Vaccines

Of course, I realize you were being sarcastic. 

But what I implied was that your silly reply still didn't address what needs to be addressed though: thousands and thousands of parents connect a vaccine to their child's autism . . . because it was at the time of the vaccine that their child lost vocabulary, motor skills, social skills, including eye contact, and even things as basic as behaving in a way that showed that they knew who their parents were.  

Your "sarcastic" answer implied that the only thing connecting autism and vaccinations were an increase in the two at the same time . . . and conveniently left out the above.

Hi Reece, this struck a chord with me, as we have good friends who had exactly this experience. I think Mothers just know when something stinks, it usually is found out eventually. As a result of their experience we waited as long as we could before giving our own daughter the MMR jab, making sure that we paid more for a mercury free one.

Yes, her modus operandi seems to be to repeat like a broken record player something along the lines of "if you're not an expert your arguments are worthless". She's been repeating the same thing endlessly for ages without realizing any of the weaknesses of it or its shortcomings. It's just an endless loop of appeals to authority.

An appeal to authority fallacy occurs when the supposed authority is not actually an authority.

~~ Paul

Definitely bowing out of this for awhile. I think both sides have some good arguments and I think both sides also think they're right. I don't think much will change that. For what it's worth I am compelled to believe that, although vaccines are good in theory, they have not been adequately tested to prove they even work as advertised. Much of this is also documented. I also believe there is so much motivation to hide any falsehood that even in the absence of direct evidence for one or the other case the inertia of the many, many proven, documented cases of government and corporate collusion and coverups in the medical field and all the others makes it seem very unlikely that the government is not lying about vaccines as well. From teh FBI crime labs to Ross Ulbritch, from the WHO board members conflicts of interest around the H1N1 pandemic to Merk knowingly putting live viruses in their vaccines, from Google's collusion with the US government to Facebook running experiments on users to manipulate their opinions and emotions, from the DOD's Sentient world simulation to  the rockefellers technocratic eugenic wet dream. There's so much out there already demonstrating the top to bottom corruption that a vaccine coverup seems pretty par for the course. I always recommend Corbettreport.com as a resource to start.

I thought that this sort of "argument by conspiracy" stuff wasn't welcome in the main forum anyways.

Linda

An appeal to authority fallacy occurs when the supposed authority is not actually an authority.

~~ Paul

To be fair - I'm not a fan of authority for authorities' sake. I refer to expertise - experience and knowledge - because I want to be able to focus on "high-validity environments" which is the area where expertise becomes valuable. Authorities in low-validity environments cannot trust that the information they provide is valid and reliable, so there's no point in referring to their say-so. Medicine and science are examples of a high-validity environment, while intelligence analysis is an example of a low-validity environment.

"They agreed that the confidence that experts express in their intuitive judgments is not a reliable guide to their validity. They further agreed that two basic conditions must be present before intuitive judgments reflect true expertise: an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable and an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice. An expert firefighter’s sensing the need to order his men to evacuate a burning building just before it collapses or a race driver’s knowing to slow down well before the massive accident comes into view are due to highly valid clues that each expert’s System 1 has learned to use, even if System 2 has not learned to name them.

Learning, in turn, relies on receiving timely and unambiguous feedback. Many if not most of the issues with which intelligence analysts are seized are what Kahneman and Klein would probably call “low-validity” environments, in which the intuitive predictions of experts should not be trusted at face value, irrespective of the confidence with which they are stated. Moreover, they would probably consider the feedback available to analysts—from policymakers and events—inadequate for efficient learning and expertise development. Kahneman was not referring specifically to intelligence analysts when he wrote, “it is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world,” but he has given interviews in which he discusses intelligence analysts in this context. At the same time, he also wrote, “however, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.” In short, Kahneman concedes that intuition has to be valued, but it cannot necessarily be trusted." 

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-t...-slow.html


Linda

Hi Reece, this struck a chord with me, as we have good friends who had exactly this experience. I think Mothers just know when something stinks, it usually is found out eventually. As a result of their experience we waited as long as we could before giving our own daughter the MMR jab, making sure that we paid more for a mercury free one.

The idea of the "mommy instinct" is one of those low-validity environments Kahnemann and Klein were talking about. Since rigorous investigation has not upheld the informal post hoc ergo propter hoc observation of the vaccine/autism link claimed by Mothers, it seems a bit misguided to give it all that much credence.

Linda

Thank you for that Linda. 

Yes, her modus operandi seems to be to repeat like a broken record player something along the lines of "if you're not an expert your arguments are worthless". She's been repeating the same thing endlessly for ages without realizing any of the weaknesses of it or its shortcomings. It's just an endless loop of appeals to authority.

I don't necessarily agree with how you've characterized it, but regardless, if you have some examples for the claim, "history is not lacking in examples of experts being proven wildly wrong, oftentimes by lay people", then by all means please provide some. Then I wouldn't need to repeat myself.

You can use my "Laypeople Trump experts" thread so as not to detail this one, if necessary.

Linda

The idea of the "mommy instinct" is one of those low-validity environments Kahnemann and Klein were talking about. Since rigorous investigation has not upheld the informal post hoc ergo propter hoc observation of the vaccine/autism link claimed by Mothers, it seems a bit misguided to give it all that much credence.

Linda

Do you really think that out-trumps an anecdote striking a chord with someone?

Linda and Paul are making too much sense...careful everyone...this is the kind of stuff that used to get people banned on the old forum!

An appeal to authority fallacy occurs when the supposed authority is not actually an authority.

~~ Paul

I had all my inoculations as a child (polio, smallpox, TB, etc.) and followed suit with my own children. I still go for my yearly flu jab. I also tend to see the sense of the idea of vaccination: to allow the immune system to create a defence by introducing a small amount of the offending agent. On the other hand, I do think that Big Pharma is profit driven and they are not above spending obscene amounts of money and using other obscene tactics to cover up or deny some of the horrors they unleash.

But, just to comment on the appeal to authority fallacy, Wikipedia - for once - doesn't seem to entirely agree with Paul's statement.

Appeal to non-authorities

Fallacious arguments from authority are also frequently the result of citing a non-authority as an authority. An example of the fallacy of appealing to an authority in an unrelated field would be citing Albert Einstein as an authority for a determination on religion when his primary expertise was in physics.The body of attributed authorities might not even welcome their citation, such as with the "More Doctors Smoke Camels" ad campaign.

It is also a fallacious ad hominem argument to argue that a person presenting statements lacks authority and thus their arguments do not need to be considered. As appeals to a perceived lack of authority, these types of argument are fallacious for much the same reasons as an appeal to authority.

Cognitive bias

The argument from authority is based on the idea that an expert will know better and that the person should conform to the expert's opinion. This has its roots in psychological cognitive biases such as the Asch effect. In repeated and modified instances of the Asch conformity experiments, it was found that high-status individuals create a stronger likelihood of a subject agreeing with an obviously false conclusion, despite the subject normally being able to clearly see that the answer was incorrect.

...

One paper about the philosophy of mathematics for example notes that, within academia,
 
"If...a person accepts our discipline, and goes through two or three years of graduate study in mathematics, he absorbs our way of thinking, and is no longer the critical outsider he once was...If the student is unable to absorb our way of thinking, we flunk him out, of course. If he gets through our obstacle course and then decides that our arguments are unclear or incorrect, we dismiss him as a crank, crackpot, or misfit."

Corporate environments are similarly vulnerable to appeals to perceived authorities and experts leading to groupthink, as are governments and militaries.