20 ms·

Is the number of people high enough to make them right? For example if one doctor says I have cancer but 100 electricians say I don't I'm cancer free

by Braxton1980 6mo ago

dylan604 6mo ago
9 out of 10 experts agree. It's that last one. That one person is just enough for people to latch on. Then, of the 9, 6 of them get tired of yelling at clouds and quit. The 6 get replaced with those that believe the one so that there's not 7. That goes on for long enough, you get people in charge that do away with vaccinations and measles has a come back.
- AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
  That's not actually how the measles thing happens. What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy and instead tries to shut him up, or starts suppressing data that doesn't actually support the crazy theory but is kind of inconvenient or complicated to explain. Then you're screwed because you're letting the conspiracy guy point to an actual conspiracy to suppress his views, which provides evidentiary support for the claim that their crazy theory isn't mainstream because it's being suppressed. Meanwhile you get free speech defenders concerned about a bad precedent coming out to oppose you, and then political lines get drawn over something that never should have been partisan, but now everyone is expected to pick a side. And a lot of people end up on the side of lizardmen guy. But once it's partisan, people are hopeless at being neutral. If you're on lizardmen guy's side then you're giving him the benefit of the doubt and on the lookout for any fault in his critics, which is how you get way too many people actually believing in lizardmen. The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them.
  - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
    > That's not actually how the measles thing happens. > What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. My observation (in Germany) is rather that many antivaxxer (and sceptics of forced measles vaccination) read the scientific literature quite deeply, but come to very different conclusions. Additionally, they often have marked "live and let live" personality traits, which authorities do not like. Because of their deep intellectual investment in this topic, they often have a much deeper knowledge about the whole topic than working doctors. The only people who are real counterparties for them are actual respected scientific experts on the topic. While these are clearly even more knowledgeable, these actual experts fear the well-read antivaxxers because the latter - love to show gaps in the whole theoretical frameworks, - ask really annoying and interesting questions - etc.
    - AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
      So there are two separate issues here. One is the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, which, basically, they don't, but there are a lot of wrong people who think they do for bad reasons. That's the thing where if you try to censor things you're screwing yourself by creating the breeding ground for bad conspiracy theories. And how you get enough people refusing vaccines for bad reasons to cause problems etc. Then there's the policy debate on whether vaccines should be mandatory, where people can make some pretty non-crazy arguments that they shouldn't be. Or the question of whether a specific person in a specific circumstance should get a specific vaccine, to which a reasonable answer could occasionally be no. But the people making those arguments aren't even necessarily wrong and having them push back on something when they have a reason to push back on it is perfectly legitimate and the people wanting to stop them are the baddies.
      - ourmandave 6mo ago
        In the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, they don't. But then frauds like Wakefield somehow got a bullshit paper published saying they do and it's off to the toon races. The paper wasn't censored, it was disproven by multiple studies and discredited by investigation. The Wakefield paper studied 12 children (multiple who had siblings with autism) and was funded by lawyers suing the vaccine companies at the time. Today Wakefield is on the anti-vax circuit giving talks and continuing to lie. Measles is a Solved Problem. Polio is a Solved Problem. But the toons are running the Fed now, canceling science and telling lies. So we'll have to wait until 2028 to get a final death count, assuming anyone is still tracking it.
GJim 6mo ago
> Is the number of people high enough to make them right? The term you are looking for is 'an argument to popularity'. It's one of many such logical fallacies. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy

Is the number of people high enough to make them right? For example if one doctor says I have cancer but 100 electricians say I don't I'm cancer free

dylan604 6mo ago

9 out of 10 experts agree. It's that last one. That one person is just enough for people to latch on. Then, of the 9, 6 of them get tired of yelling at clouds and quit. The 6 get replaced with those that believe the one so that there's not 7. That goes on for long enough, you get people in charge that do away with vaccinations and measles has a come back.

AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
That's not actually how the measles thing happens. What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy and instead tries to shut him up, or starts suppressing data that doesn't actually support the crazy theory but is kind of inconvenient or complicated to explain. Then you're screwed because you're letting the conspiracy guy point to an actual conspiracy to suppress his views, which provides evidentiary support for the claim that their crazy theory isn't mainstream because it's being suppressed. Meanwhile you get free speech defenders concerned about a bad precedent coming out to oppose you, and then political lines get drawn over something that never should have been partisan, but now everyone is expected to pick a side. And a lot of people end up on the side of lizardmen guy. But once it's partisan, people are hopeless at being neutral. If you're on lizardmen guy's side then you're giving him the benefit of the doubt and on the lookout for any fault in his critics, which is how you get way too many people actually believing in lizardmen. The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
  > That's not actually how the measles thing happens. > What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. My observation (in Germany) is rather that many antivaxxer (and sceptics of forced measles vaccination) read the scientific literature quite deeply, but come to very different conclusions. Additionally, they often have marked "live and let live" personality traits, which authorities do not like. Because of their deep intellectual investment in this topic, they often have a much deeper knowledge about the whole topic than working doctors. The only people who are real counterparties for them are actual respected scientific experts on the topic. While these are clearly even more knowledgeable, these actual experts fear the well-read antivaxxers because the latter - love to show gaps in the whole theoretical frameworks, - ask really annoying and interesting questions - etc.
  - AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
    So there are two separate issues here. One is the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, which, basically, they don't, but there are a lot of wrong people who think they do for bad reasons. That's the thing where if you try to censor things you're screwing yourself by creating the breeding ground for bad conspiracy theories. And how you get enough people refusing vaccines for bad reasons to cause problems etc. Then there's the policy debate on whether vaccines should be mandatory, where people can make some pretty non-crazy arguments that they shouldn't be. Or the question of whether a specific person in a specific circumstance should get a specific vaccine, to which a reasonable answer could occasionally be no. But the people making those arguments aren't even necessarily wrong and having them push back on something when they have a reason to push back on it is perfectly legitimate and the people wanting to stop them are the baddies.
    - ourmandave 6mo ago
      In the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, they don't. But then frauds like Wakefield somehow got a bullshit paper published saying they do and it's off to the toon races. The paper wasn't censored, it was disproven by multiple studies and discredited by investigation. The Wakefield paper studied 12 children (multiple who had siblings with autism) and was funded by lawyers suing the vaccine companies at the time. Today Wakefield is on the anti-vax circuit giving talks and continuing to lie. Measles is a Solved Problem. Polio is a Solved Problem. But the toons are running the Fed now, canceling science and telling lies. So we'll have to wait until 2028 to get a final death count, assuming anyone is still tracking it.

GJim 6mo ago

> Is the number of people high enough to make them right? The term you are looking for is 'an argument to popularity'. It's one of many such logical fallacies. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy