New York’s Rockland County declares measles outbreak emergency | Hacker News Reader

New York’s Rockland County declares measles outbreak emergency

bbc.co.uk

144 pointsdustinmoris203 comments

I know it's against the rules here to insinuate that people haven't read the article, but I don't think anyone commenting has read the article.

This isn't about the anti-vax movement as it is about the toxic relationship that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclaves in New York have with their surrounding communities. They are used to abusing religious exemptions in order to have everything "their way". Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of their ability to operate like this.

The outbreak in Rockland County is largely concentrated in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, the New York Times reported. It is believed it could have spread from other predominantly ultra-Orthodox areas around New York which have already seen outbreaks of measles.

Mr Day said health inspectors had encountered "resistance" from some local residents, which he branded "unacceptable and irresponsible".

"They've been told 'We're not discussing this, do not come back' when visiting the homes of infected individuals as part of their investigations," he said.

I was curious what’s going on here as there’s nothing in Jewish teachings[0] that would justify an anti-vaccination stance. It’s apparently more that as an insular community it is particularly susceptible to anti-vaccine misinformation[1].

0. In numerous states parents wishing not to vaccinate their children are permitted to sign a document stating that their religious convictions do not allow them to; based on this signature the child will then be permitted to attend school under the law. It is reported that small numbers of parents in Jewish schools have signed such documents. For a parent of a yeshiva student to sign such a statement in the name of Judaism is not just inappropriate, it is false. Whether a posek will rule that childhood immunizations are obligatory in halakhah or are discretionary (but highly advisable), there is no position in halakhah that says there is any prohibition or compelling reason to refrain from such vaccinations.

http://www.hakirah.org/Vol13Bush.pdf

1. “How Orthodox Jewish Nurses Are Fighting 'Anti-Vaccination Propaganda' Targeting Their Community”

http://gothamist.com/2019/03/26/orthodox_jewish_nurses_vacci...

This American Life has a very in-depth broadcast from 2014 about the many, many, issues involved. Well worth a listen:

"A Not-So-Simple Majority:

Before the war in the East Ramapo, New York school district, there was a truce. Local school officials made a deal with their Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbors: we'll leave you alone to teach your children in private yeshivas as you see fit as long as you allow our public school budget to pass. But the budget is funded by local property taxes, which everyone, including the local Hasidim, have to pay — even though their kids don't attend the schools that their money is paying for. What followed was one of the most volatile local political battles we've ever encountered."

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/534/a-not-so-simple-majorit...

I’ve listened to that episode but I don’t recall vaccinations being part of it, and I don’t see anything in the transcript re:vaccinations, so I’m not sure how it’s directly relevant.

The point of my comment is that Judaism itself is not the reason these orthodox communities are rejecting vaccines, unlike some other communities/religions that have specific cultural or religious objections to medical care.

I didn't mean to imply that it was, but that's a good point.

I was meaning to highlight their resistance to intervention by the local governments whose jurisdiction they do their best to ignore.

Fair enough. I’m Jewish and part of my extended family is Orthodox (though my direct family is not), so I’ probably being overly sensitive.

BTW, you should look at this horrible anti-vax booklet (linked to from the Gothamist piece) that’s been circulated among these communities:

https://issuu.com/peachmoms/docs/the_vaccine_safety_handbook...

Ugh.

> I’ve listened to that episode but I don’t recall vaccinations being part of it

You are correct! I was attempting to add additional context and history to the Orthodox communities that are in Upstate NY. It's a long and complicated relationship that these tight-knit communities have had with their neighbors. Not unlike the complex relationships that the Amish have with their neighbors.

> The point of my comment is that Judaism itself is not the reason these orthodox communities are rejecting vaccines

I would also agree with this. From my very outsider perspective, it seems as if this is particular to just those Orthodox communities in Upstate NY, not to Orthodox Judaism in general. A very cursory google search turns up no issues with vaccinations in the Orthodox communities in New York City itself, not too far away.

Unfortunately, anyone who points this out is automatically stamped as an "anti-semite". It is a brilliantly effective way to black-hole common discourse in the social media era.

How are we still getting measles outbreak in a developed country in current year.

This is a solved problem.

FFS.

A well-working solution is known. But a problem is not solved unless a solution is actually applied.

It's almost as if an organized movement to convince people that the solution is the problem is succeeding in its goals.

How about you stop electing anti-vaxers and climate change deniers to high power?

I assume you are talking about Trump.

I'm not American, and even if I were, I wouldn't vote for him...

Because a "large enough to cause problems" minority of people think they know what's best, science and statistics be damned.

It's the same reason people are still clinging to the war on drugs, pushing gun control, fighting densification (yes I know that's not a word) of cities and denying climate change.

I feel that scientists have also long played around with an ethic of anti-journalism or anti-marketing as a pride, like it shows you're a true person of science. There aren't enough Richard Feynman's in the modern age.

Measles even for normal adults can leave ugly scars afterwards. It is definitely not harmless.

And for guys can make you infertile and have horrific consequences if your a Woman and are pregnant when you get it.

And can permanently weaken your immune system: https://youtu.be/lrG0mOnfNv0

Facebook has a lot to answer for. The internet was supposed to be a new human enlightenment by enabling professionals to remotely connect. We didn't bank on the ability of idiots to connect too...

Well you can't blame them for the sheer stupidity and idiocy that is now celebrated in our culture today.

Facebook has nothing to answer for, unless you think facilitating communication with others endows them with the responsibility to monitor and police all communications.

They created a product that is making the world worse. I want them to answer for that just like I want cigarette and oil companies to answer for their products that make the world worse.

They created a product which allows people to stay in touch and communicate and organize with others. I can fix things with a screwdriver, or I can hurt someone. I can run over someone with a car, or I can use it to go to work.

Things have pros and cons, and when the cons outweigh the pros perhaps action must be taken. But in this case, the people spreading the disinformation are to blame.

But this isn't like that. This is like seeing a road hazard that will hurt other people, but instead of doing anything about it - not even calling someone else to take care of it - you just ignore it and drive the other way.

Seriously, they will punish an account for a nipple and do it even faster for frontal nudity, and it doesn't matter how tasteful the art is. They refuse adverts if they show "too much skin" (uncovered shoulders hinting at possible nudity). I'm pretty sure they can take these sorts of posts and pages down - or at least work towards taking them down.

