4 ms·

I've tried to argue with someone who thinks she's more open-minded and she uses critical thinking more because she didn't believe what MSM said and she just kne

I've tried to argue with someone who thinks she's more open-minded and she uses critical thinking more because she didn't believe what MSM said and she just knew (probably from all the random blogs she read) that MSM is being controlled by the Rotschilds. But probably there's a lot of confirmation bias there https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/ . She also believed Bill Gates was doing something with the devil. When she said "Do your own research, but use DuckDuckGo not Google" I had to laugh. I told her "But you do know DDG uses results from Bing, which is from... Microsoft?" (not that BillG has anything to do with MS nowadays) but of course her mind just ironed away this cognitive dissonance. I think I'm pretty sane, but how do I know I'm believing the truth? I can read 2 papers about Covid and dismiss one as baloney (like the ones written by that pro-HCQ French doctor) and take the other one as "probably legit", but how do we lay-people even tell the difference other than "It starts out with the premise I prefer". I guess there's comfort in statistics, e.g. the number of people vaccinated so far and the very few reports of side-effects, and the high correlation between high-vaccine areas and low incidence rates and vice versa. Or the statistics that if Biden's win was fraud there would've been quite a lot of fraud needed, and the chances of keeping all of that quiet and well-coordinated was very small...

tppiotrowski 5y ago
"Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder." -Carl Sagan How would you design a test to determine if MSM is being controlled by the Rotschilds? It's hard to prove the vaccine is safe but you can count how many unvaccinated covid deaths vs vaccinated covid deaths to show that being vaccinated reduces chance of death.

tppiotrowski 5y ago

"Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder." -Carl Sagan How would you design a test to determine if MSM is being controlled by the Rotschilds? It's hard to prove the vaccine is safe but you can count how many unvaccinated covid deaths vs vaccinated covid deaths to show that being vaccinated reduces chance of death.