beyond persuasion

[Tannin]

The certainty is similar, very similar. The doubts (leaving aside nut-case flat-earth loonies of the anti-vaccination flavour) are similar too: there is no doubt whatever of the central finding (vaccination works pretty well and is more than reasonably safe, with largely trivial side-effects; greenhouse gases are locking surplus heat into the biosphere, causing a variety of well-established effects), and what doubt remains is largely concentrated in (relatively speaking) minor and and quite specific areas.

[Wokko]

The certainty is similar, very similar. The doubts (leaving aside nut-case flat-earth loonies of the anti-vaccination flavour) are similar too: there is no doubt whatever of the central finding (vaccination works pretty well and is more than reasonably safe, with largely trivial side-effects; greenhouse gases are locking surplus heat into the biosphere, causing a variety of well-established effects), and what doubt remains is largely concentrated in (relatively speaking) minor and and quite specific areas.

There is far more degrees of doubt over climate change, from "It's not happening" (I believe you called these people correctly btw) through "It's happening but Humans don't cause it" to "It's happening, humans only have a small impact" through "It's happening, humans did it but it's a good thing". There are myriad other nuanced opinions both highly educated through downright ignorant heading towards borderline retarded (are you allowed to use that term in context these days?). Vaccination comes down to a tiny risk of known adverse effects vs huge risk of pandemic disease. They are not similar issues and trying to paint those who question the likes of Al Gore or loony left green groups that want to kill all the humans with those who want to stop vaccinating kids is just a piss weak ad hominem tactic and not even close to intellectual rigour.

[Tannin]

Oh dear, you really, really need to familiarise yourself with the evidence, Wokko, and with the current scientific state of play. These "degrees of doubt" you cite are precisely equivalent to the "doubt" you see about vaccination: overwhelmingly, they come from people with no genuine expertise and no relevant or current qualifications. Nearly all of the "doubt" statements you cite are, when you chase them down to their original sources from which they have been copied and often mutilated, the product of the well-funded and shadowy climate denial industry, much of it a direct descendant of the very similar tobacco denial industry - in many cases, it is the very same organisations and the very same immoral shysters running the show. The Heartland Institute, for example - perhaps the biggest and most influential of all the climate denial factories - has a long and disgusting record of support for Big Tobacco and opposition to public health measures, not to mention a range of other dreadful policy stances. Start your reading here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... _Institute

In short, you are flat wrong in claiming that "there is more doubt about climate change". Among people with appropriate training and expertise, doubt is a vanishingly small thing now, and growing smaller by the week as more and more and more undeniable evidence mounts up. The only major doubt is the exact form and severity of the damage, with credible, scientific estimates ranging from "very severe" through to "catastrophic". To suggest otherwise is to demonstrate yourself more stupid and/or ignorant and/or gullible than the fruitcakes who still think vaccination causes autism.

Finally, your contention that "looney left green groups want to kill all the humans" is as disgusting as it is absurd. If you can find anyone seriously proposing that, anyone at all, they will be some miniscule and utterly powerless minority. No mainstream, major, or reputable group (green or any other flavour) has ever been in favour of genocide. (Except, of course, for the climate deniers, who are actively promoting genocidal policies, though you might be generous and put that down to ignorance and stupidity rather than an actual desire to do harm.) It's a disgraceful thing to say and you should be ashamed of yourself.

[Morrigu]

So if vaccination is as effective as they say then how do a small minority of people who decide not to vaccinate pose a threat to those who are vaccinated?

I've had this question thrown at me whilst going through the informed consent process with patients - curious to see how others would answer it?

[Tannin]

Well, for starters, it is not possible to vaccinate everyone. I'm not talking about moronic vaccine refusers here, I'm talking about elderly people, children too young to be vaccinated yet, people with special health problems which preclude vaccination (I'm not aware of any such but I bet there are some), and people who have been vaccinated but nevertheless remain vulnerable to the infection because some types of vaccination wear off and no vaccine can be 100% effective - there is always some remaining risk. Idiot vaccine refusers put all these people at risk of death or serious illness.

There are doubtless other reasons I can't think of.

[3.14159]

This thread proves we're all descended from chumps.

[stui magpie]

This thread proves we're all descended from chumps.

He's over in Russia atm, just bombed out in the QF's.

[Dr Pie]

So if vaccination is as effective as they say then how do a small minority of people who decide not to vaccinate pose a threat to those who are vaccinated?

I've had this question thrown at me whilst going through the informed consent process with patients - curious to see how others would answer it?

My kids are grown up now but when they were little I would not have wanted my daughter to go to Kindy with an unvaccinated child. The reason being, that while my daughter would have been safe my son was nearly three years younger and not fully vaccinated. She could have brought illnesses home with her. As far as I am concerned, children who are not vaccinated against the major childhood diseases should not be admitted to child care centres, kindergartens and schools. Let their parents send them to special institutions with other children of idiot parents.

I am old enough to have gone to school with polio victims and remember several of my classmates bringing notes from their parents objecting to the Salk vaccine. By no coincidence whatever these were the same kids who repeated bigoted parental attitudes towards migrants and people of other religions.

[Tannin]

^ There is a vaccine to cure ignorant bigotry? No wonder they object to their children getting it!

[Nick - Pie Man]

Science is hard work. It's much easier to believe the claims of anti vac quacks - no research or critical thinking required!

[Wokko]

http://www.spectator.co.uk/australia/au ... issenters/

Scientists who dissent are silenced and ostracized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA ... e_plot.svg

Antarctic Ice core temperatures going back 800,000 years. Must've been some heavy industrial activity 120,000 years ago to create that fast, huge temperature spike.

http://climatism.wordpress.com/2013/10/ ... ng-claims/

Yes that's from an agenda driven site, but they link to a US Senate report on 650 dissenting scientists. The science is not set, there is no consensus and if there was 'consensus' it wouldn't be science. There is either proof or disproof and those who seek to disprove (you know, do science) are ostracized. There doesn't seem to be anyone with their hands clean on this issue (dissenters funded by Corporations comes to mind), but the silencing of dissent makes me question and question and question and the answers aren't obvious or easy to find.

