Don’t Fight Anti-Vaxxers; Socially Exclude Them

From this point on, I will no longer be participating in any conflict about vaccines. No correcting false evidence, no dissection of logic errors, no explorations of ethical calculus and general/specific freedoms. Not because I don’t care, nor have I changed my position, nor because I lack an “open mind” — but because it’s pointless.

The thinking behind anti-vax beliefs is pre-rational — in that it relies on assumptions that don’t follow from observations or reasoning. We all hold some pre-rational beliefs, because there are things we “know” that are either too trivial or too difficult to test. Fundamental aspects of one’s worldview are so central to the way one sees the world that we go to great lengths to protect them, which makes them nearly invulnerable to change. Contradictory evidence doesn’t just fail to register — the evidence itself is often changed to match one’s worldview.

As a concrete example, this week I witnessed someone reacting to stats showing that 90-something percent of people in Ontario hospitals for COVID are “not fully vaccinated”. The intended (and hopefully obvious) interpretation of this descriptor is “people who have not received a vaccine, or who have had one or two vaccines but not yet passed the 2-week mark since the second shot”. Instead, they interpreted this to mean that these people had received a vaccine, which somehow made them more vulnerable to the virus. Yeah.

For someone so fully committed to a delusional worldview, contrary evidence is actually confirmation, a lack of supporting evidence is evidence of censorship, and any refutation is an act of persecution. Paradoxically, the weaker their position and the greater the criticism, the stronger the delusion becomes. Much as with other systems of delusion — cults, grandiosity, addiction, etc. — often the only thing able to change aspects of one’s fundamental worldview is the experience of trauma. This fact alone makes me want to give up, but it gets worse.

In light of the recent whistleblower testimony (confirming what we all already knew), it’s obvious these platforms are nonneutral, or even nefarious. Being ad-funded creates a financial incentive to maximize the user’s engagement with the service — the same is true of all “free-to-use” services. Beyond becoming the de-facto communications platform for much of the world, Facebook et al exploit in-built evolutionary social biases to capture and direct attention. Given how important sociality is for human survival, we have natural predilections to being validated and an inclination to secure one’s position in the group — and its these behaviours “the algorithm” has been optimized for.

There’s a larger discussion to be had about the specific mechanisms and what can actually be *done* about this problem structurally, but one thing is clear to me: no good can come from continuing to engage — with a few exceptions. The folks who are entrenched in conspiratorial, counter-scientific, implausible delusions are beyond hope of accessing unless they or someone close to them faces death at the spike protein-y hands of the virus, and I genuinely wish no harm on them. Contradicting them publicly merely grants them additional visibility, raising the risk that someone naively sees their content and falls into that fantasy. Neither politeness, nor outward hostility are effective strategies — the only option available is social exclusion.

Note that this doesn’t *necessarily* apply to all discussion of vaccine mandates or similar credentialism. There are valid arguments in this regard — but the reasonability of the discussion ends when it becomes a slippery slope fallacy. I share your concerns if the so-called “vaccine passport” expands to a permanent, punitive, or invasive program — but that’s not what it is at present. In other words: I’m only willing to entertain arguments about things that exist in *this* reality — otherwise it’s just an incoherent shouting match.

So yeah. If you’re one of the folks in the virus-isn’t-real, vaccine-doesn’t-work/is-dangerous, population-control, vaccine-”apartheid”, or other camps I just don’t give a shit. I’m not going to unfriend you or block you, I’m just going to ignore you and there’s nothing you can say or do to get me to engage — online or in-person. I’ll still be friendly and kind, but you’ll not be getting any of that conflict-validation from me.

For everybody else, I’d encourage you to do the same. We can learn an important lesson from Paul Anka in the Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horrors VI sketch “Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores”: just don’t look.