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Comment by IvyMike | Hacker News Reader

There are a LOT of anti-vaxxers who disingenuously couch their advocacy as "I'm only asking questions". It's no surprise when you've seen a 10:1 ratio of bad actors to good (or worse), one might get a little exasperated.

In any case, I've recently been reading Lauren Sompayrac's "How the Immune System Works", and it's a technical overview of the immune system. It's not going to make you into a full blown immunologist, but it will give you the answers to most the questions you ask above, and a framework and vocabulary to begin to understand deeper academic immunology works.

P.S. The immune system is FUCKING AWESOME. There's rarely a page where my mind is not blown.

Edit: I misspelled "Sompayrac"; it is now correct.

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> There are a LOT of anti-vaxxers who disingenuously couch their advocacy as "I'm only asking questions"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

I’ve been accused of this before and it’s fucking bullshit.

I have been accused of it in another context, so I sympathize with your frustration, but this concept is not bullshit. It is important that we have a taxonomy of fallacies and troll tactics because that makes it easier to detect them. Regrettably, it also makes it trivial for bad-faith actors to just accuse everyone they dislike of some named troll tactic. The cure is not to stop using names for bad behaviors. Rather, we should have rigor when accusing someone of bad behavior: do not just name the behavior, but describe why the name fits.

Sure, this is no fun, but this whole discussion exists because trolls exist: can we really expect anything pleasant to come out of that premise.

Even if you know for certain that someone is an anti-vaxxer, disregarding their opinion/question by accusing them of sealioning is a fallacy.

Someone is not a "bad-faith" actor for asking precisely the questions that are hard to answer, even if they're using those questions to support a wrong idea.

If you don't have time to answer their questions, don't answer them. If you do have time, you have a good opportunity to expose the falsehood of their ideology. But don't use ad-hominems like "sealioning".

Sure, there are some stupid questions, or questions that come with a false premise, but that's not the same as discounting good questions because they come from an anti-vaxxer.

Sealioning is to good faith questioning as DDoS is to genuine web traffic.

I think you misread what I said. Check out the end of the first paragraph, as I think it mostly says the same thing you said.

Yes, just saying someone is "sealioning" is lazy at best, trollish on its own at worse (as I have already said in the previous post). Saying "your argument is fallacious *because* of A, B, and C", is pretty much the only way to deal with a troll (besides just banning them from the platform). In the particular example of sealioning: certainly, never assume bad-faith, but after you briefly explain and give references, it is definitely very important to also explain to the person how sealioning is a dangerous tactic - at best, you helped someone be more resilient to sealioning themselves, at worst you lost some time with a troll.

The one thing I would agree on with you: if you come in on a high horse, you have already lost the discussion, no matter whether you are talking with a troll or not.

> Even if you know for certain that someone is an anti-vaxxer, disregarding their opinion/question by accusing them of sealioning is a fallacy.

1. Labeling someone a "sealion" doesn't even hinge on their opinion. You seem to have missed the entire concept, and instead interpreted it as a generic dismissive.

2. Uh, you don't get to just call something a "fallacy" because you don't like it (though many others are doing the same thing in this thread).

Sealioning is a reference to the specific disingenuous process of spamming the same low-effort, low-brow, easily-answered questions in every last public forum. It's a basic disinformation technique to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt.

My evaluation is that the original usage of the "sealioning" accusation was indeed as a generic dismissive, and its application was dishonest as well; I don't accept the term as a well-founded descriptor of troll behavior in the first place.

If you look at the original comic[1], the sea lion follows the couple around in public, into their house, and even into their bedroom, without permission; that is what makes the sea lion's behavior bad (criminal, in fact). However, "sealioning" in practice refers to people responding to public internet comments with other public internet comments. To treat the latter like the former is dishonest.

Furthermore, the sea lion is objecting to unsubstantiated criticism of his species, which is a form of bigotry. Imagine people searching Twitter for criticism of, say, their race or religion and arguing back at it. I suspect that 90+% of those who complain about "sealioning" would consider that behavior permissible and probably downright virtuous (and would add that the arguing-back need not be scrupulously polite). I'm frankly surprised that "social justice"-associated people managed to decide that objecting to speciesism was worthy of mockery. I think they just really wanted some term of disparagement for their opponents, and happily accepted this one when it appeared without analyzing it too closely.

[1] http://wondermark.com/c/2014-09-19-1062sea.png

I get accused of something like this daily.

