I'm so not surprised by the comments here, so far.
The core points here are good ones:
- In a fundamentally emotional argument, you 'win' with empathy, not by beating people over the head with the same (very reasonable) arguments they've heard a hundred times.
- Vaccines are certainly effective, they are the correct choice, but there are also absolutely legitimate reasons to distrust the medical and scientific arguments (as pointed out in the article, both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once). That's something that has to be addressed and overcome, and not just with numbers.
> legitimate reasons to distrust the medical and scientific arguments (as pointed out in the article, both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once)
Viewing failures in isolation is not really helpful. You need to compare them to successes and the failure/success rate of the alternatives.
Things get even more complicated when you start distinguishing cure/ineffective/harmful.
It should be addressed with legislation making it a felony not to vaccinate your children by a reason early childhood age (e.g. 6 years or something), whether put in public school or not, and making proof of vaccination a requirement for federal aid for that person (e.g. student loans or assistance).
There are certain things that should be up for public debate and discourse, left to the courts, or up to personal preference. Vaccination is not one of them. "This shot will give my kids autism" is not reasonable and should not be treated as a reasonable concern any more than "Obama is Kenyan" or "We didn't land on the moon" should.
In a fundamentally emotional argument, you 'win' with empathy
Except you don't actually win. In conceding to their fears with an empathetic approach, you are enabling their delusions. That's the problem with placating unreasonable people - doing so inevitably emboldens them.
>both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once
On the other hand, non-medicine (alternative medicine) and non-science (pseudoscience) have been spectacularly right more than once. That's the point. Agree with empathy angle and need for emotional arguments, though.
The CIA did more for the anti-vaccination movement than any kind of scientific publication ever will. People that are afraid of vaccination are so for many reasons (some of them totally nonsense, others with some basis in fact). But to have actual proof that a three letter agency used a (fake) vaccination drive to gather DNA from large numbers of innocents in order to get at a fugitive was something we could have really done without.
But a lot of 'pro-vaccine' folks just completely ignore the black swan problem, which is wrong.
Also the flu vaccine lowers your chances of dying in any given winter, but many studies show that it increase your chances of the flu dying over the course of your life. This is because the flu vaccine only confers immunity against those strains for 6 - 18 months, whereas getting the flu confers immunity against those strains for decades:
Also a lot of vaccines have had very little human testing. E.g. if you look at the CDC webpage for the japanese encephalitis vaccine, it says "There are no efficacy data for Ixiaro. The vaccine was licensed in the United States on the basis of its ability to induce JE virus neutralizing antibodies as a surrogate for protection."
The author tries to make some fair points based on anecdotal evidence, but at its core, the article simply states that "I had a strong opinion about X that i imposed upon others. After being influenced by a romantic interest, I biased in another direction. Now I have a (new) strong opinion that i wish to impose upon others.".
In other words, the fundamental act is still same, it is just opinion that has changed.
This is a deep observation and it's how a lot of Art works: it's not the immediate object/product/action that makes sense. It's when you put it into a context to generate meaning.
To persevarate: I'm sure if the author ever breaks up, he'll cop to being led around by his hormones. In the meantime, his unaware writing is a bold sample of the process of mental rationalization.
And in that way, the artist is often in a bind: to intentionally produce a work that reveals an unconscious incorrectness, in order that other can properly contextualize it. The artist must be wrong in order to be right, to ruin their reputation to grow one.
>Go tell arachnophobic parents that you must put spiders on their child because society depends on it, and see how that goes
When children don't receive vaccines it is not just seen that they are endangering themselves, but other children aswell because of the possibility of spread/mutation (whether this is true or not it doesn't really matter, that's just a majority of public view at the moment).
So unlike the spider example, a direct vaccination example from a pro-vaxor's standpoint would be that NOT vaccinating everyone will put children in harm's way.
If you read the whole article, it's pretty clear that he hasn't missed any aspect of "the argument".
From the article: "But vaccines only work when everyone buys in. Public health depends on anti-vaxxers confronting their greatest fears for the benefit of others."
How come there aren't any "anti-civil engineers" who go around claiming bridges aren't safe or "anti-aeronautical-engineers" who "believe" through common sense that planes can't fly? Electricity is reading our brainwaves. Vacuum cleaners suck out our souls. If there are they are rightly recognized as crackpots in need of psychiatric help.
