A brilliant point about anti-vaccination attitudes on the Decoding the Gurus podcast this month. They discuss US talkshow host and commentator Bill Maher who is a fascinating case because on one side he floats through the world of the atheist ecosphere while on the other - for whatever reason, perhaps a sort of hippyish tendency, he is deeply invested in aspects of the woo - he is apparently for example 'sceptical' of germ theory and a proponent of the Great Barrington Declaration.
As one contributor put it:
Bill Mahers point of view is that look science, medicine was obviously very imperfect in the past, we can see that clearly now, int he future we may look back on today and shake our heads in wonder at people injecting Covid vaccines or MMR vaccines into our bodies - and I get lots of different versions of this argument from time to time, but I think what they (anti-vaxxers) miss is when they are sceptical of whatever in the current consensus in science and medicine is it may well not be perfect - we don't have 100% confidence that whatever that consensus is saying is right.
But what they're doing is that they're substituting their own alternative contrarian take .. guess at what the truth is based on their hunches and what their friends said or some article they read in some thing and they're letting it slosh all around their head and they're taking their own shot, they're taking their own guess about what the truth is based on that.
Now how is that better - like you I'll perfectly accept that whatever the medical or scientific consensus or advice is may well be wrong - it's an imperfect science as they say, but they're substituting it with something worse - like it's inevitable you have to substitute with something worse unless you think that you spending a Sunday doing your own 'research' on this topic and feeling out your friends and reading a couple of articles, unless you think you're some kind of astounding genius…. You're not going to do better [than science or medicine. Why would anyone think that they're going to do better?'
And that's it. No one should be unthinkingly credulous about any aspect of science or medicine. But this scattershot approach of asserting that somehow subjective opinion is from the get go equal in value to the overall body of scientific research and evaluation is both remarkably egotistical as well as functionally futile.
As the contributor noted, it's not that hard to use street sense to assess what is credible and what isn't in the assertions made about these matters. A basic one is that those who have some expertise are broadly speaking much better placed to
No comments:
Post a Comment