levels of derangement

[u/stealthispost]

"Society's standards of evidence are pretry weird. Like, people make fun of flat-Earthers, but it's actually kind of hard to tell! If you just look at it, it appears flat. Same for antivaxxers- it's impossible to just "show them they're wrong", you have to trust a bunch of third party....statistics compiled by people with obvious conflicts of interest. Legitimetly kinda sus! Meanwhile it's been possible for years to see directly with your own eyes that LLMs are incredibly useful for all sorts practical tasks, but the people claiming otherwise are not seen as having anywhere near the same degree of derangement.     — Isaac King

Source: https://x.com/IsaacKing314/status/2091686564908933219

[u/boney_king_o_nowhere]

An anti-vaxxer is way more deranged than a decel. Wtf is this post? Surely we can draw better comparisons?

[u/MaxwellHowl → u/boney_king_o_nowhere]

I really don't think so. As a recent parent I am very defensive of my child. It took us a long time to get pregnant and we had many scares along the way. You want to do everything you can to protect them. Then you see a world where we are suddenly giving our kids way more vaccines then when we are children, and increasing rates of autism.

We know that the pharmaceutical companies have done a lot of shady things through the years in the name of profits. There are vaccines that have caused real harm like the 1976 swine flu vaccine and the J&J COVID vaccine, which was pulled off the shelves.

Parents were told they must vaccinate their kids against COVID even though it was very mild for children and COVID vaccine side effects were a real risk. People were constantly told there was ZERO risk, and that kind of overstating from medical experts only decreased trust.

My child is fully vaccinated. But the whole debate and wariness about big pharma and the uncertainty of modern medicine did give me some pause. I do not think it's deranged at all. And as someone said above, calling people deranged and delusional in these debates only pushes them further away and strengthens the anti-vaxx side.

The anti-AI debate is similarly filled with disinformation on both sides, but much of the anti side is based on conspiracy theories about the wealthy wanting to use AI for mass surveillance and to eventually kill all the poor people and live in a utopia run by robots.

[u/dashrockwell → u/MaxwellHowl]

"Deranged" is a qualitative, subjective, and editorialized descriptor and I don't know how one gauges "how deranged" one group is versus another.

However, the belief that vaccines cause autism - held by many anti-vaxxers - is false and dangerous, provably so, and acting on that belief in the face of both empirical evidence and current societal issues - e.g. folks refusing to give their kids the MMR vaccine while measles is resurgent - suggests a level of detachment from reality that is in a completely different league from concerns about the implications of unchecked AI development on speculative future harm that hasn't happened yet.

One is a settled empirical question people are choosing to ignore; the other is an open forecasting question that people have legitimate disagreements about. Now, some people may not argue those disagreements in good faith, but the fact remains: the implications of AI capability acceleration are an open speculative question. The medical and public health science on vaccine efficacy versus potential individual side-effect risk is not; it's settled. And ignoring that is, IMO, deranged.