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What's the antidote for anecdotes?
These are just a few issues I've been thinking of recently, but didn't get a chance to write about until now, all combined into one post.
1. Hey, more crap from Sarah Palin! Does she really expect anyone (except possibly Joe Six-Pack, who's probably a Leno fan) to believe that David Letterman intended to make a joke about statutory rape? Sure, the jokes weren't all that funny, but we're talking about Letterman, not Howard Stern. Besides, even if the age weren't a factor, how would it make any SENSE to joke about Willow being promiscuous? She's not the one with the reputation! But Palin thinks Letterman was insulting to all young women, and that there's a double standard as far as people feeling free to make fun of her family and not Obama's. You know, it's really not fair to complain about that when you kept trying to use your kids as political stepping stones. But then, is anyone surprised by the fact that someone who asked about getting library books banned would be the sort who'd go around looking for something to be offended by?
2. I'm not sure why I'm bothered by the idea of Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman dating.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bethje thinks I'm jealous, but it's not like I would want to date Amanda, as cool as I think she is. Maybe I just prefer it when celebrities date non-celebrities. I'm not really all that surprised by how celebrity relationships are always failing, because I think a lot of them are just people living out their fantasies because they can. You know, the "I've always thought Neil's writing is cool, so now that I'm famous too, we can go out!" way of thinking. Since they're both active on the Internet and there's a very slim chance they might see this, I should point out that this quite possibly isn't how it is with Amanda and Neil. It's just kind of where my mind goes, I guess. Besides, isn't he a little too old for her? Eh, whatever.
3. One question that constantly comes up at the Monster-Mania Conventions is what the stars think of remakes, to which there are a variety of answers. From my somewhat geeky viewpoint, I think a lot of it comes down to how important the details are, since it's the details that tend to get changed from one version to another. You can talk about originality, and I know I've done that myself from time to time, but I don't think lack of originality in the film industry is anything new. I believe there was a shorter turnaround time for remaking movies back in the early days of the cinema, and films are typically based on SOMETHING, be it a book, a video game, another movie, an actual event, or what have you. Originality is kind of a tricky thing to define, because what constitutes a new idea? But, well, I remember mentioning in an earlier post that all the different versions of The Wizard of Oz are kind of annoying. It's cool that L. Frank Baum's story has reached traditional fairy tale status, but it's also kind of a shame. I see Oz as a quite well-realized fantasy land, and when Dorothy and the Scarecrow are reduced to archetypes, it's sort of like someone is showing disrespect for my old friends. On the other hand, most classic fairy tales had a bunch of different versions anyway. If there are old takes on Cinderella where she gets her fancy clothes from a fish, a godmother, and a tree, coming up with new takes on the tale is basically taking place in the same tradition in which the story was originally spread. Or maybe it's more a matter of a remake being a better idea when the original had some gaps that could be filled in. I don't know. Bringing this idea back to horror movies, I don't think Friday the 13th needed to be remade, and I didn't care for the remake itself. Still, I don't really see it as disrespecting the franchise, since it was already kind of a mess. I mean, Part 9 had Jason possessing people's bodies and finally getting dragged down to Hell at the end, then the next one had him mysteriously back in his own body to be frozen and end up in space. Nightmare on Elm Street was, I think, a somewhat more coherent narrative, with each film building off the last. I guess Freddy's Dead was only sort of related to the others, but it was still consistent, as far as I can recall. Hence, the idea of a Nightmare remake bothers me a bit more, since it would presumably mean changing things the fans have come to know. Sort of like the new Star Trek, I guess, although at least that was a good movie.
4. Also at Monster-Mania, Bruce Campbell told a story about how he was filming a movie in Romania, and everyone but him refused to wear their seatbelts, claiming that they'd heard of a case where people were thrown from a car and lived, while the ones buckled up in the car died. That got me to thinking about how an odd condition of the human mind is that, while most of us are probably aware that you can't really prove things with anecdotal evidence, yet we're totally swayed by it anyway (and I certainly don't exclude myself from this). After all, statistics are difficult to digest, while anecdotes provide situations that we can totally imagine.
