Yes I think it is somewhat likely that you could find insular behavior in those two groups, but don't you think it would be incredibly rare that those things would counteract the effect of vaccines exactly? Although possible, that is what I would find hard to believe. But, as you say, it's not impossible.
one must learn by reading, and a lot of people happen not to have already read news reports about the latest findings about the lack of correlation between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders.
Yes! And those people should use search engines to find out these commonly understood facts.
There are many, many ways in which being unreasonable is a crime. In fact you might say that most or all crimes have an element of unreason in them, from the perspective of society. It is a slippery slope, but it's one on which all laws sit.
Well, the cost of liberty is eternal vigilance, sometimes against wrongheaded experts. Fair point, and I hope I never said anything to the contrary. Even though experts are usually right, sometimes they are wrong. (But, I don't think "should we go to war" is a question which even tenuously attaches to a scientific fact.)
Your example of smoking in New York, though, I don't think is a strong example. You can call it education if you want, but I think it is extremely high taxes and strictly enforced no-smoking in many public places. We've had education all over the country for longer than I've been alive; nobody alive today doesn't know that smoking causes cancer. Education can take society a long, long ways (and has!), but it can't take it all the way, because there will always be a metric shit-ton of willful ignorance out there. You can't cure willful ignorance with education, but sometimes you can overcome it with a little social or legal pressure.
Yes, that's fair. Although the "You always know what is best for you in every situation" ideology comes mostly from the right, a majority of the anti-vax bullshit comes from the loony left. My comment was directed more at that political/ideological statement than at anti-vax crows specifically; in fact, that post didn't even mention vaccines or autism. Still, I could have been more clear that the screed against conservative nonsense was ancillary to the present topic.
Agreed. The issue is fraught with political danger. Many issues with parenthood are. It is definitely not an easy law to make or an easy issue to decide. The arguments for and against are both very compelling.
If you include the sentence after the one you quoted, it's pretty hard to disagree with what I said. But if you still disagree, I'm willing to explain further. Don't make the mistake of mischaracterizing what I said.
That's true. I considered expanding that whole thing in my first post, but decided it was an unnecessary detour, because of the vanishingly infinitesimal possibility that the exact population of children getting autism from vaccines were receiving an additional stimulus which precisely counteracted the effect; while at the same time unvaccinated children were receiving exactly the opposite stimulus in the exact right dose. If we lived only in theory, and not in the real universe, then we could spend time pursuing that possibility, but I didn't think it was necessary. Nevertheless, your statement adds to the completeness of what I said, in the context of the theory of science, which theoretically cannot ever "prove" anything.
It is only to the extent that science is a valid basis for belief, that we reject the link between vaccines and autism.
I respectfully disagree. His message is not "to test the link between vaccines and autism", because the tests have been done. If he were not pushing an anti-vaccine non-scientific agenda, then he would have proposed the link, encouraged studies into the link, and then publicly and vociferously retracted the proposed link when the studies showed no link. It is that final step which would have saved his credibility, but he refused that final step.
It was, in fact, the REST of the scientific community whose message was "to test the link between vaccines and autism". THEY were the ones who listened to the hypothesis, did the tests, and then accepted the results. Now, they are moving on to different tests, because they are the ones actually trying to find the cause of the disease, and Wakefield is not.
Changing people's beliefs is a difficult task, and using reason simply doesn't work. Instead, you use emotional manipulation, like the fear of losing your children, it's a better motivator than logic here.
I strongly, strongly agree with this. If I were ever in a position that I was directly trying to change the mind of an anti-vaxxer, I would not rest my case on facts and logic, I would use emotional appeals and back them up with facts and logic.
Oh, okay, I'll keep that in mind next time I'm formally debating someone in a concert hall, being moderated by a debate professional. Until then, I'll be happy enough to provide the widely held and easily discovered scientific consensus, without being sidetracked by goons trying to question things that have been settled long ago. If I say gravity pulls things down, I don't feel a need to cite that; if I say that vaccines don't cause autism, I don't feel a need to cite that. But if you like, you may do so -- go ahead and take the time to look up well-known facts and present them in a bibliographic format. You will have my thanks.
