'Staggering' number of people believe unproven claims about vaccines, raw milk | Hacker News Reader

'Staggering' number of people believe unproven claims about vaccines, raw milk

nature.com

13 pointsvoxadam6 comments

The very first of the "false or unproven" claims they list is "animal protein is healthier than plant-based protein".

And at this level of imprecision, that claim is true!

Animal protein has a good balance of amino acids. Many plant proteins do not. Sure, you can mix various plant proteins to get a good balance. But if you don't know what you're doing - getting all your protein from beans, for instance - you can end up with a deficiency.

Maybe rather than say the problem is "an overabundance of conflicting information", they might want to improve the quality of the information that they push.

There’s a huge difference between something that is proven false and something that is unproven. Why are these bucketed together?

I don’t know anyone who believes nothing that hasn’t been statistically proven. You can’t operate in real life that way.

It is staggering how many people cannot engage critical thought.

Perhaps it’s naive but I really think that teaching critical thinking patterns to young teens can help. Just telling “don’t believe everything you read” can cut both ways.

Unfortunately, even people with good critical thinking skills will throw them out the window when their egos are on the line.

People don't become anti-vax because they applied invalid thought to it. They become anti-vax because they chose not to think about it at all. They may very well have the relevant skills, but they bypassed them because the anti-vax story tells them what they want to hear.

Now more than ever, they're provided with the tools to perform what looks like critical thinking. They "did their own research", and since you're not an epidemiologist, they believe that their research is every bit as good as yours. And arguably it is, except that you're not wedded to a conspiracy theory that the epidemiologists are bad people.

I'd love to see somebody try some experiments in teaching critical thinking and seeing if it helps. But it would not surprise me if it doesn't substantially cut into the number of conspiracy theories people believe.

Because they've fallen down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole to the point of where they only trust things if there's a convoluted explanation behind it.

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