I think the masses, by and large, are still taking vaccines. The ones who don’t are stuck in epistemic systems that amplify noise (social media, conspiracy theory groups, right wing cults etc.).
I seem to be doing a poor job at making my point here. Hope you appreciated the conversation regardless.
what are you really achieving?
Having knowledgeable researchers that can help produce vaccines, and having at least a part of the population be knowledgeable enough to make sane decisions about their healthcare…
It’s a prerequisite to solving ”the antivaxxer issue”, though not sufficient.
I was trying to illustrate that filtering out (mis/dis)information it is not only important for your mental health, but also from an epistemological standpoint. All good epistemological systems (science, fair and accurate journalism, etc.) filter out/exclude a lot of point of views. I agree, there is no central arbitor of truth, that’s why good epistemological systems are doubly important.
If your process of finding knowledge isn’t based on good epistemological systems, you will drown in the pool of noise that you get from just listening to people around you. But if your epistemological approach is sound, then yes, interacting with a lot of people will make you understand the world better.
It’s not about mental health per se. For example, if I as a researcher want to search for scientific information, it’s good that I can exclude anything but scientific articles. Similarly, excluding flat earthers and antivaxxers from a social media site will probably improve the general public’s understanding of the world.
It’s just pragmatism. The alternative is to have everybody listen to all information - at that point it becomes impossible to find the signal in the noise.
Filtering out certain information flows is an integral part of freedom from speech, not an indication that you are in an “echo chamber”.
I mean a lot of things are. Russia definitely wants to destabilize the west as much as possible. But like, not literally everything that Russia could do and would benefit them is actually done by them. We gotta focus on the big picture and not get lost in the weeds of, for example, whether Russia is to blame for the Smolensk air disaster, or every single Baltic underwater cable break in the past 2 years.
The ”everything is a russian conspiracy” theory seems more plausible every day…
A proper all-encompassing conscription would be kinda insane. Drafting a percentage of people like they do in sweden might be reasonable. AFAIK they don’t actually have to force anybody to go to the army in sweden though, they have enough volunteers, but the system is set up so that in theory they can.