Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Why You Must Lead With "Yes"


"No." is one of the most aggressively abused words and concepts in any language.

Refusing something is a nebulously acceptable notion, but it's one that has requirements.

"Yes" is the only acceptable default. "No" requires valid justification. You can't say no to something just because you want to, nor can you say it because your beliefs don't align with something provable.

It's tiring to see the meteoric rise in preventable disease because "people" who are uppity about vaccines think they deserve the luxury of refusing them. I have to qualify the word usage simply because that designation is, to my mind, forfeit. Upon making the choice to actively sabotage a cooperative sociocultural environment and endanger the lives of their betters, they're worse than people, even than animals.

"Oh, this prevents the spread of a disease? No, I don't care about that." Well, off to the proverbial leper colony with you. No access to any public services ever again, because you've proven that you'd poison the well if you wanted to badly enough.

Shunning the willfully ignorant, the contrarian, the reckless, the ego-driven... it's all simply good practice. Lots of actual people with knowledge, experience, and skill do incredible amounts of actual research, experimentation, and verification to make the lives of others visibly better. 

Not every person can follow the minutiae behind most of it, and that's okay- that's why expertise as a concept exists. But thinking it's acceptable to dismiss those experts' efforts due to an inability to understand them?

No, that's definitely not. The aggressively politically motivated countercultural movement towards blatant distrust of the scientific method and disregard of validated expertise in the name of profiteering and personal preference is easily the greatest danger the U.S. (are they really though?) has faced in at least the last hundred years.

And it's spreading.


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