That’s their perogative for doing what’s good for their ad business. The real responsibility is with holding our leaders responsible for promoting the funding, transparency, and credibility of organizations such as the FDA and CDC, and educating people in the scientific method in general.

Instead we elect people who demean the very scientists working hard to protect our society.

Now, I do agree that part of the responsibility is holding our leaders responsible, and it saddens me that we elect in such a way.

This doesn't excuse facebook, however. This isn't just their ad business I'm speaking of - I was merely pointing out that suggestive paintings are too much. Pointing out they punish artists that paint tasteful nudes. Historical photos are a grey area, and it has taken heads of states speaking out for those to be reinstated.

These are merely normal people's posts.

Yet allowing posts that harm others and entire groups that do the same? Yup, allowed. Because they choose to allow such posts, they share responsibility. They choose to turn a blind eye to anti-vax groups and the like.

This is interesting to me, historical semi nude portraits are okay but recent ones are not? So old things are accepting? What does age matter, I don't see it making that much of a difference in reality

Soemtimes historical semi-nudes are OK, and sometimes new ones are. Sometimes, however, they are not. Folks have a lot of trouble trying to tell what will get them kicked from facebook.

As far as photos are concerned, age and "famous" do, indeed, matter. The "napalm girl" picture was banned for nudity - even when a head of state sent it out. Facebook said it would allow "historically important" works, but it still lies in a grey area. I highly doubt a new work of equal cultural importance could be posted today.

Except it's more like building the road hazard yourself and blaming people for crashing into it.

I see a moral obligation that they use part of the shit ton of money they made to help solve the problems. Endowing them with policing responsibility is a false dilemma. There are other things to do: It’s a question of education, not policing.

Educating the public isn’t Facebook’s job, that’s the government’s job (and by proxy, our job as voters and members of society) to ensure we educate our children and neighbors and promote research.

Unfortunately, it seems that people aren’t capable properly of wielding the power democracy gives them.

It’s kind of hard to claim that something is some entity’s job, or not.

It is “not their job” as in it is unreasonable to expect Facebook to start educating its users out of the blue. However, it’s easy to argue that it’s better for Facebook’s bottom line in many respects if their user base is more effective at navigating life and surviving.

And also, it can be made their job if we so desire.

Yes. Society lets corps get away with blue murder. We let them make huge amounts of money, at our expense:

Tobacco companies Weapon makers Oil companies

And they all sponsor powerful lobbies to screw up things even more, which we also allow. The EU fines google for the order that links appear on a page, but they let tobacco companies kill people at our expense free of charge.

In a way, that is still shooting the messenger. Or the messengers car to be more exact.

Facebook just mirrors society at large. At least those parts, that would use it in such a way in the first place.

Unfortunately, I don't think moral obligations apply to our current economic system.

They allow ads targetted towards people with antivax and other conspiracy beliefs. I think they're looking to change this but they definitely aren't innocent in this.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/15/facebook-...

Its a structural problem, not necessary facebooks -- if it werent for facebook, the idiots would congregate somewhere else to spread their lies. What is missing is an education in epistemology for a broad audience regardless of education level -- the ability to categorize and weight the value of knowledge and sources.

More/better education is always good. But there will always be idiots. Look at flat earth believers (although i have hard time believing they are not just trolls).

They used to be small groups of them all over the world, and they didn't do too much damage. What social media has done is amplified their voice, giving them look of legitimacy.

Flat Earthers used to be a joke/insult, now it’s a serious example of how the internet has developed not necessarily to our advantage.

Not only social media I might add. Traditional media also has a role to play here. They are generally more critical of these types of groups, but they also seek ever more ridiculous stories to tell, in order to get an audience -- so even a story that questions the theories of these groups but reports them as "one view among others" is problematic.

It is the structure of our media/advertising landscape that keeps nuanced but true views below the average interest and and amplifies outrageous crap, since it generates clicks and eyeballs.

Flat earthers are trolls, but they are very useful trolls.

They give kids great examples of things like falsifiability and scientific method.

It may be difficult to believe but while there may be a lot of FE trolls, there are also a significant number of true believers.

It's trolling taken to its logical extreme: you literally cannot tell whether someone posting flat-earth 'facts' is a troll or not online. The behaviour of the acolyte and the troll is identical.

Only when you meet these people in real life is there a fair chance of sounding them out to discover if they are just playing along or are actually convinced of whatever conspiracy is being peddled. I would expect most trolls keep their flat-earth proselytizing strictly as an online activity.

But they do seem to exist (the true believers that is).

Ah, ye goode olde Poe's law:

without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views... that cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views.

Too many forces will oppose this at every turn. The various religions and political ideologies come to mind.

The fact that you'll face resistance along the path should not stop you from setting the foot in front of the door. And its not an unreasonable thing to strife for. Certainly more realistic than some political demands, for which there will never be a majority consent...

Combating critical thinking is as old as critical thinking. Let them fight.

I think you mean epidemiology.

Nope, but this would also be a good idea in this context.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

Facebook is definitely an enabler for this trash. While they can indeed congregate elsewhere (like their own website or forum), people would have to explicitly seek out that “elsewhere”, where as Facebook would promote them for free thanks to their ranking algorithm.

One problem is that financing the use of the Internet has been equated with "lets put ads everywhere".

I meet so few people who are willing to pay for most Internet sites and services. They have to deliver some great value to be able to live on paid subscriptions.

Would you pay for Facebook if all ads were gone? Or Twitter? I can barely find a use case for these services anymore. Strip it to Messenger and the event pages and that's 95% of all use cases that go beyond narcissism.

Also, I am not sure if Facebook is responsible for the observed stupidity and idiocy or if it simply reveals them...

No, this sentiment is very wrong. 10% of the population is functionally illiterate. Another 10% can't do basic arithmetic. Another 10% has more important things to worry about than vetting all their sources. Another 10% just can't be bothered. There are many more reasons why expecting everyone to just be able to develop the ability to critically gather and evaluate information is clearly a fantasy that can only be entertained when you don't realize how incredibly challenged people are, probably because they don't interact with any.

To the contrary, I think the average joe is generally more reasonable and able to develop critical thinking skills than most people think. They just don't ever get the opportunity to learn it properly. There might be a subset of the population that is actually incapable of proper reason due to cognitive deficits, but that is definitly not the majority.

This sentiment is one of the reasons anti-intellectualism is thriving at this very moment.

> This sentiment is one of the reasons anti-intellectualism is thriving at this very moment.

