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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem from my PoV is that people seem like they are always absolutely sure that the contemporary understanding of morals is actually correct, unlike the primitive beliefs of the past, and that there's nothing left to challenge. Convincing people that this is what people always believe and yet it has never been true seems impossible. It seems difficult for people to imagine that there's more left to discuss.

What I'd rather do is try to convince people that it's wrong to apply this kind of ideological control regardless of whether or not you think it's correct. But that's hard, because if it was correct, and people do earnestly believe it is, then what do they have to lose?

I also think that dishonest portrayals of even recent history are a huge problem for understanding that a lot of the moral conundrums we have today are not new. It's mostly the sensationalism and moral panics that are always changing.

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Professionals have long leaned pretty liberal, but they had at least putatively neutral principles and honestly tried to put those ahead of personal politics. That seems to be eroding now as millennials have decided that the professions should be vehicles for social justice, and of course it ends up being their left-leaning vision of how to achieve that. In the process, it’s destroying the credibility of our institutions.

The behavior of the medical community during the pandemic has been outrageous. My dad has done public health for 30 years in the developing world. You don’t get vaccine-skeptical people in rural Bangladesh to get vaccinated by telling them they’re idiots and making threats. Yet that’s been the main game plan with less educated rural people here in the US: berate the white ones for not being vaccinated, and then ignore the lack of vaccination among the non-white ones. That’s a profound failure to understand the profession’s role relative to the rest of society.

>Yet that’s been the main game plan with less educated rural people here in the US: berate the white ones for not being vaccinated

Do people who do this genuinely believe they are helping to encourage people to vaccinate? My impression is that they just want to feel smug.

I think it's sort of a type of double standard where you say that "your side" is only acting out of fear/confusion/emotion/ignorance/etc but the "other side" has a long, complicated game plan that is surely going to fail, and everything they do is committed towards their bad plan, so you feel the need to "call them out" on it. You can't really "call someone out" in the same way if they are just confused or upset, rather than evil.

I think intersectional thinking clouds their understanding of the power relationship. Ordinarily, a public health person recognize non-college rural people as a disadvantaged group, and understand that these people may have less trust, be working with poor information, etc. Getting those people to use available health services is Public Health 101.

But in an intersectional analysis, “non-college rural whites” is near the top of the “oppressor” hierarchy. I think that causes people to perceive their attacks as “punching up” against more powerful people who are being willfully malicious.

I agree that shaming people is probably unlikely to work, but I’m not really sure that anything will work in the short term here. We’re dealing with a crisis of social trust. What do you think the CDC and the federal government should be doing that they aren’t, that would be more effective at getting ideologically vaccine-resistant people in outlasted in this case?

And I feel the need to mention, intersectionality does not itself create an “oppressor hierarchy.” Intersectionality is just a way of describing how people can be vulnerable to to subjugation in some ways while having the power to subjugate other people in other ways. This is a good thing, specifically for reasons you identify! Just because you’re white in America and are less likely to be killed at a traffic stop than a black person, does not mean that you have enough money to live comfortably or have adequate access to healthcare, or are abled or have no criminal record and so on. You are arguably making an intersectional argument when you talk about the specific needs of low-information white people in rural areas.

> I think that causes people to perceive their attacks as “punching up” against more powerful people who are being willfully malicious.

You still haven't said who these public health people are, publicly berating the white, less educated rural people for not being vaccinated.

Right now it sounds a lot more like you're summing up someone's twitter trending section, not public health officials, so I'll throw up the old [Citation needed].

> Professionals have long leaned pretty liberal

I'm sorry, but I think today's partisan politics are clouding your memory. There's been multiple points in history where poltically left leaning professionals were systematically kicked out of their jobs and blacklisted from their careers.

> berate the white ones for not being vaccinated, and then ignore the lack of vaccination among the non-white ones.

People around me are being given like $100 and a pat on the back when they get vaccinated around here. Antivaxxers are idiots, but people getting vaccinated are having the gold carpet rolled out to them.

Also it doesn't look good to repeat a racist fox news soundbite that's already been debunked about how the blacks are invading our cities and spreading covid [1].

[1] https://abc7chicago.com/dan-patrick-texas-lt-governor-blames...

> There's been multiple points in history where poltically left leaning professionals were systematically kicked out of their jobs and blacklisted from their careers.

