We’ve got people in the first world claiming that condoms are morally wrong, that they don’t prevent HIV, that AIDS is not caused by HIV, and so on. Those claiming that they don’t prevent HIV or that AIDS is not caused by it are marginalized because the populace is better educated, and probably also because it’s not so big a problem here as to motivate simply hiding from it. The populace in the third world is less educated, and so has less reason to see this as a defiance of evidence, and the leaders both tend to be less well educated than those in the first world, and have more problems that are likely to be intractable, and so they’re motivated to question the data. When you look at how recently first world politicians have been denying anthropogenic climate change, it doesn’t look like we set a much higher standard, our failures simply aren’t as visible.
We’ve got people in the first world claiming that condoms are morally wrong, that they don’t prevent HIV, that AIDS is not caused by HIV, and so on. Those claiming that they don’t prevent HIV or that AIDS is not caused by it are marginalized because the populace is better educated, and probably also because it’s not so big a problem here as to motivate simply hiding from it. The populace in the third world is less educated, and so has less reason to see this as a defiance of evidence, and the leaders both tend to be less well educated than those in the first world, and have more problems that are likely to be intractable, and so they’re motivated to question the data. When you look at how recently first world politicians have been denying anthropogenic climate change, it doesn’t look like we set a much higher standard, our failures simply aren’t as visible.