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Comment by stevehind | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN, no matter how frustrating something is. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Humans remain humans. Blame the systems that amplify extreme voices.

People are responsible for their own behavior and can make choices. You can make choices. They aren't victims of systems.

Choice is an illusion, it's all just chaos

Choice is an illusion, it's all just an order too big to load into RAM.

The ability to classify any system as chaotic requires an ordered mind against which the system is compared.

Some choices are far too complex for most people to grasp. Some choices require a sense of civic duty and common will.

> Some choices are far too complex for most people to grasp. Some choices require a sense of civic duty and common will.

The results show that humans do a pretty good job and do advance, and do have civic duty (I don't know what "common will" means). IME, the problem is the people who make choices like refusing vaccines and then say humanity is fundamentally incompentent. They have an easy solution!

True but I doubt you’re as immune to persuasion and logical fallacies as your comment suggests. The point remains that we’re all human and will make many mistakes in our lifetime. Our circumstances are a huge part of that.

> Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

— Ad Hominem, 1852

Look how much the world has changed since then!

I think it is fair to say that some aspects of the human condition will never, by definition, change.

That doesn't really assert anything. Many aspects will change dramatically, and often they are aspects that nobody previously imagined possible. The people who believe in change and possibility are the ones who do good things. The question is, what can we change and how much?

When people don't want change, they pull out that parent argument and apply it, through some general claim, and not actually address the issue at hand.

They are both. Theoretically they can make their own choice, but the are also heavily influenced by systems. So people who build, maintain and execute the systems have a large responsibility too.

Only if you can argue free-will exists.

Dang it.

> Blame the systems that amplify extreme voices.

you mean like the voices that pretend that vaccines are 100% effective and have zero side effects?

Please, show us evidence of these voices. Particularly if they are influential. Let’s see the evidence for your claim.

President of the US influential enough for you?

"There’s a simple, basic proposition: If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...

Fair. He should not have used that language.

Hey, why use a new throwaway account? Don’t be a chickenshit. Stand behind your claim. Especially since it’s truthful.

> Don’t be a chickenshit

Kind of rich after asking someone for proof instead of spending 1 minute to google to verify the claim.

Help me improve my Google skills: kindly provide the search term that will bring up evidence of all these voices you have claimed.

Those who ignore scientific methods, get gullible people to not get vaccinated and cause preventable outbreaks and hardship.

"It's not me it's the 'system'". What a weak excuse!

It's not really an excuse if you think about the bigger picture. A sentiment of anti-vaxxers is that pharma and doctors cannot be trusted. And while clearly helping a lot of people, systemic problems with medicine also did a number on people, to pick just one example, consider the Opioid Epidemic in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic

This isn't only a matter of antivaxers. If you're in a country in which Polio has been eradicated, such as the US, double check that you're vaccinated. Various vaccines are no longer recommended because of the virtually nonexistent risk.

I know that Africans receive the TB vaccine as part of our regular schedule, where many developed countries do not.

The Polio vaccine is still administered in the US as standard practice.

TB as well.

As a counter example TB and some meningitis vaccines have been dropped in many EU countries because of cost/benefit, as in not enough of a disease incidence to justify covering the cost of the vaccine.

You can still get them voluntarily but you have to pay from your own pocket.

>Various vaccines are no longer recommended because of the virtually nonexistent risk.

Such as?

From elsewhere in the thread:

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/16/780068006/how-the-oral-polio-...

The other type of polio vaccine is still recommended (and even mandatory in many countries) so there is nothing to be worried about if you take all the recommended vaccines.

smallpox

Smallpox has been eradicated, that's not even virtually nonexistent.

Only risk I see is biological warfare, but why do that with a virus we have a vaccine for?

There are multiple other scenarios where the virus could become released into the wild again: infection by clearing up old storage sites, a laboratory accident, or some terrorist spending 100k US$. And all of these have happened (although the latter was "just" horse pox).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Post-eradication

> anti-vaxxers

Instead of having an uneducated opinion, you should know that polio vaccines can sometimes cause... polio. Yeah, that's not even remotely debated, it's well known:

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/16/780068006/how-the-oral-polio-...

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...

This is a naive and disingenuous description of vdp.

This is misleading fear mongering, the people refusing vaccines are in western developed countries, where they are offered injectable forms of the vaccine.

Refusing free and approved vaccination programmes is anti-social behaviour and a public health hazard.

First off, the reason people refusing vaccines are in western countries is because that's who can afford vaccines. Look at the corona vaccination rates in Africa, then tell me why a 30 year old Westerner needs a fourth dose.

Second, the guy posted an NPR and a CDC link to back up his statement of fact. Both articles provide plenty of context, so accusing him of "misleading fear mongering" is, ironically enough, misleading fear mongering.

> This is misleading fear mongering

Oh so the CDC link is fear mongering? When presented with facts does it feel good to ignore them at convenience ? Cognitive dissonance much?

It is fear mongering because this was an issue, it is no more.

It is fear mongering because this affected OPV and people are only getting vaccinated with injection based polio vaccine for which none of this applies.

Social media at its finest

What most of us consider progress is based on how we manage to spread efficiently as a species, gathering more power and possessions, developing ways to push our inevitable death further away, no matter the cost. Exploit more ressources, other humans, other animals.

And while some of us aren't driven by these things, some always will, and will essentially always capitalize on it. They can take the form of corporations, religious groups, governments... They really are any organised groups. And to make things worse, power is addictive.

It doesn't seem to matter how smart we are, if we zoom out, we're as good as a self destructing virus eating up on its ressources as if it had an infinite supply of it. Following a path driven by greed. Making us a virus that's only smarter at how it gets to the outcome, not at changing the outcome itself.

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