Junk thought and junk science

I’ve been reading Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason (see booklist on the sidebar). She has a whole chapter on “junk thought”, that sort of popular mythology that, among the public, passes for intellectual or scientific thought, but is really based on mythology or religious beliefs or people’s agendas rather than fact.

I was still thinking about this as I was reading this morning about an outbreak of measles in San Diego among a classroom of young children, many of whom had never been vaccinated because their parents object to vaccinations. I grew up in the generation that was relieved when vaccines eliminated the scourge of diseases like polio and whooping cough and diphtheria. Apparently enough time has passed that we have a new generation of parents who have no idea what adult-onset measles can do to people, but who have bought into the junk thought idea that all vaccines are dangerous and might produce autism in children.

Vaccines are indeed dangerous, in the same sense that crossing a street is dangerous. There will be the odd individual who has an atypical biochemical system and has a bad reaction to a vaccine, perhaps one individual in a thousand or in ten thousand. All life is odds, and all medical procedures (indeed all actions in life) carry risks, however small. One plays the odds – if there is one chance in ten thousand that a vaccine might harm me, but one chance in ten that unvaccinated the disease will harm me, clearly the odds are better with the vaccine. These parents seem to have bought into the junk thought and misperceived the odds, since they apparently have no idea how bad measles can be for an adult.

Nor, apparently, are they aware that, despite the claims of the anti-vaccination crowd, there is no (zero, zilch, nada!) credible clinical evidence to support the junk thought theory that vaccinations cause autism, and indeed there is a very large recent clinical study from Denmark, where they keep meticulous health records for the whole population, that shows no correlation at all between vaccinations and autism. That doesn’t stop authors, a few of them even doctors, from writing popular books citing anecdotal evidence and coincidences to push their theory (and sell their books and get them lucrative speaking and TV appearances).

Junk thought and junk science (the process of cherry-picking scientific results to find the ones that support one’s theory and ignoring results that don’t support it) appear in all fields of endeavor, but seem to me to be especially prevalent in fields such as education (often fed by racial or gender agendas), social policy (often fed by political or religious agendas), diet plans (fed by the American obsession with looks) and alternative medicine (apparently fed by a deep suspicion of “the establishment”, whatever that is). Conspiracy theories thrive on this sort of junk thought, especially if it appeals to and seems to support our existing prejudices.

One wonders how a modern technologically-based society can long survive with a population addicted to such junk thought.