Quite interesting to see. I suppose there is a notion of generational memory. Two generations out, people forget what the world was like. Forgetting like this on a civilizational level is probably adaptive unless it’s catastrophic and a measles epidemic is eminently survivable as a civilization if incredibly tragic for the families affected.
I had measles as a child, too. Fortunately, my parents are doctors and I was well cared for and nature was good to me as well. So here I am, pretty much fine. I’d rather have not had the disease, all things told. Incredibly contagious disease. I was in the room with the other sick child for only a few moments.
The family ended up accepting the antibody treatment before leaving the hospital. The Daily Mail article bizarrely implies that they never accepted the treatment.
Both journalistic mistakes are clear from reading the beginning of the Wired article linked in the error-laden Daily Mail article.
Sometimes, even usually, evolution finds a “local maximum” of effectiveness. Where the solution an organism finds is not optimal but it’s good enough for the organism to survive, even win.
So yeah I’m sure evolution didn’t create something perfect in the disease here but it survives long enough, and kills few-enough people slowly enough in the wild to survive
Evolution is just a race to "good enough to consistently reproduce" and everything after the sufficient reproduction is irrelevant. Like the goats whose horns have to be cut or they'll eventually pierce their own brain.
Generally it's more advantageous for your own anatomy not to kill you without intervention, but they reproduce and that checks off the "good enough" box.
The virus "cares" if it reproduces. There is often tension between the various levels of spreading mechanisms: for example airbourne spread diseases making you cough vs. the cough making the host feel poorly and not interacting with people or the cough killing the host really preventing further spread. There are plenty of optimum points between fast intense disease and asymptomatic disease.
Short term intense disease courses tend to only work for a short period of evolution for new infection mechanisms, the intensity makes them sensitive to any increased immunity which ends up halting the spread for more mild versions. Infectious diseases tend to lower in intensity over the long term.
"Once the measles virus contacts the mucosa lining the respiratory tract, it binds to SLAM (signaling lymphocyte activation molecule, also known as CD150) on the surface of macrophages and dendritic cells. These cells then take up the virus... These immune cells pass the virus on to other groups of immune cells, including B cells, T cells, thymocytes, and hematopoietic stem cells, which disseminate the virus to other organs during the incubation period.
"Immune amnesia
"The measles virus can deplete previously acquired immune memory by killing cells that make antibodies, and thus weakens the immune system, which can cause deaths from other diseases. Suppression of the immune system by measles lasts about two years and has been epidemiologically implicated in an increase in childhood mortality from other infectious diseases during this period. The measles vaccine contains an attenuated strain of the virus which does not deplete immune memory."
It can. It’s not common, from what I understand, but there are cases where it has put various autoimmune disorders into remission, either temporary, or permanent.
That said, you become far more likely to end up sick with a whole bunch of other stuff, which can then eliminate any benefits for the autoimmune disorders.
Oh, and there’s also a chance it will give you an autoimmune disorder.
It seems like there’s a pretty strong parallel with the failure of the screw worm eradication programme. It just became a thing we did, rather than the absolute miracle it was - like vaccination - and then from complacency grows suspicion, for again, as you say, few people alive remember how it was.
Well the screw worm thing happened because Elon Musk hired a bunch of twitter nazis to put the government through a wood chipper.
This is the end result of decades snake oil moguls empowered by orin hatch and then turbo charged by people being furious that they weren't allowed to go to TGI Fridays for six months.
You should read Amusing Ourselves to Death. It is the single most informative book on politics I've ever read. Unfortunately the conclusion it points to is not great. But worth reading anyway!
It’s reductive to frame this as an alt-right only phenomenon. As long as we’re subject to modern ad-fueled social media, this is the basis for all non-retail politics.
Pro tip for my fellow graybeards: get a measles booster if you were born before 1976! Even then, it might not hurt if you are in an area where the risk is high.
Disclaimer: I am an internet rando -- talk to your doctor.
Its time, to accept the retardation, as a permanent fixture. Every 3 generations, we will have to redo all of these. As in relive them. Rediscover the cure, after horrific maimed people become the "anitbodies".. so we need cultural vaccinations every 3 generations. The education does nothing. All that helps is to relive the nightmare.
Why do problems caused by anti scientific behavior occur in a country like the United States, which has so many outstanding scientists? From a third party perspective, I wonder if it's because, as stratification has progressed in the US, distrust of the social class that scientists belong to has led people to deny even their achievements.
Why does distrust arise toward the institutions and hierarchies that speak for science? There is distrust of the universities, government agencies, media, pharmaceutical companies, and big tech that those scientists belong to. And that distrust turns science from a matter of conclusion into a matter of identity, based on 'who said it' rather than what the evidence shows.
