Do you attribute malicious motives to the skeptics employed by tobacco companies?

Right now at this moment my 60 year old SiL is holed up in her apartment with covid. She refused to get the vaccine. She believes that there are lizard people who live beneath the earth's crust, etc. She found a "doctor" to prescribe her ivermectin - the "doctor" does not allow vaccinated people into their clinic for whatever bizarre reason (sPIkE pRoTeenZ no doubt).

We asked her to take a pic of her oximeter reading and send it to us - it read 91. We told her she should get to a hospital where they could give her some oxygen, but she refuses (doesn't want to be in "the system"). She is the poster child for disingenuous skepticism and it's impossible to have a "genuine conversation" with her because she's so infected with conspiracy theories (including the Q conspiracy).

> She is the poster child for disingenuous skepticism

She doesn't seem at all disingenuous to me, what actions make you doubt her genuinity? To me it sounds like she may have some mental health issues to work out and that is an entirely different beast than this conversation.

Why do you believe that “mental health issues” (very non-specific) is an entirely different beast? My family experiences suggest that information silos (my personal diagnosis of one of the root causes of disbelief of reproducible scientific findings) can and do create mental health issues similar to the parent’s SiL.

There is good reason to not want to be in the system. During COVID, both my aunt and grandmother were abused during their hospitalizations (not for COVID). The experience left my aunt feeling she'd rather have died than endure what she had to, and after hearing her experiences, I think that would have been a perfectly rational decision to make had she known what was going to happen.

Why are we so upset when people decide to refuse treatment?

>Why are we so upset when people decide to refuse treatment?

The anecdotal evidence you gave (hospital abuse) is an outlier, not a norm.

A better question is, why wouldn't you be upset when a family member refuses life saving treatment, rationalized by disinformation?

> A better question is, why wouldn't you be upset when a family member refuses life saving treatment, rationalized by disinformation?

Because unless I'm the parents of a minor child, it's ultimately not my decision.

Hopefully someone can help get her script filled. If she doesn't notice improvement after a couple of doses, maybe she'll reconsider hospital. Time is of the essence with ivermectin, early application is more effective.

If ivermectin has any effect against covid (I'm skeptical, but try to keep an open mind) it's likely past the point where it would have been possibly effective as she's over a week into it so the viral replication phase is likely mostly over and it's entered the inflammatory phase (meaning she probably needs steroids at this point).

Hospital best choice if she's that far into it. No harm in getting her the ivm too though if possible.

Thank you. The phrase "disingenuous skepticism" is difficult to imagine. If someone believes masks don't work, or that a vaccine could have risks, they are skeptical; they haven't seen evidence that convinces them otherwise.

It's interesting how much time and effort is spent trying to win people over to another way of thinking or opinion.

I don't know how many of these conversations you've tried to have, because the confirmation bias is very real.

We're not discussing skepticism of nematode behavior, but of the politicization of a pandemic, which makes it opinion. You can't reason with someone out of an opinion who didn't reason themselves into it to begin with.

Rational bad actors abuse this notion that they have the right to play, to be heard, to have a discourse; when in reality they're repeating the same disinformation ad nausea to profit for themselves.

I also think misconceptions about Occam's razor are to blame. It's a good heuristic for choosing which hypotheses to test first, but a lot of people seem to misuse it as a heuristic for which of two propositions is more likely to be true, which is unfounded and very often leads to incorrect conclusions. It's basically on par with "there's no smoke without fire".

People tend to assume that if they cannot prove P and cannot prove ¬P, then ¬P must be assumed to be true. This is of course not correct at all, and most propositions can be rephrased so that Q=¬P and ¬Q=P.

If there is no evidence either way, then neither P nor ¬P is supported, and we should remain uncertain.

>>The phrase "disingenuous skepticism" is difficult to imagine.

I find it easy to imagine and indeed can pinpoint many observed instances. A lot of "I'm not saying anything, I'm just asking questions" ARE in fact saying something, quite strongly, with minds made up and no curiosity or eagerness to learn, but are being disingenuous. It's not skepticism: they are not awaiting or hoping for data or facts or claims, rational discourse or healthy discussion; their mind is not open to change; they have an objective, they are aiming to persuade and recruit, or sow doubt. To the point that when a user made an innocuous comment in this thread and ended it with "not a criticism, just an observation:)" we all assumed he was in fact disingenuous and was criticizing, because that's the current (unfortunate!) norm for that form of statement.

A lot of cult-like institutions or groups understand, consciously or subconsciously, that their views are not agreed upon and appreciated. So they have devised disingenuous ways of promoting them. From naming ("Discovery Institute" is hard-core creationists, "National Vaccine Information Center" is hard-core anti-vaxx group etc), to appearances (websites are full of stock photos of people in white lab coats and charts, to appear science-y), to discourse (again, the frequent, "I'm not SAYING anything, I'm just ASKING"; "I'm not AGAINST vaccines, I just have QUESTIONS on the timing" - all pulled from distributed talking points),disingenuous skepticism has become the norm, I'm sad to say... and thus trivial to imagine.

edit: All forms of discussion like this ultimately converge to definitions; so to be explicit and hopefully drive us to point of mutual understanding, to me, skepticism implies seeking facts, data, truth; openness to change your mind; genuine looking for mutual objective truth and agreement. As such, there's disingenuous skepticism aplenty in this world of ours :-/

The tongue in cheek term for this is "JAQing off". JAQ = Just Asking Questions. It is also known as "concern trolling". Any fool who spends the effort to successfully address the face value concern will find that the troll has immediately transitioned to having a new concern which happens to support/oppose the same exact things as the previous. It is a textbook example of motivated reasoning laundering itself in the clothing of skepticism.

It is like fighting a squid. The moment you've caught it by one of the tentacles it slaps at you with the other 7 while the first 1 slips away.

This is exactly right, and what the original comment was describing I believe. Although I wonder if the subject is muddied as the adjective may be applied to the wrong noun.

Their _skepticism_ is likely genuine and sincere, but their _engagement_ is not in good faith and is disingenuous.

One problem, I think, is that it the communities are self selecting. Skeptics who engage in good faith on well understood topics become converts; all who remain over time in the community of skeptics are those who do not engage in good faith.

It's a worthwhile question to ask why they don't engage in good faith, which I think has a more complicated answer than either straightforward ignorance or malice.

How much evidence would it take you to come to believe that masks work or that the risks of vaccines do not outweigh the risks of the disease?

And what do you do if the answer is "No amount of evidence"?

Hanlon's razor