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Comment by delinka | Hacker News Reader

Summary: can't outlaw Scientology, can't legally compel vaccinations. I'm against Scientology, I'm for vaccination. Neither of the opinions should ever be codified into law.

I'm pretty certain vaccination isn't "the law." The only thing compelling anyone to have their children vaccinated are the rules (not laws) for public education (keep in mind: I'm in the US and public school systems differ from county to county in my own state.) You're not required to send your children to public school; they can allow vaccination exceptions on a case-by-case basis ... there's a good amount of freedom here.

That said, I want my children vaccinated. And in the rare medical cases where they can't be vaccinated, I want to know they're safe from people who might carry a life-threatening disease (i.e. others who aren't vaccinated.) It's a tough balance, but the socially responsible thing is to vaccinate, or avoid diverse social contact (such as ... public school.)

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There's a reason these freedoms are protected. They're not just axioms of a society. Most of them stem from one very strong principle: if you don't have and extremely good reason to know something, then you can't prohibit the alternatives, because you may be prohibiting improvements. And in the long run, it's better to have 9 people fail and one succeed than to have 10 people do nothing new.

But you can have laws that guide behavior. Those 9 people who will fail? You can learn the lesson about that failure and make it illegal to fail in the same way. For instance, at one time, you were free to beat your children, because nobody really knew that it wasn't the most effective way to teach them. But if you have overwhelming evidence that it doesn't work, then you can make it illegal. You still have the freedom to choose how to raise your children, you just can't do it in obviously failure-prone ways.

So yeah, you can outlaw (parts of) scientology and legally compel vaccinations when those actions are shown to definitively run counter to the justification of those freedoms in the first place. You are not free to make clear and obvious mistakes. Take any safety law as an example.

The only thing you really need is proof.

A nitpick: you are of course free to make any costly mistake if it only affects you and no one else.

Various safety laws protect innocent bystanders from mistakes other people make, e.g. losing control of a car due to excessive speed or alcohol intake, or spreading a virus.

The fact that tax money is spent on various social protection things, like health care, allows to legally limit one's apparently personal choices, like smoking, that increase the tax money spending due to those choices. Such is the nature of most, if not any, tax-funded welfare features.

There are very few costly mistakes that only affect you, though. I actually can't think of a single one.

Emergency healthcare is a public resource (you can only handle X patients per unit time) and it's a costly one. I would bet that most safety laws are forcing you to protect yourself by way of doing simple things that lower public medical costs. Even if you commit suicide, someone has to clean up your remains and deal with the potentially dangerous bio-materials.

Yes, you are free to do things that hurt only you, but good luck finding anything that does.

Why, damaging or destroying your property, or entering an utterly disastrous but legal contract can be examples, both pretty wide categories.

There are limits on those things, though. You can't burn your house down. You can't live in filth. You can't strip mine your land or pollute it. And you can get thrown in jail for failing to fulfill certain contracts, so it can be indirectly illegal. There's also fraud: you can't lie to enter a contract you know you can't fulfill. And it should be illegal to exploit people by offering them contracts they can't be expected to fulfill, even if it currently isn't.

Sure, I can just smash up my stuff or start a risky business. But the reason for that is that there isn't proof that what I'm doing constitutes failure. (They could be very educational activities.)

Just be careful to dispose of what's left of your property in a proper fashion (some electronic components are dangerous for the environment if you just throw them with your other trash).

Also, when you inevitably fail to uphold that contract, consider settling instead of fighting it in court to reduce costs to the justice system.

> The fact that tax money is spent on various social protection things, like health care, allows to legally limit one's apparently personal choices, like smoking, that increase the tax money spending due to those choices. Such is the nature of most, if not any, tax-funded welfare features.

This is a logical fallacy - smokers cost much less in terms of healthcare than healthy people. Mostly they die relatively young. Elder and end-of-life care is drastically reduced, and that is the biggest healthcare cost in most people's lives. If you lived to be 80 as a non-smoker, you would probably cost factors more than a smoker who died at 60-70, even with only a few years of end-of-life care.

Which is one of the reasons so many people oppose government administered healthcare(At least in the US). Once the government is financially responsible for your healthcare, it has a legitimate stake in regulating the lifestyle decisions that you make.