In fact, 42% of US graduate degree holders trust scientists, but only 21% of high school graduates do [1] But when you think about it, governments, state agencies, and even universities themselves are not actively trying to improve this. Maybe humans are beings who create hierarchies and live within identities regardless of the truth. Some people think humans built civilization because farming created a need for labor, but I sometimes wonder if instead, people gathered around a certain identity (whether religious or otherwise), and then farming began in order to feed that labor force. That ideal I always heard as a child, a world where all people become one, without class, race, or discrimination, might just be something that the human species can never truly possess.
There is active propaganda against scientists and institutions; and scientists are decent but not excellent communicators. They lost the communication war and now the general public is very distrusting of science.
Since 1974, when science increasingly underwrote policy, it’s become entwined with politics through the EPA, climate change, treatment of gender and sexuality, public health, mandatory teaching of evolution, and “critical race theory.”
Conservatives don’t have as much of a problem with science when it avoids “impact science” and sticks to topics that don’t conflict with church teachings or business interests.
But trust in science has never been universal. Trust in institutions and experts had to be built painstakingly over generations. The Social Transformation of American Medicine is a great account of this process for American doctors.
My personal theory is that many responsible for teaching science in the K-12 grades are not doing a great job of communicating that science is a process for finding truth. Definitely not laying this at teachers’ feet - standardized testing and curricula, overcrowded classrooms, underfunded schools etc all contribute I’m sure, but I get the impression from talking to even well educated people that they were taught science much like they were taught math: there is a right answer, your job is to regurgitate it.
Biology in particular but also chemistry is often taught with rote memorization at its heart, and it’s easy to lose sight while getting the current thinking jammed into working memory that in the bigger picture, science is a process. Fast forward to various stages of adulthood, and when ‘science’ (not actually a thing as a whole but presented as such in the media), in light of new information, changes course or updates its priors on something you’d accepted as fact, and you might perceive scientists, a group of whom you may know none, as condescending and overconfident. In fact scientists disagree over everything and doubt way more than the public would believe but that’s often a footnote to the way the story of the scientific process is presented.
In fact, I think science teaches a specific methodology and a specific mental model for viewing the world. However, the scientific method is a shareable verification procedure, whereas scientists' mental models are fragmented depending on individuals or schools of thought.
So I think modern science is a collection of elaborately designed mental models for interpreting phenomena.
Those mental models differ from person to person, and when you read the writings of various scientists or prominent figures, you realize that even for the same theory, their interpretations are slightly different. Anyway, I've gone off on a tangent.
I am an uneducated person, so it's hard for me to speak carelessly, but as you said, we often tend to overlook the fact that when we talk about something being 'scientific,' it's spoken of as if there is a single correct answer. And as that standardized version gets talked about as if it were the 'truth,' the essence gets diluted. I think you have a point there.
Thank you for presenting a perspective I hadn't considered. Clearly, there's a difference with a doctor.
> But when you think about it, governments, state agencies, and even universities themselves are not actively trying to improve this
They are, all the time, doing outreach. It's just as Isaac Asimov said:
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'
The origin story the government brainwashes everyone through public schools is partly to blame. There are people challenging it, but mostly they end up pushing for a different form of anti-intellectualism :(.
I disagree with Isaac Asimov on that point. The reason is that professors and universities have failed to communicate that knowledge persuasively to the public. In other words, it's establishment science. They ignore opinions that oppose corporations, and they give grants to research that suits corporate tastes. This pattern keeps appearing in the United States. So it seems that public experience and word of mouth have created opposition to scientists. I know a few examples of this. The 'lead' crisis is one such case.
In fact, some academic societies are deeply tied to corporations and operate in alignment with their direct interests. I think the accumulation of such cases has led to public distrust. I don't think it's any single party's fault. Both sides are just doing what feels right within their own identities. Scientists resist corporations to fulfill their own self actualization and curiosity, and the public simply hates those corrupt corporations. I'm not saying that all scientists are on the side of corporations. It's just that when the achievements of certain scientists are publicized, the ones with the megaphone are the corporate scientists. It's a complicated issue
The Scopes trial? What was "corporate" about evolution?
The Salem witch trials.
McCarthyism
And "Universities" are the mouthpieces of corporations? The people keep electing politicians who are anti-worker-protection laws. They're purposely choosing corporation-owner-friendly legislators. This is not the fault of universities.
