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A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

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Re: A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

#51
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "generally" is the important one in your sentence. Genes don't know what environment they will be born into, and so they include various strategies to cope with the unknown in the hope that some will survive. Generally, humans are better suited to stable and safe environments. But it would be irresponsible of genes not to include, occasionally, humans who did better in chaos because chaos frequently happens.

I believe there was a study that showed a mix of behaviors because populations with cooperative individuals out-compete in plentiful times and selfish individuals out-compete in scarce times. Hard to Google now because of selfish gene theory.

D.S. Wilson did a lot of work in that area.

Re: A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

#52
post #2

It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here. The history of that movement is long. Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking. I think there's a certain amount of cherry-picking going on with th…

> It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here. The history of that movement is long.

> Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.

No, I don't think that's true. Humans are built to learn from experience, and one thing that vaccines do is eliminate the experiences that justify their use. That also makes the experience/knowledge of smaller dangers more prominent. For instance, a kid getting his arm paralyzed from the (now discontinued) live oral polio vaccine, looks a lot different if people are commonly getting worse paralysis from wild polio than if no one is getting wild polio at all anymore.

The other thing you should probably take into account when regarding a book from 1929, is the experiences people had back then with (often dangerous) quack cures promising miracles. For instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and_Drug_A...):

> By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products which had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, the mascara Lash lure, which caused blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law was unable to get through Congress for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.

Re: A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here. Not surprising. I look at vaccines the same way as I look at any new medication: has it been tested long enough to know what the long-term effects of it are, and do the benefits outweigh the risks. I don't have a problem with MMR, TB and other common vaccines, that have been around for decades. If I'm traveling to East Africa I'm going to get a yell…

> If that makes me an anti-vaxxer, so be it. Don't really care. I'm pretty sure setting a personal bar/risk tradeoff that lets you take a significant number of vaccines doesn't make you an anti-vaxxer.

That's the rational response, but in practice what we saw is that anyone who questioned the Covid vaccine was instantly labeled anti-vax. It didn't matter if they were fine with all other vaccines. It didn't matter if they just had Covid or had a complicating pre-existing condition. Anything less than full acceptance was shut down as anti-vax. They ruined the anti-vax label which was previously useful.

Re: A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

#54
post #43
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it about vaccines? Lots of anti-vaxxers are fine with other kinds of drugs and use them liberally, even in many cases street drugs. They'll eat fast food, processed food, use household chemicals, do all kinds of other things that expose them to things they don't understand and may not be good for them, but vaccines are just the devil incarnate. The word vaccine seems to provoke a visceral gut reaction among a…

A lot of is the abuse of the label anti-vaxxer. It's being misapplied to people who aren't against vaccine technology. RFK, who is vaccinated along with his children: "I’ve been fighting 40 years to get mercury out of fish. Nobody calls me anti-fish."

Can you explain what you mean by "people who aren't against vaccine technology?" I'm not sure I follow given that RFK has explicitly said he is against vaccines and that no vaccines are safe and effective. [0]

===In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.===

===“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.===

===That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”===

[0] https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-preside...

Re: A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

#55
post #37
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it about vaccines? Lots of anti-vaxxers are fine with other kinds of drugs and use them liberally, even in many cases street drugs. They'll eat fast food, processed food, use household chemicals, do all kinds of other things that expose them to things they don't understand and may not be good for them, but vaccines are just the devil incarnate. The word vaccine seems to provoke a visceral gut reaction among a…

Of course, in the pandemic we saw extreme versions of this. Anything to avoid vaccination, but ivermectin and other risky drugs were no problem. If vaccination would be alternative medicine and ivermection government mandated, we might see the reverse. So I don't think its vaccination perse, at least not on its own, but vaccines have various things going against them. Like someone else in this thread said, government…

> Anything to avoid vaccination, but ivermectin and other risky drugs were no problem.

This sort of language makes problems worse and even further decreases trust.

Casting a wide net and calling ivermectin a "risy drug" when a quick search engine query will show it is used safely in humans as an antiparasite drug. When someone who is skeptical about vaccines reads these sorts of blatant falsehoods why in the world would they believe anything else you say?

If you wanted to warn people against using forms formulated for animal consumption then you could've just said that, instead you painted with a wide brush which justifies someone to not trust you.

Re: A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

#56
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My body my choice? If being pregnant was contagious, we'd treat it as a very different issue.

[flagged]

Your right to bodily autonomy must always be balanced with your impact on others' rights. You can drink, but you can't drive drunk. You can shoot guns, but not at someone. Example abound in our society.

Re: A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here. Not surprising. I look at vaccines the same way as I look at any new medication: has it been tested long enough to know what the long-term effects of it are, and do the benefits outweigh the risks. I don't have a problem with MMR, TB and other common vaccines, that have been around for decades. If I'm traveling to East Africa I'm going to get a yell…

> If that makes me an anti-vaxxer, so be it. Don't really care. I'm pretty sure setting a personal bar/risk tradeoff that lets you take a significant number of vaccines doesn't make you an anti-vaxxer.

I think anti-vaxxer is painted with a much wider brush than that, and somehow become automatically equivalent to "anti-science"; there is overlap but there's also a lot of non-overlap. Somehow vaccines have become an "all or nothing" proposition which is just as stupid as saying that all medications are created equal.

But in any case, I'm not going to live my life by what labels others put on me.

Re: A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

#58
post #49

> Now, imagine the uproar that might ensue from some corners today if a textbook made this sort of direct comparison between two groups, with one group happening to be white and the other black. Some social justice warriors would no doubt raise an outcry. The book would be branded as Eurocentric, racist, and white supremacist, since it doesn’t give equal space to describing the intellectual achievements of the Zulu o…

Both things can be true, and there are real world examples of attacking western science as eurocentrist and what not. The imagined reaction is based on those criticisms.

Re: A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

#59
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking. That's part of what Tom Nichols has been saying: https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/09/10/democracy-di...

> Our politics has become all about hurting other people, instead of trying to create something positive. We used to go to the polls and say, here’s what I’m voting for. Now we go to the polls to vote against something and we hope it makes others really mad. This feels like a really uncharitable interpretation on what is going on. To me it feels more like you have two sides, the two sides have viewpoints that feel ve…

Also, the loudest voices being amplified online today, along with a political strategy to pursue divisiveness, because it motivates the base to vote, while making unreliable independent votes less likely to vote.

Re: A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

#60
post #52
post #2

It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here. The history of that movement is long. Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking. I think there's a certain amount of cherry-picking going on with th…

> It's amusing to see the early signs of the anti-vax movement here. The history of that movement is long. > Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking. No, I don't think that's true. Humans are built to learn from e…

I had forgotten about the Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, great reminder, thank you.

Humans are adaptive learners, shaped by both individual experience and cultural memory. The rise of anti-vax sentiments might be better explained by psychological and sociological factors. Like mistrust of institutions, the amplification of fringe views via social media, or the cognitive biases that prioritize visible risks over abstract ones.

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