaptive learners, shaped by both individual
| experience and cultural memory. The rise of anti-vax
| sentiments might be better explained by psychological and
| sociological factors. Like mistrust of institutions, the
| amplification of fringe views via social media, or the
| cognitive biases that prioritize visible risks over abstract
| ones.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| Those sociological factors aren't complex, and don't
| require an explanation of any real depth.
|
| The entire problem is this: Fifty four percent of Americans
| read below the 6th grade level, which means that the simple
| majority of Americans don't understand the world they live
| in and never will.
| drcwpl wrote:
| That is a terrifying statistic "Fifty four percent of
| Americans read below the 6th grade level" ... just found
| the research.
| pksebben wrote:
| I'd agree with this, but it's missing something;
|
| _why_ is this the case? From what I know, it 's a lot
| tougher to tease out the cause of this malfunction in our
| society. Do we have an undereducated populace because of
| poverty? Lack of school funding? (if so, why do we
| underfund schools? is it because we don't have the money?
| greed? is there a concerted effort to suppress an
| educated populace for political reasons?) Is there a
| cultural reticence built into us that resists scientific
| thought?
|
| My kneejerk analysis boils down to "it's the economy,
| stupid" and that a substantial portion of our population
| lives below the poverty line (which itself isn't defined
| particularly well and probably misses a bunch of folks
| who ought to qualify for 'living under distressed
| economic conditions'). It's tough to care about education
| when you struggle to keep a roof overhead.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| It's the old dream of the information era. We were going
| to cure all of the worlds ills by fixing the problem of
| unequal access to information. Surely people would all
| perform equally, when given equal opportunity?
|
| Not only didn't it work, it made the world a far worse
| place. I think Occam's razor tells us why: Forty nine
| percent of people will always be of below average
| intelligence.
|
| Average intelligence currently seems to mean
| understanding the world at the 6th grade level. Maybe we
| can raise that to the 7th grade level with a concentrated
| effort, but that will also raise the performance of the
| top fifty percent.
|
| There will always be a bottom half and they will always
| struggle to understand the world the top half build.
| tivert wrote:
| > Forty nine percent of people will always be of below
| average intelligence....
|
| > There will always be a bottom half and they will always
| struggle to understand the world the top half build.
|
| Before you spend too much time patting yourself on the
| back for being so superior, it's important to keep in
| mind that "intelligence" isn't all it's cracked up to be.
| "Intelligent" people do a lot of stupid shit, not listen,
| get deceived, and deceive themselves, etc. Hell, I've
| even heard "intelligence" describe as effectively a
| superior ability for post-hoc rationalization.
|
| When you find yourself trying to understand the world by
| dividing it into dumbasses and "smart people like me,"
| you should stop and remember to count yourself with the
| idiots.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| > Before you spend too much time patting yourself on the
| back for being so superior... dividing it into dumbasses
| and "smart people like me,"
|
| I didn't say anything like that, or even adjacent to it.
| I didn't imply any judgement at all, other than to
| acknowledge that we're not all born the same.
|
| That said, tall people will always be better at
| basketball on average than short people. Raising the
| average height doesn't really change that, and trying to
| pretend that if everyone were provided with the same
| opportunities they would achieve the same outcomes in
| basketball, or in intellectual pursuits, is dishonest and
| actively harmful to those born at a disadvantage.
| tivert wrote:
| > ...and trying to pretend that if everyone were provided
| with the same opportunities they would achieve the same
| outcomes in basketball, or in intellectual pursuits, is
| not only dishonest, it's actively harmful to those born
| at a disadvantage.
|
| Cultivating an us/them distinction is also actively
| harmful, more harmful I'd say. But if you can't help
| yourself, count yourself with _them_ and do your best to
| avoid condescension.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| I can appreciate your perspective, but I also think the
| populist notion that "my ignorance is just as good as
| your knowledge" (to paraphrase Asimov) has already done
| even greater damage to our society.
