Tony_Tarantula on 16/2/2015 at 16:08

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[video=youtube;cJe6-afGz0Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJe6-afGz0Q[/video]


I have noticed that if people are gullible.....then holy shit can they be gullible.


That said is going to be more interesting to see what happens to establishment common knowledge as those with competing hypothesis gain more opportunity and resources to study their ideas. I suspect that sooner or later we're going to have another bending of the flat earth, or in other words things that we've taken unquestioned as gospel will be revealed as bullshit.


RE: Vacccines. I'm actually a bit on the fence right now. While I generally believe it's a good idea to minimize the amount of artificial ingredients you put in your body, I previously believed steadfastly in their effectiveness. Two incidents make me question. The first was when I suffered a fairly severe adverse reaction to a flu vaccine that didn't even stop me from getting the same flu strain later. Second, one my wife's nephews got the usual alphabet soup round of injections when he was a toddler and almost immediately began displaying some severe deficiencies in his immune system and cognitive functions.

"Anecdotal"? Sure, but the consequences are very real for the kid involved and I'd like to know what happened.

I've also been exposed to some criticism of our current practices. In the US it is very common to vaccinate babies immediately after birth. As explained to me by a family member with over 40 years medical experience, it is useless to do so because at that point the baby is still relying on the antibodies it receives from the mother and does not produce its own. The only thing you achieve is to expose the baby to a level of toxology that he/she is not equipped to handle at that point.

heywood on 16/2/2015 at 16:25

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Good one. The sad thing is, people in policy making positions very often have the mindset you just mocked. And that is one of the big reasons why there is declining public trust in government and mainstream journalism right now.



The difficulty is that there is usually no truth, just data and reasoned judgments. The lay public want research to be conclusive, but it's often not. And they want the conclusions to be broad, but they are usually narrow. The problem lies not so much with the scientists (with some exceptions e.g. climategate) but with journalists who interpret, reshape, and/or extrapolate the results of scientific research instead of just summarizing it and reporting it. Which leads to my next point:



Absolutely true. Our culture (or maybe just the internet :)) seems to be full of non-scientists who like to think they are scientifically minded but don't think in terms of models, theories, evidence, and likelihoods. They think in terms of proofs and facts and truths, and they are prone to believe in a theory or model being true as strongly as they believe 1=1. And on the other side, there are people who believe that since science is fallible and/or inconclusive, they are justified in picking whatever hypothesis (or eating habit :)) best suits their interest. Fortunately, there are still a lot of rational people in between, otherwise western liberalism would fall apart.

Getting back to demagogue's post, things can get ugly when science is being used as a basis for public policy. Then we get policy makers and journalists who are politically aligned with them believing they have a moral imperative to ensure that the hypothesis or theory that supports the policy is accepted by the mainstream public. In these cases, science journalism is drowned out by advocacy journalism, and the science is co-opted and distorted by all sides to serve their policy interests. And the result is a lot of open minded, rational people don't know how to come to a reasoned, informed conclusion because every source of information they turn to is distorted, slanted, and/or cherry picked. What's sorely lacking in these cases is objective, impartial, balanced scientific journalism that summarizes the evidence, the margins of error, the different hypotheses, etc. That doesn't happen because policy issues like health, immunization, or climate change are considered too important to take the risk of allowing the public to think for themselves just in case they might reach the "wrong" conclusion.

And to respond to Kolya's original post (good thread BTW), I think the main reason for the "rise of the dilettantes", or the rise of anti-intellectualism, is that the more you try to shove things down people's throats the less they believe in it. It's true that the internet has exposed people to a greater diversity of views and greater access to information, but I don't think that necessarily leads to everyone thinking they are an expert, but it has made people more skeptical and more resistant to propaganda. I think most people have a sense that the strongest conclusions or theories are the ones that become self-evident as you gather more information, and conclusions that require the most advocacy are often the weakest.