One hell of a feedback loop that is...

  I think the average joe is generally more reasonable and 
  able to develop critical thinking skills than most people 
  think

You think wrong. You would like this to be the case and you let the desire cloud your judgment. It's simply not the case. The research is squarely against you.

  They just don't ever get the opportunity to learn it properly.

That's irrelevant. The point is that they never learned and cannot be expected to learn anym ore. We have to care for these people, instead of expecting them to take care of it themselves, telling them they are capable of it. Because they aren't and they don't.

  This sentiment is one of the reasons anti-intellectualism is thriving at this very moment.

This is not a sentiment: these are facts.

At least 10% of people are functionally illiterate. How are you going to teach them critical thinking skills? How are you going to get them to see the truth about e.g. vaccination? Answer: you don't. This is where we need a government, to take care of those that do not, for whatever reason, take care of themselves.

> if it werent for facebook, the idiots would congregate somewhere else

I don't think that's really true. To congregate, people must first find each other. That takes a certain amount of pre-existing interest plus a certain amount of ability to find something matching that interest. Not much, but some. Now, even the most passive and stupid people - a significant demographic, unfortunately - can basically sit back and let the other crazies come to them. The same filtering/targeting tools that have been such a boon for small businesses advertising their products have also been great for every fringe group that used to rely on old fashioned street-pounding evangelism.

Facebook brought these posts a stamp of legitimacy and concentrated all the idiocy under one URL. Pre facebook, no one trusted flatearth.com or vaccinesarebadmkay.net, because we still believed the old addage "never trust anything you read on the internet." It was a lot easier to ignore faceless people with random usernames spamming on random websites than a post from uncle Kevin, on a platform all your friends and family are using religiously.

Facebook has certain been a vehicle for the spread of misinformation, but I'm not completely sure that they should answer for it. Having Facebook control what information is "true" sounds awfully dystopian.

>Having Facebook control what information is "true" sounds awfully dystopian.

But that's exactly what Facebook already does. How would attempting to minimize the spread of disinformation be any more dystopian than optimizing it for maximum utility?

For that matter, why, in these threads, is it only ever a slippery slope to attempt to counter misinformation, but never such to let it spread unchecked and be weaponized by any interest capable of doing so?

Facebook never was, nor ever claimed to be, a neutral arbiter. Their entire business model depends on distorting the truth, which arguably implies some degree of social responsibility on their part.

Choose your poison then. Either we let idiots run loose and we are definitely screwed, or we empower some individuals and companies to control and govern communications etc, and then MAYBE we're screwed if we pick the wrong ones.

Can we perhaps come up with solutions in which we have fewer idiots, or have barriers against the rapid spread of unverifiable information in general?

> solutions in which we have fewer idiots

Not unless you are willing to avadakedavra them all, and this avenue is also wide open for abuse, as you may imagine

I was hoping for solutions more along the lines of education than “killing the idiots”…

>or we empower some individuals and companies to control and govern communications etc

We've been down this route in several countries during the 20th century and it doesn't pan out well.

Every nation did this until the internet. Those companies were collectively called “the press” in the western world.

Which kinda worked until the press worked out that favouring contentious topics and maintaining two viewpoints was more profitable.

You’re really going to throw the press in Britain, along with independent anti-establishment papers like Socialist Worker and Marxism Today alongside the Times and the Guardian, into the same bucket as that of Soviet Russia, Maoist China and North Korea?

Given my point is that you don’t need to be a dictatorship to do it, yes.

Not that being free from government influence frees you from the political preferences of your owner, as this recent non-sequitur headline from the Express should demonstrate: “EU BLACKMAIL: Brussels threatens FOOD AID to UK in 'last throw of dice of Project Fear'”.

Like I said, we're probably screwed anyway.

In a democratic society you don’t control, you elect strong leaders who guide and mentor the people to the positions that are best for society as a whole. We build a culture that believes in reason, science, humanitarianism, and progress. Then we work on spreading this culture and belief to others around us every opportunity we have.

The problem is democracy is about popularity, not reason. Most people do not elect the "best" leaders. We are very far away from that ever happening, regardless of culture.

The thing is that this outbreak isn't serious. At all. Nor do anti-vaxxers pose a significant threat. At all.

> The thing is that this outbreak isn't serious.

Every fucking outbreak is serious. Please learn something about epidemiology, and about measles in particular. I've been involved in tracking an outbreak, and have (separately) known people who were seriously harmed by measles. Dismissing any outbreak as "not serious" is truly sociopathic.

If we empower some individuals and companies to control and govern communications, we might be okay if we picked the right ones. The problem is, they have to continue to be the right ones, basically forever. That... won't happen. People retire and get replaced; people get corrupted by power; people see what they could do with power and put themselves in place to be the one to replace someone who's going to retire.

There is nobody - no person and no organization - who it's safe to trust with that kind of power.

Well dystopian or not, we either have some form of control, or not and end up where we are now. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.

FB failed on so many basic moral expectations that I have 0 sympathy for that company, and IMHO yes, their purely for-profit product is definitely responsible for the content it provides.

> FB failed on so many basic moral expectations that I have 0 sympathy for that company

Oh, for sure. But I’m cautious of instituting a blanket policy here that could end up being applied in other contexts where it may end up doing harm.

There are certain topics that are verboten in almost all of society. The obvious example here would be an invocation of Godwin's Law. We can all keep an open mind and have hypothetical, Devil's Advocate discussions, but nobody can seriously say "Hmm… Maybe systematically slaughtering Jewish people was the right thing to do".

Given that diseases have killed more people than the Nazis ever did, I don't think it's unreasonable to make that analogy.

I'm absolutely an advocate for free speech, but I am also in support of Amazon's recent move to pull any material pushing the fraudulent vaccine/autism link claim.

> I'm absolutely an advocate for free speech

You're also an advocate for the removal of free speech. Let's just be clear.

You can be both, depending on the situation. You are both. Many people here are both.

Facebook should be treated like a publisher and be held responsible for any and all content it disseminates. If someone wants to publish something there publicly (visible to more than let’s say 50 people) it should have to be reviewed. This is what for example tagesschau.de does with every comment.

It astonishes me still how much of a free ride Google gets.

The public consciousness of Facebook now is such that they're viewed as a pretty malevolent entity in general, but no-one questions the harm that Google's ranking algorithms have done to society.

