Vaccinationphobic mothers sacrificing their children

Across the nation a significant number of college-educated, middle class mothers are refusing to let their kids get vaccinations. Because of something they read on the Internet. As a result, diseases we had firmly under control are spreading again.

Measles--which can cause retardation in children--and which is highly contagious--is a prime beneficiary of these mothers' foolishness.

I haven't seen a study on what % of these mothers are Republican/Democrat. I'm guessing there are lots of each. What's certain is that these mothers have liberal arts educations with little or no scientific/technical coursework. They don't understand how science works, and they don't accept the conclusions of scientific studies.

I noticed a similar phenomenon when I taught high school. Even middle class kids would be amazingly credulous about total quackery like astrology, while at the same time incredulous/suspicious of scientific findings. They'd swallow the former while demanding impossible levels of certainty for the latter.

These mothers live in a magical universe. They use technology every second, from their minivans to their cellphones to their microwaves, without ever showing the slightest curiosity about how all that stuff works. For them it all might as well all be juju.

And then they sacrifice the safety of their children and ours in the name of protecting their children and ours. They couldn't do more harm if they despised their children and hoped they'd fall off a cliff and quit bothering them. In the case of some vaccinations--such as the one for the HPV virus that protects girls from cervical cancer but only if they take it before they're exposed--some mothers are murdering their children (albeit in slo-mo).

Their magical thinking is, strictly speaking, associative thinking, as opposed to analytical thinking. Primitives in the Amazon rain forest use associative thinking, as do the Taliban, as do probably 90% or more of the human race. Analytical thinking showed up in ancient Greece, then reappeared in the Renaissance, and is now used by many educated people around the world. And not used by many others, such as these foolish mothers.

The exact mechanism is that we have a threat assessment heuristic built into the human brain. It served to protect our remote ancestors, putting them on alert in dangerous situations. Unfortunately that heuristic can't tell the difference between a bunch of dangerous-looking toughs hanging out at the end of a street you're walking down vs. seeing a similar scene on CNN that's taking place 3,000 miles away. Much less the Internet. So these mothers are acting instinctively, no differently than a chimpanzee mother would, without interpreting their instinctive responses to adapt them to modern times.

Their harmful actions argue for including in high school curricula mandatory coursework in practical, applied technical thinking--how to evaluate a home purchase contract, how to assess political advertising, how to decide whether vaccinations are safe. Such people probably blow off science courses per se, but they might pay attention to courses that focused tightly on what they need to know to mediate between instinct and reality.

And this curriculum needs to continue in college, of course. Too often the science survey courses that liberal arts majors take don't connect to these peoples' lives. I didn't need that connection made for me--I could do it myself. But I'm smarter than them, frankly. So they need courses that aren't astronomy, chemistry, even sociology per se. They need what I described in the last paragraph--coursework whose starting point is the decisions/evaluations people have to make in everyday life, then which works backwards from those decisions into the kind of thinking and the kind of knowledge ordinary people can use to make those decisions better.