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How We Form Opinions

2025-04-25 · explainer · Hank · 9:23 · watch on YouTube

Topic: US politics & society (also: History & curiosities) · mode: Personal essay · tags: self correction

Hank tells how smallpox variolation, brought to Boston by the enslaved Onesimus via Cotton Mather and to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, met opposite reactions in the two places, and argues people judged it by how they felt about its advocates; he sees the same mechanism today with electric cars, vaccines and falling birth rates and argues for taboos against inflammatory fear of outsiders.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Onesimus, Cotton Mather and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu bring variolation to Boston and England; Hank's visit to the Royal Society

  • ★★ Hank says that in 1706 a West African man, called Onesimus by his enslavers, was purchased for Boston minister Cotton Mather, an influential voice in the Salem witch trials. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank says Onesimus told Mather a procedure from his homeland protected him from smallpox; he was right: putting pus or scab from a smallpox case into a wound induces a milder, far less fatal infection. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Hank says Boston then had only around 10,000 people, and nearly a thousand were killed in a single smallpox outbreak. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Hank says English noblewoman Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, scarred by smallpox and having lost her brother to it, returned from Turkey, where her husband was a diplomat, with stories of women performing a similar procedure. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Hank says Lady Mary had the procedure performed on her son in Turkey and became its advocate on returning to England. — 00:01:27 · England
  • ★ Hank says the story is much bigger and he is excited to make a long video about it someday. (hedged) — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Hank recently went to the basement of the Royal Society to see the original logbook of inoculations kept by Lady Mary's physician. — 00:01:27

00:01:56 — Opposite reactions to variolation in Boston and London; both sides had legitimate points

  • ★★★ Hank says the nearly identical procedure met opposite reactions: in Boston, backed by a Puritan minister, it was seen as anti-elite; in London, backed by aristocrats, doctors and the king, as elite and attacked by anti-royalists. — 00:01:56 · London
  • ★★ Hank notes that in both places variolation was attacked by people who believed foreign knowledge and people inferior: fear of outsiders trumps pretty much everything. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Hank says both sides had legitimate points: variolation was not safe and fear of deliberate infection made sense, yet there was good evidence it was much safer than catching smallpox normally. — 00:02:26
  • ★ Hank says no one understood how variolation worked for about a hundred years afterwards. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Hank says variolation was tested on humans, some not consenting; some recipients died, and some doctors performed it poorly, thinking they could improve on a practice from supposedly inferior foreign lands. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Hank says variolation turned out to be a positive step whose imperfection inspired the path to safe vaccines and the eradication of smallpox. — 00:02:55 · vaccine

00:03:24 — People judged variolation by how they felt about its advocates and backfilled the reasons

  • ★ Hank says one can easily imagine Mather and Montagu turning out wrong, so his point is not about who was right. — 00:03:24
  • ★★★ Hank argues that which side people took depended not on profession, class or the procedure but largely on how they already felt about its advocates; they decided, then backfilled the reasons. — 00:03:56
  • ★★ Hank says English anti-royalists did not cite their hatred of the king but said the procedure came from scary Muslims and stood in the way of God's will. — 00:03:56 · England
  • ★★ Hank says elite Boston doctors, rather than objecting that Mather wasn't one of them, said nothing good could come from an African's knowledge and it would kill people. — 00:04:25
  • ★★ Hank says many overcame the effect: some Boston doctors were convinced, and in England public enthusiasm, strongly anti-smallpox, quieted the dissenters. — 00:04:25 · England

00:05:04 — The same mechanism today: electric cars versus heat pumps, vaccines, and the demographic shift from falling births

  • ★★★ Hank's lesson: it is good for things not to become a fight; electric cars are a fight but heat pumps, a better way to heat most American homes, are not, and the longer kept out of fight territory the better. — 00:05:04 · United States
  • ★★ Hank says electric vehicles were made into a fight with advocates on the left, so the right feels protective of the status quo; vandals cutting fast-charger cables reflect this group dislike. — 00:05:33
  • ★★★ Hank says vaccines were once outside the ideological divide until scary stories made them a fight; vocal political pro-vaccine advocacy now gets more Democrats but fewer Republicans vaccinated, because it is tribal. — 00:06:02 · vaccine, Republican Party
  • ★ Hank jokes that a left-side example is harder to find because of course he thinks all his perspectives are rational, but he has one. (playful) — 00:06:32
  • ★★★ Hank says fewer births will bring a demographic shift; a society with far more old than young people strains Social Security and much else, a real situation needing attention. — 00:06:32
  • ★★ Hank says that because the right is loud, alarmist and even racist about it, few on the other side acknowledge the demographic shift; acknowledging it now seems a right-wing position. — 00:07:01
  • ★★ Hank rejects the right's framing (a failing of educated American women, the end of white people) as terrible, but says the situation exists; if saying so alienates you from your tribe, the mechanism is at work. — 00:07:01 · United States

00:07:44 — Mitigating it: keep strong opinions from manipulators, and keep racism and inflammatory fear of outsiders taboo; sign-off

  • ★★ Hank says the mechanism is clear and cannot be made to go away, but it can be mitigated. — 00:07:44
  • ★★ Hank wants open minds about vaccines and electric cars, which have been extremely beneficial to his life, and about whether TikTok is bad and how to handle the coming demographic transition. — 00:07:44 · vaccine, TikTok
  • ★★★ Hank says the best way is to keep strong opinions out of the mouths of those who would use them to manipulate us, which is hard because they are most incentivized to hold loud, strong opinions. — 00:08:14
  • ★★★ Hank says the stickiest, most inflammatory argument in Onesimus's day, that people and ideas from elsewhere endanger you and your family, is still the stickiest today. — 00:08:14
  • ★★★ Hank says fear of outsiders runs deep, so racism should be strongly taboo and invoking it extremely immoral, with taboos too against inflammatory rhetoric that closes minds and stalls progress. — 00:08:43
  • ★★ Hank feels we have lost many of those taboos, but perhaps we will see the negative effects and reinstate them soon. (hedged) — 00:08:43

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says Hank hates when conversation is driven where people feel they must protect their identities and stay safe in their communities, especially about things obviously true or needing open minds. — video description
  • ★★ In a channel comment, Hank corrects that the picture of Onesimus he showed is of a different Onesimus from about 100 years later. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: motivated reasoning · Onesimus · variolation · xenophobia

Also: People: Cotton Mather · Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Organizations: Democratic Party · Republican Party · Royal Society · TikTok

Groups: White Americans

Concepts: charging station · demographic transition · Electric car · heat pump · Islam · Population ageing · racism · slavery · smallpox · taboo · total fertility rate · tribalism · vaccine · Vaccine hesitancy

Places: Boston · England · London · Turkey · United States · West Africa

Events: Salem witch trials

Policies: Social Security

Only in the description or credits: in-group favoritism

Also centred on motivated reasoning: The Liger Delusion · You Cannot Trust Yourself (Hank's End of the Year Worries)

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