Of course it's a complicated issue, but it's not my University friends doing public outreach for kids that's to blame for not doing enough. It's the authoritarian public school system, it's that we allow people to be shitty parents and pass on generational trauma/poverty, it's that the foundational mythos is you can do everything yourself (even though 99.999% of people don't live somewhere nor have the skills to be self-sufficient) because the government and rich owners like keeping people divided.
Nah, I don't agree. I don't see how the US is special in this regard, yet anti-vaxers, flat earthers, fundies, conspiracy nutjobs, sovereign citizens, and every other flavor of anti-intellectual crank are a distinctly US phenomenon.
And what's worse, like an infectious person, we're sending out that corruption into other countries. We're actively funding and sending people to stoke homophobia in Africa, our idiots are indoctrinating others online to work against their own interests.
My parents have been religiously listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh since the early 90's on a daily basis. I recall listening to it on our drive into work together.
30+ years of hearing whatever the tv/radio host du jour says, without critical thinking, taking it at face value, 8+ hours every day. In the car to work, radio on while working, drive home, and then turn the TV on till bed time.
Then take a drive through rural America and see that education isn't an important pillar.
I went to college (neither of my parents did) and made it out with a different perspective, but my brother did not. He peddles in conspiracy theories and doesn't believe humans landed on the moon. My father regrets sending me to college.
I hate blaming things on social media, but I think that's at the center of it.
Once you start pausing on anything related to anti-vax or anti-science, you'll start seeing more and more people talking about alternative views.
And soon those alternative views are all you see, and those alternative views start feeling like mainstream views. And then you become confused when you're at a dinner party and no one agrees with your stance on vaccines.
I don't think it's any more complicated than that.
And it doesn't help that anti-vax views are spread with the support of bogus science. Anti-vaxxers don't view themselves as anti-science.
I would put some blame on medical billing, and the opiods pandemic also made some fertile ground for trolls (a work injury turning family member to an addict, followed by minimal fines and zero jail time for the conspirators that grew the pandemic). Basically a perfect setup to grow mistrust.
Just a couple of decades ago both sides of the US political aisles laughed at antivax style rhetoric, and didn't see forcing the issue further than it was as worth it (us religious grounds and similar).
Public health operations are hard because often when you reduce total life years lost you also redistribute the life years lost. Take the original Oral Polio Vaccine. I suspect that’s what I received as a child in India but it was also originally used here in the US. It had a small risk of causing paralytic polio. Until the ‘90s the US still had single digit cases of this. Would those people have gotten polio without being vaccinated? Since they lived in a mostly polio-free society probably not.
So “free rider” antivaxxers would find themselves at lower risk in that society because herd immunity would protect them.
My understanding (limited as it is) is that OPV was sold as a “we’re all in this together” thing while simultaneously there were far fewer sources of information and so governments were on a different scale of information distribution than individuals.
But trust in those who speak for science isn’t automatic. Most people could look out and see that claims from these institutions were calibrated to create outcomes and not strictly speak the truth. I sympathize with the institutions because many of the people present inherit a memory of a time when these institutions controlled information spread in a more systemic way.
As an example, it’s pretty well-established (from first person views) that the HHS and their governed orgs claimed that masks don’t work expressly in order to ensure that masks were available for healthcare providers. One could imagine they came from a tradition which praises allowing Coventry to be bombed for the greater good of hiding that we’d broken the German code.
But “we lied to you for the greater good” lands poorly these days because information spreads easier and from multiple sources.
Take the case of COVID-19. Some jurisdictions interpreted restrictions to disallow people from hanging out in groups in public. In Dolores Park (I think, but in some park in SF), we had these little circles you were supposed to stay in. Meanwhile, scientists signed letters endorsing large scale protests.
Stories like this abound. A scientist who wants to stop a dam finds an endangered species that would be destroyed and blocks the dam. Years later it is found to be not a distinct species but genetically identical to another species that is not at threat.
In the past, information control permitted suppression of these things or reframing of them in a different way - the people of Coventry were heroes, even if they were volunteered as sacrifice unknowingly. Today, I think that wouldn’t work so well.
Today, people see scientists as individuals as well. If you believe in disparate impact being the standard of discrimination, it is now worthwhile to ask whether the guys who vote a certain way would vote to sacrifice you for their people.
The fact that there are so many people standing for a pro-science position is precisely the right circumstance for this situation.
The GOP has fully adopted the alt-right playbook. Here's how it works:
1. Publicly announce that you hold an overtly bad position.
2. Reasonable people begin to argue with you.
3. Bicker with them about it instead of arguing.
4. Illustrate that your in-group is divided from their out-group along the axis of this position.
5. Profit from the increased engagement.
First, the politicians and talking heads start the cycle. Everyone who considers themselves part of that in-group copies the behavior. Because engagement drives voting, people in power hold overtly bad positions; guaranteeing that people from the out-group will argue with them. The cycle cannot be stopped.
