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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