Why do people get vaccines? Don't they research the ingredients?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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rojimboo wrote:

I read the news and unsurprisingly 'great' figures of state are pandering to the lowest common denominator and pretending they passed basic science classes when talking about rain being 'very wet' and climate change not man-made and/or nothing to worry about.

I give up.

It's a matter of (paleo-)climatological fact that the Earth would be warming currently even if humans were not on it, therefore some percentage of global warming is NOT man-made. Also, clearly some percentage of it IS man-made. Neither side of the anthropogenic argument is entirely wrong, although it would seem one side is more correct than the other.

Denying the overall warming trend, however, is simply batshit. It might not be as imminent an apocalypse as some doomsayers predict, but it's coming sooner or later, without question.

Oh dear god.

As much as I would like to derail this awesome thread (xd) by indulging in clobbering anti-science sentiments repeatedly, I think not.

It's not like we are supposed to be headed into an ice age or anything, right?

Oh wait.

It's not like scientists have attempted to measure the degree (no pun intended) to which the recent rapid warming since the second industrial revolution can be attributed to man-made activities?

Oh wait.

But yeah, I'd rather not. Unless I have to. Start de-programming people.

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rojimboo wrote:

Genuine science is hard work. People are just stupid and lazy.

This is true. Then again many scientists are also stupid and lazy.

Where was my point?

I have none.

Oh wait.

Whilst a post-doc researcher may indeed be doing underpaid, valuable hard work, my point was that the scientific method is a basic thing that should be taught in schools more thoroughly.

It needs to be imprinted how valuable a science-based secular society is.

I know most of you know this already, but when I say the scientific method, I mean that with which you propose something and everyone and their mother tries to disprove it, including yourself.

If it cannot be disproven, AND has a lot of corroborating, usually empirical evidence vetted by peers, THEN maybe it will become something as credible as fact. Possibly even fact.

Like gravity. Or tectonic plates. You know, stuff we consider facts, but are actually still just theories.

This is like science 101. Critical thinking basics. If you cannot pass this test, you are not ALLOWED to go out to society, and pass elementary school. Or high-school in some countries.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Well and good, but while you're sitting on your butt discussing scientific method and your mother is somehow disproving your quantum mechanics, some dickhead's just gone and made another 400k followers after tweeting that avocados cause haemorrhoids. Why, I know someone who had haemmorrhoids and they ate avocado too. THIS MAKES SENSE TO ME.

But that's precisely what I am talking about actually. I'm just not doing a terribly good job at conveying it, though I hope to improve as this discussion goes along.

The befuddlement expressed at science when confronted with it, and the eagerness to be 'skeptical'. I say 'skeptical' in quotes, because there is a difference between scientific skepticism (which should be inherent to all scientists in at least all 'hard' subjects) and fake skepticism.

Let me explain a bit more. Imagine this scenario. A school teacher in middle/high school presents a theory, perhaps even science based. Towards the end, he mentions, one should always question theories and experts.

The students take note, after all, this is a respectable figure of authority and education, and they happen to be at that impressionable young age.

They start to question all science and scientists, with a sort of ignorant skepticism offering nothing as a counter or a rebuttal, thinking it was exactly what is required to be healthily, perhaps even scientifically, skeptical.

But really it's not skepticism at all. Just ignorance, and annoyingly, a modern trend.

I find that putting so much thoughts/reasoning on topic of people who don't put any logical reasoning or even start the activity of thinking/reading themselves instead of noncritically absorbing whatever next door fraud propagates and take it at face value is a waste of brain capacity in simmilar fashion as those people do.

Our perception of such reality and people who cohabit it with us, isn't worth any more than their views no matter how wrong or correct they are.

Maybe thats my inner pseudonihilism but discussing people wont change people and is kind of meaningless. Not that I want to belittle posters that I agree with, but actions such as these are waste of productive energy no matter how much I agree with some people here.

The day the science is toppled by nonscience globally will be the true end of reason. Hope I never live to see that day.

And dont get me wrong, I like reading comments here, just that at the end of day I feel bad because nothing is accomplished with discussion here. Many people are solidified/rooted in their ways, and sometimes it feels like having 5 radio stations playing at once.

About education, it goes far deeper and it is more complex than at first glance it seems. You got teacher competencies, student abilities, national curriculum and education program, bureaucracy, school and state laws, money and equipment, parental upbringing which all severely limit what you can do at schools and how students are perceptive to information and judging that information. Trust me, I know that really well.

We live in information age. Information is readily available anywhere, but it doesn't constitute knowledge and reason. And many people are not capable of making information into knowledge. Thats why it happens what happens. Such is the world now, and it was for many centuries.

I'm a bit hypocritical typing how discussing things is waste of energy and then end up writing a lot, so I'll stop here, just wanted to say, issues that are present are much more globally widespread and complex and that we are essentially powerless as individuals in face of such trends.

Humans, in lack of problems/difficulties, will conspire to make problems even if they don't exist, as such is the human nature.