Well, communists right? Literal sympathizers with the US' greatest geopolitical foe?

> Also it doesn't look good to repeat a racist fox news [blah blah blah fox news..]

Wait are the vaccination rates between whites and blacks actually substantially equal? And your link is just playing the trick of swapping out percentages for absolute numbers to make a tendentious argument.

See Figure 3: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-...

Vaccination rates for whites is 10-15 points higher than for Black people in blue states, but about the same in the poorest and most rural states.

That’s my point—what you’re looking at is low vaccination rates among disadvantaged groups. Public health officials have just forgotten that non-college rural whites are one of those groups.

> Also it doesn't look good to repeat a racist fox news soundbite that's already been debunked about how the blacks are invading our cities and spreading covid [1].

This is a strawman argument. The OP proposed that on average whites are more vaccinated than blacks, which your citation supports. So vaccine marketing should target the biggest vaccine skeptics, otherwise the racially inequal outcomes will only grow.

A) White people, like black people are not homogenous, so certain white groups could benefit from being targeted

B) There are more white people in America than black people. So, while in relative terms there may be less vaccinated black than white people, in absolute terms, there are more unvaccinated white than black people.

The vaccines don't care about the proportion of various demographic groups. The community benefits from there being more vaccinated people overall.

> The vaccines don't care about the proportion of various demographic groups. The community benefits from there being more vaccinated people overall.

Careful, you might pull something with those mental gymnastics.

You’re right that more vaccinated people is what matters so everyone should do their part. That means per capita should be the same across all demographics. Any group that has a lower per capita is dragging covid progress, regardless of how large or small the group is.

You ignore my previous point about the fact large segments of the white population also being vaccine hesitant. The problem is more obvious with black people because the demographic information collected during vaccinations doesn't generally include things like voting intentions, strength of religious faith, profession, understanding of who won the last election, or opinion on what caused the twin towers to collapse.

However, if you look at the cross tabs of opinion polling, supporters of a particular party are much more hesitant to get the vaccine.

> That seems to be eroding now as millennials have decided...

...you're really going to lead with this?

> The behavior of the medical community during the pandemic has been outrageous. My dad has done public health for 30 years in the developing world. You don’t get vaccine-skeptical people in rural Bangladesh to get vaccinated by telling them they’re idiots and making threats. Yet that’s been the main game plan with less educated rural people here in the US

What part of the medical community, specifically, are you talking about here? What concerted pattern, explicitly planned or not, are you referring to here?

It honestly seems more like you're giving a take on popular discourse, with more than a little generalizing.

What I do see is many many medical professionals trying to counsel their patients and communities, finding out Fox News and Facebook have gotten there first, and still trying to do their jobs, sometimes in the face of a lot of abuse.

> berate the white ones for not being vaccinated, and then ignore the lack of vaccination among the non-white ones

Well, first, we know about racial disparities in vaccination rates because it's been measured and reported on as concerning well before people turned it into a talking point.

But I hope this isn't a reference to the Texas Lt Governor's comment, because not only is he stupidly wrong and his comment is a huge distraction for public health efforts and discourse, but he's the one who trotted out relative vaccination rates in different groups out of the blue in an interview that was about (wait for it) public health policy. Can't blame the medical community for that one.

And he's not remotely a millennial.

> You don’t get vaccine-skeptical people in rural Bangladesh to get vaccinated by telling them they’re idiots and making threats. Yet that’s been the main game plan with less educated rural people here in the US: berate the white ones for not being vaccinated ....

It could be that lower educational level is merely coincidental, and that the relevant characteristic is, instead, an insecure-but-obstinate egoism whose Prime Directive is, "You're not the boss of me!" If that's true, then:

1. scorn, mockery, and threats seem just about as likely to convert obstinate anti-vaxxers — EDIT: that is to say, not likely at all — as any other approach, because by this point in a pandemic, there's little hope that anything will convince stubborn contrarians that they should get vaccinated, not even the deathbed pleas of their fellow contrarians who realize too late that they fatally screwed the pooch; but

2. for the vaccinated, public mockery of anti-vaxxers could help to reinforce their sense of community with other vaccinated folks — and, more generally, with community-minded folks, as opposed to selfish individualists — by evoking primitive us-versus-them feelings, with "them" being the insecure-but-obstinate egoists. That could be socially useful, in a backhanded sort of way.

