There's a funny thing about society. Do you know how you create wildly misinformed idiots? By assuming people who disagree with you on topics are wildly misinfo

There's a funny thing about society. Do you know how you create wildly misinformed idiots? By assuming people who disagree with you on topics are wildly misinformed idiots. The National Academies put up a release in 2011 surveying all available information on the correlations between vaccines and a wide array of nasty stuff. It's available here [1]. It gives an extremely in depth overview of the evidence of the time, which has not radically changed since then. It's a 900 page report, but it's well organized. And you'll find that indeed there are quite a huge number of very real and very nasty correlations between vaccines and all sorts of things. By making the false statement (presumably based on the view that everybody who abides anti-vaccine views must be a wildly misinformed idiot) that 'almost all studies show correlations between nasty things and vaccines are exaggerated or outright lies', you do something really bad. You implicitly suggest that if the correlations were not 'exagerrated or outright lies', they would be meaningful. They are not. Correlation does not equal causation. There's an extremely strong correlation between US spending on science, space, and technology and suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation. The correlation is a 99.8% fit. But this means absolutely nothing whatsoever. There are some 30,000 various correlations available here [2]. You'll find many, such as the one I mentioned, are incredibly strong fits. But that's really the danger of data. Just because something fits, doesn't mean anything. The entire process of science is about discovering causation. Correlations mean nothing without clear causation. Even correlations that make sense mean nothing without causation. For instance, I'm sure you'd agree that US spending on science has pretty much nothing to do with suicides by hanging. So it's easy to see it's spurious. What if instead that correlation was e.g. an increase in enrollment in STEM degrees being pursued? Again, you should assume this correlation is spurious until you have a very compelling reason, certainly beyond bias confirmation, to do otherwise. [1] - http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2011/Adverse-Effects-of-Vaccines-Evidence-and-Causality.aspx http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2011/Adverse-Ef... [2] - http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations