Scientific American: Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More

[GliderGuider]

64. BTW, while I'm pro-vax, my wife is anti.

Last edited Wed May 18, 2016, 04:11 PM - Edit history (2)

It's not an issue between us because we don't have kids and are too old to ever have any, so the question is purely academic.

She is an ardent alt.med type with the typical panel of side effects (chemtrails, anti-GMO, aliens etc.) while I tend to be a pragmatic case-by-case kind of guy who doesn't get too worked up about ideological shit or peoples' weird beliefs any more. Besides, I love her more than I loved my own mother, so she gets a lot of slack on irrelevant issues like ionized water and organic vegetables. If having me behave as if I shared her beliefs makes her happy, I'm all on board.

Beliefs just aren't that important to me - I call myself a Pyrrhonian skeptic, which is way out where the buses don't run as far as these kinds of bun-fights are concerned.

I object to GMOs but that's mostly because of my complex-systems background. IMO we don't know enough about what we're messing with, we haven't done enough long-term feeding tests to be sure of the safety, and the Precautionary Principle applies. OTOH, if I want to eat a zucchini I'll eat a fucking zucchini, and not stress over it.

And just so nobody suspects me of being a single-issue anti-GMO fanatic, I also object in similar terms to almost everything human beings do, from Haber-process fertilizers to building cities, our disregard of ecological principles, large-scale energy technology, and frankly most advanced technology since the moldboard plough. The Law of Unintended Consequences and Sevareid's Law are my guiding principles.

I guess my point is that there are bigger things to worry about in life than whether peoples' beliefs are correct. That applies to the beliefs of others as well as my own. A healthy skepticism about everything is crucial.