LastWeekTonight
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2018–2021
27:15 · 27M views · Jun 26, 2017
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on vaccines, arguing that the benefits far outweigh the minuscule risks and discussing why some parents still doubt their safety.
HN recommends it as an accessible, funny explanation of why vaccines matter.
3 comments from Hacker News
Last Week Tonight has a nice episode on Vaccines: this video It explains why vaccines are important, why "taking it slow" with vaccines is a bad approach, and other important stuff. Please vaccinate yourself and your kids.
Yes, sometimes explanations and reasonable arguments can just derail conversations completely. For preventing that, I find David Burns' disarming technique[0] really useful. It is about "finding truth in what the other person is saying, even if it seems blatantly wrong, or illogical, or exaggerated." His podcast is amazing. Perhaps part of what your room mate is saying is that she is concerned about the well-being of her (future) children? Surely that's truly good. She's also interested in avoiding certain medical treatments that are excessive or unnecessary, which is also good. Don't know about the Holocaust-denying colleague, but sometimes xenophones have a fear of losing their job to someone else, which could leave them unable to economically support themselves or their family, and maybe they really enjoy the job they have. If your colleague talks about you being indoctrinated, then he must have a high regard of the truth (which is good), and if he's interested in how indoctrination works, he may even be interested in reading about Chomsky's propaganda model[1]. Of course, this disarming stuff is only useful if you actually want to prevent conflict with other people, and it's totally legitimate to have a conflict with anti-vaxers and Holocaust deniers. But also, you live and work together, and constant conflicts may not get you nor them anywhere but down. Also, Last Week Tonight has quite a good episode on vaccines[2] (but showing that to your roomie might not calm things
Would that normally be in such a document? Plenty of engineering type documents I have read don't lay out threats in plain English nor do they try to add emotional urgency to them. Reminds me of this comment about how scientists sometimes understate how certain they are: this video .