The MMR vaccine controversy refers to claims that autism spectrum disorders are a direct result to having the MMR vaccine administered. MMR is an immunization against measles, mumps and rubella. Claims of a connection between the vaccine and autism surfaced in a 1998 paper, The Lancet, a respected British medical journal. Investigation by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer discovered that the lead author of the article, Andrew Wakefield, had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest, had manipulated evidence, and had broken other ethical guidelines and codes. The Lancet retracted the, and Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010, and was struck off the Medical Register—meaning he could no longer practice as a doctor in the United Kingdom. In 2011, media circulated the news that the BMJ had declared the research about the MMR link to autism “fraudulent.”
"This type of cognitive relativism — or "truthiness," as fictional talk show host Stephen Colbert termed it — has become the defining intellectual trend of our time."
"It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all of the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts."
- Seth Mnookin; April 2010, Larry King Live
"Looking at the diseases mumps, measles and rubella in a country like the US... it doesn't tend to be a problem. Children will do fine with these diseases in a developed country that has good nutrition. And because I live in a country where the norm is vaccine, I can delay my vaccines."
- Mother of a grade-schooler that was infected while on vacation in Europe
“By 2005 … a preoccupation with vaccine safety and an opposition to traditional institutions were viewed by an ever-growing number of ‘autism advocates’ as prerequisites for membership in their community.”
In January 2011, David M. Shribman wrote “Anatomy of a panic” for the Boston Globe. In the past decade Seth Mnookin has become a chronicler of some of the icons of American popular culture. He wrote a popular book, Feeding the Monster,on the ascent of the Red Sox, and a controversial book, Hard News, on the scandals of The New York Times. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movement against vaccinations. "The Panic Virus"is sure to attract attention — and the virulent criticism of one of contemporary life’s most ardent insurgencies, those who believe inoculations possess the power to injure. Specifically the Seth Mnookin book focuses on the scare triggered by a flawed 1998 scientific paper suggesting that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could cause autism. […] In his book, Seth Mnookin traces the spread of the panic and the role of the media in it. A new parent himself, Mnookin admits a certain fear of vaccines — but an even greater fear that his child might encounter someone with measles or whooping cough before he gets all his shots. He understands the panic and passion of parents with sick children — but fears that waves of “self-righteous hysteria’’ have the power of overcoming “critical thinking.’’ […] The Seth Mnookin book is an unsparing brief against the vaccine skeptics. But in a larger sense, this volume is less about the insurrection against inoculations than it is about the democratization of information. It is less about the movement to battle the medical establishment than it is about the ability of social networks to mobilize for what Seth Mnookin and most mainstream scientists and doctors believe is a bad cause.
"That MMR paper is the best example there has ever been of a very, very dodgy paper that has created a lot of discomfort and misery."
- Dr Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, speaking about Dr. Andrew Wakefield's MMR-autism research
"Anxiety about the individual's fate in industrialized societies [plays a role in motivating anti-vaccination crusaders]. Then, as now, they appealed to knee-jerk populism by conjuring up an imaginary elite with an insatiable hunger for control. [...] Then, as now, they preached the superiority of subjective beliefs over objective proofs, of knowledge acquired by personal experience rather than through scientific rigor."
January 2011: Dr. Michael Shermer, publisher of the Skeptic Magazine and author of the forthcoming book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "The Panic Virus" is a lesson on how fear hijacks reason and emotion trumps logic. But the story starts with a bit of bad science. On Feb. 26, 1998, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a paper by a medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield who claimed that he had found a causal link between autism and the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. Even though the journal's editors made it clear that further research was needed, at a press conference Dr. Wakefield announced: "With the debate over MMR that has started, I cannot support the continued use of the three vaccines given together." […] In a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing, Seth Mnookin explains precisely how medical researchers set about determining whether there is a causal connection in an apparent pattern. "Broadly speaking, there are three ways scientists collect data to test new theories," he explains. "The best possible method is through a randomized clinical trial, in which researchers take a sampling of a population and arbitrarily test their hypothesis on one half while leaving the other half untouched."