[CP]

People who constantly defer 'proof' to whatever mainstream scientists are saying are in constant denial themselves.

I vaccinate my kids because that's what an entire movement of health professionals in a developed country with high standards of living insist I do. I read the material and tend to agree. I have fashioned no passionate paradigm of thought one way or another because I haven't got any experience to go by in terms of the effects of generations of unvaccinated/vaccinated kids on society.

I do, however, have a great deal of experience in being in amongst weather. Decades in fact. I don't need a scientist who's desperate for funding from a university who live off grants by political parties who pay them to produce a narrative, to tell me that a change in temp of 159th of a degree here or there will sends us all to Hell in a hand basket.

For this reason, immunisation deniers and climate deniers probably aren't one and the same in that they are beyond persuasion. What IS beyond persuasion is opinionated, arrogant, stubborn wankers like Tannin who continually judge people as bad, immoral or plainly wrong, just for seeing the world a little different to them.

THEY are the folk who are beyond persuasion.

[watt price tully]

People who constantly defer 'proof' to whatever mainstream scientists are saying are in constant denial themselves.

I vaccinate my kids because that's what an entire movement of health professionals in a developed country with high standards of living insist I do. I read the material and tend to agree. I have fashioned no passionate paradigm of thought one way or another because I haven't got any experience to go by in terms of the effects of generations of unvaccinated/vaccinated kids on society.

I do, however, have a great deal of experience in being in amongst weather. Decades in fact. I don't need a scientist who's desperate for funding from a university who live off grants by political parties who pay them to produce a narrative, to tell me that a change in temp of 159th of a degree here or there will sends us all to Hell in a hand basket.

For this reason, immunisation deniers and climate deniers probably aren't one and the same in that they are beyond persuasion. What IS beyond persuasion is opinionated, arrogant, stubborn wankers like Tannin who continually judge people as bad, immoral or plainly wrong, just for seeing the world a little different to them.

THEY are the folk who are beyond persuasion.

Are you Hiss?

[pietillidie]

Please Wokko and CP stop for the sake of your own moral and intellectual credibilities. The fundamental problem here is you simply haven't recognised the complexity of the actual scientific argument. Scientific theory building goes well beyond some dumb standalone Alan Jones "gotcha" metric, and touting such information without contextual interpretation is just a manipulation of those who lack the awareness to know such lines of data are common, expected and largely accounted for or in the process of being accounted for by what is a very advanced international scientific community which is much larger than many people imagine.

Almost every single smart arse gotcha piece of "evidence" thrown at the topic has already been dealt with in complex arguments elsewhere in the same manner they are taken into account in any scientific discipline you care to mention, from material science to neuroscience to quantum computing. No one bursts into hysterical denialism when it comes to the identical processes, mathematical modeling and logics in other scientific disciplines because those disiciplines are not directly contradicting some extraneous hyped-up political paranoia (although indirectly many of those disciplines are in fact making a laughing stock of such nonsense by virtue of such logics being non-controversial and assumed).

The average person is barely numerate, let alone able to deal with highly sophisticated sets of calculations concatenated into strings of logics. People ought to tread extremely carefully around areas that cannot at all whatsoever be grasped without far more maths and science than they're equipped with. To then try to cope with the fear associated with such a lack of knowledge by slandering the vast proportion of a diligent field is simply authoritarian thuggery of the sort a Maoist propaganda office would be proud.

And this dumb 1950s idea getting around which insists that genuine knowledge can be explained in 25 words or less is over; gone; done; finished. Such a view is in the same order as the 1950s notion that general management skills can be applied to any field. Well, no, they can't because the entry knowledge threshold and vocabulary for most fields now precludes those with plain old ordinary transferable general logics from even understanding the possibilities of the new knowledges involved, based as they are not on common sense functions, but on complex new functions that turn many old assumptions on their head.

Unfortunately, those who lack threshold knowledge are forced to bear with the scientific process and therefore scientific consensus whether they like it or not. This is because it is not healthy scepticism to forgo logic and calculation and gamble that some paranoid gut feeling is right. Only very occasionally are such gut feelings right, and none of us gets to gamble the quality of human existence on gut feelings any more than doctors and aeronautical engineers get to employ gut feelings when dealing with the lives of others. To think climate science is any different is to fall for the gambler's delusion: This time I know I'm going to win! I can feel it!

The whole shameful denial movement is a thuggish triumph of the manipulation of the ignorant by cheap public relations tactics over responsible and ethical process. It is immoral to abuse the naivete of others in any life situation; why people congratulate themselves when they achieve the same thing when it comes to global warming is beyond me.

Have some ethics, for goodness' sake, and defer to those with the capability of answering the questions concerned. That, or go back to university and qualify yourself by getting some serious peer-reviewed science published. Deferring to the weight of expertise is not the same as deferring to authority. To claim otherwise is to purposely conflate the negative nuances of the noun "authority" with the positive nuances of the adjective "authoritative", knowing full well they're not the same thing.

[Wokko]

You're obviously missing the part of the equation that shows that dissenting scientists are ostracized, silenced and even run out of institutions. Peer review isn't some godlike power to find the truth, particularly when the 'peers' doing the reviewing are overwhelmingly biased to the point to ridiculing and shaming genuine scientific dissent. Scientists are human, and many are unwilling to risk their careers to face down the thuggish behaviour of the climate change alarmists and those who profit from them.