5. That actually ties in with another issue I was thinking about recently, which is the current trend of not having children vaccinated. A few years ago, I would have figured vaccination was just as basic for a young child as giving them a name and clothes to wear. Avoiding vaccination is apparently pretty popular nowadays, though. Beth also told me that there are a fair number of people these days who think they can get pregnant without gaining any weight, which at first glance strikes me as a blatant contradiction to the basic laws of physics. I believe some pregnant women DO actually lose weight (for instance, I think Rosemary did when she was pregnant with the spawn of Satan), but it's hardly normal. All I can say is, if you somehow manage to have a baby with no mass, you'd better get him or her vaccinated! I wouldn't want to lose such a biological miracle to the measles! Seriously, though, I think part of the rationale involved in avoiding immunization is the anecdotal evidence thing ("Hey, I heard of someone who became autistic because of a booster shot!"), although in this case I'm not even sure the anecdotes are true. And I've actually seen some people show their complete ignorance of how the immune system works, saying that doctors are pumping people full of disease. Well, sort of, but that's missing some key points, isn't it?
1. Hey, more crap from Sarah Palin! Does she really expect anyone (except possibly Joe Six-Pack, who's probably a Leno fan) to believe that David Letterman intended to make a joke about statutory rape? Sure, the jokes weren't all that funny, but we're talking about Letterman, not Howard Stern. Besides, even if the age weren't a factor, how would it make any SENSE to joke about Willow being promiscuous? She's not the one with the reputation! But Palin thinks Letterman was insulting to all young women, and that there's a double standard as far as people feeling free to make fun of her family and not Obama's. You know, it's really not fair to complain about that when you kept trying to use your kids as political stepping stones. But then, is anyone surprised by the fact that someone who asked about getting library books banned would be the sort who'd go around looking for something to be offended by?
2. I'm not sure why I'm bothered by the idea of Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman dating.
bethje thinks I'm jealous, but it's not like I would want to date Amanda, as cool as I think she is. Maybe I just prefer it when celebrities date non-celebrities. I'm not really all that surprised by how celebrity relationships are always failing, because I think a lot of them are just people living out their fantasies because they can. You know, the "I've always thought Neil's writing is cool, so now that I'm famous too, we can go out!" way of thinking. Since they're both active on the Internet and there's a very slim chance they might see this, I should point out that this quite possibly isn't how it is with Amanda and Neil. It's just kind of where my mind goes, I guess. Besides, isn't he a little too old for her? Eh, whatever.3. One question that constantly comes up at the Monster-Mania Conventions is what the stars think of remakes, to which there are a variety of answers. From my somewhat geeky viewpoint, I think a lot of it comes down to how important the details are, since it's the details that tend to get changed from one version to another. You can talk about originality, and I know I've done that myself from time to time, but I don't think lack of originality in the film industry is anything new. I believe there was a shorter turnaround time for remaking movies back in the early days of the cinema, and films are typically based on SOMETHING, be it a book, a video game, another movie, an actual event, or what have you. Originality is kind of a tricky thing to define, because what constitutes a new idea? But, well, I remember mentioning in an earlier post that all the different versions of The Wizard of Oz are kind of annoying. It's cool that L. Frank Baum's story has reached traditional fairy tale status, but it's also kind of a shame. I see Oz as a quite well-realized fantasy land, and when Dorothy and the Scarecrow are reduced to archetypes, it's sort of like someone is showing disrespect for my old friends. On the other hand, most classic fairy tales had a bunch of different versions anyway. If there are old takes on Cinderella where she gets her fancy clothes from a fish, a godmother, and a tree, coming up with new takes on the tale is basically taking place in the same tradition in which the story was originally spread. Or maybe it's more a matter of a remake being a better idea when the original had some gaps that could be filled in. I don't know. Bringing this idea back to horror movies, I don't think Friday the 13th needed to be remade, and I didn't care for the remake itself. Still, I don't really see it as disrespecting the franchise, since it was already kind of a mess. I mean, Part 9 had Jason possessing people's bodies and finally getting dragged down to Hell at the end, then the next one had him mysteriously back in his own body to be frozen and end up in space. Nightmare on Elm Street was, I think, a somewhat more coherent narrative, with each film building off the last. I guess Freddy's Dead was only sort of related to the others, but it was still consistent, as far as I can recall. Hence, the idea of a Nightmare remake bothers me a bit more, since it would presumably mean changing things the fans have come to know. Sort of like the new Star Trek, I guess, although at least that was a good movie.