While both sides of the political spectrum have crazies in them that are skeptical of vaccines let it be known that this latest insanity is being promulgated by red states and red politicians who are showing themselves to be just the biggest science denying idiots the world has ever seen
Horseshoe theory enters the chat. I associate vaccine refusal with the ultra-crunchy Marin County unschoolers and other sequelae of the 1960s. Of course, I understand these people to be reactionary conservatives, but they describe themselves as progressives.
The CDC has a measles tracker that includes the number of annual cases since 1985 [1]. Measles was officially "eliminated" in the US in 2000. Technically it still has that status but outbreaks like this caused by low vaccination rates are threatening it [2], which is what the article is referring to.
I'm old enough to have lived with Y2K. It's not really talked about much nowadays and I suspect a good number of people don't even know about it but leading up to 2000, everybody knew about it. By 1998 it was something you'd see on the news. Anyway, a ton of work went into eliminating Y2K issues and when 2000 happened, everything kinda kept on working.
Lots of people looked at that and unironically said that Y2K was a hoax. I actually wonder if this was a significant contribution to the distrust in authority that contributed to the rise of anti-vaxxers. To be fair, that did start before 2000. The disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield blew up in the late 1990s over the UK's triple jab and his effort to sell an alternative, which failed.
Polio (effedtively eliminated in most countries), smallpox, measles, Guinea worm (due for elimination in the coming years), etc didn't disappear on their own. Australia is on track to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035 due to the widespread adoption of the HPV vaccine [3].
Sometimes it's hard not to feel like we live on the dumbest timeline.
>Lots of people looked at that and unironically said that Y2K was a hoax.
You're committing a fallacy of equivocation. "Y2K" has two distinct meanings:
1. A software bug related to date handling that could cause incorrect behavior that was unpredictable in the specifics but bounded in the kind and extent of damage it could cause.
2. A software bug that could cause the collapse of society.
You might or might not remember this, but prior to the turn of the millennium there were plenty of people regularly talking about Y2K using the latter meaning. When people say that Y2K was a hoax, they're saying that the second meaning was not something that was ever within the realm of possibility, not that Y2K would not have caused any problems whatsoever.
I live in the suburbs of Kansas City where the World Cup is happening, and the only way it’s affected me is it’s really annoying to take my disabled kid to the children’s hospital downtown because there’s so much traffic.
I know exactly one person out of my friends that is going to one World Cup game, and he’s well known as the guy who likes soccer.
My wife has enjoyed the TikToks of Europeans coming to Kansas City and reacting to stuff that’s totally normal to us, like the Bass Pro Shop and Tornado Shelter signs.
The World Cup aspect is still incredibly important to point out. The World Cup appeals to a very large demographic and so many traveling around could spell disaster.
Quite interesting to see. I suppose there is a notion of generational memory. Two generations out, people forget what the world was like. Forgetting like this on a civilizational level is probably adaptive unless it’s catastrophic and a measles epidemic is eminently survivable as a civilization if incredibly tragic for the families affected.
I had measles as a child, too. Fortunately, my parents are doctors and I was well cared for and nature was good to me as well. So here I am, pretty much fine. I’d rather have not had the disease, all things told. Incredibly contagious disease. I was in the room with the other sick child for only a few moments.
> Quite interesting to see.
No, the article is a shitshow.
Ben Dowse is an MD, not a pediatric nurse.
The family ended up accepting the antibody treatment before leaving the hospital. The Daily Mail article bizarrely implies that they never accepted the treatment.
Both journalistic mistakes are clear from reading the beginning of the Wired article linked in the error-laden Daily Mail article.
Did you notice these errors?
It erases immune memory, taking away antibodies to recently exposed diseases. It's best not to get it.
What is the evolutionary advantage of this? I mean, if the host dies subsequently that's pretty bad for both parties, or?
Sometimes, even usually, evolution finds a “local maximum” of effectiveness. Where the solution an organism finds is not optimal but it’s good enough for the organism to survive, even win.
So yeah I’m sure evolution didn’t create something perfect in the disease here but it survives long enough, and kills few-enough people slowly enough in the wild to survive
Evolution is just a race to "good enough to consistently reproduce" and everything after the sufficient reproduction is irrelevant. Like the goats whose horns have to be cut or they'll eventually pierce their own brain.
Generally it's more advantageous for your own anatomy not to kill you without intervention, but they reproduce and that checks off the "good enough" box.
Viruses don't care if the host dies. Evolution doesn't explain all things in nature.