faetal on 16/2/2015 at 16:36

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Heywood - another big factor is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance) cognitive dissonance. People spend hours on internet sites doing what they think is legit research into things they think are important and they probably feel pretty good about how much time they put into educating themselves. When someone who is actually trained in the relevant discipline comes along and says "sorry, that's completely wrong", it's quite the psychological strain to just accept that and jettison this feeling that you're more knowledgeable than other people who just read the news etc... - the weight of the psychological strain is proportionate to the amount of time spent reading Natural News or whetever, probably multiplied by how sure they are of what they have "discovered". I'd imagine the latter is likely tied to incompetence and goes in as a kind of "Dunning-Kruger modifier" if you will. So you basically have lots of very snooty sounding experts getting pissed off at lots of very shrill and folksy "telling it how it is" home remedy, anti-chemicals types and the media makes things worse by giving both groups a 50/50 exposure in some kind of weird tribute to the artificial concept of balance.

faetal on 16/2/2015 at 19:54

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The coincidence argument does hold up. If you have 1,000,000 people flip a coin and one of them flips it so it lands on its edge, that person thinks that's what coins do when you flip them. They aren't correct. In this case, we know that vaccines do not cause autism or any other mental illness. There have been so many people vaccinated over such a long period of time with no concomitant increase in the rates of any illnesses. There's your million coin tosses. I realise that's a bad analogy because a coin can land on its edge, whereas vaccines don't cause autism, but I'm tired and the general idea holds.

Vaccine ingredients may be proprietary because of commercial reasons, but the FDA can't approve them unless they are proven to be safe. All allergens and potentially toxic ingredients are known, anything proprietary is going to be related to precisely which organism components are included. If you think that people knowing that mumps capsid protein 12, peptide 82-105 are included will somehow aid in informed consent, then you'll need to explain why. Personally, I think that vaccines should be researched and produced by the state, which would make full disclosure a lot easier, but the good old US of A isn't going to buy into any of that pinko bullshit any time soon, so I guess we're stuck with not knowing the exact components, but just knowing that they are safe and that barring a few mild and very rare side-effects, vaccines are not epidemiologically or mechanistically correlated to any serious condition in humans. Not being vaccinated however, is. I think anti-vaxxers are a danger to society personally. Those who aren't able to receive the vaccine are being fucked by people who aren't vaccinated. So while some sanctimonious idiot clutching echinacea tea leaves is talking about letting their kid get measles naturally, they're missing the fact that some immuno-compromised kid might be getting killed by the measles encephalitis their kid is making more of a possibility.

It's ignorance fuelling an increase in other people's mortality. These people don't know they're making a good choice, they're letting their paranoia and ignorance put others at risk so they can slap an organic label on their kid.

(disclaimer: I've spent a while working around medics who are rightly fed up with seeing an increase in complications caused by the spread of diseases we had nearly eradicated, while not having seen any increase in conditions caused or exacerbated by vaccines)

heywood on 16/2/2015 at 22:11

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You're right that cognitive dissonance is a challenge, but I honestly think that improper science reporting contributes to it. When you tell people that X is an indisputable fact because science has proven it to be true, when they are later exposed to conflicting evidence it naturally leads to cognitive dissonance. When this happens enough times, people start to think the scientists may be full of shit. If the media just pounds the table harder and insists there is no debate, X is a fact, all scientists agree, the evidence proves it, etc. and then people independently research it and find that the scientific conclusions are not really black or white but more like dark grey leaning towards black but still evolving, then people start to think there is conspiracy to hide information and manipulate public opinion for somebody's gain.

Sometimes this happens when science reporting is deliberately manipulated for policy advocacy, and sometimes it happens because the reporter doesn't really understand science and over-sells it. Sometimes the scientists themselves over-sell it because they want the public to agree with them. Either way, it can undermine the credibility of the science and the reporter and can lead to losing the public's trust.

Here is a (https://www.wnyc.org/radio/#/ondemand/430212) commentary I heard on last week's (http://www.onthemedia.org/) On the Media program which bothered me. It ends with a hubristic "telling it how it is" type rant that I find both disappointing and a little scary even though I agree with him on the larger issue of vaccine safety. Science is never, ever as black and white as he seems to think. It almost seems like he's calling the media to be responsible not for reporting but making sure the public reaches the right conclusion. That smacks of propaganda and could fan the conspiracy flames and risks a public backlash.