You people are just vectors of disease to me

https://www.metafilter.com/194004/You-people-are-just-vectors-of-disease-to-me

by Tomte • 5 years ago

121 167 5 years ago

prohobo3• 5 years ago

I thought tenure was supposed to protect you from getting fired over bs?

This intro was engaging and informative, which is exactly what professors should be doing during lectures.

For me the obvious take-away here is: post-secondary education is a dying institution, and is losing relevance precisely because they don't allow professors and students to have real opinions or discussions. There should be no controversy here. Eccentric professor is eccentric - how awful!

cardanome• 5 years ago

As a German, I am super shocked that this a even a controversy. Here a tenured prof can do basically whatever the hell they want (as long it is not criminal like holocaust denial obviously). Science does need a certain degree freedom to flourish and a bit of eccentricity can help make the classes more lively.

A prof can not swear in front of his adult students? He is forced to teach in person during a deadly pandemic and people are even angry for him complaining about it? Insanity.

psyc• 5 years ago

As an American, I wouldn't have been able to predict that anything in that video would elicit a complaint, let alone be deemed suspension-worthy. Perhaps I'm out of touch with ... something I'd rather not be in touch with.

UncleMeat• 5 years ago

No. Tenure is supposed to protect you from getting fired for controversial but sound research or methods. Tenured faculty can and should get fired for acting like assholes. If a professor took a shit on their desk at the beginning of each class period and then left, assigning students all 0s for grades then they'd be rightly fired regardless of tenure.

Students are paying thousands of dollars per course and tenure should not prevent them from receiving an education.

The question here is whether this is eccentricity for the sake of learning or eccentricity that inhibits learning.

ianai2• 5 years ago

The only eyebrow raising thing is the suggestion he already assigned random course grades. Absolutely the rest of it doesn’t offend me one bit. I hope the admin lets him teach remote though if he’d like.

Edit-but then I went to a college where this wouldn’t have batted any eyes. Graduating with even a C average would be respectable. Any other college in the surrounding area would consider that an A average student. And in his heyday one of my math professors would hand out truck driver applications to his calculus students with their graded tests because math and engineering definitely aren’t their fields.

sAbakumoff4• 5 years ago

This professor is not wrong.

With Omicron the majority of people are walking biohazards and you better stay away from anyone who wasn't tested negative a couple of hours ago.

pawsforthought• 5 years ago

Let’s put this in perspective, walking biohazards for the professor, sure, and I wholeheartedly support his tirade.

The students to each other, not so much, but he’s right that they shouldn’t go to his class.

alexvoda23• 5 years ago

Why do they not allow him to teach remotely? Have all the students in the classroom and have him appear on a projector screen and interact with the class that way.

This would solve the Covid exposure risk for him. It would solve the various other issues the students suffer due to lockdown.

It only requires someone to setup the equipment.

coldtea3• 5 years ago

On the other hand, this is life. You can die from 100 other ways, and in his age, he could die any moment anyway. At some point you soldier up and don't fuss like a baby over any danger.

crispypotatoes4• 5 years ago

don't fuss like a baby over any danger.

It's just risk management dude

Some things aren't worth fussing over, some are

Taking steps to reduce your mortality risk isn't being a baby, it's really dumb to die over bravado like this too

alexvoda23• 5 years ago

It's about calculating risk and taking responsibility for that risk. Every person does it for themselves.

You only soldier on if the predicted payoff is big enough, or if the estimated risk is small enough, or if you simply ignore the process altogether.

It's his life, his exposure to danger so he can fuss as much as he wants.

This kind of comment really betrays a sort of pre-scientific defeatism. Just because you can die in stupid ways does not mean you should die in stupid ways.

nicoburns2• 5 years ago

from anyone who wasn't tested negative a couple of hours ago

A test a couple of hours ago may not count for much depending on what they've been doing in the last few days as the tests don't pick up infections for 2-10 after contact, and you may be infectious before the tests pick up the disease.

sAbakumoff4• 5 years ago

right. we can't figure out the testing status of strangers anyways, so it's the optimal strategy to avoid contact with people as much as possible. F.e. I do the following:

- do the groceries before 8a.m.