I'd argue evolution explains everything in nature (above physical laws) but that doesn't mean we understand it.
If it can spread before killing the host, it has done its job (evolutionarily speaking).
The virus "cares" if it reproduces. There is often tension between the various levels of spreading mechanisms: for example airbourne spread diseases making you cough vs. the cough making the host feel poorly and not interacting with people or the cough killing the host really preventing further spread. There are plenty of optimum points between fast intense disease and asymptomatic disease.
Short term intense disease courses tend to only work for a short period of evolution for new infection mechanisms, the intensity makes them sensitive to any increased immunity which ends up halting the spread for more mild versions. Infectious diseases tend to lower in intensity over the long term.
Wait, measles erases antibody memory?
First of all, this is scary. Secondly, I wonder if it hase the same effect on autoimmune disease?
It destroys memory B-cells.
"Once the measles virus contacts the mucosa lining the respiratory tract, it binds to SLAM (signaling lymphocyte activation molecule, also known as CD150) on the surface of macrophages and dendritic cells. These cells then take up the virus... These immune cells pass the virus on to other groups of immune cells, including B cells, T cells, thymocytes, and hematopoietic stem cells, which disseminate the virus to other organs during the incubation period.
"Immune amnesia
"The measles virus can deplete previously acquired immune memory by killing cells that make antibodies, and thus weakens the immune system, which can cause deaths from other diseases. Suppression of the immune system by measles lasts about two years and has been epidemiologically implicated in an increase in childhood mortality from other infectious diseases during this period. The measles vaccine contains an attenuated strain of the virus which does not deplete immune memory."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles
Measles infections can trigger the following autoimmune diseases:
* Type 1 diabetes
* Multiple sclerosis
* Rheumatoid arthritis
It can. It’s not common, from what I understand, but there are cases where it has put various autoimmune disorders into remission, either temporary, or permanent.
That said, you become far more likely to end up sick with a whole bunch of other stuff, which can then eliminate any benefits for the autoimmune disorders.
Oh, and there’s also a chance it will give you an autoimmune disorder.
Absolute bastard, if you ask me.
And there’s a non-zero chance that it lives dormant in your brain and you die several years later. Absolutely bonkers.
It seems like there’s a pretty strong parallel with the failure of the screw worm eradication programme. It just became a thing we did, rather than the absolute miracle it was - like vaccination - and then from complacency grows suspicion, for again, as you say, few people alive remember how it was.
Well the screw worm thing happened because Elon Musk hired a bunch of twitter nazis to put the government through a wood chipper.
This is the end result of decades snake oil moguls empowered by orin hatch and then turbo charged by people being furious that they weren't allowed to go to TGI Fridays for six months.
> This is the end result of decades snake oil moguls empowered by orin hatch
What did Hatch do (I mostly know him as the paid servant of the copyright industry)?
According this administration forever chemicals are good but vaccines for deadly diseases are bad.
Any position you take that gets people to argue with you. Engagement is the currency of politics, today more than ever.
I never saw it through this lens before but you might be right.
You should read Amusing Ourselves to Death. It is the single most informative book on politics I've ever read. Unfortunately the conclusion it points to is not great. But worth reading anyway!
There's a fantastic web series that explains the whole dynamic: the alt-right playbook.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbAN...
It’s reductive to frame this as an alt-right only phenomenon. As long as we’re subject to modern ad-fueled social media, this is the basis for all non-retail politics.
Pro tip for my fellow graybeards: get a measles booster if you were born before 1976! Even then, it might not hurt if you are in an area where the risk is high.
Disclaimer: I am an internet rando -- talk to your doctor.
I asked for that and they gave me an antibody titre, and I still have enough to be safe from measles.
Its time, to accept the retardation, as a permanent fixture. Every 3 generations, we will have to redo all of these. As in relive them. Rediscover the cure, after horrific maimed people become the "anitbodies".. so we need cultural vaccinations every 3 generations. The education does nothing. All that helps is to relive the nightmare.
> time, to accept the retardation, as a permanent fixture. Every 3 generations
Why? Previous generations didn’t have to accept this. This is entirely a product of ad-fueled social media.
Why do problems caused by anti scientific behavior occur in a country like the United States, which has so many outstanding scientists? From a third party perspective, I wonder if it's because, as stratification has progressed in the US, distrust of the social class that scientists belong to has led people to deny even their achievements.
Why does distrust arise toward the institutions and hierarchies that speak for science? There is distrust of the universities, government agencies, media, pharmaceutical companies, and big tech that those scientists belong to. And that distrust turns science from a matter of conclusion into a matter of identity, based on 'who said it' rather than what the evidence shows.
