Dumb and Dangerous
Oct21
on 2018-10-21
at 16:25
Anti-Vaxers at it again. Doesn’t matter what study after study has shown. Doesn’t matter to them that their sick kids kill other kids.
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Grampy says...
Stupidity isn't contagious.
But it's usually deadly.
"It's no hurting anyone," is neither true nor a defense.
Stupidity isn't contagious.
But it's usually deadly.
"It's no hurting anyone," is neither true nor a defense.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of 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.” – Issac Asimov
To put it another way, you can’t fix stupid.
I remember a really interesting movie I stumbled on back in the days of cable, didn’t get the name though. It was sort of “the US decided that the 1950s was the best decade, and we are going to stick with it.” In addition, everyone needed to be equal, so if you were really smart, they used a device to suppress your intelligence, and they encouraged you to marry someone really stupid to help make sure everyone had similar intelligence. The main character was smart and the device didn’t work right on him.
Don’t know about the movie, but the plot sounds suspiciously similar to the short story Harrison Bergeron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron) by Kurt Vonnegut. Set in the late 21st century, equality is compulsory, and enforced by the Handicapper-General.
Stumbled onto the movie Idiocracy recently; 500 years in the future, US culture has unintentionally bred for stupidity for so many generations, that the average IQ is… I don’t think they actually say, but probably around 50.
One stunningly average soldier is cryo-frozen and wakes up in this era, where he’s actually the smartest human alive! Also one hooker.
It’s not as far-fetched as it really should be. T_T
Well, I do agree: anti-vaxxers are dangerous to the rest of society…they are not, unfortunately, the only ones.
Stupidity – Nature’s only capital offense.
Unfortunately many forms of stupidity may kill more people than just the stupid ones. Case in point, drunk drivers.
Science reporting has trained the public to not trust science.
1: Too often published results are not reproducible, so why are we surprised that many people don’t trust science? While we appear to be making some progress (the 2015 study: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716 found over 60% of published results can’t be reproduced, and 3 years later: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0399-z the failure rate appears to have improved to 38%), but I think that 38% failure is still too high to convince doubters.
2: Too often official “scientific” guidance is incorrectly simplified and later proven wrong. US gov guidance often still lumps together all “saturated and trans fat” as unhealthy (ex: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/prevention/pdf/postcurriculum_session2.pdf&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjj-9jiiJveAhUZFjQIHQudBAoQFggjMAY&usg=AOvVaw1fcHx3Nrmk4IVtA95avgYA). However there are hundreds of saturated and trans fats, and they can have very different effects on health. While there is strong evidence that some of the artificial trans fats in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil has killed housands of people, some natural trans-rumenic and trans-vaccenic acids have strong evidence of being healthy. There never was strong evidence against saturated fat, and there is growing evidence that different saturated fats have very different effects.
One problem here is the mistaken belief that if it is published, it must be accurant. Publishing is part of the peer-review process, not the end result.Only after you publish your results do others have sufficient information about how your stusy proceeded, at which point they attempt to prove or disprove your results by duplicating your experiment. In many of these cases the attempt to duplicate fails due to either a faulty process, failure to properly reproduce the process, or a failure of the author to properly document the process. Note failure to repoduce the resultshas to occure multiple times to demonstrait failure of the original premise. Unfortunately all too often laypeople look at the whole system and make erronious assumptions. Funny part is that the laypeople don’t get that they are indulging in faulty scientific procedures.
http://www.jagodibuja.com/2018/08/living-with-hipstergirl-and-gamergirl-343-english/ an appropriate cartoon from Jago Dajuba
Site no longer exists, unfortunately.
I must disagree with Grampy. Stupidity [b]is[/b] contagious. People don’t just spontaneously start to believe that vaccinations are dangerous, after all. Or that jet con trails are signs that the government is distributing chemicals. Or that Trump is a self-made millionaire. You can only catch these particular kinds of stupid from other stupid people. And the only vaccination for it is knowledge.
Go to enough meetings and you learn that stupidity is contagious. Some idiot can even talk a whole room full of smart people into a really stupid decision in spite of an incredible amount of evidence that it’s a stupid decision.
Having grown with a military parent I have a response to these people. Military children receive vaccinations as a matter of course, especially if they go overseas. I’ve also lived all my life within range of an air station. I point out that if the claims were true signs would have shown up in the military families. And they don’t have any more often than in the rest of the population.
My earlier comment was not to say that they are bad, but rather to highlight the source of a lot of the antivaccine groups reason for thinking that they are bad, as that there have been instances of bad batches (causes of which will vary), that they can be mishandled, and that individuals need to be aware of there own health issues.
Basically the same: was just posting a personal anecdotal story, wasn’t meant as an anti-vaccination comment, smart people make their own decisions about their own health and well-being after getting a proper consultation
There are two sayings by robert heinlein in one of his books that i have always seen people prove are true, in my opinion.
“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity!”
“Why is it called common sense when the sense has never been common.”
and me—–
I always say that they will never get rid of stupidity because they breed faster than rabbits. They make more of their selves faster than they can be removed.
There is something to the statement that it is unethical to force someone to vaccinate if they don’t want to be (or in the case of kids, the parents’ wishes), but the danger of killing others is real. The solution is obviously quarantine, and since the anti-vax folks are choosing not to vaccinate, they should be the ones quarantined. We can probably find a chunk of land in the Midwest where they can all live. Of course, the first time polio or something gets into that community I suspect 90% of them will suddenly decide science is right-might be too late by then. I remember hearing about a measles outbreak in Amish country and them getting 30,000 people immunized in 3 months. They managed to contain it by quarantine in houses, but it was a big scare and the Amish religion does not prevent vaccination, so now a lot of them are more interested in it.
Saw a meme thingie a while back, about how the best way to protect anti-vaxers from illness is by protecting yourself: the more people that do vax, reduces the number of people infected, and those who do get infected has a chance of developing a natural immunity, which further reduces the chance of infection
Unfortunately there are a number of people who, due to various reasons can’t get vaccinated. These are the people we need to protect by making certain that we get our vaccinations. Anti-vaxxers want it both ways, they don’t want to get vaccines but they don’t want to quarantine either, which puts the population over the 20% unprotected maximum for “herd immunity”.
And, right now due to the Delta-variant, that number needs to be 97% vaxed for the ‘Herd Immunity’
Now HERE’S a page that has aged well. 😛
…actually that’s a rather sad statement. 🙁
@Hinoron:- and it’s not as bad as you would expect, just don’t have too high expectations before watching