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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

However it seems the majority of anti-vaxxers are liberals

Fear and ignorance don't respect party lines. There's things liberal people are likely to be wrong about, and there's things illiberal people are likely to be wrong about.

The issue is where people fear a situation or outcome, and then draw their answers from their peers, who are also either un or ill-informed on the subject. Then you get bad answers to important questions, which no-one goes back to question (because now disagreeing with the answer means disagreeing with your social group).

The fact that most highly educated are liberal doesn't imply that most liberals are highly educated. I would guess (and hope) that most anti-vaxers are not highly educated, liberal or not.

Perhaps not highly educated in the sciences. Many US schools allow students to graduate without any real exposure to science.

We're talking about post-graduate degrees though. I would hope that most people with advanced degrees would have the critical thinking skills to understand the net benefits of vaccination, even without formal training in science.

The lawyers? I know them. Most have no understanding of the metric system. Their science education stopped in grade school.

> . I would hope that most people with advanced degrees would have the critical thinking skills to understand the net benefits of vaccination

Yeaaaaah. No. Not really

But to be honest a lot of people trained in "hard fields" have some trouble with concepts that are "easier" for the people in the humanities field

Yet Silicon Valley has been noted as having disproportionately low vaccination rates.

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/closer-look-silicon-valleys-dis...

And anti-GMO. Anti-nuclear. Organic food enthusiasts. Anti modern farming. Naturopathy and homeopathy believers. The type of people who think that global warming causes more hurricanes for example.

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