Ezra Klein profiles Dan Kahan.
Consider the human papillomavirus vaccine, he says. That’s become a major cultural battle in recent years with many parents insisting that the government has no right to mandate a vaccine that makes it easier for teenagers to have sex. Kahan compares the HPV debacle to the relatively smooth rollout of the hepatitis B vaccine.
Actually, the HPV vaccine is not a guarantee against becoming stricken by HPV. It does not protect against all of the viruses in the family. Although I believe that there is still a case for this partial vaccination, I think that the advocates make it sound much better than it is. They make it seem as if getting vaccinated frees you to have relations without fear of getting the virus, and that is just plain not true.
Jonah Goldberg has a saying that “The left is the aggressor in the culture war.” I think that statement has some merit, looking Hobby Lobby or Brendan Eich or this example.
Tyler Cowen liked the article. I confess to being a bit disappointed. If you are going to write an article about “how politics makes us stupid,” then the article should be about how politics makes us stupid. Instead, this article is about how politics makes them stupid. It focuses solely on examples where the science is allegedly on the side of the left, and the right is culturally obtuse.
As an aside, the article says that climate-change deniers misuse scientific arguments. I think that this, too, is more of a two-way street.
But who really expected anything else from Ezra Klein?
I agree with you. Moreover, beyond science versus politics, two-way debates, there are debates where Ezra’s “us” are over-represented on arguably, one-way “stupid” side — GMO’s, hydraulic fracturing, almost all other vaccine debates, e.g. And they don’t get a mention?
In big bold letters: “Individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.”
Right below that: “This will make sense to anyone who’s ever read the work of a serious climate change denialist. It’s filled with facts and figures, graphs and charts, studies and citations. Much of the data is wrong or irrelevant.”
Well, now. Does lacking a sense of irony qualify as stupid, Ezra?
And yet when one points that particular passage out, one gets accused of ad hominem. That Klein can write that and be oblivious to the irony is stunning to me, so stunning that one suspects he did it deliberately to make a point (I don’t really believe that, but is is plausible).
Excellent catch. This one deserves an entire blog post.
Ezra Klein is a good journalist, but obviously biased. I like to read people who occasionally bite the hand that feeds them. Klein never does.
Re: climate change, indeed both sides often go way beyond what the data and models support. I loved Russ Roberts’s Econtalk with Kerry Emmanuel and John Christy. Here are two erudite and polite speakers expressing strong viewpoints without resorting to ad hominem or hyperbole. Both were convincing and reasonable. My take-away was basically, glass half-empty or glass half-full.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/03/john_christy_an.html
I’m not sure why anyone would expect vox to present unbiased data-driven journalism given its staff. And the whole concept of explaining the news in an unbiased way is just a false premise. Interpretation of data requires a model of some sort, even if it’s just a mental model, and that model will have assumptions that are debatable and possibly biased.
Actually it is opponents that lean towards HPV making it safe for sex as reason to oppose it. Something that effective against cancer needs no exaggeration.
But surely the justification for making the vaccine *mandatory* is much weaker for something spread through sexual contact than for a disease spread through breathing the same air as someone else.
Shaving one’s pubic hair is apparently responsible for massively decreasing the public health problem of public lice, and male circumcision appears to reduce transmission of HIV and other STDs, but we don’t make either of them mandatory. We trust that in general it’s possible to avoid unwanted sexual contact. (And that if you are being raped, that generally HPV and pubic lice are not your foremost concerns.)
By contrast, the difficulty involved in not breathing the same air as other people is immense, and thus mandatory vaccinations against diseases spread so easily to attend school are quite different.
“Shaving one’s pubic hair is apparently responsible for massively decreasing the public health problem of public lice”
I’ve read that shaving and waxing is causing some STD’s to spread because waxing and shaving causes microtrauma to skin that ease the way for viral pathoges. It causes also non sexual skin infections.
To your point about making ‘us’ stupid, it would have been easy to extend into the left’s views on vaccination and autism.
Most of the left has no problem with either vaccines or autism, gmo is another matter, but I am a geologist and any attempt to explain fracking is a nightmare.
I won’t even get into the carbon cycle, chemical pollutants, and peak oil. Both sides mutilate science here, but the left’s complete lack of interest in the actual state of scientific understanding is beyond belief and almost no different from misunderstood fables recounted by a delusional madman. And I say this as someone who actually believes in anthropogenic climate change.
Both sides torture science, but the left’s torture is more effective in driving bad science.
“Most of the left has no problem with either vaccines”
The left’s problem is that you have to be either for or against “lump of vaccine.”
They get tripped up by their assumption that opposition to the HPV vaccine is just that they assume conservatives think it encourages sexual activity.
(and to be clear I agree with your entire comment)
Arnold nails it with the HPV example.
The problem with Klein’s piece (and I don’t attack Klein, though nobody believes me) is not that the essay is biased, it is that it doesn’t even realize it is biased.