The Dunning-Kruger effect is killing people.
People are doing their own research and deciding not to get vaccinated.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a mental error, whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given area greatly overestimate their knowledge or competence. The less you know, the more confident you are. Here is a stylized graph showing the effect. High confidence, low competence.
Refusing to get vaccinated is dangerous. The State of Washington compiled updated data. Among people aged 12-64, the hospitalization rate is five to seven times higher among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated. The people most at risk of bad outcomes are those age 65+, and for them the hospitalization rate is eight times higher and the death rate is seven times higher.
The COVID States Project published a poll examining who believes familiar points of false "facts" regarding vaccines. They asked people if they agreed with the following mistaken beliefs:
1. The vaccine will alter people's DNA2. The vaccines contain microchips that could track people.
3. The vaccines contain lung tissue of aborted fetuses.
4. The vaccines cause infertility.
People who believe two or more of these misperceptions are people least likely to be vaccinated and boosted. Those who believed two or more of these untrue statements were the group most confident of their expertise. Nine percent thought they had expert knowledge, while 28% said "I know a lot."
There is a rich inventory of cartoons making light of this. Here are three of my favorites:
I think the cartoons are funny. They also contain an element of condescension. Look how stupid they are. Ha ha.
I have written here about my discomfort at feeling moral satisfaction at learning that a stubborn unvaccinated person contracted COVID and got very sick. I recognize that illness and misfortune come capriciously, striking both wise and foolish, both villain and saint. The Germans have a word for it: schadenfreude. The emotion is selfish and unlovely, but it nevertheless persists in the background of my mind. (The stubborn jerk was asking for it!) Expressing schadenfreude publicly is politically unacceptable.
Democratic policy leaders understand that treating unvaccinated COVID victims with anything less that whole-hearted sympathy is politically disastrous. It would be a new version of Hillary's "deplorables" comment, a projection of dismissive condescension and prejudice. The unvaccinated want validation, not shaming. They expect every benefit of medical science and technology if they contract a severe case of COVID. Democrats who hint at triage based on vaccination status get instant blowback. Democrats also feel obligated to continue to encourage vaccinations for everyone, including people who have "done their research" and oppose vaccination.
The new status quo. Democrats are doomed to look weak and unpersuasive. (Won't you please, pretty please, get vaccinated?) Vaccine refusers will continue to be confident and resolute, and they will continue to get hospitalized and die disproportionately. About 2,200 American are dying every day from COVID, with hospitalizations and deaths concentrated among the elderly and the unvaccinated. That is the new reality.
Democrats need to understand and accept that a majority of Americans have decided that on balance they are OK with this. They want to reopen America and get on with "normal," even if extra people die. That attitude is selfish and unlovely, but it nevertheless persists in the background of the American mood.
This will get resolved in the upcoming election. Democrats need to get ahead of this.
9 comments:
I worked closely with low IQ sex offenders for a few years. They did not lack in self esteem or confidence, believing in themselves and their beliefs.
Very rich topic, at the heart of the political divide.
It has been noted that a big part of the Republican base votes against their own self interest, adamantly clinging to all manner of irrelevancies, like racial paranoia or fear of Socialism (in perhaps the most socialized society in human history), encouraged by cynical, opportunistic leaders. This is related to the Dunning-Kruger effect in that it exhibits strongly held misconceptions about meritocracy, in particular related to race, that even a discussion questioning their validity is vehemently rejected.
It’s hard to sympathize with people who choose to die of stupidity rather than get vaccinated, but that isn’t schadenfreude. Nor is it schadenfreude to appreciate the irony when wingnut media hosts who descry the vaccines and call the coronavirus a “scamdemic” wind up dying of the disease. That's more similar to those famous last words jokes: “Hey fellas, watch this – here, hold my beer.”
Schadenfreude is better exemplified by those who take delight in spreading the disinformation that prolongs our misery. Nor is it correct to say that expressing it publicly is “politically unacceptable.” Conservative media made a lucrative business out of it.
“This will get resolved in the upcoming election. Democrats need to get ahead of this.”
Resolved how? Get ahead of this how?
Separately:
If you follow the daily reports from Asante, vaccinated are not left out of hospitalizations, ICUs, or deaths. Unfortunately, Asante refuses to track or report doses, so if “vaccinated” is largely two-dose, that hasn’t cut it for a while.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FLzrjHTUUAk1UVC?format=jpg&name=medium
A clinical psychologist I know once told me that you would be alarmed to see the questions you can get wrong and still score 100 on an IQ test. 100 is, by definition, the average, which means that half of the people in this country aren’t even that smart.
It’s just too bad that in this particular pandemic situation, non-adaptive behavior will probably not remove many genes from the gene pool.
It is SAD. The poster boy is the now-deceased Phil Valentine, former syndicated talk radio host, husband and father of 3 young men. Based out of Nashville, TN, he was syndicated on 100 stations and was 47 out of 100 of the top radio hosts in the US.
He died needlessly, leaving behind a widow and 3 sons. He required weeks of care in the ICU before he died, less than one month before his 62nd birthday. He had vaccine regret in the ICU.
He was not the worst COVID denier out there. But he did not take it seriously enough, by far. And he influenced his listeners daily with his special combination of ignorance, arrogance and humor.
He has an interesting biography. He was a proud southerner from North Carolina. His father was a Democratic Congressman. He dropped out of college and attended radio broadcasting school. He was very conservative. If interested, he has a page on Wikipedia.
No, there are many, many poster boys who are dead.
Aside from being dead and unvaccinated, they have one other similarity: all conservatives.
See the pattern?
Hillary may have been politically incorrect by calling Trump supporters deplorables, but she wasn't wrong.
Living in a civilized society means following rules. Too many people have a sense of entitlement. I'm sure you see that on the roads all the time. Right wing radio fuels the narrative of victimization and self-centeredness.
There are upsides and downsides to living in flocks, as humans do. Fortunately, we can exclude/ostracize people from our flock to some extent.
What started as a virus has turned into an IQ test.
We live in a society where people who flunk the test get bailed out, even though they hate the country.
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