4. Also at Monster-Mania, Bruce Campbell told a story about how he was filming a movie in Romania, and everyone but him refused to wear their seatbelts, claiming that they'd heard of a case where people were thrown from a car and lived, while the ones buckled up in the car died. That got me to thinking about how an odd condition of the human mind is that, while most of us are probably aware that you can't really prove things with anecdotal evidence, yet we're totally swayed by it anyway (and I certainly don't exclude myself from this). After all, statistics are difficult to digest, while anecdotes provide situations that we can totally imagine.
5. That actually ties in with another issue I was thinking about recently, which is the current trend of not having children vaccinated. A few years ago, I would have figured vaccination was just as basic for a young child as giving them a name and clothes to wear. Avoiding vaccination is apparently pretty popular nowadays, though. Beth also told me that there are a fair number of people these days who think they can get pregnant without gaining any weight, which at first glance strikes me as a blatant contradiction to the basic laws of physics. I believe some pregnant women DO actually lose weight (for instance, I think Rosemary did when she was pregnant with the spawn of Satan), but it's hardly normal. All I can say is, if you somehow manage to have a baby with no mass, you'd better get him or her vaccinated! I wouldn't want to lose such a biological miracle to the measles! Seriously, though, I think part of the rationale involved in avoiding immunization is the anecdotal evidence thing ("Hey, I heard of someone who became autistic because of a booster shot!"), although in this case I'm not even sure the anecdotes are true. And I've actually seen some people show their complete ignorance of how the immune system works, saying that doctors are pumping people full of disease. Well, sort of, but that's missing some key points, isn't it?
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This is actually a really typical reasoning fallacy, that seems to have very little to do with how intelligent people are. We learned about it in cognitive psychology, I can't remember what it was called but it's one of many short-cut heuristics that we use to make decisions because it's easier for our brain to do than actually sorting out the various possibilities and likelihoods. The other one I remember that was very interesting is that people tend to think the conjunction of similar characteristics is more likely than each characteristic individually (ie- it's more likely that someone be a vegetarian and an animal rights activist than just a vegetarian) which is logically impossible (in almost all cases, I guess unless the two things always occurred together), but apparently doesn't sway our minds too much. That is one of the root causes of stereotyping. Cognitive Psyche was an excellent class.
And re:vaccinating, it's a pretty complicated issue. Many things that they vaccinate against are *really* uncommon in this country, so parents are right that you are more likely to have a serious vaccine reaction (and these can include death or permanent disability) than to catch the disease in some instances. Of course the *reason* the illnesses are so uncommon is because of vaccination- so in effect we are asking parents to potentially sacrifice their child for the good of society. I think the American psyche has a hard time with the idea of social responsibilities trumping individual well being. We are going to vaccinate, but on a more spread out schedule, and we are probably going to skip a few things or delay a few that I think are not very important. They vaccinate newborn babies against hepatitis B which is a sexually transmitted disease, just to catch the few babies who might be at risk for maternal-fetal transmission. So I definitely think there is something to be said for making informed decisions about vaccines, while still participating in the social contract that lets us not worry about polio and such.
vaccination
I think you are onto something there.
MMR is good for society, and for someone else's baby, and as long as enough people around you vaccinate, your kid is safe even if not vaccinated.
It is gonna take a serious outbreak based on thousands of fearful, ill-informed parents refusing to take part in the risks of vaccination before people start taking this shit seriously.
Before vaccinations, antibiotics, and indoor plumbing, people died early, and they died from infectious diseases. The modern plague of death-by-heart-attack is the direct result of more people not dying of rubella, polio, small-pox, etc. And any previous lethality stats on these diseases? They rely on measurements of populations who were to some degree non-naive, because the vaccination hadn't been invented when they were kids.
This means when these diseases run loose again, way more people are gonna die of them. Healthy people. Like you and me. Are gonna get these diseases and die of them when a schedule vaccinations could have prevented the whole mess.
Here's the last thing I don't get - we have been vaccinating for this crap since the 60's. We all got vaccinated, hundreds of thousands of us, wave after wave of kids, for decade after decade, and just now this vaccine-induced autism is hitting us?
Really? Just now? Hm.
Let's grant that mercury-based preservatives are a bad idea in general. Mercury is a nerve toxin. But if medical studies can't consistently find a correlation between thimerisol and autism, or the vaccines and autism, what does that tell you?
