I have a friend, a fellow biologist. A much more focused person, in terms of “gotta do this today”, with lower barriers for action (e.g., I help her with simple English, but she is the one to tutor kids in it, and so on.) I have known her for about ten years.
And over time, I learned that her cousin died at seventeen. It was the time when atypical pneumonia was around, and he died in a hospital a week after he fell ill with typical symptoms, but his certificate had another kind of pneumonia in it. Officially, there was no AP in the area. And his death changed the familial structure so that it is still unbalanced, in a way, years later. Her sister has recently lost half a finger, after an accident with a saw, when there was a good chance of saving it. Both her children (one 14, the other 3 years old) usually get horrifying allergic swellings and fever from even the common bugs, and then only slowly get better. In the city region where she lives, there is one neurologist for ten thousand people, and she can’t get an appointment. I keep hearing about such things when I visit her.
Her kids are unvaccinated.
We have talked about it, and she said all the usual things about vaccines causing autism, and the mercury, and the questionable quality etc. The Kitchen Argument uniting people all over the world.
Of course, the link between vaccines and autism was disproved, but this means that somebody did take it seriously. It’s not one woman’s struggle or suspicions, its The Statistics. You can discuss it much like weather—you’re being polite! It gives me an ugly feeling, that a friend of mine should hide behind common and expected and false—she knows it’s false—lore because she knows the script and to know that it was I who forced her to it. I and people like me gave her this shield.
But the pneumonia, the finger and the swellings, the life which she builds her thoughts around, never get mentioned. We’ve had the same education, we both know this has no relation to the narrow question of having some shots, but—there’s shareable evidence, and then there’s unshareable evidence. And in this setting, people don’t have to update on evidence, even when they exchange some of it. With obvious goodwill all around.
This reminds me a little bit of the posts on anti-memes. There’s a way in which people are constantly updating their worldviews based on personal experience that
is useless in discussion because people tend not to update on other people’s personal experience over their own,
is personally risky in adversarial contexts because personal information facilitates manipulation
is socially costly because the personal experience that people tend to update on is usually the kind of emotionally intense stuff that is viewed as inappropriate in ordinary conversation
And this means that there are a lot of ideas and worldviews produced by The Statistics which are never discussed or directly addressed in polite society. Instead, these emerge indirectly through particular beliefs which really on arguments that obfuscate the reality.
Not only is this hard to avoid on a civilizational level; it’s hard to avoid on a personal level: rational agents will reach inaccurate conclusions in adversarial (ie unlucky) environments.
The unshareable evidence.
I have a friend, a fellow biologist. A much more focused person, in terms of “gotta do this today”, with lower barriers for action (e.g., I help her with simple English, but she is the one to tutor kids in it, and so on.) I have known her for about ten years.
And over time, I learned that her cousin died at seventeen. It was the time when atypical pneumonia was around, and he died in a hospital a week after he fell ill with typical symptoms, but his certificate had another kind of pneumonia in it. Officially, there was no AP in the area. And his death changed the familial structure so that it is still unbalanced, in a way, years later. Her sister has recently lost half a finger, after an accident with a saw, when there was a good chance of saving it. Both her children (one 14, the other 3 years old) usually get horrifying allergic swellings and fever from even the common bugs, and then only slowly get better. In the city region where she lives, there is one neurologist for ten thousand people, and she can’t get an appointment. I keep hearing about such things when I visit her.
Her kids are unvaccinated.
We have talked about it, and she said all the usual things about vaccines causing autism, and the mercury, and the questionable quality etc. The Kitchen Argument uniting people all over the world.
Of course, the link between vaccines and autism was disproved, but this means that somebody did take it seriously. It’s not one woman’s struggle or suspicions, its The Statistics. You can discuss it much like weather—you’re being polite! It gives me an ugly feeling, that a friend of mine should hide behind common and expected and false—she knows it’s false—lore because she knows the script and to know that it was I who forced her to it. I and people like me gave her this shield.
But the pneumonia, the finger and the swellings, the life which she builds her thoughts around, never get mentioned. We’ve had the same education, we both know this has no relation to the narrow question of having some shots, but—there’s shareable evidence, and then there’s unshareable evidence. And in this setting, people don’t have to update on evidence, even when they exchange some of it. With obvious goodwill all around.
This reminds me a little bit of the posts on anti-memes. There’s a way in which people are constantly updating their worldviews based on personal experience that
is useless in discussion because people tend not to update on other people’s personal experience over their own,
is personally risky in adversarial contexts because personal information facilitates manipulation
is socially costly because the personal experience that people tend to update on is usually the kind of emotionally intense stuff that is viewed as inappropriate in ordinary conversation
And this means that there are a lot of ideas and worldviews produced by The Statistics which are never discussed or directly addressed in polite society. Instead, these emerge indirectly through particular beliefs which really on arguments that obfuscate the reality.
Not only is this hard to avoid on a civilizational level; it’s hard to avoid on a personal level: rational agents will reach inaccurate conclusions in adversarial (ie unlucky) environments.