|
| It must be stopped, and that can't happen if we're
| pretending that all people being worthy of respect also
| implies that all opinions are.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| That's one side. The other side looks like this:
| https://spelmanblueprint.com/810/opinions/professors-
| bitter-...
|
| The background is a new faculty member actually teaching
| at university level. _We_ know that proofs and reading
| are required. _They_ do not.
| phtrivier wrote:
| Interestingly, the experiences that people are rallying
| around (for better or worse) are more going _against_
| negative effects (perceived or real) of the scientific /
| technological world:
|
| * Climate Change (caused by the tech of "burning lots of
| fuels")
|
| * PFAS, pesticides, endocrine disruptors, etc...
|
| * Opiods crisis, nartotics, etc...
|
| * Impact of GAFAM on privacy, social discourse, etc...
|
| In a sense, the "white coats in their labs" and "nerds with
| glasses" have been repeatedly found (lately) to be on the
| "wrong side of the issue". (There are usually scientists on
| both side of the issue, which is the saving grace for
| science: self-correction is built in.)
|
| Maybe it's relevant that the book is dated from 1929, that
| is, right before a time where "white coats" started being
| involved into very shady stuff (eugenics, mass-media
| propaganda, global-scale destruction weapons, and of, course,
| industrialized death.)
|
| The COVID crises could have been a time for science in
| general to earn trust again - in some sense it did, but this
| time people were overexpecting, and got disappointed at least
| (and downright enraged at worst, if they were on the wrong
| side of the politico-scientifict decisions.)
|
| And the pendulum will keep swinging, but hopefully still
| rise.
| kibwen wrote:
| This is mistakenly attributing the destructive consequences
| of profit-motivated mega-industries to "nerds with
| glasses", thereby creating more cover for the ruthless
| profit-maximizers to continue destroying the world while
| deflecting all blame.
| thrance wrote:
| I really don't like how often I have to read/hear "Humans are
| built to X" type arguments.
|
| I don't think the lack of a challenge is the root cause of
| science denialism. It's a cultural thing, coming from a lack of
| confidence in the elites. Elites are distraught when inequality
| become larger and things get tougher for the poorest.
| pksebben wrote:
| Could you expound on this a little more? I think I've totally
| misunderstood you.
|
| Like, who would you consider an 'Elite'? AFAICT, someone
| who's 'an Elite' thrives off of inequality, by definition.
| Without said inequality they wouldn't _be_ 'Elite'.
|
| Is it possible that your definition for Elite is similar to
| my definition for Specialist? Like 'Subject Matter Expert'?
| thrance wrote:
| Sorry, I wrote my previous comment after I just woke up,
| it's a bit messy now that I take a second look at it.
|
| I guess the way I used "elites" in my previous comment
| refers more to a certain perception of society some people
| hold, rather than to a definite group of people.
|
| If we take the policies implemented during the COVID
| pandemic as an example, those came from the government,
| oftentimes backed by academia. Since a lot of people think
| the government is doing a bad job overall, they don't trust
| the legitimacy of those policies and oppose the scientific
| reasoning that led to them being adopted.
|
| When the economy is doing well, people put more trust into
| their government, or the "elites".
|
| Therefore, my thesis is that distrust into the
| institutions/science comes from a general discontent of the
| population, and is not a natural state of humanity.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > humans go insane in a safe and stable environment
|
| Weird that people still get raped and murdered in your "safe
| and stable" environment. Sometimes the perpetrators don't even
| see justice and get away with their crimes. How do you account
| for that?
|
| > a certain amount of cherry-picking
|
| Without a doubt. I don't trust authority because I've been
| abused by it before. I'm sure you didn't mean to punch down but
| that's how many of us would rationally perceive it.
| api wrote:
| Science has delivered a standard of living to most of the
| developed world that is greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh
| or a Roman Emperor in numerous ways: health, food, availability
| of information, ease of travel, physical comfort, etc.