EDIT: We've seen this kind of behavior before in die-hard (so to speak) smokers; cf. the anti-smoking public service announcements by former smokers such as Leonard Nimoy, who died of COPD after smoking for years. [0]

[withdrawn]

> Scorn, mockery, and threats is NOT going to convince stubborn and contrarian people to get vaccines.

Please re-read that part of my comment: you and I are in agreement.

oops!

I agree that #2 is what’s actually happening. Instead of trying to reach less educated rural people, medical professionals are reinforcing blue tribe solidarity by attacking them. A lot of blue tribe behavior these days is based on that—antagonism toward less educated whites is a key force keeping the coalition together—but now it’s killing people.

If (by hypothesis) the insecure-obstinate anti-vaxxers can't be convinced no matter what, then it's not the blue-tribe attacks on them that are killing people, it's the anti-vaxxers' pig-headedness.

And if blue-tribe attacks on anti-vaxxers help to increase blue-tribe and independents' vaccination rates, then net-net the attacks are a good thing from an overall-vax-rate perspective, because (again, by hypothesis) the blue-tribe attacks won't decrease the anti-vaxxers' vaccination rates, which are already at or near zero, and nothing will increase those rates.

EDIT: There's also a question of patience (an exhaustible resource) and cost-effectiveness: when dealing with a toddler screaming for candy in the grocery store, at some point you stop trying to reason with them and just physically remove them from the store. Likewise with anti-vaxxers: At some point the rest of us are going to lose patience and stop being willing to incur costs in terms of dollars, unavailability of ICU beds for other patients, and needless deaths and long-haul illnesses. Personally, I'd be OK with putting voluntary anti-vaxxers under house arrest, akin to being locked up for contempt of court: The key to your cell is in your own hands.

EDIT 2: You persist in labeling the blue-tribe attacks as being on less-educated and rural people. From where I sit, the attacks are on pig-headed voluntary anti-vaxxers — some of whom are well-educated city-dwellers such as the commenters on Fox News (some of them doubtless being vaccinated themselves).

> The behavior of the medical community during the pandemic has been outrageous

Yes sure. This is the community, the medical community, that has been absolutely outrageous in its behavior over the past year and a half and must attract our ire in these discussions. We have a really awful medical community (as confirmed by your father) - How do we appropriately censure this absolutely outrageous behavior. I am at loss for words!

Intersectional thinking is killing people!

The most astounding thing is that the people who are so confident that their current understanding of morals is absolutely correct and there is no possible reason to debate it or challenge it were, not very long ago at all, just as confident and vehement about things that they now consider morally abominable. This is very obvious in rapidly-changing areas like trans rights, where you can see people insist that only evil bigots would be uncomfortable with trans activists beating up elderly lesbians just for holding views that, only a handful of years earlier, the same people insisted it was bigoted to even criticise in any way.

But are you right or wrong? Any evidence of such a person existing? Groups and political labels change their membership over time so you can't use those as a proxy for people.

The science and societies of the past were always flawed, and mistaken, they just didn't know better. The science and societies of the present never are wrong or flawed in their thinking.

Always was true always will be.

I think it's cause: 1. Arrogance 2. Dead people take blame very well, and can't really argue back.

Yes and 3. There's an element of group belonging in a collective righteousness. And that's definitely not unique to the present.

> The science and societies of the past were always flawed, and mistaken, they just didn't know better. The science and societies of the present never are wrong or flawed in their thinking.

That's also the reasoning the communists and the National Socialists used in their reasoning; turns out they were faced with the same problems their predecessors had to deal with but they didn't really have better solutions. In the end the people paid because it was more important to save face than to admit being wrong.

Or maybe it’s always true, at least on average over long time spans.

I’ve always thought that if your children think they are wiser than you it means you have been an excellent parent. If they look back with awe at your superior wisdom, it means things got worse and you perhaps failed to leave a legacy.

The logical conclusion of this train of thought is ... not to make policy based on science. Just make the science available, and let people do what they like.

If the plan is to create policies based on "the science", then people will lie about what the science is in order to get their policies into play.

It is hard to convince people with that opener, but the evidence is that it works quite well. One of the interesting tricks about Western democracies is that it channels the fleeting madness of crowds in the most productive direction without trying too hard to suppress it.

