I come here to rant occasionally, knowing that this is mostly safe territory.
It's kind of hard to really define "stupid" precisely. I've run into people who arrived at their antivaccine and antimask beliefs by perfectly logical thought processes. Aristotle himself might be proud of the reasoning.
But... these sound logical arguments are based on completely faulty premises that they have either implicitly or explicitly accepted as valid. And often, these individuals lack the insight to understand their own knowledge gaps. I've found that they can not accept this and employ all kinds of mental roadblocks to justify holding on to their positions.
Here's an example that's very fresh in my mind. The governor of my state, rather than show the political courage to re-implement a statewide indoor mask mandate while the entire state has become saturated with COVID cases, has left the decision up to the individual towns to decide. Against some small but very vocal opposition, my town board of selectors voted for the mandate. I and the handful of other health care providers who live in this very small rural town wrote an open letter of support for the mandate, and our letter was largely the deciding factor in the vote.
Flash forward a few days ago, and I'm taking my two dogs on our usual walk down to the village green. I see a woman standing on the corner holding a sign that says "Honk for no masks". Well, because I live in the town, our local hospital is bending but not yet breaking from COVID cases, and I have two children too young to get vaccinated (one not yet a week old), I could not let this go unaddressed.
So, I walked over to talk the woman. I asked her why she is against mask mandates in the middle of a pandemic, and what alternative solution she would suggest to slow the spread of COVID when the local medical system is at risk of overcapacity (turns out she was also antivaxx, but I didn't go down that route). She had no answer to the question, only to give her credentials as a "former health teacher" and to pull out a study that showed people had a slight but statistically significant increase in their pCO2 while exercising and wearing an N95 mask. She kept hammering that we don't know the long-term damage of this increase. I tried explaining that because of basic concepts like the Henderson-Hasselbach equation for acid-base buffering and the oxygen-carbon dioxide dissociation curve, this increase in pCO2 can be quickly dissipated by increasing the respiratory rate or tidal volume, or more slowly compensated by increased H+ secretion in the urine. To which, she replied, "Oh, do you have any studies that show that?" Of course I didn't, because these are fundamentals of chemistry and physiology that have been textbook knowledge for over a century. I also pointed out that I have 20 years of clinical experience as a physician and even patients with severe COPD and congestive heart failure can easily tolerate mask wearing. Which was answered again with, "Do you have a study for that"? (There are studies that show this, but I couldn't name them off the top of my head). As of if 20 years of health care experience counts for nothing.
Anyway, it was very clear that her knowledge of medicine was very superficial and the understanding of the underlying chemistry and physics was almost non-existent. But she was just incapable of reaching the realization that her own understanding was extremely superficial.
So, again, what is "stupid"? Is it someone who can not digest complex topics that require multiple levels of base knowledge to comprehend? If so, then count me as stupid, because there's a lot of economic and scientific concepts in which I have no formal training and I struggle to comprehend (I stumble everytime I hear about "bond yields" in business news). Or is it someone who willfully closes themselves off to information that conflicts with their belief system? Or is it someone who refuses to accept that their understanding a superficial point of surface data belies ignorance of the underlying concepts necessary to put that data in the proper context?
I try to have compassion for those who do not have the background to distinguish between good and bad information. I have less patience, though, for those who lack the self-awareness to recognize their own deficiencies. And I have even less patience for those who not only lack this quality, but have the potential to cause active harm through it. Hence, I couldn't let this situation on the village green go unaddressed.
End of rant... for now.
www.cnet.com
www.nbcnews.com