It's just nice to sometimes find like-minded people who can articulate current affairs into something that I can understand and agree with.

I seriously doubt anyone has ever changed their world view due to a video-game forum post, and I doubt anyone is trying to influence people that way here ;)

The issue is indeed more complex than just the lack of critical thinking faculties, I should have realised it is just one aspect of it.

I still believe it is the main issue though. I do not propose to offer any comprehensive solutions to the problem, though. I would sooner play Diablo 3 again, and that's just something that's not going to happen anytime soon.

Going back to what was being discussed...

It's not only this 'fake skepticism' that has spread like a contagion.

It's that it is also selective. People selectively decide to apply fake skepticism. Somehow you can be religious, yet read the daily horoscopes. Or, take your daily medication for some affliction, but god forbid you trust medical professionals about vaccines and homeopathy and nature's medicine and vitamins.

As if you are the perfect, unrelenting skeptic (fake) only when it suits your world view, and a blind fanatic the next day, and not seeing the contradiction and hypocrisy of it all.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Well and good, but while you're sitting on your butt discussing scientific method and your mother is somehow disproving your quantum mechanics, some dickhead's just gone and made another 400k followers after tweeting that avocados cause haemorrhoids.

It's true. There's even logical rationale behind the theory:

Avacado's Number (6.022 × 10^23)is such a large number that it causes people's math sphincter to pucker up. As they digest more story problems, this leafs them in a pickle as there is no way for the solution to emerge. While some people soy this isn't a big dill, as people can immunize their sphincter with wax beans, anti-Waxers are skeptical, and think a simple life style change is enough, chanting "No Grain, No Pain"

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鬼殺し wrote:

Spoiler

Why, I know someone who had haemmorrhoids and they ate avocado too. THIS MAKES SENSE TO ME.

But honestly, I have no real truck with the scientific method. I'm a dirty writer, and I learn just enough of whatever it is I need to know to use it convincingly. Writers trust experts of other fields in a way that I suspect most people couldn't begin to grasp. That doesn't mean we trust them all -- our writing is on the line, so you can bet when it comes time to fact-check, a good writer makes sure to pick someone who knows their shit.

I just have neither the time nor energy to be skeptical about everything. I start with my gut, which, me being relatively well-educated across the board and specially trained in one area, usually means instinct first, then scrutiny. I'm *very* good at spotting a shyster or charlatan, mainly because most writers and artists spend a lot of their internal time worrying they might be one, but also because I'm an investor, which to some people is like saying 'sucker!'.

To avoid that, I read tone, argument, agenda, angle. All those, to discern what someone is really saying under the words. I can and do cross-reference with ease. If something feels off, I'll look into it. If I decide it doesn't matter, I'll stop. If someone *convinces* me they're an idiot or a troll or just wasting my time (and it takes a lot to convince me of that), they cease to exist as far as I'm concerned. Life's too short. :)

None of these should be anything unusual or weird. And until a few years ago, I actually didn't think they were. Like you said, critical thinking and intelligently questioning things based on established knowledge, being able to judge the veracity, authority and verisimilitude of a source...that's all school level stuff. But Jesus H, that sort of thing has to be unusual or weird now because far, far too many people are falling under the sway of the most transparent shysters and charlatans I've ever seen.

There is something to be said for that approach as well. If IQ tests scored for the ability to read other people (which I think they should), we would likely see some complex results.

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rojimboo wrote:

It's that it is also selective. People selectively decide to apply fake skepticism. Somehow you can be religious, yet read the daily horoscopes. Or, take your daily medication for some affliction, but god forbid you trust medical professionals about vaccines and homeopathy and nature's medicine and vitamins.

Some of it is just trypanophobia.




If vaccines came in nice friendly packaging, instead of needles that people fear/hate, it might lower resistances...

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rojimboo wrote:

It's not like we are supposed to be headed into an ice age or anything, right?

Oh wait.

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鬼殺し wrote:

honestly, I have no real truck with the scientific method. I'm a dirty writer, and I learn just enough of whatever it is I need to know to use it convincingly. Writers trust experts of other fields in a way that I suspect most people couldn't begin to grasp. That doesn't mean we trust them all -- our writing is on the line, so you can bet when it comes time to fact-check, a good writer makes sure to pick someone who knows their shit.

I just have neither the time nor energy to be skeptical about everything. I start with my gut, which, me being relatively well-educated across the board and specially trained in one area, usually means instinct first, then scrutiny. I'm *very* good at spotting a shyster or charlatan, mainly because most writers and artists spend a lot of their internal time worrying they might be one, but also because I'm an investor, which to some people is like saying 'sucker!'.

I hope you understand that, when I say your instinct followed by scrutiny is far more likely to be the more animal elements of your brain followed by confirmation bias, that I know I'm being hypocritical.

