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Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

It is a position that goes against all available data. We should absolutely stigmatize stupidity. People making crowd-harming decisions despite available evidence should be shamed.

People stopped dying because of (their own) stupidity a long time ago. Selection can still occur if we stigmatize bad behaviors enough.

On the other hand, if we don't stigmatize it, people who are innocent of the sin of stupidity will be harmed. That said, selection would also do its good work in this case, just less effectively and with a sadder outcome for all.

The only way to have an intelligent nation that's pushing forward in terms of technological progress is to have a nation that embraces intelligence and shuns nonsensical stupidity.

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You haven't considered the most important part of this: is stigma good at changing behaviours?

If you stigmatise something and shame people for it, you tend to push people underground. At that point rational discourse can't exist because there are social pressures to not reveal the unpopular opinion, and thus discussion doesn't occur.

It's foolish to think that people have stopped dying from stupidity, it happens every day in every country on earth. And it's foolish to think you can cure "the sin" of stupidity by using shame. This doesn't mean we ignore people's bad decisions, but that we must be realistic about the utility of our response.

Right now in Australia, there is a huge gap between indigenous vs. non-indigenous vaccination rates.

Would your strategy be to stigmatize indigenous Australians as stupid, or to stigmatize them in other ways (which ones?) in order to convince them to get vaccinated?

Similar in the US, we have a “vaccine gap” for black and latinx caused by hesitancy/racism. They amazingly don’t trust a system the authorities have been spending a lot of effort telling them is a racist system.

But the media, despite the fact that the most hesitant groups are people of color, have painted a portrait of the vaccine hesitant as bad white people (rural, politically conservative, Christian). So shaming and ridicule have been embraced. The media and most elites, many posters here included, love to hate rural citizens, at least those who they presume to be privileged (ie white). They do not realize they are criticizing the uneducated poor, largely disadvantaged black people in urban areas.

>We should absolutely stigmatize stupidity.

Would that include stigmatizing people who insist on continuing a tactic that quite observably has flipped into being counterproductive?

Do you have some evidence that shaming people changes their behavior?

Here's an obvious one:

As a society, we went from a period of it being socially acceptable to marry ridiculously young girls as an old man to the present day where it's unheard of. People will point to the law being the reason for this, but that's not actually the truth, really. The age of consent isn't really that high; in many states it's unrestricted at sixteen and much lower with loopholes. Also, in many cases, the raising of the age of consent is a historically-recent thing that followed the shaming.

We've managed to (largely) eradicate the case of "man finds a fourteen-to-sixteen year old girl and erases her future by making her responsible for children" in under a hundred years, and it came from shaming, not law.

Has the incidence of this kind of terribleness actually gotten lower, or do people just talk about how awful it is?

I hear a lot of horrible stories about sexual abuse and enslavement in the modern world, so I'm not sure this has actually changed materially. I would be glad to see evidence that it actually has changed.

> "It is a position that goes against all available data. We should absolutely stigmatize stupidity. People making crowd-harming decisions despite available evidence should be shamed."

Is then also stupidity not to force vaccinated people to be tested regularly? "all available data" shows they spread the virus, therefore also being "crowd-harming"?

"How do vaccinated people spread Delta? What the science says"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1

No it doesn't. All available data show that those with natural immunity are immune to covid far more than those with vaccine immunity.

Why should those with natural immunity be stigmatized?

Is this about immunity and getting out of a pandemic or is it about compliance and control or about something else entirely? Should be about the first, to me, and if so, natural immunity should not be stigmatized at all.

“So who is capable of mounting this ‘superhuman’ or ‘hybrid’ immune response?

People who have had a ‘hybrid’ exposure to the virus. Specifically, they were infected with the coronavirus in 2020 and then immunized with mRNA vaccines…” *

Natural immunity is not nearly enough. Everyone should get vaccinated. Those who have had covid should get vaccinated so that they can get a chance of super-human SARS-variants protection. Those who have not caught covid so that they avoid the very high risk of long covid, and of course to reduce their risk of hospitalization by an order of magnitude.

* https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/07/1033677...

You may be confused. At least here in Germany, we (mostly) implement 2G: "Geimpft oder genesen." -- vaccinated or recovered. (Depending on context, "getestet", meaning tested negatively, is also fine.)

So no, "natural immunity" is not treated any differently from "artificial immunity", and it absolutely is about getting out of a pandemic without too many people dying. By the way, there is no difference. Immunity is immunity.

I completely agree with you that shame works. I think people who pretend that shame changes nothing haven't been to Asia. But the world has already shamed these people as much as any group can be shamed in current year; there's not really any higher level of shame that can be given out at this point. The ones remaining are unaffected by shame.

So I'm not saying your plan is ineffective, I'm saying your plan was already executed and finished. That's why we're at 80-something percent instead of what it would have been.

Stupidity is in the eye of the beholder.

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