Thanks to your ongoing efforts, my 40+ year old sibling finally got vaccinated about three weeks before getting infected by her kids. She still had it pretty bad, so I think it’s likely you saved her a trip to the hospital or worse.
She was on the brink of getting vaccinated weeks earlier, but “That Guy” had cast enough doubt that a family member talked her out of it. So I’m glad you specifically mentioned him back then. Thanks to our civilization’s shiny new censorship machine it was maddeningly difficult to actually find good counter arguments to his claims, since we’re all supposed to just pretend bad claims don’t exist. So mostly I had to just point to the favorable evidence rather than being able to give a point by point rebuttal.
[...]
And her family is fox news conservative, so all the tribal hate made it especially hard for her to take their claims seriously. She stayed up all night making her decision, and had 250 browser tabs open by the end. So people do try, and do pay attention.
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and later, in response
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I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked.
> I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked.
This is a really frustrating perspective to hear.
> I heard this bogus claim about something I don't understand and wanted to know if it was true
> All I could find was doctors saying it was nonsense
> How could I know what the truth was?
I suspect it's a common form of reasoning. It's committing so many mistakes all at once.
* Refusal to acknowledge that you might be considering nonsense and thus perceiving anyone saying it's nonsense as malicious
* Complete refusal or certainty in your inability to do basic research on things that are well documented by many organizations and easy to find BUT STILL SAYING ITS HARD TO FIND
* Not just lack of trust, but certainty of distrust for authority figures. Anything they say has negative value.
It's far more upsetting to me than hearing people with malicious political agendas being assholes.
So you think it's a problem that people want to see an actual explanation, rather than just hearing authority figures say "don't worry your little head, we'll make the decisions for you"?
Every day we hear the mantra, "follow the science!". Here are people striving to do exactly that, and they're being criticized for it. Saying that they're not trying hard enough if they're not finding the answers they seek when it's framed the way you say it must be presented is not a recipe for helping such people overcome their objections.
If you want an actual explanation you can google "do vaccines alter your dna" and find plenty of results that explain it in simple detail for non scientists.
Others simply say "No it does not alter your dna" because that concept is irrelevant and made up. There's no basis for it.
You don't get to say you're unable to get an explanation if you're not getting it because you either refuse to do the most basic search, or do the search and refuse to acknowledge it.
This isn't about who has moral high ground. This is about convincing people to take the damned vaccine. I'd think it's more important to find ways to reach such people, than it is to feel morally righteous about the skeptic being a parasitic moron who isn't researching hard enough.
It's not about moral high ground. It's about lamenting the vast wave of anti-intellectualism that has reached such a disturbingly high level.
You cannot lead an effective society in which people embrace the doublethink of simultaneously refusing to acknowledge experts, refusing to even attempt to understand something themselves, and still demanding an understanding of something.
Maybe you should go back and read what I quoted. In both cases, the people said that they did eventually find what they needed, and decided to do the vaccination.
These two people were complaining not that they couldn't find anti-vax information. They were complaining that they couldn't find anybody directly refuting anti-vax claims, because those anti-vax claims had (assumedly) been censored.
But let's assume that you're correct. Wouldn't it be better to let the skeptic find some posting from a person who wrongly believed that, say, the vaccine causes sterility; and when they go read that (maybe just to bolster their own beliefs) they also see the reply from someone who addresses the skeptic's incorrect beliefs? If we prevent our hypothetical skeptic from finding that page that made him feel safe, he wouldn't have gotten to the counter-argument at all.
> Wouldn't it be better to let the skeptic find some posting from a person who wrongly believed that, say, the vaccine causes sterility; and when they go read that (maybe just to bolster their own beliefs) they also see the reply from someone who addresses the skeptic's incorrect beliefs?
No, because...
"The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." ~ Albert Einstein
--- start quote #1 ---
Thanks to your ongoing efforts, my 40+ year old sibling finally got vaccinated about three weeks before getting infected by her kids. She still had it pretty bad, so I think it’s likely you saved her a trip to the hospital or worse.
She was on the brink of getting vaccinated weeks earlier, but “That Guy” had cast enough doubt that a family member talked her out of it. So I’m glad you specifically mentioned him back then. Thanks to our civilization’s shiny new censorship machine it was maddeningly difficult to actually find good counter arguments to his claims, since we’re all supposed to just pretend bad claims don’t exist. So mostly I had to just point to the favorable evidence rather than being able to give a point by point rebuttal.
[...]
And her family is fox news conservative, so all the tribal hate made it especially hard for her to take their claims seriously. She stayed up all night making her decision, and had 250 browser tabs open by the end. So people do try, and do pay attention.
--- end quote #1 ---
and later, in response
--- start quote #2 ---
I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked.
--- end quote #2 ---