mon petit blogue sans importance...

flu vaccine scares...

I'm tired of all the quacks out there touting all sorts of imbecilities about the H1N1 flu and its vaccine. My level-headed friend Alison pointed out an article published by McGill.

This is a most excellent article about the different scary stories out there that have people panicking about the vaccine, and getting a lot of people to not get vaccinated, which is frustrating to someone like me who, in a few days, will be holding a newborn and bringing her to various holiday parties.

Problem is, anyone who believes the 30-second shocking blurbs from the quacks out there is just not the type of person who would actually read such an article, even if you threw it in their face.

The fundamental problem is that it's often rather complex to explain to everyone why they're wrong - they prefer to believe the too-quick arguments that way too often confuse causality and correlation.

There's a really good explanation of this problem here - why are people quickly convinced by those quacks but are then very hard to convince otherwise, even faced with hard data from knowledgeable people:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/08/why-putting-climate-change-on-trial-is-a-terrible-idea.ars

excerpt:
"The gist of this is that it can easy to make a simple, intuitive presentation of an argument that is simply wrong. In contrast, reality is often complex and counterintuitive, and providing all the details needed to understand it can be arduous. It's the difference between multiplying two prime numbers to encrypt something, and figuring out which prime numbers are needed to decrypt it. "

(read the "The one-way hash argument" section, about half-way down - it's short and really good; the rest of the article is irrelevant here).

I've stopped getting frustrated about this, but i have yet to come up with a good strategy against it. I just calmly try to explain my point of view to the people i care about, and ignore the others...

by wiswaud on 19 November 2009
Tags: english, quacks