Because the examples you're giving are clearly ridiculous, even to the layperson. Obviously planes can fly, nobody has ever gotten their soul sucked out by a vacuum cleaner, etc.
Now first let me say I think vaccines are a Very Good Thing, but people have actually been harmed by vaccines: it's extremely rare, and happened more in the past than it does today, but it can happen which makes it much harder to shake peoples' paranoia.
Believing electricity can read your thoughts is clearly crazy, but believing vaccines are harmful can just be a case of not understanding/respecting the probabilities involved.
The difference and paranoia arise from the intangibility of microbes and electricity/software. The closest you'll find are the "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" people who exercise doubt in the face of the strength of structures.
The exceptions in this list are almost entirely due to possible allergic reactions. Take flu vaccines - most of them are created via eggs, so people allergic against eggs cannot use these vaccines, until especially prepared without using eggs. If no vaccine is available for your child, it should skip this especial vaccination. This also is the reason why it is so important that every child which can, should be vaccinated. If a small percentage of the population is not vaccinated, they are still safe/no danger to society due to the protection given by the vaccinated part of the population. This is not a reason to skip vaccinations for non-medical reasons.
Well, most people in the pro-vaxx community won't deny that vaccinating has risks. The risks of not vaccinating, however, are bigger in a lot of cases. I think that's the most important message in the article, that their concern might be justified, but that the coin has another side.
How do you convince your wife when your child gets the disease that vaccination would have protected them against
(which is far more likely to happen, and has cost thousands upon thousands of recorded deaths in the past)?
Your question is analogous to: "If you told you kid it's ok to go out and play, and while outside a car hit him, do you let the other child ever go out again?" probability wise.
I'm curious how far the label "anti-vaxxer" extends. Does it also include people who accept the science behind vaccination, but who as a political principle are opposed to it being made compulsory?
It means you're against vaccination. If you think vaccination is good (or even just "meh") then I don't think the term can rightly be applied to you, regardless of how you feel about it being compulsory.
If you don't make it compulsory, then it doesn't work. Vaccination relies on herd immunity because the vaccination doesn't work for everyone; some people can't have the vaccine (allergic to one of its components), for other people it just doesn't take effect (biological systems are unreliable like that), so you have to have an over 90% vaccination rate for herd immunity to actually work. By allowing people to opt out, you're condemning a bunch of people to illness and death.
I looked at this article as a simple case study in being compassionate.
For me, learning to be compassionate has been a pretty big deal. While it is clearly great from a moral perspective, even from a selfish perspective it provides value. Just like the article states, it greatly improves communication and cooperation. Beyond that though, being compassionate makes me feel good.
I definitely recommend practicing compassion, particularly if you tend to be naturally critical, judgmental or cynical.
Is there any research anyone is aware of about a possible connection between movements like these and how Facebook promotes and displays certain types of articles to certain people?
Scaring people is a fantastic way to create and emotional connection and increase engagement do to the fear of missing out on new information. The type of thing that will get you to check your phone every couple minutes all day.
In the back of my head I've always felt(without any information to back it up) that the anti vaccination movement was one of the first real big public health impacts to come out of Facebook and other social applications that serve content designed to cause emotional reactions to increase engagement.
I should add that I do not believe any of this is intentional as opposed to simply optimizing for engagement over time.
The whole anti-science movement is in parts self inflicted. If someone reads one day that scientists discovered "walking" causes cancer and the next day that "walking" is the key to eternal living it is no wonder nobody takes any form of evidence serious anymore. We just see those studies coming out every other day - and journalists certainly playing their part by over-hyping them.
Once you realize how hard consensus finding is and all the personal interests and agendas involved, including the "big" failures of science (e.g smoking is save), I can see the point of people rejecting science as subjective.
Science isn't the problem. It's lay people ingesting their information from dumbed down articles written by professional journalists looking to sell more newspapers or get more clicks. Even if these studies were free and not stuck behind a paywall, your average person will not bother to read the details. Maybe it's human nature to want to be told what to believe. No one has time to do the independent research on every little thing they hear or read.