Most people still believe that when they type a search into Google they're asking for objective results on a topic.

(What it actually shows is the results it thinks the person asking the question wants to see, which is wildly different person-to-person, but presented as objective truth to the user).

This audience knows that because we're deep in the industry, but Joe Public has no idea that Google works this way.

Of course he thinks his own crazy ideas are true and shared by the majority. Google told him so (as he sees it).

>The public consciousness of Facebook now is such that they're viewed as a pretty malevolent entity in general

The general public doesn't consider Facebook as being even remotely malevolent. I think you're confusing the views within the HN/tech bubble for the mainstream.

I disagree, but the best evidence I can find falls somewhere in the middle:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16976328/facebook-mark-zuc...

Facebook hired a pollster to survey opinion about them.

32% of respondents in one survey said they're harming society, while only 7% said the same of Google.

I would suggest this difference is largely because the public doesn't understand how Google works, and believe it is as described above.

I would put money on the outcome of some research (with "harm" being well defined) that Facebook has caused more harm than Google's ranking algorithms.

Facebook has constructed a business model on captivating people to spend _as much time as possible_ on their site. Google's search engine does no such thing.

But Google sure does spend enough time trying to be in every aspect of your life. They want to be your search engine, and your phone, and your TV (you tube), and your music service, and your voice assistant, and your watch, and your calendar, and your email, and your office, and your car, etc. etc.

Maybe so, but that has no bearing on the economic incentives that make google search and facebook different, which was the parent's point.

How do the incentives for Facebook and Youtube differ?

From my perspective, they are exactly the same, but I'd be interested to know the thoughts of others.

I don't think they are that different, and I think youtube is also problematic in similar ways to facebook. But, this thread from the start was specifically talking about google search and its impact compared to facebook.

I also think there are differences (youtube has some value that isn't predicated entirely on being a social network), but the distinctions are debatable and opinions will vary.

Facebook does not pay for content the way that YouTube does. This creates very different economic incentives.

Facebook needs to realy on content from people pushing an agenda. YouTube gets content from people directly trying to make money.

Net result, it’s easy to find many videos for home repair or learning Calculus on YouTube, not so easy on Facebook.

I think this fact makes Youtube even worse than Facebook. Let's say you are an idiot with an audience for your idiocy (e.g. anti-vaxers). YouTube is happy to pay you to create idiotic content for your audience. They will even promote your idiotic content across their site if you get enough clicks. What's more is they will cross promote your content with similarly idiotically minded people and lock them in a content bubble that increases clicks and views. The worst part is, for every view of your idiotic content, Google makes a profit, and you do too, so they get to keep hosting your nonsense, and you can make a living creating it. This was all fine and dandy when the context was home repair, but shift the context to idiotic conspiracies and we have an issue that is moving from the confines of the Internet to a public health nightmare.

Yet, YouTube does not have an incentive to promote ignorance over cat videos. Facebooks’s model is so broken they are paying for “please come back” advertising. They could have focused on connecting people, but spreading ignorance and rage was simply more profitable.

Cars may do more evil by killing people than most things, but they are not nessisarily more evil becase they also provide a lot of utility. FB unlike YT has no such excuse.

I disagree. Google and Facebook have the same exact business model -- learn as much about you and use that data to sell ads. All of the Google products I listed above are funded by ad revenue. Facebook executes their model by keeping you on one site, while Google executes theirs by being pervasive in your life. They are two sides of the same coin. Since they face the same economic incentives, they have similar pathologies.

Google Search has done an ok job ranking search results. Not perfect, but it's not an easy problem. YouTube's recommendation algorithm on the other hand seems to push all kinds of garbage.

It's terrible. The first two pages of results for many searches are just blogspam and aggreggated information

The quality of the algorithm isn't the point.

Say the algorithm worked 100% perfectly, 100% of the time.

Joe believes the algorithm is engineered to answer his queries with facts. It's not.

It's engineered to show Joe what other people that think like Joe (based on profiling he is unaware of) have clicked on in the past, in the hopes Joe will click more and generate ad revenue.

You gotta fight with it with operators if you want a useful search. Google loves to remove useful operators or hit you with captcha challenges if you are using operators too much.

> (What it actually shows is the results it thinks the person asking the question wants to see, which is wildly different person-to-person, but presented as objective truth to the user).

I don't think this is anywhere near as significant a problem as you suggest. I just tried a few incognito vs. not incognito searches of various conspiracy theories that have become much more visibly popular in the last few years. I saw little significant difference between incognito mode and not, and most of the results are about why the particular conspiracy theory is bullshit.

In contrast, it's a small sample size, but I've seen first hand a small number of friends (and one family member) become much more extremist anti-vaccine crusaders, and the primary vehicle for me seeing this is facebook.

I think youtube is much closer to having these kinds of problems than google search, but youtube is also a lot closer to being "social media", which is the general problem, not facebook in particular. Facebook is just far and away the biggest and most influential.

I'm interested in hearing if you get different results by using TOR browser instead.

Couple of things.

You'd need to check with Tor for a fair comparison to rule out geographic/workplace affinity.

also..

Your starting perspective governs the search term. I'm confident vaccines are safe overall - so I'll search for "are vaccines safe?" (positive connotation). Someone who believes that vaccines are causing brain damage has already formed a contrary opinion, so in all likelihood would be expected to search for "vaccines cause autism" (negative connotation). The question is the same, but it's been presented differently, and Google will respond to the question asked.

Believe it or not, I'm not actually blaming Google for this. In essence, it's still trying to answer the question asked, but I think we need to seriously reassess what the heck we're doing and maybe launch public awareness campaigns about how this all works at a fundamental level.

> Someone who believes that vaccines are causing brain damage has already formed a contrary opinion, so in all likelihood would be expected to search for "vaccines cause autism" (negative connotation).

I understand this, in fact, "vaccines cause autism" was exactly one of my test searches.

As for Tor: I don't have it and I'm not going to bother. And if nothing else, my region is a well known hotspot for anti-vaccine idiocy, so I would expect that to bias the test in favor of the filter bubble hypothesis, not against it.

^^ This makes me feel better, believe it or not.

I still think an Internet search / social media PSA campaign is urgently needed.

> ^^ This makes me feel better, believe it or not.

Frankly, why trust me? Why not try this yourself? I wish no one would trust random commenters on any social media, whether it be facebook or hackernews.