But that's just how we're built. And for good evolutionary reason, too. While it's no doubt true that humanity benefits from having a community of experts, we simply can't have a world where everyone has the time and the capacity to be skeptical of everything. From an economic perspective, we need higher quantities of guys who lift heavy objects than guys who wrestle with weighty ideas, so in a way it makes perfect sense that society produces only a small minority of the latter. This isn't to say average folks should be incompetent reasoners, any more than an average guy should be unable to lift anything heavy — hence mandatory gym in schools — but it should be understood that market demand for thought and economic competition between "thought providers," are the primary factors determinening the quantity of people who will think critically and the quality of how well they do so. As a wise man once said, if you're good at something, never do it for free.

I don't know if people are necessarily lazier than previous generations, so much as that they're drawn to work towards the goals that have the biggest payoff, whether that payment is monetary or neurochemical. A lot of y'all motherfuckers work damn hard at playing video games, which I do file under "value hierarchy failure" but not necessarily under laziness. Instead, the reason why we don't think everything out ourselves and rely heavily on faith is that we're merely human, our most precious resource — time — is limited, and no one of us is ever going to science more than a tiny fraction of the knowledge we as a species have access to. And this has been true for a long, long time, long enough for evolutionary biology to apply.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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rojimboo wrote:

It's not like we are supposed to be headed into an ice age or anything, right?

Oh wait.

Spoiler

Oh, I get it. At some point you saw a chart like this one
and thought you knew everything.

Well first off, here's a plot of temperature going back about 9 times further:

It's not accurate to say we were heading into another Ice Age, so much as heading out of one. Homo sapiens is essentially an Ice Age species, which is part of the reason why global warming should rightly be concerning.

Next, graphs the emphasize recent global cooling tend to use bethnic oxygen isotope 18 to gauge temperature — the higher the concentration found in the strata, the cooler the corresponding era is presumed to be. While I don't at all disagree with that practice, I do find it interesting that carbon isn't typically used for historical evidence — where the more greenhouse gas in the prehistoric atmosphere, the hotter it is presumed to have been. Atmospheric CO2 levels levels during the so-called Eocene Optimum were almost exactly what they are presently, even after hundreds of years of heaven human industry. During the Cretaceous period, atmospheric CO2 was over three times present levels.

I think we'd have more sane discussions about our environment if we focused on oxygen in terms of present and future evaluations. The way I see it, the same beautiful chlorophyll-based life that scrub carbon out of our atmosphere are the same ones that add oxygen to it, but I think it's more healthy to focus on the good than the bad. But don't you think it's a tad strange how the so-called Green movement now seems to care more to corporate energy research projects than it cares about photosynthesis? One wonders how many suffer under the delusion that, once put there, anthropogenic CO2 cannot be removed by any technology humans are aware of.

Thank you for your response, though you might consider sourcing your figures and information next. I will leave Joanne Nova and wattsupwiththat for next time :)

In between ice ages, Earth is of course in a warmer interglacial period.

To look at ice core data, say the Petit et al. 2000 Vostok ice core paper, we can roughly say the interglacials in the past half a million years have lasted about 10k years.



We are now 11k years since the last ice age.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong but there are not going to be any changes to earth's orbital patterns around the Sun, from predicted, right? These orbital patterns are of course the main reason for ice ages, reducing the amount sunlight reaching Earth. On Earth, northern ice sheets would grow, increasing albedo (i.e. the amount of sunlight reflected back into space) and amplifying this cooling trend, bringing us into an ice age eventually.

But! What else provides radiative forcing on our climate? Greenhouse gases of course.

We're now on course to double CO2 concentrations from their pre-industrial levels, in less than a mere couple centuries.

What effect would that have on our future ice age? You think?

Well, this is exactly what Archer et al. 2005 looked at:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2004GC000891

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Figure 4 examines the climate response to various CO2 emission scenarios. The green line is the natural response without CO2 emissions. Blue represents an anthropogenic release of 300 gigatonnes of carbon - we have already passed this mark. Release of 1000 gigatonnes of carbon (orange line) would prevent an ice age for 130,000 years. If anthropogenic carbon release were 5000 gigatonnes or more, glaciation will be avoided for at least half a million years.

"

As things stand now, the combination of relatively weak orbital forcing and the long atmospheric lifetime of carbon dioxide is likely to generate a longer interglacial period than has been seen in the last 2.6 million years.

Now that that's settled, let's move on.

You mentioned a part of the warming, some unknown %, is natural in 2018.

If that is true, what is the source of the warming? What is warming the climate naturally? What is the cause of this warming?

According to you?

I'm interested to find out.

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鬼殺し wrote:

This is a bit like that time the Enterprise had to sling-shot around the sun to get back to the future with a whale in its belly...I'm sure you'll get back on topic eventually, and it's fun to watch. Carry on.

I frankly don't know why this climate change stuff was not discussed under the Trump thread, who is a huge culprit to the whole mess.

But I guess we arrived here from anti-scientific sentiments in the general populace, and went from there :)