It tells me this: no matter how much they love them, the lives of people who have autistic children are ruined to some extent. I know that's harsh, but they have kids who are life-long burdens in a way normal kids are not. They recognize this, and they're angry for their kids, and they want some easy-to-control, discrete event that explains it. Ah, Johnny started falling apart after that vaccination.
Parents of normal kids see it, too, and they want an easy-to-control single event they can avoid to prevent it happening to their kids and their lives. Vaccines fit the need very neatly. It is even has a demonizable external source, the government. All I have to do to be a good mom on this one is resist the evil government and evil medical establishment; I can do that. I have some control over the bad things that might happen to my kids. It relieves my fear.
Under the surface is this kind of thinking:
If the problem is the cumulative effect of 150 years of industrial pollution getting into the food chain, if we have finally been presented the biological bill for our consumerism, I have no control over that, so it can't be that. I just can't bear the thought that that might be the problem. It also might point back to me, to my SUV, my liberal use of bug spray in our house, and weed-killer outside. I mean, bug spray is safe, right?
Vaccine avoidance is about fear relief, not about science.
Re: vaccination
As far as the difference between generational styles of trusting or not trusting the government vaccination program, back in the early polio vaccine days there were hundreds, maybe thousands of instances of illness - and more than a few deaths - directly caused by polio vaccine. Very little backlash from the parents in the US on the vaccine program. Just saying...
Re: vaccination
Thimerosol, hell, I used to clean up broken thermometers with a my fingers and a paper towel. I clearly remember chasing droplets around the bathroom tiling, getting them to join into one big blob to make it easier to get off the floor. No wonder I'm batty.
I probably licked the radium off watch faces, too, for all I know. Sheesh.
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Also, chicken pox is not like measles - it's a herpes virus, which means that once you get it, it is incorporated into your nervous system, and you can start creating the virus again at a later date. That's what causes shingles. Any virus that get incorporated into your genes and can come back later to screw with you is bad news. Ask AIDs patients with dormant CMV infections in their brains.
So optimally, you would never want be exposed to chicken pox, ever. Unless the chicken pox vaccine provides immunity without it incorporating in a form that can reproduce later?
I understand why parents are nervous, too. I wasn't saying they shouldn't be nervous; I'm saying the fear of the vaccine isn't a rationally-based one, because most of the time, they have no adverse effects. Fear for your kids makes you irrational, makes you overestimate dangers and furiously try to be 110% sure about everything in their lives. Which is how it should be, us being mammals and all. I'm not arguing that.
What I'm saying is that with all kinds of risks we introduce our kids to, we use a ballpark estimation of the likelihood of harm, and then proceed if the perceived harm likelihood is low, but fear really messes with our estimators. We drive around in cars with our kids, for instance, and pretend that a safety seat removes the risk. Morbidity and morality stats for cars say otherwise, but buying and using the car seat alleviates our anxiety by promoting the idea that we are controlling the risk, so the decision to use it is based on how much it reduces our fear, not on some rational judgement that "car-seats reduce mortality 22%" or something like that.
Another example: When polio vaccines were first available, nervous parents were lining up to get their kids treated, because it reduced their perception of probable harm. They could see what happened when polio struck. The adverse effects of polio were so randomly severe, that even if it wasn't highly communicable, the risk was perceived as huge. Fear's inflationary properties at work. NAmerican parents today grew up in a world without epidemics (except those who know HIV+ people) that pass easily from person to person and cause death or grave disability, so they have a lack of fear about plagues. It's an example of the complement - no direct experience of epidemics leads to an irrational underestimation of risk.
Hey, we now have a group of kids to use as a control group, in fact! They aren't even in the radical agrarian groups, like the Amish. Lots of middle-class parents are opting out, so look forward to control groups of kids who never had vaccination#1.
Re: vaccination
Heh, except they are an anti-control group, since they all have certain things in common (and probably lots of little things) that made them decide not to vaccinate.
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*puts cynic hat on*
Because there is a non-zero chance that this is as much about publicity and attention-whoring as romance?
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You don't say? :)
Neil's too old for Ms Palmer; he still has a chance if she comes to her senses.
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Seriously, I think I was already jealous of Neil. He's friends with Tori Amos, and collaborated with Terry Pratchett, for Odin's sake.