The internet is a fun place.

Were you saying something racist? I'm just asking.

Come on, really!? In a discussion about how trolls use "I am just asking", you decided that doing the same is a good idea. I am not op, but I have been accused of sealioning in the exact opposite direction: I was defending some curriculum based on ideas from critical race theory.

Edit: Well, as the comment below alluded to, I probably missed a pretty obvious piece of sarcasm... This is certainly funny in hindsight.

One of the difficult parts of text based debate and discussion is that it's impossible to determine from vocal inflection, tone of voice and method of delivery whether someone is genuinely a fool, simply cosplaying as one, being sarcastic or facetious, etc.

Oh, I'm definitely, genuinely a fool. For ever trying to get a point across on the internet.

Sorry it wasn't clear. I tried to be as extreme as possible to avoid being taken seriously. (Although I guess these days that works the other way.)

You have fallen afoul of Poe's Law.

Basically, it is now impossible to make a point by attempting to present an absurdly extreme viewpoint in the opposite direction, because too many of us have encountered people who genuinely espouse viewpoints even more extreme. (As well as the exact one you said—no matter what it happens to be.)

If you want to present such a thing sarcastically, you're gonna have to make an explicit indication of your sarcasm (even just a "/s" at the end is usually enough). Otherwise, you're very likely to just be taken as meaning it sincerely.

/s takes all the fun out of it. If someone initially thinks I'm serious, someone else gets an opportunity to explain a joke, which is a rare pleasure.

But of course we all know confronting someone directly about their opinion always works.

You are all good! I feel like such a fool :D

They're not the exact opposite.

It is bullshit. It helps to create an atmosphere where you can't ask questions or debate.

I'm entirely pro-vaccines. However, I'm simultaneously entirely in favor of people asking questions, no matter what their intentions are. Their intentions do not matter. You either know your stuff or you do not. It's always better to draw out the eg anti-vaccine types. If something is defensible, then don't be a coward about it, don't be lazy, respond with a decent answer. Put in some effort. Use it as an exercise for your own brain, your own beliefs, your own ability to discuss and debate in an (ideally) civil society. Only the anti-vaccine arguments benefit from not doing that.

The shut-down angle always comes from cowardice and or intellectual weakness. You can tell a lot about someone by whether they're terrified of a discussion. Shut-down attempts are meant to evade personal shame (and more rarely to avoid putting in the time/effort), while preserving an intellectual or moral foundation established by someone else who did put in the effort.

Nearly all shut-down attempts come from weakness. If the position is important, such as vaccines, then that weakness only encourages the skeptics even more. They can practically sense it. The right thing to do is to engage and push back with facts (and or even links, with which all the hidden passive readers can go make up their own minds as to whether they agree or not), even if you don't have all day to argue a topic.

I like your idealism, but there are plenty of tactics that would make even the most knowledgeable person look like a fool, because knowledge and oratory skills are completely separate: my favorite example is the gish gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

This is why good journalists do not invite a "flat earther" and a "nasa scientists" when discussing, e.g., climate change. Because those organizing debates have a responsibility to ensure the debate is based on facts, not on oratory skills.

I don't know what your experience has been, but I would wager good money that nearly every anti-vaccine person I have encountered has nearly zero capacity to have their opinion changed by properly formatted scientific evidence and experts presented in a rational, logical way. They are firmly set in their bubble of conspiracy theory rhetoric. You could literally bring an expert panel of eight virologists and epidemiologists in front of them, face to face, and they would still stick to their position. In summary, a real waste of time.

For some of them, their entire method of operation is to waste your time, troll, and gain acclaim from their own hardcore fan base by doing so.

I'm sorry to say that I have no time and effort left on my part for anything other than low effort mockery and derision of people engaging in infowars/hardcore conspiracy theory stuff.

The only (limited) success I've had moving emotionally-held models of belief is specifically exploring what signals would be present if the competing models were incorrect. By focusing on falsifiability and reconciling it with reality, I've _sometimes_ managed to have my counter-party downgrade their argument from scientific surety to human behavioural expections in some key ambiguous situation.

One of the thousand unfalsifiable “troll” accusations.

There is no way to differentiate a troll from either a fool, an extremist, or simply one who happens to not share the opinion of the reader.

This presumes that anyone on the Internet owes a troll their time and effort to discern between a fool, an extremist, a shitposter, a troll or a misguided but earnest individual who shares a genuinely held but scientifically false opinion.