From the website of the James Randi Educational Foundation, dated April 1, 2009: Jenny McCarthy is well known as a model and actor, but in recent days she's getting far more publicity for her stance that vaccines cause autism. She has a son who may be autistic, and of course we are sympathetic to her plight. But that can only go so far when Ms. McCarthy appears on endless chat shows, is interviewed in magazine articles, and even writes books encouraging people not to vaccinate their children. Numerous, well-done studies have shown conclusively that there is no causal link between vaccines and the onset of autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) - the claim that they are connected is spurious, based on anecdotes and the fact that vaccines are given to children around the same time that ASD symptoms begin to appear. The antivaccination movement has been directly linked with outbreaks of various vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, and there have been numerous illnesses and even deaths associated with these outbreaks. The facts are in, and have been for quite some time: vaccines are an overwhelming modern medical success story, having eradicated such scourges as smallpox, and hugely lowering rates of other diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio, influenza, and diptheria. The evidence is also overwhelmingly against any link between vaccines and autism as well. Yet all that evidence has been overturned in the public's mind with ease and alacrity by Ms. McCarthy, so she wins the Pigasus award for her contribution to the country's ill-health.
"Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains" is a magazine article technology author Nicholas Carr. The article—or rather, the essay—was highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition. The essay was published in the July, August 2008 issue of The Atlantic magazine, as a six-page cover story. The essay builds upon Carr's book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (in particular, it builds upon The Big Switch’s last chapter, "iGod". Nicholas Carr’s main argument in The Atlantic essay is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition, i.e. the internet diminishes the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not singling out Google, but is more a critique of the technological utopianism, surrounded by the fervor of the latest and greatest technological fad, be that Web 2.0 technologies, social media, etc. Nicholas Carr builds on these threads further, in his latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, published in June 2010.
“You want access to as much information as possible so you can discern what is most relevant and correct. The solution isn’t to limit the information you receive. Ultimately you have to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind.”
- Google co-founder, Sergey Brin; in a 2004 interview with Playboy Magazine
"I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. My brain wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it."
The Effects of the Internet and Its Technologies on Reading Behaviors: Nicholas Carr asserts that using the Internet can lead to a lower attention span, and can make it more difficult to read in the traditional sense (that is, read a book at length without mental interruptions). Nicholas Carr says that he and his friends have found it more difficult to concentrate and read whole books, even though they read a great deal when they were younger (that is, when they did not have access to the Internet). Researchers from the University College London have done a 5-year study on Internet habits, and have found that people using websites on a regular basis exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.
"It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."
- University College London, School of Life and Medical Sciences
"But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."
- Richard Foreman, March 2005
In June 2010, Jonah Lehrer wrote “Our Cluttered Minds” for The New York Times. While Nicholas Carr tries to ground his argument in the details of modern neuroscience, his most powerful points have nothing do with our plastic cortex. Instead, “The Shallows” is most successful when Nicholas Carr sticks to cultural criticism, as he documents the losses that accompany the arrival of new technologies. The rise of the written text led to the decline of oral poetry; the invention of movable type wiped out the market for illuminated manuscripts; the television show obliterated the radio play (if hardly radio itself). Similarly, numerous surveys suggest that the Internet has diminished our interest in reading books. Carr quotes Wallace Stevens’s poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” in which stillness allows the reader to “become a book.” The incessant noise of the Internet, Nicholas concludes, has turned the difficult text into an obsolete relic.
"In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us."
"Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other — sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth. This will be the reign of the human word in all its plenitude. Thought will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book — the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a newspaper."
