Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Where’s The Harm?

It has been pointed out to me that I’ve been hammering on the theme of people being credulous idiots lately, and at least a few people have asked me what the big deal is. It’s hardly as if willful ignorance is an invention of this new Century; people have been doing things that they know to be harmful to themselves or to the world at large for millennia, and the planet and the human race are both still here. But there were two stories that turned up on the news aggregation sites this week that I think demonstrate that our world really is getting more dangerous – and the penalties for refusing to face the truth are no longer limited to an increased chance of public embarrassment…

First, there was the story on Gizmodo (also mentioned on the Cracked website) about a line of stickers being sold through Gwyneth Paltrow’s website that are purported to somehow promote your health. The ad copy for these things originally claimed that they made use of a material used by NASA for space suits, but once the folks at NASA called shenanigans on that it was toned down to a more generic new-age pseudoscience word-salad. I’m calling this product an extraordinary example of harmful and malignant nonsense, not because there is any reason to believe that affixing stickers to your skin is actually harmful, but because this product sells for up to $120 USD for a package of 24. You could buy quite a lot of vitamins and nutrients for that kind of money, whereas these “health” stickers will do you approximately the same amount of good that you would get from just taking 120 dollar bills and setting them on fire…

The second story was a great deal less light-hearted: CBS News is reporting that the state of Maine has just confirmed its first case of measles in twenty years. There’s no word yet on how many people in the region may have been exposed to the disease, or how many of those people may have refused to vaccinate their children against this completely preventable and potentially fatal disease because a bunch of celebrities appear to have latched onto a single completely-discredited study. We are justified in asking whether any of this would be happening if people weren’t more afraid of a supposedly possible side-effect of the vaccine than they are illnesses that are known to have a non-zero chance of lethality, however…

Now, I will be the first to admit that I have no credentials in medicine or the life sciences, but as a management professional and a student of failure analysis I’ve learned more than I really wanted to about people doing things for the wrong reasons. The fact is that working out and eating well is difficult and time-consuming, whereas slapping a sicker onto your skin is easy. Learning about disease, immunization, public health concerns or statistical probability is hard; taking the word of some celebrity clown on television is easy. Working to make yourself better informed, better equipped, or more capable of dealing with problems is difficult; just believing what you want to believe for no apparent reason is much too easy…

It has been said by people much wiser than I am that belief in conspiracy theories is one of the ultimate ways of dealing with life as just one person among billions in the midst of a world that does not care about any of us. It you believe somebody is trying to trick you, then you believe that they care about you, you see. I would submit that embracing the belief that you know better than people who have spent years in medical school and decades in research is the ultimate way of declaring yourself a person of importance in a faceless society. But it’s also what gets you epidemics of obesity, opiate addiction, poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and diseases that were all but eradicated decades ago…

And if the same idiotic principles are applied to Global Climate Change, Civil Rights, International Relations, Wealth Inequity, Renewable Energy, Nuclear Proliferation, or artificial damage to other aspects of the Earth’s biosphere, then we really could be looking at the end of life as we know it on this planet…

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