|
| Yet visit social media and it's absolutely overflowing with gloom
| and doom and histrionic political rage and fear bait. Saw a
| thread recently on Reddit about how many young people in the USA
| are contemplating suicide because the present or the future looks
| so bleak to them.
|
| We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to
| decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II.
|
| It's convinced me that the human brain is just not wired for
| abundance. Our brain keeps searching and searching for the
| immediate existential threats that millions of years of evolution
| have programmed us to know _absolutely must be there_. If we don
| 't see them it actually makes us panic more since it means the
| lion is hiding so well we can't spot it and it's about to jump
| out and get us.
| tombert wrote:
| I think people are extremely sensitive to the first derivative
| of things happening to them, with a very short time window.
| Even if your life is objectively better (by any measurement you
| want) than it would have been 500 years ago, is it better than
| it was a week ago?
| rqtwteye wrote:
| You also tend to compare yourself to others. For example, I
| am not happy when CEO gets a 20% raise while telling the rest
| of us that money is tight and no raises can be given. We all
| want some level of fairness.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| People don't set their standard of a good life against a 3000
| year old kingdom they've never seen or think about. Nor are
| they impressed when people resort to mining the ancient past or
| far-off countries for the deepest pits of misery they can find
| to make things sound good by comparison.
| snozolli wrote:
| _Nor are they impressed when people resort to mining the
| ancient past or far-off countries for the deepest pits of
| misery they can find to make things look good by comparison._
|
| Practicing gratitude is a pretty common strategy for
| combating depression. If young people today in developed
| nations don't even understand how bad humans used to have it
| (and still do, in some places), how can they possibly be
| grateful for what they have?
|
| Maybe AI-generated, historical influencers should be a thing.
| "Walked two miles to the river to fill my clay jug. Set my
| baby down and a croc took her."
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| But it was the Faustian striving ever upwards that built a
| better world.
|
| Anyway, I'm not sure this is gratitude so much as the
| gratification in having someone you can look down on.
| api wrote:
| It's entirely rational to be upset when things get worse,
| such as housing prices. IMHO housing prices are the big one
| for most young people in the developed world today... dig
| into why they're so upset and you get to housing prices
| pretty fast.
|
| I'm talking about deep existential despair and doomerism
| though, like people discussing suicide or refusing to have
| children because they're convinced the world is ending
| because of online discourse and/or paranoia.
|
| Edit: speaking of perspective: one of my favorites is to go
| find a global salary comparison calculator and input my first
| world tech salary. If you are on this site chances are you
| are _at least_ in the global 5% if not the global 1%.
| goatlover wrote:
| Maybe having a better view of human history would help combat
| the largely false narrative that things are overall getting
| worse, and there's little hope for future generations?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| You do realize that many people in America live paycheck to
| paycheck and work more than full time in demanding jobs and
| still need foodstamps to afford enough food? Its not exactly a
| stress free life of leisure.
| liontwist wrote:
| Do exotic foods, information, entertainment, and travel make
| you happy? Or are they more like cheap substitutes for the real
| thing.
| goatlover wrote:
| Usually they do. That's why most people want access to those
| things. What is the "real thing" they are substitutes for?
| liontwist wrote:
| A safe place to live, meaningful work, good health,
| experiences with family and friends, feelings of
| contribution and importance.
| nradov wrote:
| If you live in the USA or other developed countries then
| your _opportunity_ to have all of those things is greater
| than at any other time or place in human history. Of
| course, not everyone chooses to seize that opportunity.
| Some people would rather complain or blame others rather
| than grinding and delaying gratification to improve their
| circumstances.
| liontwist wrote:
| Blaming poor character may be true of individuals, but
| when you're referring to large groups of people you have
| to look at the social system.
|
| And by those standards our economic system is not working
| for the vast majority of people and getting worse every
| year.
