@ceoln @rudyschwartz@dobbs.town @freemo

I was talking about two different things.

(1) The UO requirements for vaccination are close to useless for safety and somewhat burdensome but not particularly harmful

(2) Personal anecdotes about medical exemptions NOT being available (e.g. you can't come on campus, and it's not possible to do this work remotely because, say, it's a lab class, so...).

@ichoran

Ah, okay.

@rudyschwartz@dobbs.town @freemo

@ichoran @rudyschwartz@dobbs.town @freemo

fwiw, we seem to have come up a bit short with instances of left-wing scientism that are as bad as right-wing anti-science. imho.

@ceoln @rudyschwartz@dobbs.town @freemo

Okay, that's fair. In part I was extrapolating from older behavior before I'd checked to see what it was currently (always a dangerous thing), and a few of the more egregious things that I'd remembered have since been fixed.

Also, the anti-vax movement was *really* bad. It's hard to compete with that. If we take it as water under the bridge and ask about the ongoing impact *now*.

But it isn't fair to pick a particular slice in time in the past, and compare it to the impact of right-wing anti-science right this second, and I think I was partially guilty of doing that. So, mea culpa. I should have gotten the timeline straight in my head first before giving these examples.

(They're still examples of pulling the wrong way, just well short of what was asked for if placed in proper historical context.)

@ichoran

The ongoing impact of right-wing anti-vax is still pretty large, IMHO; at least partly because the establishment left seems to have given up on the science. And then there's, just for instance, climate change denial...

@rudyschwartz@dobbs.town @freemo

@ceoln @rudyschwartz@dobbs.town @freemo

Do you have solid evidence that at *this* point Covid anti-vax is actually a substantial medical problem? The immunological history of people is so complicated now w.r.t. Covid-19--keeping in mind all the asymptomatic cases that nobody ever detected!--that it's really hard to do a careful study. Nonetheless, exposure rates are getting close to 100% in populations where it's measured: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/29/cdc-majority-of-us-has-covid-antibodies-what-that-means-for-you.html

This suggests that the big gains in protectiveness--where you can use vaccination to avoid having immunologically naive people catch Covid, with concomitant risk of death and severe disease--have already been made, and what is left to do is perhaps try to reduce somewhat the impact of repeat infection by repeat vaccination.

Of course, the anti-vax-in-general people are still a problem, but at least where I am this cuts across political outlook, and if anything is more associated with a kind of kooky leftist natural crystal energy type perspective, or the view that the government has in the past taken harmful actions against some community so therefore this must also be some sort of trap or hostile action, than a no-gummint-gonna-tell-me-what-to-do-with-my-freedom irascibility.

@ichoran @rudyschwartz@dobbs.town

It's true, there's been some anti-vax sentiment on the left also; but (to return to the original take) it's not due to "scientism" in any case.

I don't have a strong opinion on how important it is to urge more people to get more vaccinated; it seems like the unvaccinated (even if exposed) still have a higher death rate, but I haven't studied the latest statistics.

I do think that the right wing antivax movement is still causing trouble, both as part of the general science denial, and by distorting the field for public health; whatever the right thing to do is, I rather doubt that it's nothing. Lots of people are still dying early, and I think we can do better.

@freemo

@ceoln @rudyschwartz@dobbs.town @freemo

I also think we can do better.

To be clear, the left's scientism here--as opposed to actual science--is in taking superficial and/or outdated perspectives, basing ritual behavior on them, and claiming it's science.

This has all sorts of pernicious knock-on effects that don't rise anywhere near the level of the huge death toll caused by the right's anti-vax anti-science perspective, but at this point I would argue are a comparable problem, (in part because it makes it almost impossible to combat the right's anti-science attitude).

Scientism is an anti-science perspective: it says that if you kinda go through the motions and say the right words, it's as good as continually refining your understanding through theory and experiment. Because it nominally is science-supportive, it exerts its negative effects by example rather than by exhortation. Because it's not actually based on anything solid, it has to be maintained by appeal to authority and/or social pressure rather than explanation, which also isn't good for a scientific outlook. In particular, if you oppose an anti-scientific political position with a scientism-based position, that it's not scientific will often be readily apparent, emphasizing that "the other side" doesn't actually care about the science either, reinforcing the original perception that something was off about science anyway.

