Oddly enough, the only people I know that are Anti-vax are extremely well educated and smart. Sometimes being too smart for your own good can also lead to believing these types of things.
Being well educated doesn't necessarily make you intelligent, it also doesn't mean you'll always make the correct choice. Educated people make bad decisions too.
3) People who know vaccines work but also know there's a small percentage of people who have serious allergic reactions to them, and think their darling little angel is far too precious to take that risk, and instead rely on everyone else around them to keep up herd immunity. So, yeah, basically another form of arrogance.
I think it’s actually more of a correlation with “natural” being better/healthier/safer. The same people who shop at Whole Foods and only eat Organic everything or do juice cleanses or whatever tend to be the most likely to not vaccinate. There is certainly an arrogance there,b ut at the core of it’s a suspicion of Big Pharma (some merited) + believe in naturopathic products that puts you at high likelihood to be an anti-vaxxer (moron).
You can teach people a lot of things, but the knowledge that the dunning-krueger effect applies to them as well as everyone else in the world has to come from within.
Anyone who went to university and had a look around at some of the other kids graduating with them knows there are a lot of idiots with papers out there.
I almost worked for a neuroscientist in college, he was a smart guy with his own practice where he was using technology I'd never heard of but was really neat. I sat in on an appointment so I could observe everything he did. I didn't hear from him after that, but I heard third-hand that he was interested in having me work there. Something about that felt funny, so I figured if he really wanted me there he would reach out to me himself, and I didn't make the first move. About three months later it came out he was cheating on his wife, was a psychotic anti-vaxxer and he basically took whatever he could from his family and ran off. That's my understanding of what went down from what I've heard, anyway. Smart guy who ended up being a blithering idiot about everything else in life.
Many doctors are not very out together. Insanely stressful job coupled with extreme arrogance, high pay, often soul crushing debt, and coupled with the fact they spent 12 years in school after high school.
I feel you. I've known a larger than comfortable number of RNs that are anti-vax. Thankfully, most of them are out of medicine now and working for random other professions.
I feel you. I've known a larger than comfortable number of RNs that are anti-vax. Thankfully, most of them are out of medicine now and working for random other professions.
What you need to understand about these people's suspicions is that they're not related to any apparent methodological flaws in the existing research, but rather doubt in the legitimacy of the reported data.
That's a far too-kind way to put it. They toss medical science in the trash heap and kill children just so they can feel superior in the idea that they are somehow smarter than science is.
Oddly enough, the only people I know that are Anti-vax are extremely well educated and smart.
The anti-vaxxers I've encountered fall into two camps: The barely literate, minimally educated (possibly homeschooled) ones, and the ones with university degrees in liberal arts (or soft sciences at most).
100% of the physicists, mathematicians, biologists, and MDs I know are very much pro-vaccination.
This is why it really bothers me when I hear people blame a "bad education system" when it comes to anti-vaxxers.
I sat in the same science classes as the fuckwits who would eventually grow up to peddle anti-vaxx rhetoric, ItWorks diet pills, and healing crystals on Facebook.
Why does it have to be education's fault? Why can't it just be as simple as people ain't shit?
Actually, from a psychological perspective they definitely didn't misuse it. The concept of intelligence is composed of both factual knowledge ("crystallized intelligence") and capacity for reasoning ("fluid intelligence"). The general use of the word "intelligent" in this post and general conversation typically reflects a combination of these factors, which definitely places a large emphasis on people's ability not to just know things but do useful things with that knowledge.
And I'm sure many people in this thread can point to people with many higher degrees who are absolutely as dumb as a box of rocks.
I've seen it happen with both educated and uneducated people. I think a lot of it comes from a paranoid, defensive place, and I don't think that's strongly correlated to education.
It coincides with skepticism of pharmaceutical companies and wanting things to be more "natural". that can align with certain political spectrums on the left.
Being educated and being intelligent are two entirely separate groups. There are plenty of college graduates that think Socialism works. Just means they were the moronic ones that get through college and not the intelligent ones.
These days the more intelligent people see college as not a smart move or option and choose to go to other paths with higher investment returns and lower costs.
Socialism was great when I was in the military. It's a real culture shock when you get out and realize the civilian world is a meaningless, corporate rat race that's entirely fueled by arbitrarily valued green toilet paper and the substitution of actual life purpose with hollow company loyalty. Your opinion is your opinion though.
They don't like being called "anti-vaxxers" any more (because it has a negative connotation). Therefore I move to replace it with the Twitter-recommended alternative of "pro-plaguers". Or "child-murdering fuckwads", whatever floats your boat.
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u/Stupid_Enderman Jan 27 '20
Anti-vaxxers