I know a couple anti-vaxxers, and they are very rational, but just selfish, people: they don't believe vaccines are evil in general, but rather they believe what is, basically, true: it is best of all if everyone else is vaccinated, but you aren't.
And what does it protect against? a bad case of diarrhea.
An intussusception is a medical condition in which a part of the intestine invaginates (folds into) into another section of intestine, similar to the way the parts of a collapsible telescope slide into one another.[1] This can often result in an obstruction. The part that prolapses into the other is called the intussusceptum, and the part that receives it is called the intussuscipiens. Intussusception is a medical emergency and a patient should be seen immediately to reduce risk.
Diarrhea kills more than a million people each year. In 2012, it was the second most common cause of deaths in children younger than five (0.76 million or 11%).
Be thankful that you live in a time and place that allow you to not take it very seriously. I know I'm thankful for this.
A really good article. Similar things are happening with so many things in our lives (feminism for instance). The worst is when people begin to deny the existence of real problems (like with vaccines, although they make sense, there really is some risk for the people that get vaccinated).
This article doesn't really dive into the issue in a real, honest way.
Vaccinations are generally a public health benefit, no doubt about it, but there's also much we don't understand about how the immune system works. It's not completely, entirely, 100% irrational to desire to avoid messing with something you don't fully understand. The more science you learn, sometimes, the more you learn how little we really know and understand about the complexities of our own bodies. With enough science, that can turn around and reinforce rationality; but I don't think we're there yet as a society in either the body of science available, nor the prevalence of good science education in the population.
I used to be in the same camp as the author. My mom is what I'd call a rational anti-vaxxer, and I hated her for it. She's a trained biologist. She vaccinated where she could see all the science and the benefit, but treated each vaccine as an independent entity, requiring new proof and new science and understanding of how it functioned and how effective it was and the cost/benefit to society before making the decision. When I turned 18, she turned the reins over to me and told me to make my own decisions based on all the data available. She trusted me with the science.
I took this to heart as an adult. I feel it is an excellent way to approach the problem, and in fact is more scientific than blindly accepting recommendations that have dozens of conflicting influences outside simple public health. This became particularly apparent to me as I now battle a chronic GI immune condition that has made my life extremely difficult over the past year. It took a full year to actually diagnose, and even then, what was the best doctors could tell me? "We have no idea what causes it, but we know it doesn't correlate to cancer. Here's some steroids. Good luck." I am not saying any vaccination causes this—I simply don't know—but it's that kind of doubt in the field that makes people doubt blanket statements on all vaccinations, whether that be right or wrong.
I agree with the author of this piece: we need more empathy, more understanding, and much less confrontation. But we also need more science, and a better understanding of science, and a more nuanced, honest discussion of vaccines in medicine and society. In a complex world, when a scientist hears "All X are good," they are right to be skeptical of it. We need to recognize that we live in a world where no one is allowed to have a conversation on vaccines based on reality. Instead, any discussion that doesn't qualify itself with the greatness of vaccines and the wrongness of anti-vaxxers instantly labels you an anti-vaxxer yourself, and loses you all credibility.
This article, too, succumbs to that mental virus. I refuse to. He says, "my point isn't that the anti-vaxxers might be right. They're not." With that attitude, we'll never be able to understand the problem scientifically as a populace, and that's what's wrong with our response to anti-vaxxers—not that they're wrong and delusional. If you want real empathy, stop calling people wrong all the time, and start trying to understand their fear instead of dismissing it and strategically trying to quell it.
Wow, someone who gets it. Science has really become the religion of our time, "scientists" are the priesthood. We should trust their recommendations unconditionally, without question.
If someone has an irrational fear that can pose harm to their child (or other children), the person should do something about it. Never letting a child to play with others, based on the fear that something might happen to in wouldn't be right, would it?
This whole discussion reminds me of seat belt law debate:
Pro-seat belt: "It will save hundreds of lives and reduce injuries"
Anti-seat belt: "What if an accident pushes my car into the water and the seatbelt jams and my child drowns."
Make it the law and put parents in jail. Better yet, since the first confrontation over vaccinations will be when the children are young, put them up for adoption. Lots of vetted, rational people looking to adopt young children.