- French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, 1831, on the proliferation of the burgeoning medium of the day, the newspaper
In September 2010, Steven Poole criticized the Nicholas Carr book, The Shallows: Like the majority of contemporary books, then, The Shallows does not justify its length: its natural form was always that of a pithy provocation, so as an argument for the superiority of book-length prose it is rather self-defeating. Sometimes, however, it does seem as though the author's memory really has been degraded by his internet abuse. "It's possible to think deeply while surfing the net," Carr admits on page 116, thus momentarily torpedoing the determinism on which his jeremiad is predicated, before he gets back on message a mere three pages later, accusing the net of "preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively". Well, both cannot be true. Either you can think deeply when using the internet, or the internet prevents you from doing so. It is easy to see which version is correct; and which version, conversely, makes for a more polemically enticing sales pitch. All too rarely do defenders of books (and, for that matter, newspapers) ask themselves the uncomfortable question: might it be that people are reading fewer of the products not because people are becoming more stupid but because many of the products are not actually very good?
"In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life."
In July 2008, Clay Shirky, digital-media scholar at New York University, wrote “Why Abundance is Good: a Reply to Nick Carr.” Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion. But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream. Much of the current concern about the internet, in fact, is a misdirected complaint about television, which displaced books as the essential medium by the 1970s.
ABC News recently invoked the author and his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower, in this report on Wikileaks: Lawrence Wright is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Looming Tower," an investigation of the rise of Al-Qaida and the events leading to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He relied in part on internal State Department documents, the kind WikiLeaks has just released by the hundreds of thousands. "That was really helpful. I'd hate not to have such inside glimpses," Wright says of the documents he obtained, including how the State Department dealt with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He sees the short-term advantage to WikiLeaks, but wonders if books such as his will become harder to write. "I worry that there will be a backlash in terms of classification, so that more information that would be considered merely confidential will be termed top secret and kept from wider distribution, so that people on the ground who could put such knowledge to work, won't have access to it."See that ABC News report here.
In December, 2010, the Financial Times had this to say about the book:
The book’s title is taken from the Greek myth in which Procrustes fitted his guests to a bed – cutting to size those too tall and stretching those too short. Taleb’s crystalline nuggets of thought stand alone like esoteric poems, but together produce a sort of picture in reverse – the surrounding space shaded in to reveal the central subject: human knowledge and its limitations.
We are here in this French café in Morningside Heights to talk about Socrates, Seneca, Averroës, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. These are his forebears in the art of the aphorism, a form he took up for several months earlier this year, resulting in his new book, The Bed of Procrustes, a compendium of Talebian witticisms and skeptical philosophizing: “You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.” “Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.” “You are only secure if you can lose your fortune without the additional insult of having to become humble.” It is a work very different in format from The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, best sellers that predicted that the mathematical models Wall Street relied on to measure risk would help bring down the world economy. When the crash of 2008 came, it secured Taleb’s fame as the oracle of the Great Recession and made him, for a time, a ubiquitous cable-news presence, inveighing against the financial-policy elite.
Bryson has been chosen as one of the winners of the prestigious EU Descartes prize for science communication for his rough guide to science, A Short History of Nearly Everything. The Descartes is a 'prize of prizes' and Bryson was nominated by the Royal Society after winning the Aventis prize for science writing for the book in 2004. Accepting his award, Bill Bryson said: "Never has someone been more generously awarded for his ignorance. I'm very grateful to all the scientists who, without exception, helped me to discover the wonder of their science. "I'm especially grateful to the Royal Society for nominating me for this award and in recognition of that, plan to return a small portion of the prize to the Society, in the hope they'll be able to buy the staff a seasonal drink."