| nradov wrote:
| That comment is just totally disconnected from reality.
| Sure, some people have it rough through no fault of their
| own and we should implement public policies to expand
| their opportunities. But the vast majority of people are
| doing pretty well by historical standards. The
| unemployment rate is 4.1%! The Consumer Confidence Index
| is 111!
|
| If you pay attention to the whining losers on Reddit and
| other social media then you get a distorted view of the
| state of the country. The silent majority are doing
| fairly well.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| No one cares that our lives are better than humans who lived
| thousands of years ago or even 100 years ago. And why should
| we? The benchmark is other humans living today and how they are
| faring.
|
| > We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to
| decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II.
|
| Not most people in America. Sure, Ramses didn't have a car,
| phone or modern medicine; but he could get whatever he wanted
| _that was available at the time_. That's the yardstick.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly with this.
|
| I'm not even in the US and I have multiple friends who have
| expressed to me that they'd be afraid to holiday there due to
| reproductive rights stuff. For say, two, three weeks.
|
| It's like some sort of extreme anxiety that has no basis in
| reality.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _"...greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman
| Emperor... "_
|
| I agree it's a thought-provoking comparison. It's a remarkably
| distorted lens, the one modern humans apply to interpret pre-
| industrial civilization. Should we glamorize a patrician of
| ancient Rome? Their lifestyle would be a mediocre, low-prestige
| one, if faithfully translated into the modern world. The
| vaunted villas of the aristocrats were farmhouses--go look up
| farm prices in rural Georgia or Kansas: that is ancient
| aristocracy. If you owned a herd of goats, that was a measure
| of wealth and success; we'd interpret the same thing as
| poverty. A chickenwire fence isn't a signifier of blight, but a
| delineation of land, and a sigil of an authentic land owner--an
| elite.
|
| The wealth of a great empire, the trade routes of rare spices
| and fruits from thousands of leagues away? That's Wal-Mart.
|
| It's a provocative idea! The life of the Roman _upper
| aristocratic class_ is fully accessible to probably a full
| majority of contemporary Americans. You could replicate
| practically every part of it, if you liked*. And you 're right
| that that's no longer a benchmark for self-actualization today;
| we want--need?--so much more than that.
|
| *(The only large difference, and this is much more than a
| footnote, is the total abscence of slavery. Iron-age farms
| needed large numbers of slaves--something with the social
| impact that they'd label the farm owner, the aristocrat, as a
| high-status invidual. A human ranking above many others. The
| industrial revolutions replaced most of this with machines. You
| don't acquire social status by being superior to a tractor).
|
| (The part where the humans alive today aren't 99% farmers has
| wildly rewritten the human experience, and we're still far from
| adjusted to that).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The only large difference, and this is much more than a
| footnote, is the total abscence of slavery.
|
| Convict labor is very much a thing in the US. That still
| counts as slavery.
| perihelions wrote:
| That's fair.
| revel wrote:
| > Now, imagine the uproar that might ensue from some corners
| today if a textbook made this sort of direct comparison between
| two groups, with one group happening to be white and the other
| black. Some social justice warriors would no doubt raise an
| outcry. The book would be branded as Eurocentric, racist, and
| white supremacist, since it doesn't give equal space to
| describing the intellectual achievements of the Zulu or to
| recognizing the validity of indigenous ways of knowing. The
| picture of the African witch doctor might be described as a
| "culturally insensitive caricature". The book would also be
| criticized for not describing ways in which Zulu society is more
| healthy than contemporary American society.
|
| This textbook is from 1929 and was probably being written at the
| exact same time as the Snopes monkey trial (1925). You're reading
| science hype because science was under attack; and not from
| "social justice warriors" but from conservative Americans. Notice
| that the single most transformative discovery in all of biology,
| evolution, isn't mentioned.
