5 ms·

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

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.

vdaniuk 11y ago
>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.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Can you give some examples of what you're thinking of here?
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    Medicine is usually right and only sometimes wrong, but alternative medicine is usually wrong and only sometimes right. The fact that medicine can be spectacularly or trivially wrong doesn't provide any inputs for change of personal healthcare strategy.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      I understand what you wrote. I was asking for specific examples.
  - palimpsests 11y ago
    My guess is that this demographic would tend to categorize traditional Chinese medicine as being pseudoscience – if you agree, here's an example from within that system: The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to a Youyou Tu, a Chinese pharmacologist who identified powerful antimalarial compounds in a traditional Chinese medical formula that has been used for centuries to treat Malaria: > Youyou Tu in China turned to traditional herbal medicine to tackle the challenge of developing novel Malaria therapies. From a large-scale screen of herbal remedies in Malaria-infected animals, an extract from the plant Artemisia annua emerged as an interesting candidate. However, the results were inconsistent, so Tu revisited the ancient literature and discovered clues that guided her in her quest to successfully extract the active component from Artemisia annua. Tu was the first to show that this component, later called Artemisinin, was highly effective against the Malaria parasite, both in infected animals and in humans (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2015/press.html http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/20...). There are plenty of other examples if you are curious and inclined to do the research. As an aside, I would argue that the type of empiricism within this system of medicine is indeed a type of science (cataloguing pharmacological agents for thousands of years and recording their effects in the treatment of myriad medical conditions), but it probably has little to no examples of the modern day notion of randomized clinical trials.
pc86 11y ago
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.
- sharemywin 11y ago
  just like buying a gun since more people die from guns in the US than the diseases we vaccinate against. The troll is on the other foot now...
  - pc86 11y ago
    You want to make it a felony not to give your child a gun by the age of six? :)
  - zachrose 11y ago
    Yeah, as I was reading the article I noticed a lot of parallels to gun control in the US. The harder one part of society pulls against guns, the more convinced gun rights advocates become that this is all a bigger conspiracy to to disarm them and take away their agency.
    - pc86 11y ago
      I live in a rural part of the US and have many, many strong pro-gun friends and acquaintances. The vast majority (95%+ at least) do not think there is any conspiracy to disarm existing gun owners. To imply otherwise is disingenuous at best. The problem is that a lot of times the restrictions don't make any sense. We'll ban 30-round magazines but not 20. We'll ban barrel shrouds that are entirely cosmetic. We'll ban pistol grips on shotguns that actually reduce the lethality of the weapon by making is less accurate. All the while these things are proposed by legislators who truly do not understand what they're talking about. It's worse than octogenarian Senators discussing the internet, it really is. There you have "it's a series of tubes," and here you have people referring to "the shoulder thing that goes up." If you could have a well-spoken conservative Democrat who actually understood firearms and the culture surrounding them, who could propose real gun control solutions that aren't based on emotion or cosmetics, you'd probably get something passed.
the8472 11y ago
> 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.
- prostoalex 11y ago
  What if the numbers work out against vaccination? To quote CDC http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/polio/dis-faqs.htm http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/polio/dis-faqs.htm "Of the 162 cases, eight cases were acquired outside the United States and imported. The last imported case caused by wild poliovirus into the United States was reported in 1993. The remaining 154 cases were vaccine-associated paralytic polio (VAPP) caused by live oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV)." 162 polio-related issues, 8 from actual virus, 154 from the vaccine.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    Vaccine induced polio is not nearly as bad as wild-type polio. And this would also be the reason we phased out giving the polio vaccine.
    - prostoalex 11y ago
      So the probability of a health issue attributed to vaccine is higher than probability of a health issue attributed to the original disease. Isn't that the core of the anti-vaxxers arguments?
      - XorNot 11y ago
        No, the probability of getting a health issue due to the vaccine has now become much higher then the probability of getting polio. Your comment rather suggests you don't know much about polio: I suggest looking it up. But that only applies to diseases which lack a natural harbor like polio does, where eradication is practical. Stop vaccinating for measles and oh surprise there is now an outbreak of measles. We haven't needed to seriously vaccinate for polio for over a decade. But that itself is all sorts of iffy because there are two quite different polio vaccines of different effectiveness.
vox_mollis 11y ago
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.
- calinet6 11y ago
  You're thinking too logically. It is a human connection you're building with empathy, not a strategy. Play the long game.
  - aharonovich 11y ago
    But do you want to live with this person? If I hold an opinion that's so sub optimal and I hold it because of emotional reasons I'd like someone to shake me out of it, not pet me on the head and smile.
    - isolate 11y ago
      That's like the worst thing you can do for a delusion.