You don't own "your" children, they are people and they have the right to proper medical care. Proper medical care isn't decided by irrational phobias and fears.
There are laws that you aren't allowed to wear your seatbelts in certain situations; e.g. on some ice roads in some countries (Estonia). Not that this is very relevant to anti vax.
The author comes across as a bit of an idiot too in the article. Basing his opinions on blogs and a particular internet community. Rather than acquiring an understanding from the scientific source material on these issues.
Basing his opinions on blogs and a particular internet community. Rather than acquiring an understanding from the scientific source material on these issues.
I expect that approximately 100% of the people who argue for vaccinating children are doing exactly the same thing. The number of parents personally familiar with the scientific evidence and qualified to make an independent judgement is probably tiny.
This then leads to the argument that non-experts should respect the scientific consensus, but then how does a non-expert evaluate the credentials of a commentator to determine whether they are in fact an expert and part of a real scientific consensus? Bad science abounds in the media, and there is a lot of money to be made from peddling it, and some of the people presenting it are very convincing because that's what they do.
This is a fundamental problem with any debate about policy based on scientific merit: at some stage, there is always a degree of trust involved for anyone who is not personally an expert in the subject matter, which in practice means almost everyone. This opens a gap for the critics and sceptics. And crucially, this is a legitimate concern. There is room for the "science" to be wrong, and sometimes it has been.
The rational point is that it is far more likely that a consensus among large numbers of people who are probably scientific experts will be correct. When that is the best information we have to go on, as it nearly always will be, we should probably make our decisions consistent with that consensus rather than in opposition to it to give ourselves the maximum chance of a positive outcome.
[+] [-] astalwick|10 years ago|reply
The core points here are good ones:
- In a fundamentally emotional argument, you 'win' with empathy, not by beating people over the head with the same (very reasonable) arguments they've heard a hundred times.
- Vaccines are certainly effective, they are the correct choice, but there are also absolutely legitimate reasons to distrust the medical and scientific arguments (as pointed out in the article, both medicine and the science behind drugs have been spectacularly wrong more than once). That's something that has to be addressed and overcome, and not just with numbers.
[+] [-] the8472|10 years ago|reply
Viewing failures in isolation is not really helpful. You need to compare them to successes and the failure/success rate of the alternatives.
Things get even more complicated when you start distinguishing cure/ineffective/harmful.
[+] [-] pc86|10 years ago|reply
There are certain things that should be up for public debate and discourse, left to the courts, or up to personal preference. Vaccination is not one of them. "This shot will give my kids autism" is not reasonable and should not be treated as a reasonable concern any more than "Obama is Kenyan" or "We didn't land on the moon" should.
[+] [-] vox_mollis|10 years ago|reply
Except you don't actually win. In conceding to their fears with an empathetic approach, you are enabling their delusions. That's the problem with placating unreasonable people - doing so inevitably emboldens them.
[+] [-] vdaniuk|10 years ago|reply
On the other hand, non-medicine (alternative medicine) and non-science (pseudoscience) have been spectacularly right more than once. That's the point. Agree with empathy angle and need for emotional arguments, though.
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccin...
[+] [-] Alex3917|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS
But a lot of 'pro-vaccine' folks just completely ignore the black swan problem, which is wrong.
Also the flu vaccine lowers your chances of dying in any given winter, but many studies show that it increase your chances of the flu dying over the course of your life. This is because the flu vaccine only confers immunity against those strains for 6 - 18 months, whereas getting the flu confers immunity against those strains for decades:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870374/
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/11/study-add...
Also a lot of vaccines have had very little human testing. E.g. if you look at the CDC webpage for the japanese encephalitis vaccine, it says "There are no efficacy data for Ixiaro. The vaccine was licensed in the United States on the basis of its ability to induce JE virus neutralizing antibodies as a surrogate for protection."
http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2016/infectious-disea...
I think there is a major lack of critical thinking of both sides of the issue.
[+] [-] omonra|10 years ago|reply
Not to mention that this story has absolutely nothing to do with Western anti-vaxer movement.
[+] [-] drglitch|10 years ago|reply
In other words, the fundamental act is still same, it is just opinion that has changed.
