Part I
I am a covid vaccine skeptic. I don’t think a vaccine is going to give me autism (any more autism) and I don’t think Bill Gates is going to use a vaccine to insert nanobots into my blood to bring about the End Times. But at first I was skeptical about whether a vaccine would ever arrive.
One of my heuristics is this: doubt most of the things you want to believe. It’s a sort of cognitive precautionary principle. If I want to believe something I am more motivated to believe it regardless of its truth, and I would rather not believe things that are not true (unless the benefit of doing so clearly outweighs any possible cost).
If you tell me, “soon there will be a vaccine and we will get back to normal,” that’s something that I want to believe. So I am particularly skeptical of it.
And, because I associated “vaccine arrival” with “back to normal,” my normalcy skepticism translated to vaccine skepticism, despite at least two vaccines being in Stage 3 clinical trials.
Lots of people appea…
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