Rich people in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania are to blame for dangerous anti-vaxx surge

[Ambiguity]

@orenwolf

1. No one (as in, the masses) trusts “science” anymore, because a) we know that there were bad people manipulating or hiding results in the past (think sugar lobby, tobacco companies), and so now all “science is suspect”, coupled with b) No easy way to call out the good “science” from the bad unless you’re one of the minuscule percent reading the studies themselves (or the few blogs that cover them objectively), coupled with…

I think this kind of gets at it, but it’s even worse than that.

The world is filled with ambiguity and uncertainty (not surprising that I would think so, right?). And it seems to me that there are, at base, two kinds of people:

1. Those who don’t mind uncertainty and ambiguity
2. Those who do.

Those in the latter category tend to really misunderstand science (and if we’re going to pain with a very broad brush, these people tend to prefer religious explanations).

Science makes no claims to the truth. Science can be wrong. Science can change its mind.

These are all good thing!..if you’re a member of the first camp. If you’re a person with little dispositional ability to deal with uncertainty, you’ll end up not “trusting” science, because in your book, trust means correct, not trying ethically to be correct.

So yea, layer on bad science and unethical science, and you can multiply the above be 10.