Confirmation Bias

I finally deleted my pregnancy app.  It was long overdue, mostly since my daughter is 8 months old, so I hung onto this for almost a full human gestation period beyond its useful life.  But, I've wanted to do so for some time, but needed to check in from time to time to watch this like one would watch a car crash.  Except for me, it was the watching death of data and reason erode over the course of a few months, and a small scale experiment in how social media can be easily hijacked.

It started out as a need to reach out to other people when I was pregnant and couldn't brush my teeth without throwing up and needed to know that I wasn't the only person experiencing this.  Once I found the message boards, I got the confirmation that I needed, but also a group of women who suddenly discovered that the United States was a shitty place to be a pregnant woman.  So I stuck around.  It was nice to see a bunch of Red State women complain about the lack of paid maternity leave, their high deductible insurance plans, the lack of affordable day care, and how their at-will employment state didn't make it illegal for their employers to fire them for being pregnant.  Come for the pregnancy tips, stay for the schadenfreude of telling someone to petition the state government of Texas or Mississippi or Arkansas to protect workers. 

But then the inevitable happens.  A few loud-asses start saying that anyone who doesn't agree with them is Mom-shaming.  Providing a link to the CDC site demonstrating the effectiveness of vaccines - Mom-shaming.  Linking to the AAP guidelines for introducing peanuts to infants - Mom-shaming.  Starting a discussion about a Fisher-Price recall - Mom-shaming. You could say that you were adding sharks to the water birthing tub you were considering, and the first person to ask you if that was a good idea would be accused of Mom-shaming.  There's only so much of this silliness that you can take before you just decide it's not worth it.

The problem stems from two separate ways of conducting an argument - the first is to support one's opinions with data and logic.  The other is to resort to name-calling to shut people up.  So if you decide to put your newborn into bed with you to "co-sleep", you don't care that this has been shown through data that this increases the likelihood of SIDS.  But since you can't refute this with your own data or logic, you just start name-calling.  Eventually, the people who are good at finding reputable sources of data reach their breaking point and drop out.  Those left behind rarely look around and say, "Hey, didn't there used to be a dozen doctors posting in this group and now we only have an unlicensed holistic midwife around here?", so this change in the group's dynamics is often unnoticed unless you are looking for it.

Just in case you were wondering how Facebook and the 2016 election worked, it's the same.  I mean, do you correct your dumb home-schooled cousin anymore, or did you unfriend him?