vdaniuk 11y ago

>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.

jacquesm 11y ago
Can you give some examples of what you're thinking of here?
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  Medicine is usually right and only sometimes wrong, but alternative medicine is usually wrong and only sometimes right. The fact that medicine can be spectacularly or trivially wrong doesn't provide any inputs for change of personal healthcare strategy.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    I understand what you wrote. I was asking for specific examples.
- palimpsests 11y ago
  My guess is that this demographic would tend to categorize traditional Chinese medicine as being pseudoscience – if you agree, here's an example from within that system: The 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to a Youyou Tu, a Chinese pharmacologist who identified powerful antimalarial compounds in a traditional Chinese medical formula that has been used for centuries to treat Malaria: > Youyou Tu in China turned to traditional herbal medicine to tackle the challenge of developing novel Malaria therapies. From a large-scale screen of herbal remedies in Malaria-infected animals, an extract from the plant Artemisia annua emerged as an interesting candidate. However, the results were inconsistent, so Tu revisited the ancient literature and discovered clues that guided her in her quest to successfully extract the active component from Artemisia annua. Tu was the first to show that this component, later called Artemisinin, was highly effective against the Malaria parasite, both in infected animals and in humans (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2015/press.html http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/20...). There are plenty of other examples if you are curious and inclined to do the research. As an aside, I would argue that the type of empiricism within this system of medicine is indeed a type of science (cataloguing pharmacological agents for thousands of years and recording their effects in the treatment of myriad medical conditions), but it probably has little to no examples of the modern day notion of randomized clinical trials.

pc86 11y ago

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.

sharemywin 11y ago
just like buying a gun since more people die from guns in the US than the diseases we vaccinate against. The troll is on the other foot now...
- pc86 11y ago
  You want to make it a felony not to give your child a gun by the age of six? :)
- zachrose 11y ago
  Yeah, as I was reading the article I noticed a lot of parallels to gun control in the US. The harder one part of society pulls against guns, the more convinced gun rights advocates become that this is all a bigger conspiracy to to disarm them and take away their agency.
  - pc86 11y ago
    I live in a rural part of the US and have many, many strong pro-gun friends and acquaintances. The vast majority (95%+ at least) do not think there is any conspiracy to disarm existing gun owners. To imply otherwise is disingenuous at best. The problem is that a lot of times the restrictions don't make any sense. We'll ban 30-round magazines but not 20. We'll ban barrel shrouds that are entirely cosmetic. We'll ban pistol grips on shotguns that actually reduce the lethality of the weapon by making is less accurate. All the while these things are proposed by legislators who truly do not understand what they're talking about. It's worse than octogenarian Senators discussing the internet, it really is. There you have "it's a series of tubes," and here you have people referring to "the shoulder thing that goes up." If you could have a well-spoken conservative Democrat who actually understood firearms and the culture surrounding them, who could propose real gun control solutions that aren't based on emotion or cosmetics, you'd probably get something passed.

the8472 11y ago

> 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.

prostoalex 11y ago
What if the numbers work out against vaccination? To quote CDC http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/polio/dis-faqs.htm http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/polio/dis-faqs.htm "Of the 162 cases, eight cases were acquired outside the United States and imported. The last imported case caused by wild poliovirus into the United States was reported in 1993. The remaining 154 cases were vaccine-associated paralytic polio (VAPP) caused by live oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV)." 162 polio-related issues, 8 from actual virus, 154 from the vaccine.
- XorNot 11y ago
  Vaccine induced polio is not nearly as bad as wild-type polio. And this would also be the reason we phased out giving the polio vaccine.
  - prostoalex 11y ago
    So the probability of a health issue attributed to vaccine is higher than probability of a health issue attributed to the original disease. Isn't that the core of the anti-vaxxers arguments?
    - XorNot 11y ago
      No, the probability of getting a health issue due to the vaccine has now become much higher then the probability of getting polio. Your comment rather suggests you don't know much about polio: I suggest looking it up. But that only applies to diseases which lack a natural harbor like polio does, where eradication is practical. Stop vaccinating for measles and oh surprise there is now an outbreak of measles. We haven't needed to seriously vaccinate for polio for over a decade. But that itself is all sorts of iffy because there are two quite different polio vaccines of different effectiveness.

vox_mollis 11y ago

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.

calinet6 11y ago
You're thinking too logically. It is a human connection you're building with empathy, not a strategy. Play the long game.
- aharonovich 11y ago
  But do you want to live with this person? If I hold an opinion that's so sub optimal and I hold it because of emotional reasons I'd like someone to shake me out of it, not pet me on the head and smile.
  - isolate 11y ago
    That's like the worst thing you can do for a delusion.