Except what are policies supposed to be based on? Replacing "science" with "data" is effectively the same thing. So policies are supposed to be pushed without evoking evidence of their effectiveness? Referencing where such policies have worked elsewhere is referencing experiments

Policies are supposed to be (and inevitably are) designed based on a balance between empirical analysis of their likely effects and a more holistic analysis of what people want. The holistic factors determine what kinds of empirical evidence are relevant and how much of it is required. If someone tells you they've designed a policy based purely on "science" or "data", they've baked in some implicit value judgments, and you've gotta understand what they are to properly evaluate the policy.

> If the plan is to create policies based on "the science", then people will lie about what the science is in order to get their policies into play.

Or, in my opinion, more frequently - sincerely adhere to, but not actually understand the science and still push those policies anyway.

I've been more concerned with people who claim that some viewpoint is based on "science" while they actually don't even have a surface level understanding of it and whether it's been twisted to support a particular viewpoint. For the sufficiently hardheaded and ignorant, "science" is another form of religion and one-word conversation stopper.

More of a comment, no suggested solution.

I think part of it is that different conditions that different societies exist in affect what's morally right and wrong. For example, in a secure stable country, the need to fight wars may seem unimportant and you might even think war is morally wrong. But in a country that's constantly under threat of being destroyed by enemies, war is essential to survival, and a conscientious objector would reasonably be seen as morally wrong.

That's an important part, yes. Morals are ideas, and as such evolve in an environment that makes them thrive, with the ones more adapted to the situation gaining more weight. If only because a population led by maladjusted ideas will disappear.

Ideally, scientific facts thrive by surviving to experiments that fail to disprove them, but this does not exclude them entirely from that dynamic of social evolution. What experiments are performed is decided on the basis of what is desirable to investigate, according to the beliefs of the type of research that is deemed appropriate.

> "The biggest problem from my PoV is that people seem like they are always absolutely sure that the contemporary understanding of morals is actually correct, unlike the primitive beliefs of the past, and that there's nothing left to challenge."

If they claim to be on the left, point out to them that that type of worldview is actually a form of conservatism. Quoting from Wikipedia, "Traditionalist conservatism places a strong emphasis on the notions of custom, convention, and tradition." and note that "customs [and] convention" is the same as the "social norms" argument trotted out by the modern left to defend their activities.

I don't get it, what is that supposed to do?

"Owning the libs", in a way that won't actually change their minds, but will make the speaker feel smarter and righter.

In other words, nothing useful.

What do you do if they claim to be on the right? Or if they claim that they're not political at all, they're just stating facts? (Genuinely asking!)

For the right, conservatism is their schtick so there's no criticism to be made. One can (and should) disagree with their beliefs but the contents of the box is exactly what the label says it is, so to speak.

It's the new left who claim to be on the side of liberals but whose continue to espouse illiberal beliefs that need to be called out as to what they are.

Sorry, what does "Traditionalist conservatism places a strong emphasis on the notions of custom, convention, and tradition." have to do with the left?

If what you are trying to say is that what's new and modern today will someday, probably sooner then later, be old and "normed" tomorrow, then yes...absolutely this will be the case.

This understanding is the basis of the Right's "slippery slope" argument...that in normalizing behaviors today that yesterday were considered "wrong", they tomorrow can we expect ever more and more outrageous behaviors to follow this same template?

The answer is, of course, yes.

It is my belief that many, if not most, people believe themselves to having never changed their opinion, even though they have done so many times. To admit to yourself that you once were wrong is to admit that you were imperfect; it is easier to believe that you have always thought what you currently believe.

And, consequently, if you have never changed opinions, your current understanding of things must therefore be correct and unchanging, and policy can be written and implemented with this assumption.

In a way, it is the antithesis of science.

> and that there's nothing left to challenge.

Also, I would add that history is not linear, it’s not the progressive challenging of old prejudices.

Sometimes, in our efforts to strive for better morals, we make terrible mistakes. Phrenology come to mind, but there could be many other examples.

Both past societies and current ones contain contradictory points of view. There was always conflict between people of opposing opinions. They were always people who broke contemporary moral codes, either for money, power or profit or idealism.

There were always sociopaths or people who were cruel for fun.

As in, here you are attacking strawman.

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