People are Strange

The online world gives you exposure to people that probably wouldn't even make it into your circle of close friends, and perhaps for good reasons. I had such an encounter earlier this week. I knew in advance, due to circumstances, that nothing serious would come from it but nevertheless, they sounded like a person that could be worth getting to know; East European with the depth of history that such an experience brings, educated, knew multiple languages, worked in the performing arts. The first warning sign in the conversation occured when she said: "I don't think I could date a bisexual man. They can't be trusted. What do you think?" After I picked my (masked) jaw up from the ground I muttered disarmingly about Woody Allen's famous line. Then we started discussing the foolishness and selfishness of people who have held pub crawls and engagement parties that have now led to an outbreak of the Delta variant in Melbourne which has caused the current lockdown. To this, they responded, "Oh well, it's the Jews. They have their own communities. They're not like us". At that point, I had to bid my farewells, and was made a mental note to visit the Pride Synagogue at the earliest opportunity. For what it's worth, I did confront the person afterward about their prejudices.

The next encounter was an online (former) friend who was trying to argue against "vaccination passports", a concept which I am thoroughly in favour of. They felt if we need to have vaccination passports to go to a restaurant the staff should also be questioned on whether they have hepatitis A or B, or HIV. I suggested to them that the main difference is that Hep A and B and HIV usually require a proximal exchange of bodily fluids whereas COVID-19 is airborne (OK, hep A can be transmitted through food handling, but it's extremely rare for it to happen that way). Point being, as remarkable as it sounds, there are still people out there who seem almost proud of their complete scientific and mathematical illiteracy on the subject, not to mention their lack of research skills. I just had another encounter with a "what about the children?!" hysteria over the prospect of pericarditis and myocarditis from mRNA vaccines. As the European Medicines Agency analysis found there have been around 300 cases of this from almost 200 million doses provided.

In all these encounters a few things become apparent. The first is that otherwise well-intentioned people engage in hurtful discrimination because they lack the self-awareness to even realise that they even are prejudiced; they are, quite literally, "pre-judging" and unless they have reason to actually engage in consideration of their opinions, they won't. It's like an extension to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where incompetent people are unaware of their own incompetence, over-estimate their abilities, but also lack the metacognitive capacity to realise that they're incompetent. Likewise, prejudiced people often think that they are not prejudiced, indeed that they are less prejudiced than others, and people who don't understand vaccine science or probability think that they're raising "reasonable questions" when a little bit of competent research would prove otherwise. Of course, they don't even have the research skills to realise why NaturalNews.com is not a good health information site, but the Harvard Medical School is. Of course, we are all somewhat prone to this, because we are somewhat intellectually lazy. It's much easier to trust our prejudices and the opinions of our tribe, rather than actually confront the unpleasant reality that we and those nearest to us could be dangerously wrong; that requires effort and a degree of intellectual humility.