Yeah, it's a balance between absolute freedom (which is anarchy, do whatever you want at all times) and absolute good life (whatever that means, but it would include things like society and technology and health, all of which are anathema to anarchy).
But, to be clear, there is no place in the world where you have "freedom to be a total ass": everywhere you go, there are jails. If you push people, eventually pretty much everyone admits that government "do-gooders" do, in fact, "know better" than a rapist whether rape should be a crime.
Does vaccination predispose a person to faulty logic or exceptional proclivity for ad hominem?
Maybe. I don't have any studies showing zero correlation between vaccination and predisposition to faulty logic, so I can't say for sure that it isn't the case. But, it wouldn't really fit with everything else we know to be true about the universe.
In the end I guess I just have to disagree. I don't think it's an untenable leap of logic to go from fact to opinion thusly:
Fact: vaccines are the second most important public health technology in the history of mankind (number on is sanitation). While they do have very rare and known negative side effects, those effects are vastly dwarfed by the prevention of disease, and specifically vaccines do not cause autism.
Opinion: only a douchebag would decide not to vaccinate their child, whether it be because of an irrational and ignorant fear of autism, or some other silly nonsense like a religious objection.
If you disagree with the opinion, I can respect that. I will give you extra credit for making an ad hominem attack in the same sentence in which you deride ad hominem attacks, though. I assume you did that on purpose, and I think it shows a little bit of cleverness.
It's a sliding scale, but I agree, in my opinion failure to vaccinate is criminal-level negligence. The legal question is, can a reasonable person decide not to vaccinate, and in my opinion the answer is no; only unreasonable people can do that.
I won't play a game where you pretend that science doesn't prove things. Sorry, I just don' have time to do that today. If you can't use a search engine, I can't be bothered to show you how.
Yeah. Andrew Wakefield. He might currently be the world's most discredited scientist. For profit motive, he has made children sick and die -- hundreds, maybe thousands of them. In fact, for sickness, certainly thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands.
Right. Which is why this is a problem. Society doesn't get so worked up when, say, a bunch of kooks get together and kill themselves as adults, like with Heaven's Gate or something. Adults doing stupid shit to themselves might be an area where society would step in, or it might not; but adults doing stupid shit to children is a situation where society most often feels the need to act.
The only people I trust less than qualified, vetted, officials is uneducated jackasses pretending to understand the world around them when really they are just ignorant twits. There is a mantra from conservatives "They think they know better than you!". Um, yep. I think the scientists and knowledgeable health professionals "know better" than the backward backwater assholes who raise their children as if it were the year 1512. Obviously that isn't a general rule -- bureaucrats make all sorts of boneheaded decisions -- but I basically reject the notion that only you can know what is best for you in all circumstances. No; no, no, no; often, others know what is best for you, and people should be open to that possibility.
If we lived in a perfect world, then parents would be rational, intelligent, and informed. Yes, we would all "rather" live in that world. But we don't, we live in a world full of hysterical ignoramuses. (Same basic argument against libertarianism.)
To be fair, if vaccines caused autism, I would probably opt out of most vaccines, because most kids don't die of whooping cough or scarlet fever, but autism is forever. It might be rational, depending on the prevalence and severity of the disease, to decline a vaccination.
But, vaccines don't cause autism, and we know that absolutely 100% for a fact. We don't even have to do fancy science to prove it (although we have done that fancy science), because we can simply look at autism rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated kids. If there is no correlation between vaccines and autism, then that precludes the possibility of causation; and there is no correlation, therefore there is no causation.
Vaccinate your children. If you don't, you are a douchebag.
Hmmm. No, I still think it was Cheney who personally outed the name. Cheney pushed the blame downwards, but I have never heard any serious informed person say it was anyone other than Cheney who first purposely outed Plame.
Bush-Jr let the Bin Laden family go home because the Bin Laden family didn't have anything to do with Osama's terrorism, and his kin in the States would immediately be in personal, present, bodily danger -- because people like you wouldn't understand that the family long ago disowned Osama and is an ally of the United States. I'm saying Bush-Jr sent the Bin Ladens home in order to save them from you.
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Yes I think it is somewhat likely that you could find insular behavior in those two groups, but don't you think it would be incredibly rare that those things would counteract the effect of vaccines exactly? Although possible, that is what I would find hard to believe. But, as you say, it's not impossible.
