Of course we're not totally certain of this stuff. But the important thing people often miss is that you have to quantify your uncertainity. How much uncertain are we about vaccines causing autism? So uncertain that you'd expect vaccinating your child to be a russian roulette? A little uncertain so that the chances of autism via unknown process is below the benefits vaccines provide? Yes, maybe vaccines do sometimes cause autism. But there's a difference between 50% of times and 0.005% of times, and in case of former, we'd have spotted that long time ago.
I agree - we should encourage people to think for themselves. But we should also teach them not to think in terms of boolean logic, but in terms of probability and tradeoffs.
> So I agree with you; we need that trust. But what nurtures trust? Is it calling people "stupidly wrong," or is it recognizing their motivations and addressing them with a human understanding? And why aren't we doing that?
I don't know. Maybe because it doesn't sell? I'm yet to see a reasonable analysis in media. It's always "this group is wrong" or "that group is wrong".
> They might be very smart, but they arrived at objectively wrong conclusions.
In many, many cases, we call that science. Extremely intelligent people are allowed to be wrong for many, many years, and continue searching in the cracks and crevices for the truth—as long as they're wearing a white lab coat.
Of course I realize this is reducto ad absurdum—the general public is not qualified to be making such judgements. But systemically, one of the things that prevents people from making binary judgements about the world is to prevent making binary judgements about them.
And that starts with all of our responses, not just the media. I'm convinced that these anti-scientific (as in, people who disagree with the scientific consensus) people are more influenced by the response of their close social circles in the context of social media than by the oft untrusted old media. It is the responses of hatred from people they do trust that drive them further into their hole.
If we want these people—often your friends and family—to learn nuance and probability and tradeoffs and the ability to think in grayscale rather than black and white, then we need to teach them directly using our responses. We need to lead by example, and that begins with not calling them "stupidly wrong i.e. really really wrong"—even if they are. Often they already are thinking in grays: they have doubt where everyone else has an absolute!
Lots of people have been stupidly, really, really wrong in history. Some of them changed the world. That's not likely in these cases, but it is the perspective that will make an argument rhetorically effective. And in the process, we may discover the small nuanced ways in which they were actually right—that's the beauty of the scientific process, and that's the reason people fight against the black and white. They have more to offer than you realize; and especially more to offer than the label "stupidly wrong" would have you believe.
For perspective, I'm almost sorry to admit it, but my mother is a vaccine... 'doubter.' She is a scientist, a biologist, extremely intelligent. She has a nuanced understanding and soaks up data like a sponge, references studies in her sleep and connects more dots than a first grade class. It's less clear-cut than you might think, and not all vaccines are equal. 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. They're not stupid, they're just living in an extremely complex ecosystem without a guiding light to bring it all together in the right direction. Show them that, instead of pitchforks.
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?
Uncertainty, yes, but not radical uncertainty, in which we begin to doubt that we exist or the sky is blue, nor infinite uncertainty, in which we always invent new reasons to disbelieve whenever presented with evidence.
Correct reasoning is about finite uncertainty, which can be moved towards yes-certainty or no-certainty by evidence.
This is actually one of the reasons there's such resistance to science I think. These people are actually expressing a very scientific mentality: that we are not totally certain of the consequences of our influence on a complex system. Yet the response is absolute, which is arguably very unscientific!
Sure, they don't respond to it in the right way, and the discussions are never as nuanced or knowledgable as they should be, but they are fundamentally right about the fact that even science leaves room for doubt and uncertainty. They just don't fully understand why. Yes, we need better science education for the masses, and yes their perspective is fallacious individually, but as you say, it's not their fault. There's a systemic issue here.
Ironically, and perhaps impossibly, we still need to validate this mentality, because it is actually mostly right. We should be doubting science. We should be questioning data presented to us. We should not treat all things that appear equal on the surface as the same without demanding a deeper understanding and evidence. These concepts are correct, the process is correct, and people are being lambasted and called stupid for it. These people are often extremely intelligent for thinking those thoughts, even if their macro scale conclusions are not (even though, at times, they are).
Instead, we should encourage that type of thinking—and guide it. Yes! You're right! We're not 100% certain. But here's why that's okay. Thank you for doubting. Thank you for recognizing uncertainty in the face of complexity. Thank you for being complete in your understanding, because here's all the data. Thank you for trusting us—let's keep working together.
So I agree with you; we need that trust. But what nurtures trust? Is it calling people "stupidly wrong," or is it recognizing their motivations and addressing them with a human understanding? And why aren't we doing that?
I just get the sense that in the face of the truth, we're approaching this problem in a profoundly wrong way, and the societal vitriol and information problem is actually becoming a public health consequence. Really stupid, indeed, but not on the part of an individual: it's the mob that's to blame.