- avoid public transport

- don't visit crowded public places

- wearing a mask everywhere except of home

podgaj3• 5 years ago

What have we become? This fear and alienation over less than 1% chance of dying?

sgift• 5 years ago

I have no idea what you've become. I've learned to understand that there are not binary outcomes dies / is perfectly fine, but a spectrum in between from "won't do well for a long time, maybe forever" up to "all well after a few days".

beebmam3• 5 years ago

How ironic that you say this given that the professor mocks exactly this argument

mikewarot5• 5 years ago

You're overlooking the somewhere between 1% and 30% chance of becoming disabled from Long Covid. I've been unable to sustain vigorous activity since March 2020, and it's dropped me from the workforce. I used to be on my feet making gears 8 hours per day.

There's more to this than the risk of dying. It would be far, far better for my family, financially, if I had died.

pjc50• 5 years ago

“You’re not wrong, Walter. You’re just an asshole.” -- Big Lebowski

(for the record it's probably a bad idea to have in-person classes in the middle of Omicron unless and until everyone is vaccinated)

fristechill• 5 years ago

I interpret that Lebowski quote as, "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just undermining the conditions which enable future non-wrongness to prevail."

waffle_maniac2• 5 years ago

Is the risk 1 out 100 for vaccinated?

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

Saw a table that showed vaxxed and boosted 80 year olds have a lower death rate from covid than unvaxxed 25 year olds.

Other hand I think about 1 in 50 people over 75 have died from covid in the US.

coldtea3• 5 years ago

Saw a table that showed vaxxed and boosted 80 year olds have a lower death rate from covid than unvaxxed 25 year olds.

Sounds totally unsupported from all I've read. Have a source?

ya_throw2• 5 years ago

Could you share that table?

Here's that data for the UK (in section 4): https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Maybe the unvaxxed 25 year olds where you live are spectacularly unhealthy.

torstenvl• 5 years ago

The table in question is here:

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

It doesn't seem to hold for deaths, but 80+yos with a booster have lower hospitalization and ICU rates than 12-29yos with no vaccination. Tables 6 and 8.

wilde• 5 years ago

For deaths. We don’t have nearly as good of stats on long COVID, which is not a lifestyle I would pick for myself.

waffle_maniac2• 5 years ago

That’s not what he was complaining about…

isolli• 5 years ago

According to this table [0], the risk of death after infection for a 75-yo male is ~2%. After the vaccine, it should be around 0.2%.

[0] https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatalit...

ralferoo• 5 years ago

Watching the actual video puts a lot of it into context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrOzY86YcEM

It's hard to know how serious all this is, because he keeps switching between outrageous comments and then a serious voice explaining the point he's making, and why the students should think about the issue.

It might well get him fired before the end of his final year, but I suspect this will end up being a video that gets referred to a lot over the years as a great way of challenging students' viewpoints.

fileeditview• 5 years ago

I am still not sure if his performance is serious or satirical.

simonh• 5 years ago

You're not sure if he seriously just arrived from Rigel 7?

beebmam3• 5 years ago

This is delightful. Thank you so much for the link. I especially loved the part about plagiarism. Incredible

yskchu• 5 years ago

So many outrageous things in that video...

Tenure or not, is he seriously going give his students random final grades even before the first day of class (as he put it, "predestination")? Surely the school won't allow him to do this

prohobo3• 5 years ago

No, he's not. He was just trying to be outrageous to wake his students up. I don't understand how this is all seemingly so cryptic to everyone?

beebmam3• 5 years ago

Maybe you should read the article. It's specified in there.

synthos• 5 years ago

Apparently a lot of bible thumpers go to that school and he's probably heard the predestination argument w.r.t. Covid & dying far too often. Him saying grades are predetermined is another way of challenging that viewpoint. The grades won't (or shouldn't) be assigned randomly

necovek2• 5 years ago

Later he goes on to explain how you can get an A from remote-friendly materials too.