In fact, 42% of US graduate degree holders trust scientists, but only 21% of high school graduates do [1] But when you think about it, governments, state agencies, and even universities themselves are not actively trying to improve this. Maybe humans are beings who create hierarchies and live within identities regardless of the truth. Some people think humans built civilization because farming created a need for labor, but I sometimes wonder if instead, people gathered around a certain identity (whether religious or otherwise), and then farming began in order to feed that labor force. That ideal I always heard as a child, a world where all people become one, without class, race, or discrimination, might just be something that the human species can never truly possess.
[1]https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20244/public-perceptions-of-sc...
There is active propaganda against scientists and institutions; and scientists are decent but not excellent communicators. They lost the communication war and now the general public is very distrusting of science.
Since 1974, when science increasingly underwrote policy, it’s become entwined with politics through the EPA, climate change, treatment of gender and sexuality, public health, mandatory teaching of evolution, and “critical race theory.”
Conservatives don’t have as much of a problem with science when it avoids “impact science” and sticks to topics that don’t conflict with church teachings or business interests.
But trust in science has never been universal. Trust in institutions and experts had to be built painstakingly over generations. The Social Transformation of American Medicine is a great account of this process for American doctors.
My personal theory is that many responsible for teaching science in the K-12 grades are not doing a great job of communicating that science is a process for finding truth. Definitely not laying this at teachers’ feet - standardized testing and curricula, overcrowded classrooms, underfunded schools etc all contribute I’m sure, but I get the impression from talking to even well educated people that they were taught science much like they were taught math: there is a right answer, your job is to regurgitate it.
Biology in particular but also chemistry is often taught with rote memorization at its heart, and it’s easy to lose sight while getting the current thinking jammed into working memory that in the bigger picture, science is a process. Fast forward to various stages of adulthood, and when ‘science’ (not actually a thing as a whole but presented as such in the media), in light of new information, changes course or updates its priors on something you’d accepted as fact, and you might perceive scientists, a group of whom you may know none, as condescending and overconfident. In fact scientists disagree over everything and doubt way more than the public would believe but that’s often a footnote to the way the story of the scientific process is presented.
I deeply agree with your statement.
In fact, I think science teaches a specific methodology and a specific mental model for viewing the world. However, the scientific method is a shareable verification procedure, whereas scientists' mental models are fragmented depending on individuals or schools of thought.
So I think modern science is a collection of elaborately designed mental models for interpreting phenomena.
Those mental models differ from person to person, and when you read the writings of various scientists or prominent figures, you realize that even for the same theory, their interpretations are slightly different. Anyway, I've gone off on a tangent.
I am an uneducated person, so it's hard for me to speak carelessly, but as you said, we often tend to overlook the fact that when we talk about something being 'scientific,' it's spoken of as if there is a single correct answer. And as that standardized version gets talked about as if it were the 'truth,' the essence gets diluted. I think you have a point there.
Thank you for presenting a perspective I hadn't considered. Clearly, there's a difference with a doctor.
> But when you think about it, governments, state agencies, and even universities themselves are not actively trying to improve this
They are, all the time, doing outreach. It's just as Isaac Asimov said:
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'
The origin story the government brainwashes everyone through public schools is partly to blame. There are people challenging it, but mostly they end up pushing for a different form of anti-intellectualism :(.
I disagree with Isaac Asimov on that point. The reason is that professors and universities have failed to communicate that knowledge persuasively to the public. In other words, it's establishment science. They ignore opinions that oppose corporations, and they give grants to research that suits corporate tastes. This pattern keeps appearing in the United States. So it seems that public experience and word of mouth have created opposition to scientists. I know a few examples of this. The 'lead' crisis is one such case.
In fact, some academic societies are deeply tied to corporations and operate in alignment with their direct interests. I think the accumulation of such cases has led to public distrust. I don't think it's any single party's fault. Both sides are just doing what feels right within their own identities. Scientists resist corporations to fulfill their own self actualization and curiosity, and the public simply hates those corrupt corporations. I'm not saying that all scientists are on the side of corporations. It's just that when the achievements of certain scientists are publicized, the ones with the megaphone are the corporate scientists. It's a complicated issue
The Scopes trial? What was "corporate" about evolution?
The Salem witch trials.
McCarthyism
And "Universities" are the mouthpieces of corporations? The people keep electing politicians who are anti-worker-protection laws. They're purposely choosing corporation-owner-friendly legislators. This is not the fault of universities.
