To know what I am talking about, let me give you an example. I have this friend who went crazy over the vaccine issue. She’s done so much research into it that I feel like I can’t talk to her about her vaccine skepticism. Whenever I start to talk about something, she would drown me with a ton of articles and youtube videos and most of the times from the actual websites of UN health and stuff. It would have taken me a day to just go through that stuff. So I gave up on convincing her about vaccines. Might seem cruel but even I lost my certainty about vaccines after I met her. There’s just too much to know and I don’t completely trust the institutions either, but I do trust the institutions enough to vaccinate myself and my kids but not enough to you know, hold a debate about it with someone who has spent days researching this stuff.
You can take any topic which is divisive, which basically looms over the media all day and you can find a ton of articles to either support it or “debunk” it. I think 9/11 wasn’t caused by Bush, I am almost certain, but I won’t bet my house on it. I mean, this is almost a certainty, but yeah.
On other issues which are not this much of a certainty I fail to see how to convince a person who thinks something that they are wrong.
Stuff like earth is round or not, I can prove. But was the virus from Chinese market or from a lab, I can’t.
Have aliens visited earth? I don’t know. It would be wicked if we make first contact, but as awesome as this is, I am not motivated to search about this on the internet. I don’t think I would search anything about the not so cool topics of life. I don’t know enough to hold an informed debate about capitalism vs socialism or any other hot button issue for that moment.
What do you do in these situations?
I can sense that this is poorly written, but I hope you get the gist of what I am trying to say.
These “hot-topics” glazed all over American News Media are designed to be just how you describe them to be. Divisive.
The vaccine works, and because it’s a new kind of vaccine it’s not exactly what we were used to. It works as in “there is a really good chance that you will not die gasping for air.”
Once you get into semantics like origin and all that, why does it matter? It happened and we’re here now.
You can’t argue about something that isn’t known, it would be an astronomical feat for humanity to have the ability to track origins of viruses down to the exact organism in its cage. We’re lucky enough to have a geographical reference.
Socialism, Capitalism? It’s not in our control really, I usually tell colleagues or friends that bring this up that “well we’re here now, so all we can do is make the best of it.” Be active within your local government, inform yourself about local politics, inspire change with your community so that they can inspire change elsewhere.
Fighting about the execs on 49th floor won’t do squat for us if we’re all fighting over who gets to sleep on the buildings heat exhausts.
While I do agree the vaccine does work, the medical community did itself no favors with constant backtracking and shifting narratives/goalposts.
It is not surprising to see people being skeptical of them.
Better to be honest and backtrack IMO, than to be caught lying. The problem is that they were projecting unwarranted certainty from the start. I can understand why: they were probably afraid of not reaching herd immunity otherwise.
But I think there are ways around that. For example they could have said “yeah, there is definitely a certain risk in taking the vaccine. But the risk is much, much higher if you don’t vaccinate. And for solidarity with your elders you should risk the vaccine. Be a hero for them.”
Dude I totally agree. In the pharmacy you have no idea how many meetings were held and calls were made to clarify with the manufacturers worldwide every time a revision is made. I think it made people complacent rather than skeptical.
Most patients are the one and done type, where they get told they need a lifestyle change or something that is then met with resistance. As with the vaccine, I assume it’s because they already feel safe with the 1 jab if they don’t have the other 2 etc.
interesting take. Thank you!
If the other person is arguing in good faith, I’ll listen and exchange views until that becomes pointless. If the other person is loaded with an opinion and won’t listen to anything different, I basically shut down and leave them hanging.
If the other person is arguing in good faith
amen!
“Doing research” by looking at YouTube videos and even WHO pages isn’t research. It can be informative, you know, to learn some things but it’s not research.
Just check out the scientific method, our research is based on this (simple?) set of principles, if you do not know how that works then it’s hard to argue about anything scientific.
Learn, learn, but I think it shows what kind of person someone is if they think they can find the thing that changes everything, that everyone else is missing (in 9/11, covid vaccines, …) just by looking on YouTube videos!
Hilarious if it wasn’t that people get so delusional.