Here are three examples of how this has played out in a negative way, two of which I've given, but I wanted to try to present the problems more clearly than I have previously.

(1) Ineffective vaccine requirements that are nonetheless requirements. As a hypothetical example, barring an unvaccinated 20 year old who has had Covid recently from university, while admitting an 80 year old who was (fully) vaccinated 20 months ago and hasn't had a booster, is what UO's policy calls for. If we think a lecture in a large lecture hall is a potential superspreader event (it is), and that attendees are in danger (they are), and that it's our responsibility to enforce behaviors that help mitigate the danger (debatable because enforcement always has downsides), then this is not a sensible way to do it. The students are probably okay anyway, and if we want to protect the 80 year old (professor?), that mandate isn't helping them at all. If everyone's very clear that this is some simple-to-enforce university policy that's rather divorced from how things actually are, sure, no worries. If criticizing the policy gets you shouted down for being "anti-science", that is a problem. (I don't know about UO specifically. I have witnessed substantial hostility directed against people who are critical of this sort of mandate.)

(2) Mildly effective masking requirements where all the focus is on masked-vs-not and not on effectiveness. Again, if it's clear that this is done for political expediency because "it probably helps some so we'll do it, but it's too much effort to do it well, so we'll do it poorly, and by the way we don't care if someone really hates masks", sure, no worries. If, however, the message is that the policy is "because of the science", no, it's loosely motivated by science and shouting people down who object pulls the wrong way. Unlike the vaccine one, where the problem is that having people vaccinated only protects them not everyone else (over the timescales that are relevant now), the problem here is that asking for actually effective masks *does* protect everyone else but we *don't* ask for it!

(3) Countering brainless anti-vax rhetoric with equally brainless anti-anti-vax rhetoric. Anti-vax sentiment is a real problem on two levels: one, it has led to a lot of unnecessary deaths, and two, it has led to a lot of unjustified skepticism of science. Unfortunately, the anti-anti-vax stance, while it might have been somewhat helpful in reducing deaths, isn't helpful in being pro-science. For instance, there's a very negative attitude towards reports of vaccine side-effects without regard for who is reporting it, how well documented it is, what the nature of it is, and so on. That's also anti-science! It also leads us, overall, to fail to ask important safety-related questions like: the CDC claims that it uses Rapid Cycle Analysis to detect vaccine-associated risks on a timescale of a couple weeks from VSD data; and people used VSD data to confirm myocarditis and GBS as rare side effects so the signal was in the data; but RCA was NOT how we learned about these side effects! So...is this system actually up and running?

You see another example with climate catastrophism developing on the left, to the point where I've had people tell me I'm anti-science because I'm quoting primary research and/or the relevant sections of the IPCC AR6 WG1 report to show why they're drastically overstating the case. It's bizarre. It's still pretty niche compared to climate denialism on the right, fortunately. But it's indicative of something really starting to go wrong with the left's relationship with science.

@ichoran

I agree with (most of) your evidence, but not your conclusion. :)

There's always a spectrum involving people who completely reject science, people who misunderstand it seriously, people who misunderstand it somewhat, and people who mostly accept and understand it.

People who accept and understand it are those that fit the descriptions you gave, "this isn't the absolutely best way to do this, but it's what we can actually afford and make happen with real humans".

People who don't understand it as well but at least don't reject it are more "this is what the science says!" and that's not as good, but at least they aren't rejecting it.

Those two tend to be (very roughly) "on the left", even though it doesn't involve workers' control of the means of production, but just because the right has gone insane, so anyone not entirely insane is "on the left".

And then we have people who completely misunderstand it and come to entirely the wrong conclusion, and people who just reject it for whatever reason.

Some of these are on the left in the more traditional sense (distrust of people in power etc), but the most pernicious seem to be on the right (MAGATRUMP2024 NO CRT NO JABS JAIL KILLARY!).

I don't think any of these people are examples of "scientism", really, unless simply not understanding the science all that well (which is the condition of most people most of the time, sadly) counts as scientism. And if it does, it's certainly not as bad as outright science rejection.

I would argue that we don't need to find something wrong with the left's relationship with science; we just need to teach and communicate science better. To people on the left, but especially (somehow!) to people on the right.

@rudyschwartz@dobbs.town @freemo

Note to self: this message is practically incoherent. When sleepy and rushed *just be quiet* rather than failing to express thoughts clearly.