For example, if the overwhelming evidence shows that consuming pork results in increased healthcare costs over time, the government has a compelling interest to prohibit the consumption of pork or since we know unequivocally that use of tobacco results in increased costs for healthcare, (as you mentioned)the government has already taken steps to limit its use but has not yet gone to far as to prohibit it (in large part) because the tax revenues collected on its sale are not inconsequential.

Coming from a social democracy I think the main difference in viewpoint is that the downward spiral has to stop somewhere because otherwise the damage not just to a person but to society can be too great - e.g. see communist revolutions. Letting whole families go bankrupt because of a medical issue is counterproductive even just using capitalistic values. Long term you want people to be prosperous enough to buy your stuff and educated enough to create value. Too many pressures towards negative social mobility is therefore a net loss for society. Thus you can simply regard social health care and social services as an investment towards future growth.

It's legal to beat your children in the US. It would be incredibly controversial and a major change to the legal status of parenthood for it to be otherwise.

> Neither of the opinions should ever be codified into law.

There's a really good reason to make vaccines mandatory/heavily incentivized however, which is because you need a certain critical portion of the population to get them before they really are effective at reducing the spread of a particular disease.

If, say, only 10% of the population is vaccinated against polio then there will always be plenty of people around that the disease can spread to. Those 10% won't get polio, but it doesn't really benefit society as a whole. On the other hand, if 95% of people are vaccinated then the disease will have a very hard time spreading and [ideally] can be completely eradicated. Even the un-vaccinated 5% benefit since their chances of exposure are much lower. Assuming you agree that vaccines are harmless (I realize some people don't, nor are they totally without negative side effects), it's in the best interest of society as a whole to vaccinate widely.

As for Scientology: There's a distinction between the faith and a specific organization.

It's entirely possible to crush the Church of Scientology, the specific organization, without outlawing the Scientology faith. That's both legally possible and possible to imagine, even though a lot of people seem hard-pressed to understand the distinction I'm drawing here.

Which leads into another idea some people seem unable to grasp: Being a cult is a property of some specific organization, not a belief system.

If I recall correctly, those who study such things have a formal definition of "cult". It doesn't just mean "new religion", or "weird religion", or "religion I don't like".

From memory, there are four parts of the definition. First is aberrant theology. That is a property of the belief system. Second is emphasis on "you must be part of our group". That's a property of the organization. Third is that they are heavy on control of their members. Again, that's a property of the organization. And I don't remember what the fourth thing was, just that there were four of them.

The number of points defining a cult change depending on who you ask, but from my experience they all have this in common - whatever the definition you take, Roman Catholic Church is definitely a cult under them. Some companies too, likely. Or pretty much any organization formed by people who decided to approach some issue seriously. Hell, haven't you heard that Hacker News itself is a cult, and pg is its leader? Or Less Wrong and Eliezer.

Of course, it is useful to have a concept to describe organizations centered around some bullshit beliefs, that lure people in and then harm them, but it is very hard to make a definition (especially for the "bullshit beliefs" part), partially because a lot of features assigned to cults are in fact features of efficient organizations. You have to evaluate beliefs and intent on a case-by-case basis.

There's a fair amount of research into cult psychology and working definitions of a cult.

Here's an informal example:

http://www.neopagan.net/ABCDEF.html

It takes a lot more than bullshit beliefs. In fact it's not about beliefs at all, so much as exploitative, manipulative, controlling behaviours.

IMO HN really doesn't qualify. Nor does Less Wrong. YC may have culty tendencies, but it's still quite a way short.

Some businesses and startups are close to the edge, and a few are probably on the wrong side of it.

Scientology certainly qualifies. (I suspect people who haven't looked into it have little idea just how incredibly weird Scientology is as an org, never mind as a belief system.)

So do some churches.

The hard part isn't finding cults, it's working out how damaging the experience is. I know a couple of people who spent a lot of time volunteering for a cult in California. The leader was a genuinely dangerous psychopath and exploiter, but they don't seem to mind because they never met him personally, most of the people they met were nice, and it's where they met each other.

That may be unusual, but cults often collect curious, generous, and rather insecure people who are herded and abused by a few crazies. So it may not be that unusual to have a good experience, as long as you can avoid becoming a toy/servant/sex slave/cash cow for the leadership.