[+] [-] chillingeffect|10 years ago|reply
To persevarate: I'm sure if the author ever breaks up, he'll cop to being led around by his hormones. In the meantime, his unaware writing is a bold sample of the process of mental rationalization.
And in that way, the artist is often in a bind: to intentionally produce a work that reveals an unconscious incorrectness, in order that other can properly contextualize it. The artist must be wrong in order to be right, to ruin their reputation to grow one.
[+] [-] condescendence|10 years ago|reply
>Go tell arachnophobic parents that you must put spiders on their child because society depends on it, and see how that goes
When children don't receive vaccines it is not just seen that they are endangering themselves, but other children aswell because of the possibility of spread/mutation (whether this is true or not it doesn't really matter, that's just a majority of public view at the moment).
So unlike the spider example, a direct vaccination example from a pro-vaxor's standpoint would be that NOT vaccinating everyone will put children in harm's way.
[+] [-] cname|10 years ago|reply
From the article: "But vaccines only work when everyone buys in. Public health depends on anti-vaxxers confronting their greatest fears for the benefit of others."
[+] [-] plg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slavik81|10 years ago|reply
There are plenty of people who won't fly because they're afraid it will crash, despite that being tremendously unlikely.
> Electricity is reading our brainwaves.
I got some great pamphlets in my mailbox about how the neighborhood powerlines were going to affect my mood.
But, no. They are not in need of psychiatric help. They're just wrong about something.
[+] [-] NickM|10 years ago|reply
Now first let me say I think vaccines are a Very Good Thing, but people have actually been harmed by vaccines: it's extremely rare, and happened more in the past than it does today, but it can happen which makes it much harder to shake peoples' paranoia.
Believing electricity can read your thoughts is clearly crazy, but believing vaccines are harmful can just be a case of not understanding/respecting the probabilities involved.
[+] [-] chillingeffect|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donkeyd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharemywin|10 years ago|reply
Especially when the CDC recommends against it for your child: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/should-not-vacc.htm
then what do you do about the other child?
[+] [-] _ph_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donkeyd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|10 years ago|reply
Your question is analogous to: "If you told you kid it's ok to go out and play, and while outside a car hit him, do you let the other child ever go out again?" probability wise.
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donkeyd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pc86|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grishnakh|10 years ago|reply
Lemme guess, you're a libertarian, right?
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|10 years ago|reply
For me, learning to be compassionate has been a pretty big deal. While it is clearly great from a moral perspective, even from a selfish perspective it provides value. Just like the article states, it greatly improves communication and cooperation. Beyond that though, being compassionate makes me feel good.
I definitely recommend practicing compassion, particularly if you tend to be naturally critical, judgmental or cynical.
[+] [-] hiou|10 years ago|reply
Scaring people is a fantastic way to create and emotional connection and increase engagement do to the fear of missing out on new information. The type of thing that will get you to check your phone every couple minutes all day.
In the back of my head I've always felt(without any information to back it up) that the anti vaccination movement was one of the first real big public health impacts to come out of Facebook and other social applications that serve content designed to cause emotional reactions to increase engagement.
I should add that I do not believe any of this is intentional as opposed to simply optimizing for engagement over time.
[+] [-] 1337biz|10 years ago|reply
Once you realize how hard consensus finding is and all the personal interests and agendas involved, including the "big" failures of science (e.g smoking is save), I can see the point of people rejecting science as subjective.
[+] [-] jinushaun|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JTon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anovikov|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharemywin|10 years ago|reply
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/rotavirus/vac-rotashield...
And what does it protect against? a bad case of diarrhea.
An intussusception is a medical condition in which a part of the intestine invaginates (folds into) into another section of intestine, similar to the way the parts of a collapsible telescope slide into one another.[1] This can often result in an obstruction. The part that prolapses into the other is called the intussusceptum, and the part that receives it is called the intussuscipiens. Intussusception is a medical emergency and a patient should be seen immediately to reduce risk.
[+] [-] jwmerrill|10 years ago|reply
Be thankful that you live in a time and place that allow you to not take it very seriously. I know I'm thankful for this.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diarrhea
[+] [-] legulere|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|10 years ago|reply
Vaccinations are generally a public health benefit, no doubt about it, but there's also much we don't understand about how the immune system works. It's not completely, entirely, 100% irrational to desire to avoid messing with something you don't fully understand. The more science you learn, sometimes, the more you learn how little we really know and understand about the complexities of our own bodies. With enough science, that can turn around and reinforce rationality; but I don't think we're there yet as a society in either the body of science available, nor the prevalence of good science education in the population.