"depending on the prevalence and severity of"
one must learn by reading, and a lot of people happen not to have already read news reports about the latest findings about the lack of correlation between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders.
Yes! And those people should use search engines to find out these commonly understood facts.
There are many, many ways in which being unreasonable is a crime. In fact you might say that most or all crimes have an element of unreason in them, from the perspective of society. It is a slippery slope, but it's one on which all laws sit.
Well, the cost of liberty is eternal vigilance, sometimes against wrongheaded experts. Fair point, and I hope I never said anything to the contrary. Even though experts are usually right, sometimes they are wrong. (But, I don't think "should we go to war" is a question which even tenuously attaches to a scientific fact.)
Your example of smoking in New York, though, I don't think is a strong example. You can call it education if you want, but I think it is extremely high taxes and strictly enforced no-smoking in many public places. We've had education all over the country for longer than I've been alive; nobody alive today doesn't know that smoking causes cancer. Education can take society a long, long ways (and has!), but it can't take it all the way, because there will always be a metric shit-ton of willful ignorance out there. You can't cure willful ignorance with education, but sometimes you can overcome it with a little social or legal pressure.
Yes, that's fair. Although the "You always know what is best for you in every situation" ideology comes mostly from the right, a majority of the anti-vax bullshit comes from the loony left. My comment was directed more at that political/ideological statement than at anti-vax crows specifically; in fact, that post didn't even mention vaccines or autism. Still, I could have been more clear that the screed against conservative nonsense was ancillary to the present topic.
Agreed. The issue is fraught with political danger. Many issues with parenthood are. It is definitely not an easy law to make or an easy issue to decide. The arguments for and against are both very compelling.
If you include the sentence after the one you quoted, it's pretty hard to disagree with what I said. But if you still disagree, I'm willing to explain further. Don't make the mistake of mischaracterizing what I said.
That's true. I considered expanding that whole thing in my first post, but decided it was an unnecessary detour, because of the vanishingly infinitesimal possibility that the exact population of children getting autism from vaccines were receiving an additional stimulus which precisely counteracted the effect; while at the same time unvaccinated children were receiving exactly the opposite stimulus in the exact right dose. If we lived only in theory, and not in the real universe, then we could spend time pursuing that possibility, but I didn't think it was necessary. Nevertheless, your statement adds to the completeness of what I said, in the context of the theory of science, which theoretically cannot ever "prove" anything.
It is only to the extent that science is a valid basis for belief, that we reject the link between vaccines and autism.
I respectfully disagree. His message is not "to test the link between vaccines and autism", because the tests have been done. If he were not pushing an anti-vaccine non-scientific agenda, then he would have proposed the link, encouraged studies into the link, and then publicly and vociferously retracted the proposed link when the studies showed no link. It is that final step which would have saved his credibility, but he refused that final step.
It was, in fact, the REST of the scientific community whose message was "to test the link between vaccines and autism". THEY were the ones who listened to the hypothesis, did the tests, and then accepted the results. Now, they are moving on to different tests, because they are the ones actually trying to find the cause of the disease, and Wakefield is not.
It would depend on the prevalence and severity of the disease, which I mentioned in the second sentence. It's hard to disagree with that.
Changing people's beliefs is a difficult task, and using reason simply doesn't work.
Instead, you use emotional manipulation, like the fear of losing your children, it's a better motivator than logic here.
I strongly, strongly agree with this. If I were ever in a position that I was directly trying to change the mind of an anti-vaxxer, I would not rest my case on facts and logic, I would use emotional appeals and back them up with facts and logic.
Oh, okay, I'll keep that in mind next time I'm formally debating someone in a concert hall, being moderated by a debate professional. Until then, I'll be happy enough to provide the widely held and easily discovered scientific consensus, without being sidetracked by goons trying to question things that have been settled long ago. If I say gravity pulls things down, I don't feel a need to cite that; if I say that vaccines don't cause autism, I don't feel a need to cite that. But if you like, you may do so -- go ahead and take the time to look up well-known facts and present them in a bibliographic format. You will have my thanks.
