Though it's worth noting that MDs (and all other kinds of doctors) can be incompetent and/or batshit insane.
For instance, I had the pleasure of viewing a video where a psychiatrist leaned on his MD credential to "debunk" COVID and the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. Even ignoring his personal competency, I wouldn't be surprised if his specialty has the least qualification to speak on the topic of infectious disease of all medical specialties. Here's the video for anyone interested: https://off-guardian.org/2020/12/09/watch-ask-the-experts-co..., the guy I'm talking about is the first speaker (didn't bother with any of the others).
Edit: watching a bit more of that video, many of the other speakers emphasize being "medical doctors" and several use the odd phrase "medical pandemic." I wonder if they're reading from a script?
Why am I going to have a bad time for following his rules and advice?
> Why am I going to have a bad time for following his rules and advice?
You're not, you're just being over-literal. Most ophthalmologists are sensible people who will give guidance outside their fields that comports with the guidance from medical professionals in that field. That sounds like your ophthalmologist. However, if you find an ophthalmologist who blatantly contradicts the guidance from areas far outside his field, then that's when "you're going to have a bad time." The reason for that is you've likely found someone who doesn't respect the limits of his own knowledge and experience.
What evidence is there of the efficacy of the vaccine that isn’t provided directly from Pfizer/Moderna?
What evidence is there that it is safe, when there are 0 mid-to-long term studies on the effects of it? If it safe why are the pharma company’s immune from all liability?
Why is anyone that question the narrative on how safe and effective the vaccines immediately labeled a “quack”, “alt right”, or “anti-vax” (there are plenty of pro-vax people that are skeptical of THIS vax, not all vax).
There are multiple observational studies looking at real-world effectiveness. If necessary I'll find some links, but have you looked?
I just hear anecdotal evidence like “hospitalizations have gone down”. Which may be 100% true, but is hardly evidence that the vaccines are effective. The placebo effect is well known. It’s not shocking that hospitalization has gone down when the media has been beating the fear drum on how terribly dangerous the virus is 24/7, causing people to panic (pre vaccine days) and go to the hospital out of caution. Along comes a vaccine that is touted as effective and the media pounds that drum 24/7 and hospitalization goes down. The vaccine could have been saline solution and you would have seen a drop in hospitalization.
There's a PDF in this article that links to dozens of independent studies. Or, just google "covid vaccine efficacy" and it pulls up a bunch of links for you.
It really only takes a minimum of effort to answer these hard-hitting questions you've posed. As another example, I googled "why are pharmaceutical companies immune from liability over covid vaccine" and found https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=848329 .
So lets say I have a 30% chance of getting covid without a vax and a .1% chance of serious long term illness or death from covid.
Now If I get the vaccine, I have a 1% chance of getting covid, and.01% chance of serioues injury or death + an unkown chance of unkown serious health complications from a vaccine.
Id take bet 1 any day, personally, since the odds and stakes of the vaccine are unkown.
Admittedly though, I think the chance of serious injury from vaccine is probably quite low or nonexistant but Im just trying to make the point that that perspective involves some reasonable value judgements.
Note : all oercentages listed are majorly hand wavy. This comment is in no way intended to be statistically accurate
Cheers.
> Doesn't seem silly at all to me : the known risks of covid are pretty tolerable. Death rate is extremely low for my demographic [emphasis mine].
That perspective is why we can't have nice things.
It doesn't make me a bad person to be unvaccinated. It would if I was cavalier about potentially getting others sick...
> It doesn't make me a bad person to be unvaccinated. It would if I was cavalier about potentially getting others sick...
Then you truly are a rare bird.
I guess I just feel more comfortable rolling the dice with a natural (maybe? Lmao) disease than a product made by the same companies that were public enemy #1 just months before they became our "saviours"
The authority based medicine surrounding Covid is completely out of hand
I do agree however that fact-checking is extremely challenging, but for different reasons. That is, in a society that is being programmed to choose the reality/truth they prefer, you'll end up with cult-like belief systems that no amount of fact-checking will break through.