|
| That attack on evolution is still taking place. In Texas there
| was an attempt to strike all references to evolution and climate
| change from the curriculum, along with other attempts to
| introduce biblical references. When did that take place? That was
| this year; oh, and in 2023: https://www.wsj.com/us-
| news/education/texas-education-board-...
|
| Getting mad at "social justice warriors" for an _imagined_
| reaction while ignoring the actual attacks on science is... well,
| it 's what I've come to expect.
| goatlover wrote:
| Both things can be true, and there are real world examples of
| attacking western science as eurocentrist and what not. The
| imagined reaction is based on those criticisms.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| I still thought that passage was interesting. It is a totally
| reasonable prediction of how much of public health would read
| it.
|
| The post and your comment emphasize how the _impact_ of science
| depends more on the public than the handful of scientists who
| create it. Roughly ~0% of people understand any given
| scientific topic. It will always be completely asymmetric. It
| will always involve stuff like belief in an ideology, struggles
| for political power, (relatively blind) trust in a movement or
| leader, etc. As a result, there is no world in which scientists
| don 't _regularly_ harm whoever follows them, the same as any
| leader in an uncertain /asymmetric environment (by getting
| stuff wrong accidentally, or actively abusing their power for
| personal gain).
|
| The part about social justice warriors is actually interesting
| because that view will come across as "we hate science!" to
| some people but the real idea is somewhere between "successful
| science requires exerting some political power over other
| people" (obviously true) and "western science was built on a
| foundation of coercion and oppression, making lots of
| technological progress _and_ causing some unavoidable tragic
| effects. " Whatever the "truth" is, it's really complicated
| ethically.
| delton137 wrote:
| Hi.. original post author here.
|
| Interesting point RE the Snopes trial. You are right, evolution
| is not mentioned in the book as far as I can tell. Even though
| it is foundational to understanding the human body (in
| particular some weird features it have which any half-good
| creator would never design that way.)
|
| The SJWs / woke cult are a bit of a personal hobby horse for
| me. I think it is important to mention, since woke ideology
| comes from academics at top universities, as well as
| journalists at top media outlets -- people who have a lot of
| power to shape the public discourse and influence public
| policy. The power of Christian fundamentalists over society and
| culture, on the other hand, has been waning, if one looks over
| the past few decades. Yes, they are in the ascendancy at the
| moment with the 2024 election and whatnot, but overall their
| influence is waning. Of course, both anti-science from the left
| and from the right are issues we should worry about -- I'm just
| giving an argument why we might want to be a bit more worried
| about anti-science from the left. How much either issue is
| discussed probably greatly depends on what circles you run in.
|
| Note I did mention how there is no discussion of sexual health
| or women's health in the book. That is an issue with health
| textbooks that has been improved a lot but still exists to some
| extent today due to Christian conservatives.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| When will you feel like you all have won the war here? What
| is it that you need to happen? Is it simply a matter of
| removing academics you deem too woke from their positions, or
| is it more a matter of public opinion becoming less woke?
| Just really at this point trying to get a gauge for how long
| we have to live inside this particular discourse.. Because it
| just structurally is such that it cant last forever, for I
| hope at least to you somewhat obvious reasons... (Although I
| wouldn't be _too_ surprised if this is truly a gnostic battle
| against darkness for you personally. There are some variants
| here.)
|
| I just miss when yall were simply libertarian and talked
| about taxes! We can go back to that one day right?
| Aunche wrote:
| What far-end conservatives learned and what sjws are starting
| to discover is that mainstream exposure is a trap. You can get
| Walmart to say "Merry Christmas" (instead of happy holidays) or
| "Black Lives Matter", but that doesn't actually translate to
| any material church attendance or racial equity. All it does is
| create the illusion that your side is more of an oppressive
| force than it actually is, which alienates moderates like the
| author who can potentially be allies.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > as the Snopes monkey trial (1925)
|
| It's the Scopes trial.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-12-04 23:01 UTC)