I'd rather you not trust me, I only spent 5 minutes on it. For someone such as yourself with such a strong opinion on the topic, I think it is worth spending a bit more time on it. This is one of those rare issues where if you think there's a problem, it's not hard to check for yourself.

I have, insofar as searching from my own connection in multiple incognito windows - but as we've said that tells me nothing.

I'm not going to download Tor because honestly I don't want my ISP thinking I'm up to no good (paranoid and ridiculous as I realize that is).

Totally agree otherwise on trust not being a substitute for critical thinking and applied reason, and yes, it's the biggest problem of all of this.

When is the American voter responsible for the quality of their clarity or their grasp on reality? Or should Facebook and Google be more in that business?

How do we have faith in the notion of citizen communal leadership if we think people can't handle Google giving you what you want? How much faith do we have when we think the members of our community aren't trustworthy as vanguards of clarity, so we want Facebook to step in and judge what counts as dangerous delusion?

Facebook is already making these decisions today with the algorithmic feed. They're already stepping in and deciding what people should see and what people should not see. It's stupid to pretend that the status quo is some hands-off natural state of the world, and get upset at the suggestion that the way this is already being done should change.

If you can't trust people to understand that Facebook promoting the post of a peer in your network, which you curated, isn't as popular as you think it is (Facebook doesn't generate content; the people you accept do)...

What does that say about what we think of their judgment capabilities, and whether they can take on a more serious democratic challenge like a policy debate on Brexit, or the Californian initiative process? I view the judgment necessary for Brexit or other public policy as more than a magnitude harder than judging whether peers or posts in your network are as popular as Facebook wants you to think.

Your response again makes me ask whether we have esteem for the clarity of our peers. Is there even faith that people can manage their own click?

It's hard to argue against this point without looking like an asshole.

But no, I have little faith that many people (including at least one family member) can handle the firehose of bullshit from facebook. I have one family member that was always anti-vaccine, but it was not really an issue until she got on facebook. The degree of radicalization she has now reached is intense, and I pretty directly blame facebook for this. Her sub-network of friends that post about this regularly did not exist before facebook.

There are many firehoses of bullshit, but facebook is a singular example that has connected enough people to it via people they already trust that it seems to be having a real impact on the world's decision making abilities.

This would be a valid point if we were talking about Google/Facebook/whoever giving people what they want or not.

The question I raised is whether not people understand that this is what's happening. It's not explained at all to a user who visits the homepage, hence people believe Google is providing objective truths, when in reality they're not even attempting to.

You're still feeding into my point about whether or not you trust your fellow peers to be agents of esteem and clarity in an activity of citizen communal leadership (democracy). Do you have esteem for your peers?

If they can't get past this information judgment activity (Britney Spears isn't popular just because YouTube shows me), what happens when a more serious intellectual challenge comes along? Like Brexit?

Does the slightest wind blow away the faith you have in the judgment of your peers?

You and I agree that we're responsible for our own critical thinking, but the average person accepts as reality that Google is black and white with regards to facts (even though that is clearly not possible).

That's not in itself on Google, but as democratic whims over the last few years have shown, the lack of awareness is having out-sized effects on all of us that still isn't being talked about.

Social media may not be actively seeding viral nonsense, but it sure is making bank selling the petri dishes.

The American voter is under attack by entities seeking to confuse, mislead, and misinform him or her for their own profit and power. Isolated from reasonable or normative thought, uneducated in the mechanisms attacking their thought, and indoctrinated in these lies as cultural, social, and even patriotic standards to be upheld and identified with, we can hardly be expected to break this crushing mold and make choices with clarity and rational thinking.

The first step, when one is able to temporarily rise above this suffocating morass, is to cry out that it must be torn down. Reform the first-past-the-post voting systems that generate and enforce an extremist 2-party system, stop powerful and wealthy entities from buying their own rules through lobbying and regulatory capture, adapt rules that were written without a concept for what they would mean in a world with broadcasting and instant copying of information, recognize that harmful externalities are not corrected by an irrational purely capitalistic economy...the list of injustices is long and reasonably obvious, from the outside. Tragically, though, these goals are next to impossible to achieve without a critical mass that the systems are actively repressing.

> We didn't bank on the ability of idiots to connect too...

The downside of this connecting is not "just" idiots, it's the creation of echo chambers in general.

Pre-Facebook social circles only had the capability to form echo chambers when they reached a certain size, something that was greatly inhibited by the reality of the physical world.

Today, even the most irrational minds can meet and reinforce each other's beliefs without any effort at all, beyond a few mouseclicks.

Idiots are just a subset of the problem. The actual problem is people in general just having their misconceived notions reinforced, rather than having them challenged. It's the opposite of intellectual growth.

IMO, Twitter is even worse in this regard.

Chomsky argued that the medium of television (this was in the pre-internet era) frames any discussion held within it on the outset, because, on it, noone can present an argument longer than 5 minutes, due to logistic reasons, which is insufficient for someone to form an adequate opinion about, and certainly insufficient to change someone's mind. In effect, he was saying that television was an echo chamber, because you'll just end up hearing what you like, all the debates being castrated of the ability to change your mind.

5 minutes. What is the twitter message character limit again?

This is on the nose. Even a 5 minute article is too much work, people would rather read a viral twitter screenshot or watch a talking head on youtube read that screenshot back to them.

Irrelevant.

Most posts on blogs are much longer, and some of the most listened to podcasts are hours long.

This is a critique of "short-form" mediums, like TV, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This is, of course, not a critique of blogs or podcasts (or books, or essays, etc.)

Why people should trust pharma companies considering all the scandals and dick moves? I think we just lost patience and antivaxxers are kinda over-reacting. This is not a problem with misinformation, it's a problem with trust. Patients are always disinformed and act when disinformed wheter they choose to vaccinate or not. Creating and mantaining trust therefore is the main issue.

Edit: gonna specify that I'm in favor of vaccines otherwise some won't read the message and think this is an anti-vaxx post

> Why people should trust pharma companies considering all the scandals and dick moves?

We shouldn’t! We should trust a medicine once they’ve published peer-reviewed papers, cleared multiple national efficiency and safety clinical trial standards, been universally recognised by medical professionals as a prudent personal and publish health measure and can look back on decades of evidence that pretty much points one way. When parents can’t weigh that evidence against some hocus pocus sense of unease, they should be liable for the costs of their decisions.

