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Comment by Eric_WVGG | Hacker News Reader

no offense but your friend sounds like kind of an ass

How did he respond to the "you don't and you don't think about it" bit?

It was kind of a mike drop moment. Honestly, my buddy has associated hard-right and anti-left views as part of his identity. He doesn't wear a seat belt because he doesn't want the gov't telling him what to do. That type of extreme. But he's also smart, so I suspect sometimes he says things as a cry for help, the way an alcoholic will mock you for drinking just one beer because it reminds them that they have habits they can't break or have regretfully become part of their identity.

All sorts of insecurities start to show in people when you decide to go against the grain, choose for yourself and embrace deliberate action without hiding anything. That most people tend to think it's because of trying to show off rather than a small sacrifice that you eventually stop thinking about, is sadly very telling.

It's very natural though to ask about something that is different in some way.

Smart how? Like a good programmer or creative or just some sad contrarian?

> He doesn't wear a seat belt because he doesn't want the gov't telling him what to do. [...] But he's also smart

Is he?

People have weaknesses. Some people are afraid of cockroaches. You can't explain all behaviors with logic

> Some people are afraid of cockroaches

Not so much "afraid" (I don't think they will attack me) as "deeply disgusted", particularly by their smell, and their fouling of my foods. There are lots of reasons to hate cockroaches.

As a mercifully sheltered Brit, what do they smell of?

You are not sheltered - they are endemic in the UK. And if you have them, you will know the smell (human languages are notoriously bad at describing smells).

My 3 yo daughter was afraid of flies. It was REALLY annoying. I tried to teach her she can poke them and they'll leave her alone.

You can be a brilliant neurologist and also be anti-vax.

Expertise in one field doesn't imply expertise in others even if they appear closely related to the layperson.

Uh dunno if you saw his, but this morning I read about a study that shows that PhDs have the highest by-education rate of not getting vaccinated. https://unherd.com/thepost/the-most-vaccine-hesitant-educati...

At the beginning of the year their rate was not the highest, but other groups got convinced (their rates lowered), but PhDs remained constant.

To me it means the PhDs have a high degree of confidence in their own beliefs (surely thinking they've come to their conclusions rationally and with rigorous scientific reasoning), and no push will change their minds. Whether this self-evaluation is accurate or not, is a different question. I wonder what their PhDs are even in, if it's molecular biology, then, well, maybe there's a case there, but a PhD in, say, Polynesian cultures?

My guess is that the level of education required to get a PhD instills in one an extreme level of skepticism; since most PhDs are not in genetics or virology (just simple statistics), most PhDs are skeptical of the fields from which they are not experts.

But if they are skeptical of the experts, why in the world aren't they skeptical of the non-expert saying the vaccine is dangerous?

"They" here are 23.9% of PhDs. So 76.1% believe the experts. The rest are probably like other skeptics (or like most of us humans), they've come up with the conlusion and they've seen the proof that supported that conclusion and dismissed proof that don't.

Although as PhDs they should know more about confirmation bias...

Yeah, but to be fair, if I knew how sausage was made, I'm sure I would eat less sausage

i would expect MDs to have a much higher than average fax rate for that very reason. There’s a lot of really awful illnesses for which we have still very crude protections and treatments. vaccines are a godsend treated as such among all the MDs i know.

The main issue I have seen with people that work in the medical field is when they value anecdote over data. Inevitably, some that work in the field are going to have a disproportionate outcome of some type that doesn't fit the data. So if several of your patients had a bad reaction to a vaccine, you might incorrectly assume that there is an issue.

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