About a month ago, Timothy Garton Ash wrote about Wikileaks and conflicting public interests in The Guardian:
There is a genuine public interest in knowing these things. The Guardian, like the New York Times and other responsible news media, has tried to ensure that nothing we publish puts anyone at risk. We should all demand of WikiLeaks that it does the same. Yet one question remains. How can diplomacy be conducted under these conditions? A state department spokesman is surely right to say that the revelations are "going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world". The conduct of government is already hampered by fear of leaks. An academic friend of mine who worked in the state department under Condoleezza Rice told me that he had once suggested writing a memo posing fundamental questions about US policy in Iraq. "Don't even think of it," he was warned – because it would be sure to appear in the next day's New York Times. There is a public interest in understanding how the world works and what is done in our name. There is a public interest in the confidential conduct of foreign policy. The two public interests conflict. One thing I'd bet on, though: the US government must surely be ruing, and urgently reviewing, its weird decision to place a whole library of recent diplomatic correspondence on to a computer system so brilliantly secure that a 22-year-old could download it on to a Lady Gaga CD.
Richard Muller is a guy who thinks spouting fun physics facts will make you the life of the party. And his new book, "The Instant Physicist: An Illustrated Guide," may just convince you he's right. Who knew, for example, that liquor, by law, must be radioactive? Or that you really can get your clothes whiter than white? Or that the earth is travelling through space at a million miles per hour? These are some of the astonishing facts Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, explains with the help of witty cartoons by illustrator Joey Manfre. "When I was a kid, I used to love ‘Ripley's Believe it or Not,'" Muller said. The 2011 book's anecdotes are like Ripley's amazing tidbits, "but with a real explanation. I think this is a new approach to teaching physics. If you know ten-year-olds, giving them a copy of this book will begin to make them fascinated by science. But the book is equally liked by physics professors," he added.
I cover the White House and the president, and I often wonder if there is such a thing as "Obamaism." This book offers one definition. Kloppenberg is the chairman of the history department at Harvard; he's written books about liberalism and social democracy, and he places Obama squarely in that progressive intellectual stream. Kloppenberg offers an answer to one of the great ironies about reactions to Obama: how the same man can be vilified as a socialist and derided as a sellout to Wall Street. According to Kloppenberg, Obama's writings and speeches show that he is an adherent of philosophical pragmatism, a home-grown American philosophy developed at the end of the 19th century by William James and John Dewey. Philosophical pragmatists are anti-absolutists. They believe that compromise, public debate and civility are the building blocks of true democracy. Kloppenberg believes Obama's cerebral caution and his nuanced understanding of both sides of a debate are not personality traits or signs of weakness; they are a philosophical choice.
Read the blog post here. But of all the blog posts and plugs for the book at NPR, the BBC and the like, the most substantive of them, must be this post out of the quarterly, "Democracy" ("a journal of ideas"), which we'll quote at length here:
One of Kloppenberg’s most important claims is that Obama embodies the spirit of pragmatism–not the colloquial pragmatism that is more or less the same thing as practicality, but the philosophical pragmatism that emerged largely from William James and John Dewey and continued to flourish through the work of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and others. Kloppenberg provides an excellent summary of the pragmatic tradition–a tradition rooted in the belief that there are no eternal truths, that all ideas and convictions must meet the test of usefulness. (Or, as James put it, ideas have to “work.”) Josiah Royce, James’s Harvard colleague and friend, argued that behind all moral claims there must be some “absolute truth” or “absolute knowledge.” Without such absolutes, he (and many others) believed, individuals would have nothing on which to build a moral life. But the pragmatists insisted that every idea has to confront the test of relevance to its time and circumstances. There could be no easy recourse to an absolute truth, either from religion or ancient texts or even from contemporary philosophy. People and nations must live with the knowledge that even their deepest beliefs can be challenged and, if necessary, rejected.
What is the evidence that Obama shares that view? His years at Harvard Law School drew him into the pragmatic ideas that dominated much of the faculty, and so there is little doubt that he knew a great deal about the tradition of pragmatism. But despite Kloppenberg’s claim, it is not entirely clear that he wholly embraced it. In The Audacity of Hope, a book that was designed for his presidential campaign but that also contains much of what we know about his opinions and convictions, Obama makes clear that he has an interest in pragmatism, but he is not wholly committed to it. “It has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty,” he writes. “The hard, cold facts remind me that it was unbending idealists like William Lloyd Garrison . . . Denmark Vesey . . . Frederick Douglass . . . Harriet Tubman . . . who recognized that power would concede nothing without a fight.”
