- The drone panic is about human psychology;
- So is the fear of vaccines.
Once again, the drone panic is not about drones.
NY Times, Zeynep Tufekci, 19 Dec 2024: How to Make the Drone Panic So Very Much Worse
The writer begins by recalling a similar panic from decades ago that I only recently heard about.
In 1954, a few people in the town of Bellingham, Wash., reported seeing pits and dings on their windshields — perhaps the work of vandals. Roadblocks were quickly set up. This became front-page news in nearby Seattle, prompting people to rush to check their own windshields. Thousands then reported that they, too, had mysterious dings, in an ever-widening area from Seattle to Vancouver, British Columbia.
Panic quickly spread. People speculated that the cause might be cosmic rays, a radio transmitter in a nearby naval base, fallout from H-bomb tests or sand-flea eggs hatching in windshields. The mayor of Seattle begged for help from the governor and the White House. Motorists began stopping police cars to add their name to the list of the affected. Scientists were called in, Geiger counters whipped out.
The mysterious windshield pits of 1954 turned out not to be the result of vandals, aliens, radioactivity or sand fleas, but were instead the domain of mass human psychology. Examinations revealed that these were mundane, long-present imperfections, everyday wear and tear. It’s just that no one had bothered to notice them before, because who studies his windshield that closely?
A similar dynamic is playing out right now under the New Jersey sky. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of drone sightings have sent people in the area and far beyond into a state of high alarm.
And the government authorities are responding in the wrong way.
Experts have been pulling their hair out trying to explain that they aren’t a cause for alarm, they’re the result of it. Because those unidentified objects are planes. Airplanes. Landing and taking off at Newark, one of the busiest airports in the country. Or they’re hobby drones that other amateur sleuths have sent up to get a glimpse of the phenomenon. Or they’re celestial bodies. Atmospheric scientists took a look at the lights that Hogan had spotted and quickly identified them as stars in the Orion constellation.
People find the simple explanation hard to believe for the same reason that people in Seattle did in 1954: because they had never before bothered to look that closely.
\\\
Similarly, perhaps. What is the root cause for conservatives’ distrust of vaccines?
LA Times, Robin Abcarian, 18 Dec 2024: Column: The latest evidence that putting RFK Jr. in charge of public health would be a disaster
The photo shows an iron lung, the treatment of polio victims in the decades before the vaccine virtually eliminated polio. But now…
Last week, the New York Times reported that in 2022, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attorney and close advisor Aaron Siri had petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the polio vaccine in use for the last three decades until its safety can be studied further against an unvaccinated control group. Kennedy, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, is a longtime vaccine skeptic who spouts nonsense about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and a lot of other things. He is, in the view of many medical professionals, a danger to public health.
The naivety and presumption of this request is astonishing. Until the vaccine can be “studied further”? As if no one has thought to do such studies before? This is the peril of putting numbskulls in charge of branches of government they know nothing about.
The Times’ report set off shock waves. Before Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine in the mid-1950s, the disease killed or paralyzed more than half a million people around the world each year. Many high-profile Americans who suffered from childhood polio, including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and the actor Mia Farrow, immediately condemned the questioning of the vaccine. Kennedy and Trump were forced to reassure Americans that they support the lifesaving treatment.
And my high school AP English teacher (and college guidance counselor) Mr. Friedman, who’d survived polio but walked with a limp.
The article moves on to the autism question, which has been “studied to death”:
“Do we know what causes autism? Not yet,” [pediatrician Richard] Pan said. But, he added, we do know what does not cause autism: the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which was implicated in a long-since-discredited 1998 paper based on 12 cases by the defrocked English physician Andrew Wakefield.
“What will it take to convince Trump and RFK Jr. that a retracted 12-subject study with fake data was actually wrong?” asked Pan.
And there’s this issue:
In any case, he added, blaming the vaccine is an “ableist” response to autism by some parents. “They don’t want to accept that their child is neurodivergent,” Pan said. “You want to say your child is broken and my life has been ruined and it’s the fault of Big Pharma or whoever.”
Again: being autistic is a facet of a person’s personality, like being smart or musical; it is not a disease that people “got” somehow. And parents of course would ideally raise children to be just like them. You can understand them casting about for something to blame if their children are different from themselves.
But the answer to the question I posed above? Simply refer to Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory (discussed here and elsewhere), in which one facet of morality is the divide between sanctity and degradation. It’s all about fear of contamination. And it makes perfect sense in the ancestral environment — actually it makes perfect sense for all animals to have a sense of what is safe to eat and what should be avoided (all the disgusting things, which we perceive as disgusting precisely for the reason that they are unsafe, from dead animals to feces).
So the answer is: conservatives fear contamination, and vaccines involve injecting something foreign into the body. And for some people, no matter how much you explain it to them, they can’t get over the idea that injecting something into the body is some kind of contamination. And that’s why, to justify their fears, conservatives pass along stories about how mercury is involved in making vaccines, and therefore! With no understanding of how these things actually work.
In the big picture, humanity’s cognitive limitations may bring down the species. Just as most species in the history of the world have gone extinct, mostly because of environmental changes, humanity might suffer the same fate because of our current environmental change: we’re filling up the world. And need new policies to keep the species alive.