Creating all of the above is the true aim of every cult. The bullshit beliefs are just the window dressing.

Or, even more specifically, we could patch the rules regarding "voluntary" donations to religious-affiliated organizations so that people cannot receive any material or social (rank within the church, respect from congregation, etc.) benefit for having donated. Require that all donations to religious organizations be anonymous, for example. This would wipe out the "attack vector" the Scientology organization uses to stay so large and powerful overnight (nobody would be allowed to follow those "donate $x to become level N+1 in the church" strictures), without really materially affecting the faith, or doing much to any other organization that doesn't raise money that way.

> that people cannot receive any material or social (... respect from congregation, etc.)

That seems totally impossible. People donate for social prestige all the time (those silly bricks with people's names on them, placards in classrooms, etc. wouldn't exist otherwise)

Yes, but this would specifically outlaw the organization recognizing donations only if the organization was also considered religious-affiliated (i.e. getting the particular tax breaks a church gets.) You could still donate to regular charities, companies, etc.

(And before you say "but then the religion would just create a separate charity for people to donate to, which would recognize people with some sort of token, and then the church could acknowledge people who have that token": creating a shell company to avoid a restriction on commerce like that is pretty much the definition of money laundering!)

I want my kids vaccinated too. But I did wait until they were older to do it. It's not because I'm on-board with anti-vaxer ideology either. I had a very personal experience with vaccines and it made me cautious.

My younger brother (by 7 years) had a 5 hour screaming fit and siezures after getting a vaccination (don't remember which one, I was only 8 or 9). It's one of the clearest memories from that time period that I have. Me standing on the landing, Ian convulsing below just inside the front door, my dad and mom holding him down and trying to keep him from hurting himself.

I know now that it's something like a 1 in 14000 chance but I'm glad that we waited an extra year to start vaccinations and I'm glad we weren't forced to start on someone elses schedule and I'm glad that year of being nervous about measles or whooping cough is over too.

I'm sincerely glad you waited until they were older so you could maximize your chances of getting your kids infected with previously eradicated diseases.

You are the problem, and you should feel bad. Unless there is an explicit medical reason why (your child is legitimately allergic to the contents of the vaccine) there is no good reason to not vaccinate your child immediately. You are in the same crowd as the anti-vaxxers, because you're afraid of some 1 in 14000 boogeyman. Do you not drive your car because you're very likely to be seriously injured in the process of doing it? Your idea of waiting until they were older is absolutely just as ridiculous.

Just to clarify, you should never hold someone having a seizure. You should clear out things they could hurt themselves with, but never hold them. I see clearly that smart decisions runs in your entire family. I seriously hope you didn't hurt your children's health by getting them vaccinated later in life.

AFAIK, pieman's brother's seizure could have been related to some genetic trait or environmental exposure that could have been in pieman's kids too. Even if the population risk is 1/14000, I'd put the risk in his own kids significantly higher than that - maybe 1/1000.

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can tell me that no, there's no chance seizures like that are going to run in the family. But knowing what I currently know, I can't fault pieman.

As far as I know it is genetic. There was a study done in Denmark I believe that showed a strong correlation between febrile siezures after the MMR vaccine and a couple of genetic markers. My searching is failing me or I'd link it.

Edit: here it is: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v46/n12/full/ng.3129.html Notice that is was published less than a year ago.

It illustrates the point well, though. Even if the chance of complication is minuscule, making the activity absolutely compulsory without recourse is still an unjust, potentially crippling intervention on the individuals who are affected.

I don't see anyone advocating that pedestrians be outlawed and making operating a vehicle compulsory, is the critical difference here.

Do you make every decision in your life because it seems like a sure bet? In fact today I bet you could go out and pick a couple of stocks which seem a sure bet for your life savings and invest in them in the hopes of seriously increasing your wealth, but I highly doubt you will.

A better analogy would be someone else betting your life's savings without your approval or knowledge.

Is there some type of a constant and ongoing epidemic in the US?...

Where un-vaccinated people are dying at a rate greater than the reported illnesses (and deaths) caused by vaccines?

> can't legally compel vaccinations

vaccionation is about public health. Certain diseases could reappear if you don't vaccinate, and you'd pass that onto other people.

It stops being a personal decision when it affects the health of others, and the state must intervene.

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