It does not such thing.

In fact, by saying there is no way to differentiate, it implies the distinction is not that relevant.

It doesn't presume that.

There is more at stake in public debates than just the back and forth between troll/skeptic/questioner and someone responding to them.

If you benefit from such a good idea as vaccines and the rather obscenely massive benefit they have delivered to humanity, you have a moral obligation to step up and - even if rarely - throw down in a debate in their favor, when presented with such a tremendous opportunity. It requires the tiniest of efforts compared to the scientists that manage to give us these vaccines across decades of their efforts. Which also doesn't mean a person can't be lazy and free-ride on everyone else that is putting in some group effort to intellectually defend vaccines, of course. There are always free-riders.

The public skeptics and trolls are doing everyone a favor. They're being public about it. They're providing an intellectual and social opportunity that should be taken advantage of, eagerly. It's wonderful that they exist. They provide an opportunity to educate/inform, not specifically the troll or skeptic, rather, everyone else that is reading along. There is no avoiding the consequences of public debate on such important ideas, there is only to engage or give ground to the other side.

That's fine- whether or not their question is disingenuous, it's almost always a reasonable question that has been asked and answered by researchers, or that has been asked and not been able to be answered (e.g. what are the long term effects of mRNA vaccines?).

It's perfectly fine to say, "we don't know what are the long term effects of mRNA vaccines but we can guess they're unlikely to be worse than the long term effects of the thing they're vaccinating against, which you're almost certain to catch sooner or later".

I’m having a hard time believing you’ve met worse than a 10:1 ratio, with respect to interest in vaccines, of “bad actors” to “good actors”.

Here are some links to polls about American views on vaccines. It seems unlikely you’re running into this ratio without some major biasing factor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/09/he...

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/03/05/growing-share...

(I’ll admit the numbers in September from the Pew poll are surprising to me)

Granted, you’re further assuming the person asks questions about vaccines. In your description it seems to me that we’re already far away from scientific thinking as a society if the way we can confirm someone is anti-science is by whether they exhibit symptoms of any kind of curiosity. This sounds like what the previous commenter is talking about.

Maybe you’re saying, “people who spread doubt in the form of a disingenuous question frequently do so in a particular social environment I’m a part of.”

There is a major biasing factor; it's trivial to ask a question like "Have you looked at the data in VAERS that shows tens of thousands of adverse vaccine reactions??" It's not so trivial to answer the question in a way that explains how VAERS works, and why this conclusion is incorrect. This is the same with many possible questions.

This specific scenario happens on my local Nextdoor groups all the time. I've answered responded with what I think is pretty clear and concise information, and then seem that same person ask the same question the very next day in a new thread. (And the next day, and the next...) I cannot help but conclude they're not really looking for an answer.

> This specific scenario happens on my local Nextdoor groups all the time. I've answered responded with what I think is pretty clear and concise information, and then seem that same person ask the same question the very next day in a new thread. (And the next day, and the next...) I cannot help but conclude they're not really looking for an answer.

Maybe I'm a jerk, but I'd be inclined to answer the second question with "I answered that yesterday. Why do you keep asking if you aren't going to listen to the answers?" And reply with that every single time they re-asked the question.

But... Nextdoor... does that mean it's your physical neighbors? That might make me hesitate to do so. Or maybe I'd still do something like the same, but worded more gently and politely.

> There are a LOT of anti-vaxxers who disingenuously couch their advocacy as "I'm only asking questions".

And they quickly reveal their bad faith, at which point they can safely be ignored.

Or, if you don't feel like discussing it, it's easy enough to say "I don't know about that, but the anti-vaccine stuff sounds like lies to scare people so I decided to trust my doctor."

If honest questions are met with hostility, while the anti-vaxxers are friendly and "helpful", guess who's going to be more influential?

I agree, and that's why I try to answer questions with friendly answers. It wasn't so much that I was advocating for dismissing the question, I was just trying to explain why experts have gotten really, really tired, and might do so.

(Also: My local county facebook group has no shortage of very vindictive, angry, and seeming inexhaustible anti-vaxxers.)

Most of the Q-idiots are of the same mindset. "Go do the research" is a common phrase.

Is that a book?

Yes: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/How+the+Immune+System+Works%2C+6...

Yes. https://www.amazon.com/How-Immune-System-Works-dp-111954212X...

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