Posted by Tara C. Smith on April 3, 2013

Dear Pa,

I know you care deeply about many issues, especially social justice. You’re tired of wars, you’re ashamed of the attempts to destroy social programs in this country, you hate seeing the unions that helped you as a worker provide for our family get dismantled by wealthy CEOs whose only goal is to make themselves and their cronies more wealthy. These are noble things to believe in, and values that you’ve instilled in your children.

But you probably don’t often consider how you select and digest (and frequently, share on Facebook) the stories that you’ll accept as true. This is called cognitive bias–sorry, that’s a terrible article for a layman, but I’d be happy to discuss next time I’m home. Anyway, the bottom line is that the beliefs you already hold prime you to accept certain types of information, and reject others–and it’s something everyone should be aware of when reading anything on the Internet, especially. You don’t investigate how the authors of articles and videos you read and view came to their conclusions, or what data they may have overlooked (I’m being generous here–in most of the things you post, it’s not a matter of “overlooking” contradictory evidence on the case of the authors, it’s flat-out denial that it even exists). And you’re not an expert on health issues like fluoride or vaccines, so I don’t expect you to go back to the journal articles and try to figure out if these people you’re listening to are telling the truth. That’s what I do, but it took years of training to get me to this point, as you probably remember.

You repeatedly caution, “follow the money.” Often this is the case, and no one disagrees that many times people or companies do some nasty shit in the name of profit. However, you have to look at this on a case-by-case basis. Let’s look at vaccines, for instance. Sure, pharmaceutical companies make money off of vaccines. However, this money is a fraction of what they make for drugs that treat chronic conditions or “lifestyle” medicines, like cholesterol meds and Viagra. Indeed, many pharmaceutical companies have gotten out of the vaccine game altogether because it’s not particularly profitable, and because of lawsuits directed against them (which, in most cases, aren’t based in science but on fear and misunderstanding of cause and effect). This leaves us with fewer and fewer options when we need new vaccines quickly, like for the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.