While it's preposterous on the face of it, it's not even completely satirical since he goes on to explain the actual "rules" later for anything he "prescribes" early on.

telxosser2• 5 years ago

COME ON! really??

mikewarot5• 5 years ago

He taught what plagiarism is, and how to transform it into a proper citation.

He explained his attendance policy, and very clearly defined WHY.

He taught why you shouldn't trust authority blindly.

He pointed out the problem with predestination, and provides instruction on how to earn an A in a fully remote manner later in the video

This is a well crafted lesson, aimed at adults who can handle a few fucking swear words, not children. It shows respect to their new status as grown ass people in the course of doing so.

It is a lesson in empathy, and if they don't understand it, they should ask their grandparents the next time they see them on zoom.

Brilliant stuff, worthy of a tenured professor. I hope he enjoys his now accelerated, well earned retirement.

madeofpalk• 5 years ago

At the risk of being a terrible off topic HN commenter,

He's taught
He's explained
He's taught

I'm not sure if it's technically correct (or incorrect) grammar, but I (native English speaker) found these constructs to be really difficult to parse. I wasn't sure whether it was a contraction of "he is" or "he has" as both made sense (though the second point later has context that points to "he has").

I'm not bothered, and I hope no offence is taken by this, I just thought it was mildly fascinating. I don't think I often see that "He's" contraction in English.

telxosser2• 5 years ago

Hahaha utterly amazing stuff. Just a flame thrower to all the bullshit in college.

I absolutely had that professor that thought the students were cocksuckers not worthy of an A in HIS class.

seumars• 5 years ago

Fantastic. Thanks for including the link. It's pretty clear he's making a point of quoting the dialogue in and out of context. His tone makes the lecture pretty engaging to be honest.

sundarurfriend• 5 years ago

Watching the actual video puts a lot of it into context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrOzY86YcEM

Also gets around half of the fucking "transcript" being censored. Honestly, why bother "quoting" from the video when most of it is unintelligible because a lot of the creative swearing is replaced with *s?

ricardobeat2• 5 years ago

The "don't come to class" part doesn't appear to be satire, yet the whole class showed up. Goes to prove his point on 50 selfish… kids who don’t give a sh* whether grandpa lives or dies.

Hnrobert42• 5 years ago

I don’t know that it does prove his point. Just because he asserted that if/then, doesn’t make it true.

t-writescode5• 5 years ago

If you were told by your professor:

  * everything you need to succeed in this class is in the syllabus
  * I'm required to be here, you're not
  * If you wouldn't want to get your grandfather sick, I'm as old as your grandfather, treat me like him
  * I'm wearing this ridiculous mask to protect me from you
  * I will not be answering any questions in class
  * I will not be tracking your attendance, while other professors might

What do you think he was saying? And how would you interpret people still choosing to physically show up to his class?

Mizza• 5 years ago

This guy rocks. I thoroughly look forward to aging into an cantankerous old coot who doesn't give a shit about anything and can't keep his mouth shut about the insanity all around.

bobsmooth• 5 years ago

I feel so bad for college aged kids right now.

yosito• 5 years ago

Someone needs to have some harsh words with the administrators who aren't allowing this guy to work remotely.

edmcnulty101• 5 years ago

Why aren't college professors allowed to work remotely!?

Unless he's running a chem lab that's insane to me.

mrfusion• 5 years ago

I can't put this into words, much like the author of the account of Jesus healing the Leper. But I think he was onto something deeper than what a literal interpretation might suggest.

There is something worth non 0 value of living in a society who accepts you despite being sick or 'dirty', and is willing to take the risk of having those who are tainted amongst them. I feel that's an attitude that comes from a place of strength not weakness. But being scared of the air is certainly not something Jesus would have been.

alexvoda23• 5 years ago

Why would you be scared of anything when you are God?

Fear of disease is a normal biological response present in many other animals. The fact that we manage to overcome this fear through social conditioning is laudable because in several cases, the fear is worse than the disease.

But in this age, that should not be the approach we take, because we have a far better alternative available. We have a growing arsenal of tools to make use of the best approach: genocide against the diseases. We did it against small pox. We can do it again.

gadflyinyoureye4• 5 years ago

The covid pandemic proved two things about our policy management, under both administrations in the US.

