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Comment by UweSchmidt | Hacker News Reader

That's not why people don't trust science.

Science has become a pawn in the cultural conflict that seems to go on in America these days; the classic battlefield of "evolution vs. creation" has expanded to a World War 1 - style trench warfare going through all parts of society, with various major battles around things like "vaccination vs. autism" flaring up all the time.

This will doubtless hurt science. While a neutral science can trivially correct old theories when new evidence shows up, ideologically entrenched science can't easily give up ground. Saying two neurons don't share DNA might be harmless as it touches no sensitive spot in society - who cares? But what if multiple vaccinations (i.e. significant stress for the body to fight a disease) for for young kids actually turned out to be problematic in some circumstances? This won't be pretty on social media.

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"who cares? But what if multiple vaccinations (i.e. significant stress for the body to fight a disease) for for young kids actually turned out to be problematic in some circumstances?"

This is a trivial argument. The benefits of vaccination is both individual and that a large population of immunised individuals The idea of herd-immunity is a large percentage of the population is immunised the chances of disease spreading is minimised. [0]

Vaccinations are effective because individuals taking vaccinations develop immunity and if they come into contact with antigens again, anti-bodies are produced to fight. This is important for infants, who if exposed to an antigen, the time taken and effectiveness of response is weak. [1]

References

[0] http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vaccinations/Pages/How-vaccines...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/howvpd.htm

Not trivial if it turns out vaccines are linked to autism.. don't assume everyone is a hard utilitarian

"if it turns out vaccines are linked to autism"

I don't believe you, please show me some peer reviewed science instead of waiving around some ^hokey-pokey^ rubbery belief.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/if

It seems you were making the argument that even if autism was linked to vaccines, the benefit would outweigh the cost. Now you are attacking me on a different point (that I didn't make)

"It is unclear whether decisions people made about vaccination were influenced by their exposure to certain tweets and media, or whether they simply chose to inhabit an online community that reinforced their beliefs, a tension known as contagion versus homophile." [0]

Interesting article on role of social media. Obviously you are a hard core, a non-fence sitter, so I'll ignore you.

[0] http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/how-twitter-more-accur...

We appreciate your many contributions to HN. But you've crossed into incivility in this thread. Would you please not do that, regardless of the other comments?

Vaccines are also a classic flamewar topic that, unless there's something genuinely new to be said, are off-topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

"The bottom line is that when you add up all of the genetic risks, it looks like genetics can account for 50 percent of the risk for autism, which is very high,” -- David Amaral, an Autism specialist UC Davis MIND Institute. ~ https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/5/11/15508006/wh...

Yes you're write Dang. Incivility vs factual evidence. Maybe I should be more tactful.

"if it turns out vaccines are linked to autism.."

Facts not superstition, reducibility through empiricism. Rational thought instead emotion. Ideas like this were fought and won during ^the Enlightenment^ some 200 to 250 years ago. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

Spot on.

Hope you didn't miss my point though. Say you discover data that leads you to suggest a different vaccination procedure. That is difficult to communicate in an ideologically entrenched environment, don't you think?

Look how the parent post expressed discomfort already in the face of harmless new information relating to neurons.

"Say you discover data that leads you to suggest a different vaccination procedure."

There are plenty of examples of how accepted treatment is hard to shake. Take for example ^stomach ulcers^. Barry Marshall conducted self experiments to prove the H. pylori theory. The initial work started in '82. Marshall/Warren won the Nobel prize in 2005 [0] for this work. It changed the way stomach ulcers were understood and the treatment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall

What do people who dont trust science trust instead? Not the religious nuts who would prefer to pray away an illness than get treatment, but the rest, lol.

Follower of Christ here. The short answer is, you can't trust anything. Science is neutral and good because, if true, you can reproduce and see for yourself. The problem is, you can't trust the reporting. I see science-related reports the same way I see political reports – bias with an incentive to lie.

If I were well-versed enough to read the white papers, I would probably trust it a little more. But even then you can't be certain unless you perform the experiment yourself; it's not uncommon for scientists to leave out inconvenient data to get the result they want.

Such is the state of this world – you can't truly know a fact for a fact unless you actually see it for yourself. And even then there's room for doubt :)

Thats certainly better than trusting just to faith to solve things and understandable. I would say about the same. Its an interesting philosophical problem, what we know, and how we know it. I guess instead of black and white trust or not trust I would rephrase and question peoples distrust of highly likely things.

Ah, but then you get into the trouble of what "highly likely" means :) Outside of common observances, the "truths" that we know are only known because they happened to be spread by society – much like how DNS works.

Here's a thought experiment. The government has assisted in pushing the idea of "eggs are bad for you" for decades. In effect, many people truly believe that "eggs are bad for you" is a fact. If you, being slightly more knowledgable in the subject, tell one of those people that this is a load of bollox, and have a paper to back it up... would you actually convince them? You'd be one voice against many; a rebel against history. If you did managed to convince them, would it be due to raw truth, or due to the effectiveness of your rhetoric?

True, that is a whole rabbit hole in itself, but I think you know what I meant :D. I do subscribe to that line of reasoning myself.

Though most things are at least a little subjective, there is always lets say a confidence value or percentage everyone could apply to some bit of knowledge, and while those may vary significantly across the population, some things could just objectively be said to be more likely than another. I dont think much of anything is 100% true, but 99%? Sure.

Im like, 99.99999% sure that this laptop is real and is about to run out of power, but I could be wrong.

Certainly, I didn't mean to go so far as to say what we can see and touch might not be real. As far as I'm concerned, that's covered in the "common observances" I mentioned in my previous comment.

The "truths" I was referring to are things we can't verify ourselves (due to practicality or lack of knowledge), yet are commonly believed or taken for granted. Some examples:

- World maps

- Authorship (of music, books, etc.)

- Photos (see #bowwowchallenge for a good laugh)

- News

- The immutability of physics :)

First principles. A priori logic. There is a long history of antiempiricists in philosophy.

I minored in philosophy and that has always interested me, though not quite to the extent of anti-empiricism, haha.

If you ever want to chat lmk I come at the world from a pretty anti empiricist angle these days

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