People don't have the tools or the time to understand all this stuff. It's all about trust, good reputation. The only way governments and pharmas have been able to deal with loss of reputation is by trying to ridicule worried people, or persecuting them for a choice. Of course this is only making things worse.

> People don't have the tools or the time to understand all this stuff

Which is why we delegate that trust to experts. There are many such experts. Take your pick among your government, other governments, pharmaceutical companies, your doctor, anyone else’s doctor, immunologists, or any scientist with domain expertise. They all come to the same consensus.

What doesn’t make sense is distrusting all of them while trusting Internet numpties peddling supplements.

Exactly, that's the point. For many reasons these experts are losing their good reputation, that should be the main concern. If they get a good rep again, less and less people are gonna listen to misinformations

I had a chuckle and generally I agree with you.

However I see as part of the problem that trust in experts has eroded caused by... those experts themselves. There are many accounts of matter experts turning out to be shills for a certain industry which did harm to public up to upright killing people. Look at the opioid crisis or the latest development with Boeing. How would a layperson distinguish between honest and dishonest statements?

Like to upvote this infinity+

Trust is gone and fear is dispensed as a culture.

This is the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where people aren't on the internet so much. Lots of this same misinformation is instead being distributed by print: http://gothamist.com/2019/03/26/orthodox_jewish_nurses_vacci...

The publications are funded by these bozos: https://www.nvic.org

No one knew what they are doing - remember “wisdom of the crowds”? Cynics and other cultures thought this was a pipe dream.

But man, did it work at the start. We all had hopes for the future.

And for that bright moment, we do have the Silicon Valley of yore to thank.

However, what’s not forgiveable is staying in the dark and not adapting.

Especially if you land up on HN, Where pivot is a verb, mantra and well respected course of action.

————

Here’s what i postulate -

Any sufficiently large network is a proxy for the underlying state of the population.

At humanity scale this means that commerce is optimized, but then this (through attention farming) exacerbates human fault lines.

It means that anonymity will always be misused by criminals and revolutionaries.

As a result, there will always be a centralizing tendency that begins to apply on large networks. Only small inconsequential networks can avoid this.

(Central tendency as in - government oversight and force to order chaotic activity online,)

Any tool built must always play on this divide - increasing transparency and central control vs increasing anonymity and increasing the are of illegal behavior.

—————-

Most of this would be solved if print media were still a viable business.

We generate tons of data, and content, sifting through it is impossible.

But teams of editors and reliable news papers could once upon a time, do that. However it seems the information industry is suited for centralized, agenda dominated firms.

There's very much an individual aspect here--identifying with and following the various tribes.

We are literally witnessing a self-selecting Darwin event here. The vaccinated tribes will live longer than the unvaccinated ones.

That faux science helps no one. As bad as communicable diseases are, anti vax segments won't wipe out the whole population. And these "tribes" are flexible since they are based in psychology not firm genetics. They aren't fish who die when the lake dries up.

I was merely pointing out the causal relation of vaccination vs life expectancy. Do we agree so far? Doesn't that mean there will be a higher proportion of vaccinated to unvaccinated people over time, because math?

This is occurring mainly because of an offline distribution in the Orthodox Jewish community[1], if this source is correct. Facebook has nothing to answer for when people are hand-distributing a pamphlet, and overworked doctors refuse to talk to mothers concerned about vaccines. Coming down hard on communities (via laws about what can be discussed online) can backfire, the cure is sometimes worse than the disease, and yes, people will die if you don’t crack down, but that’s the price of freedom of speech and association. Why are you blaming Facebook instead of Orthodox Judaism? Because they are an easier or bigger target? And what happens when the “do-gooders” get a taste of power and start cracking down on other talk they don’t like? Be careful wishing for the secular equivalent of blasphemy laws! The slippery slope may be a logical fallacy but it’s often a good rule of thumb for reasoning about hard topics. Proceed with caution.

http://gothamist.com/2019/03/26/orthodox_jewish_nurses_vacci...

If people think I can destroy citizens' voting power and their ability to think and make them endanger kids because of things people voluntarily share over Facebook, what do we say about how much we respect that vote and voter? And what are we saying about what we think Facebook's role should be in this, potentially as a guardian against our destructive and irresistible instincts?

People, both as individuals and communities, also need to have some responsibility over their own willpower, their own souls, their own minds, their own clarity, their own grasp, their own sense of reality. Or else how do we believe in the true heart of democracy -- the citizen and their worthy mind, a mind of ideas worthy of community negotiation and leadership?

Somewhere else people are condemning Google for not showing people the objective truth, and instead giving you what you want to search. Like it's Google's responsibility to regulate you against your own risk for delusion. If people think citizens are that weak then how do you trust the value of their intellect?

Are voters one Facebook network away from losing their trustworthiness as citizens in a democracy?

It does, but not in this case.

Rockland county is home to a large ultra-conservative religious community that is extremely insular and uses local scale to control the civil institutions of their local government. (Village, school district, etc) Members of the community have limited access to outside media and certainly not Facebook.

In this case, the leaders of the communita took a stance for reasons I do not know. Sheep do what the shepards want.

> Facebook has a lot to answer for. The internet was supposed to be a new human enlightenment by enabling professionals to remotely connect. We didn't bank on the ability of idiots to connect too...

Cheap printing presses were a wonderful idea, but just one of first major application happened was printing books about the "jew/catholic/arab burning."

...where "idiots" here means "people who aren't as enlightened as we are."

C'mon, if you go with an open mind into the serious problems with vaccination safety, you come away with serious questions. As least I do, and I'm part of the usual Ivy-educated CS crowd around here...

Same problem in germany, recently. Parents think they know better and refuse to have their kids vaccinated. Now the vaccination rate is low enough for measles to start spreading in schools etc.

Currently there is a discussion about making vaccination mandatory:

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-measles-vaccine-could-be-compu...

While I'm not sure on the legal side of things if this is enforceable, I think not allowing them to participate in school as a matter of public health would be easier to put into law than forcing them to get vaccinated. Obviously, state and private companies could require vaccinations for employment as well, so unless you have a medical reason to not be vaccinated you won't be able to be part of civilized society.

Yes, for kindergarden I would imagine such kind of approach to be very effective. However, school is obligatory (at least where I come from) and people even get into trouble for taking kinds on vacation outside of school holidays, so denying kids to participate in school may not be an option (and would also not be in the kids' interest).

In my country too, I think cbg0 is referring to homeschooling these kids instead.

