Often they already are thinking in grays: they have doubt where everyone else has an absolute! The thinking in grays is great; as you point out, that's the bas

Often they already are thinking in grays: they have doubt where everyone else has an absolute! The thinking in grays is great; as you point out, that's the basis of science. But when it comes to making a decision, the actions need to be, or end up being, absolute. You can't "play it safe", stick a toe in the water, and get "half vaccinated" (you either follow the schedule or you don't). You can't build half a nuclear power plant. The gray area thinking leads to an absolute lack of action when it comes to further understanding. These kind of projects and scientific endeavors are large, society-befitting advancements, and they require everyone to get on board. I suspect that some of this actually is laziness and not wanting to learn or participate in the scientific process, or considering science to be inaccessible to the layman. It's useful to say that more education and empathy is required, but these kind of society-level things eventually need to be considered lab tested enough to get used in the field for mass benefit. And we need to be both confident of that field use and cognoscent that that's just another stage of the data collection. We should never stop collecting data, stop trying to understand it, or stop doing science. One might argue that we, as humans, can't stop (we just get into ruts sometimes where we slow down significantly). Lots of people have been stupidly, really, really wrong in history. Some of them changed the world. Unfortunately, the people who have been really really wrong outnumber those who were wrong and also changed the world by significant orders of magnitude. Those who were wrong and changed the world changed it because they acknowledged they were on a path to discovering the truth. Others who were wrong weren't out for discovery. my mother is a vaccine... 'doubter.' She is a scientist, a biologist, extremely intelligent Despite that your mother is a vaccine "doubter", would she fail to recommend getting vaccinated? It's a healthy scientific process that is open to new data, but when it comes to action the data already collected that is what matters (even if the data collected is not immediately at hand). That being said, the question with vaccination isn't "do vaccines work" (do they satisfy the need for which they are administered), but rather "does the risk of unintended side-effects outweigh the documented benefits". In this light, it comes down to being able to do risk assessment, not necessarily being able to interpret the data and scientific results. I think we know way more about vaccination than we do about autism, and the risk assessment needs to take that into account. People like her are fighting against the absolute mentality of the mob and how the issue is thought about in public discourse—not the end result like you might think they are. It's interesting that the mob has an absolute stance, but is made up of individuals who are comfortable in the gray area of their interpretation. Is there something in this dichotomy here that can help further the education and empathy?