Yeah, it's a balance between absolute freedom (which is anarchy, do whatever you want at all times) and absolute good life (whatever that means, but it would include things like society and technology and health, all of which are anathema to anarchy).
But, to be clear, there is no place in the world where you have "freedom to be a total ass": everywhere you go, there are jails. If you push people, eventually pretty much everyone admits that government "do-gooders" do, in fact, "know better" than a rapist whether rape should be a crime.
Does vaccination predispose a person to faulty logic or exceptional proclivity for ad hominem?
Maybe. I don't have any studies showing zero correlation between vaccination and predisposition to faulty logic, so I can't say for sure that it isn't the case. But, it wouldn't really fit with everything else we know to be true about the universe.
In the end I guess I just have to disagree. I don't think it's an untenable leap of logic to go from fact to opinion thusly:
Fact: vaccines are the second most important public health technology in the history of mankind (number on is sanitation). While they do have very rare and known negative side effects, those effects are vastly dwarfed by the prevention of disease, and specifically vaccines do not cause autism.
Opinion: only a douchebag would decide not to vaccinate their child, whether it be because of an irrational and ignorant fear of autism, or some other silly nonsense like a religious objection.
If you disagree with the opinion, I can respect that. I will give you extra credit for making an ad hominem attack in the same sentence in which you deride ad hominem attacks, though. I assume you did that on purpose, and I think it shows a little bit of cleverness.
It's a sliding scale, but I agree, in my opinion failure to vaccinate is criminal-level negligence. The legal question is, can a reasonable person decide not to vaccinate, and in my opinion the answer is no; only unreasonable people can do that.
I won't play a game where you pretend that science doesn't prove things. Sorry, I just don' have time to do that today. If you can't use a search engine, I can't be bothered to show you how.
Yeah. Andrew Wakefield. He might currently be the world's most discredited scientist. For profit motive, he has made children sick and die -- hundreds, maybe thousands of them. In fact, for sickness, certainly thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands.
I do feel bad for their children.
Right. Which is why this is a problem. Society doesn't get so worked up when, say, a bunch of kooks get together and kill themselves as adults, like with Heaven's Gate or something. Adults doing stupid shit to themselves might be an area where society would step in, or it might not; but adults doing stupid shit to children is a situation where society most often feels the need to act.
Unfortunately the ones making the bad decisions aren't the ones who die. Alas.
We would miss that 40% of the country, though.
The only people I trust less than qualified, vetted, officials is uneducated jackasses pretending to understand the world around them when really they are just ignorant twits. There is a mantra from conservatives "They think they know better than you!". Um, yep. I think the scientists and knowledgeable health professionals "know better" than the backward backwater assholes who raise their children as if it were the year 1512. Obviously that isn't a general rule -- bureaucrats make all sorts of boneheaded decisions -- but I basically reject the notion that only you can know what is best for you in all circumstances. No; no, no, no; often, others know what is best for you, and people should be open to that possibility.
If we lived in a perfect world, then parents would be rational, intelligent, and informed. Yes, we would all "rather" live in that world. But we don't, we live in a world full of hysterical ignoramuses. (Same basic argument against libertarianism.)
To be fair, if vaccines caused autism, I would probably opt out of most vaccines, because most kids don't die of whooping cough or scarlet fever, but autism is forever. It might be rational, depending on the prevalence and severity of the disease, to decline a vaccination.
But, vaccines don't cause autism, and we know that absolutely 100% for a fact. We don't even have to do fancy science to prove it (although we have done that fancy science), because we can simply look at autism rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated kids. If there is no correlation between vaccines and autism, then that precludes the possibility of causation; and there is no correlation, therefore there is no causation.
Vaccinate your children. If you don't, you are a douchebag.
Hmmm. No, I still think it was Cheney who personally outed the name. Cheney pushed the blame downwards, but I have never heard any serious informed person say it was anyone other than Cheney who first purposely outed Plame.
Bush-Jr let the Bin Laden family go home because the Bin Laden family didn't have anything to do with Osama's terrorism, and his kin in the States would immediately be in personal, present, bodily danger -- because people like you wouldn't understand that the family long ago disowned Osama and is an ally of the United States. I'm saying Bush-Jr sent the Bin Ladens home in order to save them from you.