The best argument for Obama as a pragmatist is his well-known preference for “deliberative democracy,” which he describes as a politics “in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.” Kloppenberg sees Obama as a person who is prone to “building support slowly, gradually, through compromise and painstaking consensus building . . . . It is a gamble he may lose. But it is not a sign of weakness.” Perhaps not. But the last two years suggest that the kind of slow, deliberate consensus-building that Obama seems to prefer is not consistent with the character and needs of national politics and is certainly not consistent with the political world he has inherited–as exhibited by the obdurate and virtually unanimous opposition of the Republican caucus to almost everything he proposes. It may be that no president could be more effective than Obama has been in this political climate. The climate of crisis that he inherited would make it difficult for any leader. But that is all the more reason for him to rebut energetically the powerful opposition that is attempting to derail him. His quasi-pragmatic coolness has not so far been helpful to him or to the nation.
Nassim Taleb is the philosopher and former trader who correctly predicted that the mathematical models Wall Street used to measure risk would lead to a massive financial crisis. His new book, ‘The Bed of Procrustes,’ scrutinizes the economy, as well as human knowledge and values. The book features "practical and philosophical aphorisms," and includes fortune-cookie sized sentences that attempt to "expose self-delusions you have been living with but have never recognized." Taleb is the current Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University. He is the author of 'Fooled by Randomness' and 'The Black Swan.'
Why put off until tomorrow what you can postpone until next week? It’s the motto of many a procrastinator and something that most of us have said at one point or another. And what’s the big deal? Is procrastination such a bad thing? Don’t some of us actually work better under pressure Chrisoula Andreou and Mark White don’t think so. They’re the co-editors of a new book called “The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination.” They explain why we procrastinate, and whether it’s actually good for anything.
CHARLIE ROSE: Christopher Hitchens is an English-born, Oxford-
educated writer and journalist who has lived and worked in Washington for
many years. He is well known for his wit, his sharp arguments and strong
opinions on religion, politics and especially the war in Iraq. David
Brooks of "The New York Times" says "There are few people in this country
who bring such a literary perspective to political and policy
controversies." And here is what his friend Martin Amis said on this
program this week.
,on the ascent of the Red Sox, and a controversial book, Hard News
, on the scandals of The New York Times. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movement against vaccinations. "The Panic Virus
"is sure to attract attention — and the virulent criticism of one of contemporary life’s most ardent insurgencies, those who believe inoculations possess the power to injure. Specifically the Seth Mnookin book focuses on the scare triggered by a flawed 1998 scientific paper suggesting that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could cause autism. […] In his book, Seth Mnookin traces the spread of the panic and the role of the media in it. A new parent himself, Mnookin admits a certain fear of vaccines — but an even greater fear that his child might encounter someone with measles or whooping cough before he gets all his shots. He understands the panic and passion of parents with sick children — but fears that waves of “self-righteous hysteria’’ have the power of overcoming “critical thinking.’’ […] The Seth Mnookin book is an unsparing brief against the vaccine skeptics. But in a larger sense, this volume is less about the insurrection against inoculations than it is about the democratization of information. It is less about the movement to battle the medical establishment than it is about the ability of social networks to mobilize for what Seth Mnookin and most mainstream scientists and doctors believe is a bad cause.
, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "The Panic Virus
(in particular, it builds upon The Big Switch’s last chapter, "iGod". Nicholas Carr’s main argument in The Atlantic essay is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition, i.e. the internet diminishes the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not singling out Google, but is more a critique of the technological utopianism, surrounded by the fervor of the latest and greatest technological fad, be that Web 2.0 technologies, social media, etc. Nicholas Carr builds on these threads further, in his latest book, 
, published in June 2010.
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