First, regardless of what tools are in our arsenal, we the people, will only be allowed to use whatever tool those in power allow. Trump bashed vaccines. He pushed monoclonal antibodies. Biden won't allow the use of traditional vaccinations such as Covaxin. “We have enough vaccines, the best vaccines available, in the United States,” Fauci, the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, said in response to a question about Covaxin during his Thursday interview with Adrienne Bankert on NewsNation’s “Morning in America.” https://www.newsnationnow.com/health/coronavirus/vaccine/cov.... Many of those who refuse to be vaccinated do so because they don't trust the vaccine tech. Even if they are wrong in that mRNA is safe (the point of this post is not to debate that; please don't get caught up on that detail), we have a perfectly good weapon in Covixan, but we're not allowed to use it because the orthodox leading society won't allow us. This causes those in the unclean camp to take an already defense posture to new levels.

Second, the general public is anti-science and pick their side no matter what. For example, we can't wipe out Covid like we did Polio or Smallpox for the simple scientific reason that Covid has animal reserves in which it may escape and mutate.

Further we can't have adult conversations around policy. Under Trump any one discussing anything other that an absolutely open economy was vilified. Under Biden anyone saying that the evidence does not support individuals under 40, especially males, getting the double shot or boosted, is immediately going to be downvoted on whatever social media on which they comment. The fact that a male under 40 is 4x more likely to suffer heart damage from the shot than the disease, the fact that the same individual has little chance of hospitalization or death from the disease, the fact that those with mRNA vaccines still spread Delta at meaningful rate, the fact that Omicron rips through both populations are to be ignored because nuance is too much. It is too hard. The current orthodox view, regardless of the bent, of a particular social media rules the day. All others, the heterodox, are nothing more than a vector of disease, either of the mind as the right says or the body as the left says.

As to the issue raised below about needing citation of heart damage, I suggest those that actually care, please watch videos from Vinay Prasad MD MPH, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUibd0E2kdF9N9e-EmIbUew. He is not an anti-vaxer. To the claim about heart damage, see his analysis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR_ZVzrTeYk&t=601s.

As to our ability to eradicate Covid, I don't think the science actually supports the view. https://www.quantamagazine.org/will-we-ever-eradicate-covid-.... If we hold to the idea that we can eradicate it and that the only thing preventing us from doing so is the anti-vaxxers, we're going to get into a religious war where both side devalue the lives of their enemies. This is how rhetorical vitriol turns into physical violence. I hope we can steer clear of that.

In general, the orthodox overestimate the chances of hospitalization relative to reality, https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat.... Since they are leading the policy charge, their warped view is making it all but impossible to discuss things rationally.

betterunix28• 5 years ago

Except that Jesus taught his disciples not to wash their hands before eating -- a basic hygenic practice that people of his time certainly understood. However valuable his moral teachings may have been, Jesus is not exactly an authority on preventing disease spread...

(Also, the story of Jesus and the leper may have been nothing more than an attempt to talk about Jesus' miraculous powers.)

ekianjo3• 5 years ago

not to wash their hands before eating

if you dont have soap rinsing your hands with water that could be contaminated by a myriad of bacteria may not be the best course of action. Even in the modern world of less-developed countries, most gastrointestinal infections come from (unclean) water, not food.

alehander4217• 5 years ago

It is about the actual purpose of the Law and it references ritual purification. It's about human traditions vs God's Law. We don't need to wash our hands as a spiritual ritual before eating, we absolutely can wash them if it makes sense to wash them, e.g. hygiene.

Read Mark 7:

1 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus 2 and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.[a]) 5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”

larger second EDIT:

The focus is of course, spiritual, and it is on the actual things that defile people, for example:

20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

alexvoda23• 5 years ago

Since we are discussing religion, lets invoke the problem of evil and see what theodicy GP comes up with.

What kind of god, with the ability to completely cure a horrible disease with a simple gesture, instead goes arround and publicly heals a handful of people. How do you classify someone with the ability to eradicate a source of suffering, only making use of it for a few public appearances surrounded by those who will tell the tale.

