Deep dive into stupid: Meet the growing group that rejects germ theory

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/deep-dive-into-stupid-meet-the-growing-group-that-rejects-germ-theory/

by science4sail • 5 years ago

13 7 5 years ago

h2odragon• 5 years ago

People have a right to be wrong. We've been wrong about things ourselves; and shouldn't forget the possibility it may happen again.

If it's really important to you that someone you don't know share your beliefs about germ theory, or anything else, ask yourself why.

Would either the full conversion of the heretic, or their elimination, make any actual difference in your life?

krapp• 5 years ago

Would either the full conversion of the heretic, or their elimination, make any actual difference in your life?

First, no one is discussing "eliminating" anyone.

Second, their beliefs are dangerous to public health, they don't exist in some philosophical vacuum free of external consequence. These people refuse to take effective precautions against viruses and infectious diseases because they don't believe such things exist, and they actively spread both disease and misinformation.

This isn't a matter of disagreement over politics or religion, but science. Yes, people have a right to be wrong, but that right doesn't imply society must allow them to remain wrong at its own expense. People who shoot up synagogues have a right to hate Jews and immigrants, but their bullets don't count as free expression.

quantified2• 5 years ago

They’ve made an enormous difference- you and I are both alive and relatively healthy. I stepped on a couple of rusty nails in my life, glad my doctor didn’t prescribe a few carrots to keep tetanus at bay. Put a terrain enthusiast in charge of a public safety agency and watch. I want my food inspectors and water treatment engineers to believe in germ theory.

sprafa• 5 years ago

This is one of the top comments and one I 100% agree with.

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Sigh... Idiocy is like a virus. We don't have a vaccine for it, but we used to keep it under control through isolation. Every village might have its idiot, but at least the idiots were in separate villages. Thanks to Facebook and other social media, the idiots now get together all the time in online super spreader events of idiocy. Now the idiocy pandemic is out of control, and we still have no vaccine. Of course a new idiocy variant would be the denial of germ theory during a pandemic of a novel virus. We are so fucked.

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I think we might be going from a genetic to a memetic evolutionary process/society. Right now we’re on the start of something terrible, because memetically we’ve opened the organism and are letting bacteria fester.

The 1930s were similar. We allowed mass psychosis to set in through the new medium of radio. Now we’re letting it set in through the internet. Different kinds but same effect. We’re about to head into a similar mass psychosis event.

moistly• 5 years ago

Time to promote The Ebola Challenge, an update to the Tide Pod Challenge.

LargoLasskhyfv• 5 years ago

Maybe they discovered this "the teachings" of this guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryke_Geerd_Hamer

quantified2• 5 years ago

If there’s a point to terrain, it’s that a living critter like a human is a complex system and disease effects and responses are complex. The idea that a human being is a biome, with vast numbers of non-human cells active within and necessary for health, would have been shocking in the 18th century and is still sometimes a bit disquieting for me (because it sort of makes me a “we”). There is a terrain in there. Science is better at finding answers to things that have a small number of variables than a large number. (If, for example, autism in offspring is increased by a subtle effect of multiple classes of chemicals during a particular phase of pregnancy followed by another subtle effect in the child’s first year, we will have a very hard time teasing that out. Not pathogenic, but perhaps you get the point.)

As to the rest- we observe bacterial, viral and fungal infection in non-humans. Germ theory works well for them too. Germ theory also predicts how disease gets transmitted and which diseases get transmitted (the one you have is the one you give).

Flat-earthism is easy enough to debunk in person (if time- and energy-intensive, you just need to spend enough time flying and sailing), and relatively harmless. Anyone acting on terrain beliefs can infect a large number of people with cholera or typhus, that’s a bit more dangerous.

Deep dive into stupid: Meet the growing group that rejects germ theory

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