The Need for a Vaccine against Alternative Facts

From “The Real Horror of the Anti-Vaxxers,” by Frank Bruni, The New York Times, Mar. 9, 2019.

…The parents who are worried or sure about grave risks from vaccines reflect…too many people’s willful disregard of evidence, proud suspicion of expertise, and estrangement from reason.

…They choose their own alternative facts. Take Darla Shine, [who]…claim[ed] that not being vaccinated and coming down with measles or mumps was a…hardiness builder that could help a person fight cancer down the line.

…Nutty hypotheses…have been around forever. Humans aren’t rationalists. We’re romantics, and [it feels good] when you believe that you belong to some brave and special tribe and have experienced enlightenment…that all the less perceptive, more gullible conformists out there simply can’t comprehend.

But there are differences now that make [people] fly ever more stubbornly in the face of sophisticated research and hard-earned knowledge. …In many educational circles, there’s as much talk of students’ individual truths as of the truth. …Social science and history courses increasingly emphasize that truth is situational and that “very few things are always true all the time.” That healthy skepticism can turn unhealthy when it leads to the rejection of incontestable realities. There’s “a crisis of authority, a crisis of expertise.”

…The internet… turbocharges everything. “It’s…the most effective echo chamber in the history of mankind,” said Michael Specter, … the author of the 2009 book “Denialism,” about irrational thinking. …“It’s very difficult for people, no matter how well educated they are, to parse what’s the wheat and what’s the chaff on the internet. …It’s very difficult to get away from falsehoods and conspiracies. We’re living in a world where facts are just another element of your decision-making process.”

One of the best explanations of that came in a 2016 essay…by Jonathan Mahler, who noted “a radical new relationship between citizen and truth.” He wrote that millions of people “are abandoning traditional sources of information, from the government to the institutional media, in favor of a D.I.Y. approach to fact-finding.” They turn to the internet, which…lets them customize their input and thus tailor their reality, which is reinforced by the like-minded company they keep online.

…Where’s the vaccine against that?