Homeschooling is not allowed in Germany

Not at all? It is in my country (the Netherlands) in some circumstances, for example if you are of a certain religion and there is no school within x kilometers that satisfies your religious requirements.

> denying kids to participate in school may not be an option (and would also not be in the kids' interest)

We're talking a hypothetical that might require legislative changes, which isn't too far-fetched if the problem keeps growing. Also, I'd argue that not vaccinating a kid is also not in the child's interest, and not in the interests of that child's classmates.

Education is compulsory and a constitutional right where I live (Romania) and we have problems with low vaccination rates here as well. I'm question at which point do we put the well being of the pack above the individual's rights.

Then the parents will just home school and the kids will grow up with the same views and not learn critical thinking. Better to keep them in the system I think.

Home schooling is not legal in Germany.

Although anecdotal, I studied in the public system and I would say that most of my classmates did not really learn critical thinking, neither from school or a different source.

I guess it depends on the education system in question, as some of them, like mine, are more focused on memorizing facts instead of questioning them.

The problem is that in Germany I believe schooling is mandatory - you can't homeschool, for example. So what do you do with kids whose parents refuse to vaccinate?

In Australia they went for a different approach - just make it really expensive by not allowing government subsidies and tax breaks for parent who don't vaccinate.

> So what do you do with kids whose parents refuse to vaccinate?

Well, there are rules for parents failing to send their kids to school. Ultimately authorities can take away guardianship from the parents.

Wow. That's a leap to me to take away their children. I'm just curious, why, when the CDC states that there is a possibility for long term reactions to vaccines, and we know from practice to be skeptical of science's fallibility, is it such a stretch to consider some folks don't want to take the leap of trust.

There's a much greater possibility of long term reactions to the diseases vaccines prevent. It's not such a stretch to consider refusing to vaccinate your children as on par with refusing to use seat buckles.

Do you have some statistics on this analogy? I'm curious how many children have died in recent years from not getting a vaccination. I'm honestly not taking one side or the other, but it's clear that you can't have an honest debate on this subject without being called an "anti-vaxxer" and "anti-science" and the like.

The general point of the analogy is that the risk of vaccination is sufficiently low that eschewing it should be equated with reckless child endangerment.

> how many children have died in recent years from not getting a vaccination

There's actually not a straight forward answer to that question, because its an (unintentionally) loaded question. Lets focus it specifically on Measles. The natural death rate from measles is not high. Couple that with herd immunity that most non-vaccinated children benefit from, and high quality medical treatments available in (e.g.) the US, and you'd expect it to be low. Definitely higher than the death rate from vaccines, but low. But that's excluding both morbidity, and side-effects of Measles. There's this false belief that getting viruses (like Measles) and surviving them make you stronger. The opposite is more common -- Measles in particular opens you up to re-infection from things you already had because it partially wipes out your immune system. Some viruses are not as bad, others are even worse (e.g. might tilt your immune system towards cancer). After all, viruses are hijacking your body's cellular replication machinery and if they happen to muck with some other stuff in the process, what do they care? Do you think that is a fair answer to your question?

As for honest debates, you'll find a great deal fatigue on the vaccine side, because frankly vaccines have decades of studies, evidence, and readily available information supporting their use. Of all the medical interventions available, they are the cheapest, safest, and most effective measures available, and perhaps the greatest breakthrough medicine will ever have.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I honestly don't know the least on this subject, but I'll do more research. I certainly don't doubt the value of vaccines, I'm somewhat familiar with the impact of polio, and likewise the impact of the vaccine.

I think the inner cynic in me is troubled by the total heap on attitude of everyone towards the subject, so much so that now I think any discussion of it is blocked on Facebook and other socials. It seems like I missed the public debate on this and other topics because I didn't have social accounts, I don't know.

If you or anyone else has any suggestions for any non-politicized books on the matter, I would be happy to report back on my thoughts afterwords.

I’m calling out some serious disease-enthusiast bullshit here. The CDC does not state what you claim. From their website:

“We learn about a vaccine’s safety during clinical trials before it is licensed, and monitor it continually as millions of doses are administered after it is licensed. We also know there is not a plausible biologic reason to believe vaccines would cause any serious long-term effects. Based on more than 50 years of experience with vaccines, we can say that the likelihood that a vaccine will cause unanticipated long-term problems is extremely low.“

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/tools/parents-guide/par...

"Disease-enthusiast"? Please help me understand what you are meaning by this. And how does this refute my statement that the CDC states there ARE possibilities of long term complications, and they DO happen.

I mean that people who are against the usage of vaccines must be very enthusiastic about speeding disease.

How does this refute your statement? Dude, you made a false claim about what the CDC says, I put up the actual CDC statement. Burden of proof is on you now. Provide me a citation to a CDC source that proves your claim.

This is the entire premise of the anti-vaxxer movement, in case you’re not familiar. The argument is completely bogus: vaccines are orders-of-magnitude safer than the diseases they prevent.

I know the hysteria is overwhelming, and this subject is clearly political, but I don't think questioning something that should be completely acceptable to scrutinize is "bogus". Medical science has been wrong before, and there have been unseen long term effects because of it. The history of science is the proving wrong of past theories and advancement of new theories. Is this really not open to thoughtful discussion?

Germany has a very dark history with that.

This would create its own echo-chamber of sorts I'd wager

I have no problem forcing all non-vaccinated kids to go to their own (quarantined) school.

Fake news.

The vaccination rate is the same it was 10 years ago and a few decades before that.

The discussion is political of course but its primary function is to ease the temper of judgemental people.

How come such vaccines are not mandatory? Shouldn't the parents be held responsible for endangering their children and potentially killing them?

Maybe they should also be held responsible for causing harm to other people, teachers, pupils their kids come in contact with?

I dislike the antivax movement but mandatory state injections would be a huge violation of liberties in my opinion. Just because most vaccines are safe and worth while getting don't mean they all are, or always will be.

>I dislike the antivax movement but mandatory state injections would be a huge violation of liberties in my opinion.

That's true, but if we consider any violation of personal liberty to be harmful, then we're left with primitivist anarchy.

We've decided, collectively (albeit not individually and not always voluntarily) that it is beneficial in some cases to abridge the rights of the individual for the sake of society. We invented systems of laws and courts because we consider a fixed set of common laws and a controlled system to adjudicate them to be more just and fair on average than retributory violence and clan based tribalism, despite the existence of the state and its monopoly on violence being an abridgement of personal liberty.

