Nonzerosum Roundup - Week Ending 23/09/2018

Every week I come across articles, videos and podcasts that don’t really fit into to the structure of one of my full-length post but are none the less full of wonderful ideas that have enriched my life. This weekly “roundup” post is an attempt to share three of the best of them with you in the hope that it may inspire future posts of your own.

Enjoy!

Disney’s The Winged Scourge (1943)

It seems hard to believe now but Malaria was once endemic across many of the southern states of the US. This week I found a short (10 mins) Disney film used to educate the public about Malaria disease prevention. Its great, it feels like war time propaganda, but against mosquitos!

The film starts off normal enough by explaining how the Malaria parasite uses mosquitos to spread from person to person, but takes a suitably weird turn when the narrator recruits the seven dwarfs to instigate protective vector control measures around their home.

I’m glad this film exists. Like most of early Disney, it still holds up today and it’s a seriously weird thing to see.

Best quote of the film has to be the narrator saying:

“That a boy Dopey, kill her good and dead”

My PhD supervisor on BBC Newsnight

The recent news of the continuing spread of measles in Europe and the fact that vaccine uptake rates have slipped over the last few years has sparked interest in vaccine hesitancy again here in the UK.

This week one of our national evening news programs, Newsnight, aired a segment on this issue, in which I was very proud to see my supervisor, Dr Pauline Paterson, represent our vaccine confidence project. The clip as a whole (13 mins) gives a good overview of much of the work our group is involved in.

The title of the clip as it appears on YouTube and when shared across other platforms, “Why the anti-vaccination movement is wrong”, is a bit of a mess in my opinion. We really need to move away from the dichotomous of pro and anti-vaccination narrative. The outcome is the binary decision for each vaccine but the beliefs are nuanced and on a number of continuum.

How fear deforms our politics

Finally this week, as a nice amendment to my #steemstem post last week, is a conversation with Martha C. Nussbaum on the influence of fear (and other emotions) on our political judgements.

Often in psychology we talk about emotional intelligence, the ability to recognise the emotions experienced by others and ourselves. This is a highly important skill that some people naturally have but that others can improve with emotional literacy. This conversation helps with the latter. It reminded me of this amazing infographic of the language of emotions

The Ezra Klein show:- Martha C. Nussbaum on how fear deforms our politics

I’ve had The Ezra Klein show on heavy rotation in my podcast listening for a while now. Ezra is the editor and chief at Vox media and has a real talent as an interviewer of interesting academics and experts in all the super interesting areas of life that I cant get enough of (except of blockchain/cryptocurrency, Vox seems to have a bit of a blind spot there in my opinion)

About me

My name is Richard, I blog under the name of @nonzerosum. I’m a PhD student at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I write mostly on Public Health, Effective Altruism and The Psychology of Vaccine Hesitancy. If you’d like to read more on these topics in the future follow me here on Steemit or on Twitter @RichClarkePsy.