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If you ever find yourself arguing with an anti-vaxer, point them at this page. One personal story beats a thousand medical statistics.
by PaulAJ 7y ago
If you ever find yourself arguing with an anti-vaxer, point them at this page. One personal story beats a thousand medical statistics.
- lez 7y agoOne personal story NEVER beats a thousand (correctly orchestrated) medical statistics.
- krastanov 7y agoOp is probably talking in terms of how to reach a person that has shown already they do not understand science (e.g. they are an antivaxer), not in terms of how to do good science. I suspect they are right in this case, albeit a bit optimistic.
- jddj 7y agoTo take this a little further, this framing effect/appeal to emotion has been shown to affect a large segment of the general population, not only those in the anti-science, antivax extreme. Granted it's not exactly the same thing, but Oxfam uses campaigns which hilight the story of a single child suffering extreme poverty rather than attempting to move people with statistics which express the scale of the problem.
- braythwayt 7y agoGood luck with that. --Georges St. Pierre When someone has a closed reasoning system, even an emotional story will not sway them. It will be waved away as a rare outlier, or something God wanted to happen to that person, or fake news ginned up by Big Pharma, &c. People like anti-vaxxxers don't just have strong beliefes, strongly held, they have integrated their beliefs into their personal identity, they have integrated their beliefs into their tribal membership, and they have converted them into a persecution complex. Those three things--personal identity, tribal membership, and persecution complex--brush truth aside like chaff in the breeze.
- jimhefferon 7y agoI have found the Debunking Handbook of some help (it was written about climate science but applies more widely). https://skepticalscience.com/Debunking-Handbook-now-freely-available-download.html https://skepticalscience.com/Debunking-Handbook-now-freely-a...
- sysbin 7y agoBasically like a person following a religious ideology?
- braythwayt 7y agoYes, except I am not "just" talking about someone following an ideology, I am talking about someone who engages with others who follow the same ideology, and thus gets emotional support from "belonging to the tribe." This is why the internet changes everything about radicalization: It makes it nearly frictionless to find a critical mass of other people who share your ideology and engage with them all day long.
- deogeo 7y agoProblem with personal stories is you can find one to support any viewpoint.
- ajuc 7y agoProblem with internet is that people look for the stories that support their view and ignore data and science as conspiracy.
- rixed 7y agoProblem with this HN entry is it's doing exactly this. I understand that the BBC might want to play the "statistically irrelevant but emotionally moving" card from time to time, as it's provably more efficient and, at their scale, could even save a sizeable number of lives. But I still had hope that the comparatively much smaller population reading HN was into science as opposed to this kind of "argument". Is it really important to have a real life illustration of the possible consequences of the feer of vaccines? I doubt it. Can you convince anyone to question his own irrational thoughts by resorting to irrational arguments, or do you actually help the bad habit to grow longer roots? As the saying goes, the most pernicious way to damage a cause is to argue for it with dubious means.
- deogeo 7y agoSounds like we all agree.
- simondw 7y agoRight, and then they'll point you at an equally poignant story about a kid who was vaccinated and then was diagnosed with autism. If the hypothetical anti-vaxxer didn't already know that life-threatening diseases exist and can be prevented with vaccines, that's probably where you should have started your argument.
- everdev 7y agoSo construct a worldview based on a small sample size of personal stories? Sounds like what antivaxxers do.