We've also decided that, while scientific inquiry has its faults, it is preferable to assume that the premises of science (specifically, epidemiology and the utility of vaccines) hold sound, given the evidence, despite this amounting to an appeal to authority for most people, who aren't likely to be willing or able to do the work of personally validating all of the claims ever made by a particular scientific field.

In the case of vaccines, we have ample historical evidence of the effect of epidemics and a lack of preventative measures on human populations, and of the improvements made to society as a result of vaccination and preventative measures. The choice here is not between potentially harmful vaccines versus a healthy life in their absence, rather, between between an abstract threat (vaccines) and a concrete threat (disease.)

So, yes. Mandatory vaccines are a violation of liberty. We didn't spend the last several millennia laying a foundation of civilization and scientific progress just to subject ourselves to the blind malice of nature for the sake of a few people who don't like the government telling them they're not allowed to catch polio if they want to.

> a huge violation of liberties in my opinion

Usually when your actions (or inactions) endanger others in an unreasonable way we write laws to force the individual to act a certain way for the greater good of society.

I don't see how this is any different to drink driving laws.

> Mandatory vaccines are a violation of liberty.

They are not. Not vaccinating is a means of harming and killing people around you, which is not within boundaries of personal liberty. Theoretically, if you spent whole your life in wilderness far from other people, you could risk all diseases you want.

I strongly dislike this normalizing language of giving up some liberty "for greater good". All things that superficially look like this should be really either a defense of liberty or autonomy of others, or an exercise of collective political liberty of the people to shape the world around them. The latter is subject to political change if people change their minds, and still has to respect personal liberty as the primary aim of free society. We should not equate progress with imposing more and more restrictions that are supposedly objectively "good" in some abstract way, as determined by some people. This loosens the principles at best. Some people can reject them, but we should be clear when they do that.

The US government has an admitted history of running fake vaccine programs and intentionally cultivating syphillus in non-consenting vulnerable populations. The US government lost its vaccine-mandate legitimacy through its own crimes against humanity.

That's universally condemned in the medical world as unethical.

Which is why the US government cannot be trusted on the matter

You mean that government is still doing it?

Appeal to liberty is almost always the lowest and weakest answer when applied to most questions.

Even in context of the great patriots of Massachusetts in the American revolution, throwing off the yoke of imperial Britain brought the less than enlightened governance of the legislative process, which was arguably less respectful of liberty... impressing sailors, levying goods, etc,

In the US we instituted a supreme Federal government because of the failure of the initial, “liberty” focused government that enabled petty local interests over the overall good.

But we reached vaccination quotas above 95% without being mandatory, so that argument evidently does not apply.

It totally applies because (a) the threshold needs to be 98% according to the math that governs such things, (b) we're not sure to stay at 98% (or even 95%) in the face of disinformation campaigns such as the one you're a part of, and (c) it really is important to be sure because the consequences of allowing outbreaks to continue are actually severe. Making other people suffer the burdens of illness could be seen as a violation of their rights, and is impossible to address via litigation after the fact, so prevention is necessary.

You've already claimed that measles doesn't cause serious harm, and been proven wrong. Multiple times. You've claimed that this outbreak isn't serious, despite the facts that are known about how disease spreads and how infectious measles in particular is. Why do you persist in pushing this anti-vax narrative?

I don't want to do the whole "think of the children!" thing here, but: It's children we're talking about.

Forced immunisations in adults is absolutely a violation of civil liberties. They are an adult and they can decide whether they consent to being immunised or not after making a choice on the matter.

But children have none of those rights or responsibilities. Why should a child suffer and/or die from a disease preventable by immunisation because of the actively harmful choices of their parents? It's literally child abuse. Refusing to immunise your child on some completely false belief that it will harm them is no different from letting your child play on a busy road.

Sure, I completely understand where you're coming from because I share your concern, but if you truly believed a vaccine wasn't safe and that it had a significant chance of side effects, wouldn't you feel differently?

You seem to be making the assumption that researchers always get things right or that there isn't sometimes unexpected consequences.

I'm saying this as someone who is extremely happy my parents vaccinated me and wouldn't hesitate to vaccinate my own children, but that doesn't mean I can get on board with forcing parents to inject their children with something they feel could be dangerous. Just look at the state of the opioid epidemic, or the medication of conditions like depression. Medical professionals don't always know what's best for every individual, and arguably if you live in a rural area and home school your children, it's not so important to vaccinate your child.

I believe strongly that children are the responsibly of their parents, not the state. I really dislike how the state is becoming the defacto parental figure in most childrens lives.

Exactly. Plus, it would be unnecessary. Vaccination quotas are still high and got as high as 98% in the past. Without mandated vaccinations in many cases. So it is possible to get there without decreasing liberties any further.

We are on this course of decreasing liberties for decades now and it ruined trust in government and societies. Guess what? If that happens, we see more esoteric fringe groups. Geniuses...

It's like nuclear power. It's a great technology that is a net positive to society, but you have one accident and people start rioting

In some (most?) states vaccines are already required for a child to attend public school. There are some religious and medical exemptions though.

And on the other side of the globe, "Australian Teens Ignore Anti-Vaxxer Parents by Getting Secret Vaccinations":

https://www.thedailybeast.com/australian-teens-ignore-anti-v...

Unfortunately, minors in the US have few actual rights. I don't think they have the right to get vaccines without their parent's permission and it isn't considered medical abuse.

It depends on the state and age of the minor:

https://vaxopedia.org/2018/09/25/how-can-i-get-vaccinated-if...

Rockland County, a county in New York State, not New York County, which is congruent with the borough of Manhattan [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_New_York

I parsed it as "(a) New York County ..."

Not "The county named 'New York County' ..."

If you’re not super familiar with the existence of New York County, that definitely makes sense as a default reading. For those of us who are, the headline was double-take worthy. And yes, I skimmed the comments for the answer instead of opening the article.

That said, New York County as an entity rarely if ever does anything. It’s the borough of Manhattan that actually has a governmental structure. I’m not aware of any belonging to the county except maybe a court. And an emergency like this would always be declared on a city-wide basis (and has been in the past), just based on the amount of travel within and between the boroughs.

I think that’s why the title is “New York county” and not “New York County”, but maybe that’s a BBC thing as they don’t use Title Case for Everything.

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