Are you safer with a gun in the house? Should you spank your child? Should you vaccinate your child? Would legalizing all drugs reduce drug-related deaths & violent crime?
These are big questions with potentially disastrous consequences if answered wrong, and there are plenty more where they came from. In our "Fairness Doctrine" media climate where both sides of every issue are often given equal time even if there aren't two equally correct sides in reality (as there rarely are), it can be damn near impossible to discern what the REAL truth is, so people default to relying on their intuition or what "feels right" when faced with big decisions like these. (These days where you stand on a given issue is often determined by your political affiliation, which is nothing short of absurd).
While gut feelings play an important role in keeping us safe in the wild (i.e. "I feel like I'm being watched/followed and need to run"; "That guy is giving me serious creeper vibes and I don't want him around my kid"), depending on them to answer complex questions like these is a dangerous idea for reasons you're about to see. You'd be no worse off flipping a coin to make your major life decisions.
Our Feelings Are Often Inaccurate--Sometimes Dangerously So
Emotions like joy, sadness, fear, anger & disgust serve many vital functions, helping us understand ourselves & others, build relationships & communicate effectively. But allowing them to drive our decision-making to the exclusion of scientific data is foolish and may put us or our loved ones in danger. That's because our feelings/emotions don't always align with the medical, scientific or political reality. Even our physical perception--literal sensations within our bodies and those picked up by our 5 senses--cannot be relied upon as you're about to see.
Things that don't feel bad for us can be quite harmful. High blood sugar, hypertension & high cholesterol don't cause any noticeable symptoms in the moment but each one causes unique damage to the cardiovascular system as well as almost every other organ in the body, eventually putting sufferers at high risk for heart attack, stroke, dementia, blindness, kidney disease, heart failure & limb amputation among other serious health problems. Likewise, a mild or moderate case of COVID may not feel as miserable as a bad case of influenza or norovirus (winter vomiting bug) but is likely doing much worse damage to your body over time, especially with repeated infections. Indeed, even asymptomatic cases have been proven to increase the risk of stroke and heart attack for up to 6 months following infection.
Stage 1 endometriosis may cause unbearable pain while Stage IV endo may go undetected, only being diagnosed during surgeries for other conditions or when the patient can't get pregnant. Cancer--one of the most dreaded diseases in the world--rarely causes noticeable symptoms until it's in advanced stages and when it does, they may be incredibly vague as in the case of ovarian cancer: one of the most deadly kinds. Conversely, the treatments for cancer (chemotherapy & radiation) often cause hair & weight loss, horrific nausea, searing pain & other side effects that feel worse than the disease they're treating, yet they have saved & prolonged countless lives. For this reason you cannot rely on how bad something feels to determine how much damage it's doing to your body.
Serotonin transporter protein loss after MDMA (Ecstasy) use. 😱
Worse, things that feel AMAZING are sometimes downright destructive. Drugs like meth and MDMA (Ecstasy) are a great example. As I can personally attest after trying it once in 2012, meth feels healthy--like giving your brain a big drink of water or putting on glasses after being near-sighted your whole life. Thinking is clearer, response time faster, your grades or work performance may even improve... at least in the beginning. Those are objective measures of performance--not merely user bias. However, if you understand how the drug behaves in the body, you'll know that it causes irreversible damage to dopamine receptors in the brain, putting the user at risk for all kinds of mental issues (paranoia, mood swings, hallucinations, insomnia) as well as early-onset Parkinson's disease. And Ecstasy (the name alone suggests the highest high a human can experience!) similarly damages serotonin receptors, breaking them off short & often causing a terrible comedown known as "Suicide Tuesday"--a term coined by ravers.
Perhaps a more relatable example would be that sitting or lounging FEELS a lot better than standing up or exercising, yet it's disastrous for our health. The phrase "sitting is the new smoking" has even caught on because it's THAT fucking bad for us, causing everything from anxiety and depression to increased risk of lung and colon cancer, shortened hip flexor muscles, deep vein thrombosis & varicose veins. Similarly, you need not be a foodie to know that many of the foods that taste great to us are godawful for our health while the healthiest "superfoods" can be bland at best (and vomit-inducing at worst). Examples: kale, black pudding, bamboo worms, natto & kombucha tea. 🫣 🤢 🤮
Science Literacy: Vital for Public Health & Safety
This is why understanding "the science" behind how things work is so vital. It can and often does conflict with our feelings or natural inclinations, and there are no shortage of entities out there who know this and try to appeal to our feelings for their own benefit (read: profit) to our detriment. Religion, the alternative medicine community & extremist bullshit peddlers like InfoWars & Andrew Tate are but a few examples. The answers to the 4 questions posed at the beginning of this article have been answered by science so many times and have so much data backing those answers that they're not even considered "questions" by scientists anymore, yet people will argue with them until they're blue in the face, using nothing more than emotional appeals, anecdotes & foot-stomping tantrums to justify their position. Ironically, it's often the "fuck your feelings/facts over feelings" crowd that engages in this behavior the most.
For those curious, the answers to the 4 questions are: NO, NO (unless you want your kid to be a psychopathic bully with mental health issues), YES (if you want a healthy living child) & YES (unless your only goal is to see drug users die & drug dealing criminals get filthy rich). The scientific proof to back those answers is below. Please actually 1.) Note the validity of the sources cited and 2.) Read the damn info contained therein before attempting to do a "but-but-but!" and clap back. You can most certainly find "sources" to support the opposing conclusions but personal blogs like this one, Youtube/Rumble videos, social media posts, memes & alternative medicine woo BS are not credible. Some examples of credible sources include:
.edu and .gov websites; studies published in medical journals (Nature, NEJM, Lancet, JAMA, etc) within the last 35 years; scholarly books and journals; trade magazines like Smithsonian Magazine; well-known or gov't-funded organizations like NASA, the World Health Organization, the Associated Press, AARP, the American Psychiatric Association & the Library of Congress to name a few. 👍🏽✔🥇
Non-credible sources include: websites with a political agenda such as whale.to, Breitbart or Infowars; discussion forums like Reddit, Mumsnet or 4Chan; tabloid newspapers & gossip sites; content farms like WikiHow, eHow or Examiner.com; social media posts, videos published by or featuring non-experts on the subject at hand & personal anecdotes or stories from people in your life. 👎🏽❌🚮
Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home
Guns in the Home: How to Keep Kids Safe (Contains numerous links to excellent sources)
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