Of course it's a complicated issue, but it's not my University friends doing public outreach for kids that's to blame for not doing enough. It's the authoritarian public school system, it's that we allow people to be shitty parents and pass on generational trauma/poverty, it's that the foundational mythos is you can do everything yourself (even though 99.999% of people don't live somewhere nor have the skills to be self-sufficient) because the government and rich owners like keeping people divided.
Nah, I don't agree. I don't see how the US is special in this regard, yet anti-vaxers, flat earthers, fundies, conspiracy nutjobs, sovereign citizens, and every other flavor of anti-intellectual crank are a distinctly US phenomenon.
And what's worse, like an infectious person, we're sending out that corruption into other countries. We're actively funding and sending people to stoke homophobia in Africa, our idiots are indoctrinating others online to work against their own interests.
Very occasionally, I think I'm being rational, but they probably see me as just as irrational as I see them
My parents have been religiously listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh since the early 90's on a daily basis. I recall listening to it on our drive into work together.
30+ years of hearing whatever the tv/radio host du jour says, without critical thinking, taking it at face value, 8+ hours every day. In the car to work, radio on while working, drive home, and then turn the TV on till bed time.
Then take a drive through rural America and see that education isn't an important pillar.
I went to college (neither of my parents did) and made it out with a different perspective, but my brother did not. He peddles in conspiracy theories and doesn't believe humans landed on the moon. My father regrets sending me to college.
Dismantling the education system has been a political project decades in the making.
You need a certain baseline of power and influence in order to inspire a backlash like what we're seeing in the US.
It happens because so many Scientists are influential, and in particular because of the way that influence was used during COVID.
(I enthusiastically take my vaccines)
I hate blaming things on social media, but I think that's at the center of it.
Once you start pausing on anything related to anti-vax or anti-science, you'll start seeing more and more people talking about alternative views.
And soon those alternative views are all you see, and those alternative views start feeling like mainstream views. And then you become confused when you're at a dinner party and no one agrees with your stance on vaccines.
I don't think it's any more complicated than that.
And it doesn't help that anti-vax views are spread with the support of bogus science. Anti-vaxxers don't view themselves as anti-science.
I would put some blame on medical billing, and the opiods pandemic also made some fertile ground for trolls (a work injury turning family member to an addict, followed by minimal fines and zero jail time for the conspirators that grew the pandemic). Basically a perfect setup to grow mistrust.
Just a couple of decades ago both sides of the US political aisles laughed at antivax style rhetoric, and didn't see forcing the issue further than it was as worth it (us religious grounds and similar).
Public health operations are hard because often when you reduce total life years lost you also redistribute the life years lost. Take the original Oral Polio Vaccine. I suspect that’s what I received as a child in India but it was also originally used here in the US. It had a small risk of causing paralytic polio. Until the ‘90s the US still had single digit cases of this. Would those people have gotten polio without being vaccinated? Since they lived in a mostly polio-free society probably not.
So “free rider” antivaxxers would find themselves at lower risk in that society because herd immunity would protect them.
My understanding (limited as it is) is that OPV was sold as a “we’re all in this together” thing while simultaneously there were far fewer sources of information and so governments were on a different scale of information distribution than individuals.
But trust in those who speak for science isn’t automatic. Most people could look out and see that claims from these institutions were calibrated to create outcomes and not strictly speak the truth. I sympathize with the institutions because many of the people present inherit a memory of a time when these institutions controlled information spread in a more systemic way.
As an example, it’s pretty well-established (from first person views) that the HHS and their governed orgs claimed that masks don’t work expressly in order to ensure that masks were available for healthcare providers. One could imagine they came from a tradition which praises allowing Coventry to be bombed for the greater good of hiding that we’d broken the German code.
But “we lied to you for the greater good” lands poorly these days because information spreads easier and from multiple sources.
Take the case of COVID-19. Some jurisdictions interpreted restrictions to disallow people from hanging out in groups in public. In Dolores Park (I think, but in some park in SF), we had these little circles you were supposed to stay in. Meanwhile, scientists signed letters endorsing large scale protests.
Stories like this abound. A scientist who wants to stop a dam finds an endangered species that would be destroyed and blocks the dam. Years later it is found to be not a distinct species but genetically identical to another species that is not at threat.
In the past, information control permitted suppression of these things or reframing of them in a different way - the people of Coventry were heroes, even if they were volunteered as sacrifice unknowingly. Today, I think that wouldn’t work so well.
Today, people see scientists as individuals as well. If you believe in disparate impact being the standard of discrimination, it is now worthwhile to ask whether the guys who vote a certain way would vote to sacrifice you for their people.
Anyway, as an aside, GCHQ says today that the Coventry story as told is a myth. Pretty interesting read: https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/the-bombing-of-coventry-...
