> If your aim is to protect children by increasing the numbers of vaccinated children it's important not to use mockery or ridicule. Those are the wrong tools.

When education fails, when facts fail, when logic and reason fail, you're left with mockery and/or ridicule.

I understand the urge, believe me. But now I'm trying to be a less sarcastic person, because the way I see it, mockery / ridicule is tantamount to giving up.

Totally cool with it. It's fun, and gives you a smug feeling that is unfortunately also fun. But I don't let myself think I'm doing anything other than throwing in the towel in trying to help this other inhabitant of our rock.

Once I frame it that way to myself, I find myself either continuing to try or completely ignoring the other person.

Or force.

I always liked the quote, "You can't reason someone out of a place they didn't reason themselves into."

Emotional influences like skepticism, fear, frustration, and community seem to be the main drivers for not vaccinating your kids. It may be that the best way to combat that sentiment is through emotions. Maybe it takes tactics similar to anti abortion groups? Should we be standing in communities with big posters of dead kids?

Emotions probably are the right way to go.

Interesting that you picked abortion as an example. Those placards of gruesome images - do they change anyone's opinion? Or do they strengthen existing viewpoints? The people who are anti-abortion see the images and can't understand how anyone could want an abortion afterwards. People who are pro-choice see the placards and think the pro-life people are viciously anti-woman.

There is a group in the middle who might be swayed, but those people can be reached with calm language. In this analogy the placard-wielders are the "anti-vaxxers".

I guess I'm trying to say that mockery and ridicule are using emotion to try to change behaviours, but they create the wrong emotions and are counter-productive. We want people to feel welcomed, understood, supported, etc, while we're trying to change their mind.

They can, in fact, change people's minds over the long run. Although more at the population level rather than for specific individuals who already hold ridiculous beliefs.

" Once upon a time, there was a racist tree. Seriously, you are going to hate this tree. High on a hill overlooking the town, the racist tree grew where the grass was half clover. Children would visit during the sunlit hours and ask for apples, and the racist tree would shake its branches and drop the delicious red fruit that gleamed without being polished. The children ate many of the racist tree's apples and played games beneath the shade of its racist branches. One day the children brought Sam, a boy who had just moved to town, to play around the racist tree. "Let Sam have an apple," asked a little girl. "I don't think so. He's black," said the tree. This shocked the children and they spoke to the tree angrily, but it would not shake its branches to give Sam an apple, and it called him a nigger. "I can't believe the racist tree is such a racist," said one child. The children momentarily reflected that perhaps this kind of behavior was how the racist tree got its name. It was decided that if the tree was going to deny apples to Sam then nobody would take its apples. The children stopped visiting the racist tree. The racist tree grew quite lonely. After many solitary weeks it saw a child flying a kite across the clover field. "Can I offer you some apples?" asked the tree eagerly. "Fuck off, you goddamn Nazi," said the child. The racist tree was upset, because while it was very racist, it did not personally subscribe to Hitler's fascist ideology. The racist tree decided that it would have to give apples to black children, not because it was tolerant, but because otherwise it would face ostracism from white children. And so, social progress was made. "

A baffling parable. People who don't vaccinate are not social excluded - they tend to huddle in hotspots of unvaccination. By ostrasizing them you just make their views stronger - you cut them off from facts and let them stew in made up nonsense.

I'm curious what the basis is for your statement? Is mockery the best method for changing peoples' behavior here? Probably not, but I'm not convinced that it's counter productive like you assert.

I prefer facts and reason. When those don't work, what's left that doesn't involve force?

Law, and injunctive measures.

Both of those are meaningless without force to back them up.

An injunction would be enforced by whatever means the judge deems necessary to ensure compliance, and anyone who violates it would be in contempt of court, which could result in arrest.

EDIT: did anyone persuade you to run Linux by using words like "Micro$haft"? Did anyone persuade you that some Apple functionality was sub-optimal by calling you a "fanboi"? /EDIT

There are broadly speaking three groups of people.

i) those who get vaccinations

ii) those who are unsure

iii) those who are anti vaccination

People sometimes assume that the people in group ii and in group iii and are deluded idiots who ignore all the evidence. Let's look at a real example of mass non-vaccination -- the MMR Autism hoax.

This involved a real but corrupt scientist who wrote a scientific paper but used faked data and published that paper in a respected medical journal, although they later withdrew it. That's not people believing in Unicorns! That's people thinking there's some scientific reason not to get that vaccination. Newspapers with their terrible reporting of science fed that fear. When the paper was retracted by the journal people don't know if that's because it's true but there's a technicality, or if it's false. At the point people were not aware of Andrew Wakefield's criminal corrupt behaviour.

Now try putting yourself in their position. Remember that Wakefield is still a scientist at that point; that although the paper is retracted you didn't know about the faked data. You have a bunch of your friends worried about whether they should get that vaccine or not, or whether they should get single vaccines instead of MMR. There are starting to be conflicting stories in the newspapers. And then, a group starts a website and members of that group start calling you a fucking idiot for even considering not vaccinating your child. They compare you to flat earthers and Yeti-watchers and alien abduction kooks. You know you're not like that, so already you've started to reject what they're saying. Some of your friends are sympathetic to you, reinforcing your doubts with phrases like "maybe there's nothing to it, but look at Bob - he was fine, he got the vaccine, and now he's Autistic" or "maybe there isn't anything to it but measles isn't that bad and do you really want to risk Autism" (and remember weak anecdotal evidence is rife on HN; and at least on HN user has suggested that measles isn't that serious).

I believe that mockery here pushes people away from information about vaccination and towards misinformation.

This example is tricky because of "hindsight bias". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

This is the best document about the crook Andrew Wakefield - http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html

You might say that if you focus the mocking on group iii that people in group ii would want to avoid them. I think that people in group ii would feel themselves to be the target.

Also don't forget that people are not rational even when they claim to be. There are a bunch of areas where the science is very much clearer than in the early days of MMR (climate change) and you still have denialists who trot out arguments created by shills paid by a few large companies - the same shills that were used by the tobacco industry using the same tactics that delayed smoking controls for so long.

I think Child Protective Services would be a good tool.

People who choose not to vaccinate their children are by and large beyond the reach of reason, in much the same way the typical religious person is. I wouldn't advocate mockery and ridicule because it is as equally wasted as reason is on these people. Instead they should simply be ignored to the extent possible, and when not possible as in the case of the subject of this article they should be quarantined so the rest of us don't suffer from their ignorance.

The parents might be unreachable. But the children grow up and they, and then their children, might be reachable.

Those later generations are easier to vaccinate if they haven't been subjected to years of mocking.