I used to be in the same camp as the author. My mom is what I'd call a rational anti-vaxxer, and I hated her for it. She's a trained biologist. She vaccinated where she could see all the science and the benefit, but treated each vaccine as an independent entity, requiring new proof and new science and understanding of how it functioned and how effective it was and the cost/benefit to society before making the decision. When I turned 18, she turned the reins over to me and told me to make my own decisions based on all the data available. She trusted me with the science.
I took this to heart as an adult. I feel it is an excellent way to approach the problem, and in fact is more scientific than blindly accepting recommendations that have dozens of conflicting influences outside simple public health. This became particularly apparent to me as I now battle a chronic GI immune condition that has made my life extremely difficult over the past year. It took a full year to actually diagnose, and even then, what was the best doctors could tell me? "We have no idea what causes it, but we know it doesn't correlate to cancer. Here's some steroids. Good luck." I am not saying any vaccination causes this—I simply don't know—but it's that kind of doubt in the field that makes people doubt blanket statements on all vaccinations, whether that be right or wrong.
I agree with the author of this piece: we need more empathy, more understanding, and much less confrontation. But we also need more science, and a better understanding of science, and a more nuanced, honest discussion of vaccines in medicine and society. In a complex world, when a scientist hears "All X are good," they are right to be skeptical of it. We need to recognize that we live in a world where no one is allowed to have a conversation on vaccines based on reality. Instead, any discussion that doesn't qualify itself with the greatness of vaccines and the wrongness of anti-vaxxers instantly labels you an anti-vaxxer yourself, and loses you all credibility.
This article, too, succumbs to that mental virus. I refuse to. He says, "my point isn't that the anti-vaxxers might be right. They're not." With that attitude, we'll never be able to understand the problem scientifically as a populace, and that's what's wrong with our response to anti-vaxxers—not that they're wrong and delusional. If you want real empathy, stop calling people wrong all the time, and start trying to understand their fear instead of dismissing it and strategically trying to quell it.
[+] [-] RUG3Y|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krcz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pluma|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ensorceled|10 years ago|reply
Pro-seat belt: "It will save hundreds of lives and reduce injuries"
Anti-seat belt: "What if an accident pushes my car into the water and the seatbelt jams and my child drowns."
Make it the law and put parents in jail. Better yet, since the first confrontation over vaccinations will be when the children are young, put them up for adoption. Lots of vetted, rational people looking to adopt young children.
You don't own "your" children, they are people and they have the right to proper medical care. Proper medical care isn't decided by irrational phobias and fears.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinkPlug|10 years ago|reply
I can relate with this.
[+] [-] everyone|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Silhouette|10 years ago|reply
I expect that approximately 100% of the people who argue for vaccinating children are doing exactly the same thing. The number of parents personally familiar with the scientific evidence and qualified to make an independent judgement is probably tiny.
This then leads to the argument that non-experts should respect the scientific consensus, but then how does a non-expert evaluate the credentials of a commentator to determine whether they are in fact an expert and part of a real scientific consensus? Bad science abounds in the media, and there is a lot of money to be made from peddling it, and some of the people presenting it are very convincing because that's what they do.
This is a fundamental problem with any debate about policy based on scientific merit: at some stage, there is always a degree of trust involved for anyone who is not personally an expert in the subject matter, which in practice means almost everyone. This opens a gap for the critics and sceptics. And crucially, this is a legitimate concern. There is room for the "science" to be wrong, and sometimes it has been.
The rational point is that it is far more likely that a consensus among large numbers of people who are probably scientific experts will be correct. When that is the best information we have to go on, as it nearly always will be, we should probably make our decisions consistent with that consensus rather than in opposition to it to give ourselves the maximum chance of a positive outcome.
[+] [-] slavik81|10 years ago|reply
It's nice to take a look at individual papers sometimes, but without a lot of context it's difficult to be sure you're interpreting them right.
[+] [-] donkeyd|10 years ago|reply