Yeah. When I was in tenth grade my school had a whooping cough outbreak - that was not fun. (Apparently you can sometimes still get whooping cough even if you have been vaccinated, as the friends of a certain unvaccinated sixth grade girl found out...and her siblings...and her friends...and her siblings' friends...and the siblings of her friends...)
This is the one fight that I have with my roommate that neither of us have backed down on (she no longer drinks bottled water in front of me, I no longer eat food in front of her, neither of us mention each other's compulsive light-turning-on-window-closing/light-turning-off-window-opening habits). COME ON PEOPLE GET VACCINATED. *ahem*
You know what I think about this. The problem is the special and undeserved respect that we grant to superstition, woo, pseudoscience, personal beliefs, and religion. There is no way to fight any particular branch of woo as long as we have invested all our lives in "respecting" woo in general and getting people used to "Well, this is true for me" or "I feel it in my heart" as being more important than facts, objectivity, reason, logic, and data.
Your comment sounds to me like a general message of hopelessness. I hope this is a misinterpretation on my part. I think the history of science strongly suggests that we can do positive things even when large portions of the population (and even authority figures) disagree with the conclusions of evidence-based reasoning. See, e.g., this story. Perhaps some of Snow's success has to do with the town council's desperation resulting from the death toll, but I think much of it just followed from a well-packaged presentation. This is the sort of presentation that we would hope for in the context of child vaccination.
It is not hopelessness, but a justification of my strong conviction that I should always try to combat pseudoscience and superstition, whether it appears to be having direct harmful consequences right now or whether it doesn't
( ... )
Comments 9
I have the technology.
[I've seen a vaccination model before, based off of simple population modeling... can be pretty easy to set up.]
Reply
who will star as the crazy math guru?
Reply
http://www.youtube.com/meepsmathmatters
No prof. math to be seen. I think it detracts to insert a person where a person is not needed to be seen.
Reply
This is the one fight that I have with my roommate that neither of us have backed down on (she no longer drinks bottled water in front of me, I no longer eat food in front of her, neither of us mention each other's compulsive light-turning-on-window-closing/light-turning-off-window-opening habits). COME ON PEOPLE GET VACCINATED. *ahem*
Reply
(The comment has been removed)
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment