I'm often impressed by the fundamental intelligence of human beings. I don't mean the obvious things like engines and rockets. But little things like my son trying to figure out how to make his bicycle fly. He's figuring that out and he's come up with some interesting ideas.
Given how intelligent humans are, it always makes me sad when people are stupid. But the stupidity shows up some interesting foibles about how humans work.
The one that caught my eye this week is the
Jenny McCarthy Body Count site. This is a stie that looks at heath statistics and determines sickness and death based on people not getting themselves or their kids vaccinated. I don't consider the site stupid. Just Jenny McCarthy.
But it shows how humans evaluate risk.
There is a risk to vaccination-- heck, there's a risk for your kid to swallow ice cream. It's an immediate risk in that if a child is susceptible, the child can get sick. Possibly die, though that's very rare. There's no current way to determine who is susceptible and who isn't; there are just too many factors. My own bet is that there are genetic subsets of the population that can be susceptible to different factors. But it's pure speculation.
The risk of
not vaccinating is of a different sort. If you are the only person not vaccinating your child, there's a good chance you can get away from it unscathed since all around you are people who have vaccinated immunity. There is, then, an incentive to not vaccinate and take the risk.
The problem is, of course, that there is rarely any one person that does a single thing. People act in groups. So your single child is several children until they are a significant number of people undercutting the population immunity. Now, if this vulnerable subset of children get sick they not only pose a risk to themselves, they pose a risk to the immune group since in the immune group there are ranges of immunity.
This reminds me of the "
Tragedy of the Commons" so eloquently expressed by
Garret Hardin. The medieval commons is where everyone grazed their cattle. As long as everybody took their turn and kept their numbers of cows down, the commons was sustainable. But if an individual took advantage of the group and overgrazed the Commons, he got an immediate advantage at the expense of everybody else. The individual got the advantage of the additional cows but the damage to the commons was sustained by the group.
This sound curiously like the vaccination situation-- using an emotional currency of fear rather than economics.
The solution to the commons was to enclose the commons and make individuals responsible both for the profit and the loss from their husbandry practices. These were called the
enclosures.
But you can't enclose disease.
Or stupidity.
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