For example, I probably wouldn't 100% believe that hundreds of people can cross the sky in a metal tube (i.e., modern jet airplane) if I had only been told about it. But I've seen it myself.
Another example: I've learned enough about technology to think the moon landings were feasible, and I've learned enough about society to think that a successful conspiracy around the moon landings is implausible. So I believe the moon landings happened.
So doesn't critical thinking in fact have to have a baseline in something other than one's own direct experience? Rationality, possibly?
Evidence for the big bang ultimately comes from sense data. You have to integrate a lot of sense data into scientific theories, which then are integrated with other scientific theories, and so on. Science has gotten so far - but it all started out with simple experiments, eventually microscopes and weak telescopes, etc. and built from there.
Critical thinking allows you to overcome cognitive biases. Faulty perception is pretty easy to detect. A stick in a glass of water will look bent, but it's easy to figure out that it actually isn't bent.
By that reasoning, all the people who deny the moon landings happened are completely logical, no? And there should be a lot more of them, right? Hell, I've never even seen a rocket take off (outside of video broadcasts), let alone seen spacecraft in flight, so I shouldn't believe in the moon landings either, right?
If I hadn't seen airplanes and flown in them, I'd still be open to believing they exist. My belief would depend on what other evidence there is (broadly speaking), as in my example of the moon landings.
It's easier to make a strong judgment about the existence of airplanes, than about the moon landings. I'd argue that most things in life are more like airplanes in that regard.
Physics is a fairly clear example. It's hard to make all those equations work without creating paradoxes unless they actually model the real world correctly. If it was all fake but internally consistent, then even a small amount of observation could destroy the whole thing.
Yes, what you're getting at there is "a priori" knowledge in epistemological-speak and I agree that it forms the basis for much of what we consider true.
But, even the ability to accurately conduct and assess the results of those experiments relies on some set of facts. Your physics example speaks to exactly that: i.e. there's a foundation of "rules" that underpins the field, much of which have been developed through rigorous observation, experimentation, mathematical proof, etc. These rules form the "accepted truths" through which we are able to think critically about new ideas.
So, while we can debate degree, it should be clear that there has to be some accepted base reality to make sense of anything. And, of course, in this thread analogies to science are a bit of a digression. That is, the topic is fact-checking sites, which are largely about dispelling disinformation/misinformation of the social/political variety. So, for instance, whether x politician did or did not do something can be important to know when trying to critically assess their fitness.
Most leaders think they are right, and I would think they would want enhanced critical thinking in the population so that the people would better appreciate the leaders rightness.
I hate to beat the "evil-zillionaire" drum, but if you made your fortunes selling people juice-boxes they don't really need, you'd prefer it if they complicitly buy all the junk your ads tell them to buy instead of critically thinking "maybe I DON'T need another one"
Take also cult-leaders for example (or other con-men in power/leadership positions). If their followers possessed the critical thinking skills to see through their manipulations, they wouldn't have any followers. Complacency in this case is fundamental
No, I can't imagine anybody would like it if folks were dim and complacent and just generally easy to fuck over
And if voters pick up critical thinking skills as a side-effect of education that will get them high-paying jobs, what's not to like?
Pretty sure that work was started thousands of years ago.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. IMHO, insisting the only solution is to increase "critical thinking" to unheard of levels is wishful thinking that mainly serves to shoot down necessary mitigations for the psychological and social failings of individuals and communities. Fact checking isn't a perfect institution, but nothing is.
The truth can't be so hard to discover in a functioning society/democracy, and it shouldn't require an entire population to be expert critical thinkers who devote significant time undergoing epistemological exercises to discover base reality.
It's claims like these and dozens of others that are made every day that fact checkers need to verify, as few if any of us have the time or expertise to check all these claims ourselves.
[1] - https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2008/f...
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...