And if you respond that it is not him that healed them, it is their faith, that faith has spread far and wide on all continents since then, yet the only progress humanity has made against Mycobacterium leprae, has been since sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccination (BCG vaccine) entered the stage.

Here is a chart about leprosy epidemiology in 2016: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy#/media/File%3ALepros...

It must be really nice living in a country where the threat of leprosy is closer to a myth than to an everyday topic. One in which you are not praying to a god each day to be shielded of the threat of leprosy or to be cured of it because you have better things to pray for.

I find it amazing how some human traits are so deep that people do not realise just how human, every single description of a god is. It is a monumental failure of imagination of what a god might be. And no wonder it is so. People before the enlightenment had far fewer sources to feed that imagination. And people after, found better uses of that imagination.

hajile2• 5 years ago

He was rejecting ritual purification saying that your actions are more important. He agreed with all the requirements in the Torah, but not all the additional rituals gradually stacked on top (where the excessive ritual purification of his day fit).

Leprosy was viewed as a symbol of sin. This story was about Him touching a sinner and purifying them from that sin.

dTal• 5 years ago

"Scared of the air" is a phrase I've only heard covid deniers use. Most people understand that in fact we're scared of the deadly viruses floating in the air, which are a real thing that one should be scared of, and framing it to sound absurd like that is dishonest.

maxerickson2• 5 years ago

It's even possible to be concerned about things like losing your sense of smell without that concern justifying the label "scared".

Putting on sunscreen, not because I dislike the discomfort associated with sunburn but because I am scared of the Daystar.

znpy• 5 years ago

Can you really blame him?

He's 74 and retiring at the end of this year, he lives in a state that does not mandate wearing a mask (nor a vaccination) and he's forced (along with the students) to go back to in-person teaching despite covid still circulating and the latest, more contagious covid variant emerging.

Now he's quite colorful in his choosing of words, but then again, so are many showpeople that a lot of people like and follow (think of John Oliver for example) and I don't see that much of a difference.

NGL, I'd choose different words but I fundamentally agree with his underlying point: keep social distancing.

mikewarot5• 5 years ago

In real life, the response was predictable - “I was shocked and appalled by this video. It is profane, offensive and disturbing and in no way reflects our university or its values,” President David Eisler said Thursday.[1]

In a better, more adult, timeline, as suggested by one of the replies on Metafilter[2], the response would have continued

  "He went on to explain that the University reserves the right to kill off as many of its old professors as it deems expedient and requires them all to meet their deaths quietly and without fuss. "It's difficult enough to keep being paid more than any of these people without needing to meet their accusing eyes in the staffroom as well", Eisler said."

If the latter had happened, I'd be quite interested to see what remote courses I could attend at such a fine institution. Alas, we're on the worst timeline.

1 - https://apnews.com/article/education-michigan-big-rapids-d18...

2 - https://www.metafilter.com/194004/You-people-are-just-vector...

xtiansimon• 5 years ago

Ah, Mr. Smith I presume?

d--b• 5 years ago

Don't watch it, it's a waste of time.

The video is neither particularly funny nor infuriating nor interesting whatsoever. It's mostly an 75 year old dude who's pissed off about having to give a class during covid, which is understandable. He swears a lot. End of story

oxymoran• 5 years ago

These kids are paying tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education. If the job is too dangerous for grandpa, perhaps he should retire now so that these kids can actually learn AND he can be safe. Instead of, ya know, bilking an extra year of salary.

ianai2• 5 years ago

He really shouldn’t be fired. But I would council him to consider retirement to live his life. YOLO and all that.

halfmatthalfcat• 5 years ago

He said he was retiring after this year. It was in the article.

teliskr• 5 years ago

While I think he is quite funny, I would be pissed if I had to pay money to take his class.

hkchad• 5 years ago

This guy is the type of teacher we need more of. Great sense of humor, connecting with students and presenting material in a fun/easy to understand way. Bravo!

You people are just vectors of disease to me

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