The fact that there are so many people standing for a pro-science position is precisely the right circumstance for this situation.
The GOP has fully adopted the alt-right playbook. Here's how it works:
1. Publicly announce that you hold an overtly bad position.
2. Reasonable people begin to argue with you.
3. Bicker with them about it instead of arguing.
4. Illustrate that your in-group is divided from their out-group along the axis of this position.
5. Profit from the increased engagement.
First, the politicians and talking heads start the cycle. Everyone who considers themselves part of that in-group copies the behavior. Because engagement drives voting, people in power hold overtly bad positions; guaranteeing that people from the out-group will argue with them. The cycle cannot be stopped.
While both sides of the political spectrum have crazies in them that are skeptical of vaccines let it be known that this latest insanity is being promulgated by red states and red politicians who are showing themselves to be just the biggest science denying idiots the world has ever seen
What's craziest to me is that I know lifelong Mormons that left the church because the last CEO, a surgeon, was pro vaccine.
Horseshoe theory enters the chat. I associate vaccine refusal with the ultra-crunchy Marin County unschoolers and other sequelae of the 1960s. Of course, I understand these people to be reactionary conservatives, but they describe themselves as progressives.
This time series suggests, however, that Marin has handed the torch to its MAGA neighbors. https://vax.edsource.org/school?schoolCode=6988448&schoolNam...
“What did children do before vaccines!?”
They died, Kayleigh. There were just 9 others siblings to see who survived
Well, good news to that, birth control might be outlawed soon...
“marking the latest and longest-lasting series of measles outbreaks in the US since last year as health officials panic.“
Having trouble parsing this one.
The CDC has a measles tracker that includes the number of annual cases since 1985 [1]. Measles was officially "eliminated" in the US in 2000. Technically it still has that status but outbreaks like this caused by low vaccination rates are threatening it [2], which is what the article is referring to.
I'm old enough to have lived with Y2K. It's not really talked about much nowadays and I suspect a good number of people don't even know about it but leading up to 2000, everybody knew about it. By 1998 it was something you'd see on the news. Anyway, a ton of work went into eliminating Y2K issues and when 2000 happened, everything kinda kept on working.
Lots of people looked at that and unironically said that Y2K was a hoax. I actually wonder if this was a significant contribution to the distrust in authority that contributed to the rise of anti-vaxxers. To be fair, that did start before 2000. The disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield blew up in the late 1990s over the UK's triple jab and his effort to sell an alternative, which failed.
Polio (effedtively eliminated in most countries), smallpox, measles, Guinea worm (due for elimination in the coming years), etc didn't disappear on their own. Australia is on track to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035 due to the widespread adoption of the HPV vaccine [3].
Sometimes it's hard not to feel like we live on the dumbest timeline.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html
[2]: https://www.kff.org/other-health/measles-elimination-status-...
[3]: https://www.health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-rebecca-white-mp...
>Lots of people looked at that and unironically said that Y2K was a hoax.
You're committing a fallacy of equivocation. "Y2K" has two distinct meanings:
1. A software bug related to date handling that could cause incorrect behavior that was unpredictable in the specifics but bounded in the kind and extent of damage it could cause.
2. A software bug that could cause the collapse of society.
You might or might not remember this, but prior to the turn of the millennium there were plenty of people regularly talking about Y2K using the latter meaning. When people say that Y2K was a hoax, they're saying that the second meaning was not something that was ever within the realm of possibility, not that Y2K would not have caused any problems whatsoever.
With the World Cup starting in the coming days, this can spiral out of control very fast.
Football fans can get infected and spread the virus in their home countries if they get exposed.
The World Cup already started. But there are no games played in Utah
> The World Cup already started. But there are no games played in Utah
For now, Utahns can travel freely to US states where World Cup games are played.
Relatively nobody in the US cares about soccer, much less travels for it.
I live in the suburbs of Kansas City where the World Cup is happening, and the only way it’s affected me is it’s really annoying to take my disabled kid to the children’s hospital downtown because there’s so much traffic.
I know exactly one person out of my friends that is going to one World Cup game, and he’s well known as the guy who likes soccer.
My wife has enjoyed the TikToks of Europeans coming to Kansas City and reacting to stuff that’s totally normal to us, like the Bass Pro Shop and Tornado Shelter signs.
Did people from outside the US travel here to see the world cup?
They didn't travel to Utah to see the world cup. Of all the things in the world worth worrying about, this isn't one of them.
The Olympics happen every two years and aren't the cause of such issues. I doubt the World Cup will be any different.
The World Cup aspect is still incredibly important to point out. The World Cup appeals to a very large demographic and so many traveling around could spell disaster.