Quickies
Quickies: Inspiring Digital Feminist Campaigns, Why Doctors Need Anthropologists, and the Incoming Robot Army
On April 7, 1827, John Walker sold one of his inventions, the first match that was able to be lighted with friction (which you should be familiar with today).
- 23 Inspiring Feminist Digital Campaigns That Changed the World – A nice, uplifting story on how you can make a difference through grassroots campaigns. From Sarah.
- Why Anthropologists Join An Ebola Outbreak Team – “Before the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders started bringing in anthropologists, medical staff often had a difficult time convincing families to bring their sick loved ones to clinics and isolation wards.” From Will.
- The Coming Robot Army Just Wants To Rock – When can I sign up to transfer my brain to a robot body?
- How the Internet Is Taking Away America’s Religion – “Using the Internet can destroy your faith. That’s the conclusion of a study showing that the dramatic drop in religious affiliation in the U.S. since 1990 is closely mirrored by the increase in Internet use.” Muhaha! From Jason.
I have issues with that study. If you are conceding the fact that you don’t know what causes most of the drop in religiosity, why not concede the possibility that wasn’t discussed.
“At this point, it’s worth spending a little time talking about the nature of these conclusions. What Downey has found is correlations and any statistician will tell you that correlations do not imply causation. If A is correlated with B, there can be several possible explanations. A might cause B, B might cause A, or some other factor might cause both A and B.”
Or, A and B might be entirely unrelated, except in terms of timeframe. There are a trillion things happening at any given time, and most of them are unrelated to each other. The internet suddenly showed up, and that’s why internet use went up. Religious belief may have dropped due to increased internet use, but it may also have been the result of scientific advances, a rise of skepticism, etc, etc. Se7en came out in 1995, so maybe people watching that lose their faith, after all, views of that movie would’ve been high the first few years, then tailed off.
Interesting discussion wrt: anthropologists and medical teams. One of the ideas I’ve seen floated is using the IHS (Indian Health Services) model for spreading vaccines to indigenous communities. It might only work in English-speaking countries (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), though. In sub-Saharan Africa, you have a lot more conspiracy theories. (Justifiable, given history, even if those theories are now deadlier than any present-day plot they claim exists.)
One of the ideas I’ve had was to train more indigenous MDs, the Emmanuel Goldsteins of our campaign, if you will. (I think of Goldstein because there was always something Orwellian about the most well-known medical myth in the developing world, HIV denialism: That a German had any right to wrap his medical ideas up in the banner of anticolonialism.) It’s one thing to hear a white man say vaccines save lives and are in no way part of an evil plot. It’s another thing to hear your neighbor say it.