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To me you either 1) have the many years of specialized education required to understand (for real) how vaccines works, or 2) trust the national and international institutions that vouches the work of estimeed scientists, or 3) do your research and perhaps watch your children die of fucking measles.
Trying to convince someone that chose no.3? Your only hope is to make them understand that they cannot understand, a very very hard task.
Trying to convince someone that chose no.3? Your only hope is to make them understand that they cannot understand, a very very hard task.
that’s rather depressing isn’t it. I trust the scientists but when politics gets mixed into science, it’s hard to know who is lying and who’s not.
Understanding who is lying is also impossible for the majority of us not having the specialized education etc etc (see no.1), so I just trust the scientific consensus. It’s so easy!
that’s the last thing you can trust rn. Scientific consensus. But that’s getting out of hand too. Corporations funding research that shows them in a positive light, perverse incentives for some streams of science and media misrepresentation of facts are concerning.
Cool, then do like your friend and trust youtube. Good luck!
If you really want to engage with people like this, one good survival tactic is to ask simple questions. “How do you know that?” “Why would they do that?” “How can you be certain?” “Isn’t there a more plausible explanation?”
You might even catch them in logical fallacies or just clear contradictions. “But didn’t you just say the opposite?” “Wouldn’t it make more sense if …?”
A lot of them believe things without questioning it, so your questions could even help them snap out of it. Of course they could also get tired of your questions and end the conversation.
that’s a good one that applies for most of those fallacies out there. Kurzgesart method han?
Think to the root of it.
We’re constantly bombarded by information these days, and one way to sort out where to devote your energy is to consider the “next steps” in whatever rational process.
Who would benefit from institutions lying about vaccines? Who would value that, what could their goals be, what methodology could they be following?
You’ll find it’s going to lead you eventually to old Jewish conspiracy theories, literally nothing else makes any sense. So, if you do want to participate in those conspiracy theory communities and ideas, ask yourself again, “what next?”
Just keep doing this, going step by step through the process. If, at any point, you decide it’s a waste of your time, you know where it all began. Where the entrance to that rabbit hole was.
I am sorry, I don’t think that argument is sound. There are pretty good reasons for companies and government to lie about vaccines. Idk, keep the economy going and get people out of home stuff.
Biden would want to be the guy under whom people got vaccinated and same goes for Trump. don’t get me started on pharma lobbies or any other lobbies for that matter. There are good reasons for people to lie.
Need to remember the details if you’re really going to be thinking about these things. Companies, first off, will lie about anything unless expressly prohibited. I’m not talking about them, they all say their products are great, it’s just what they do. If you were them, you’d probably be saying your product is great too.
If the govt wanted people out of their homes, then just lift the restrictions and make all the people asking for that happy. Maybe they’ll even think about voting for you, if you make them happy like that. Why lockdown, lie about a vaccine, jab everyone, and then open everything up? Makes no sense, right? Unless it was all just real. Or unless… right?
The core issue is ignorance and and poor abilities at investigation. School fails so many people. And, societally, most people seem to feel they’re entitled to opinions even if they know nothing or very little about a topic, which helps keep them ignorant and unable to critically investigate topics and sources.
Finally, the “trust in institutions” issue. These institutions should not be trusted, they have been overtaken by capitalism. Healthcare is profit-driven and the tendency is towards poorer science that covers up dangers and inflates benefits. In addition, people have no sense of agency over the state (they’re correct about that), so a feeling of understanding can temporarily substitute that.
The question is what to do about it. Well, individually, you can do very little. You can try to convince people through argumentation, like you mentioned, but this is very difficult. The example of vaccines makes it clear that this is someone that bought into these ideas without critically engaging. They probably did so for a number of reasons, including societally-ingrained hubris, peer pressure, personal experience, personality, politics, and the production value of whatever got to them first. Your task is to sow doubt (ask challenging questions) and try to rebuild from shared understanding.
The best way to combat this, more generally, is not as an individual, but as a member of an active organization that combats all of this at once, and with a plan for how to do so adequately. This would best be a socialist org, as the thing you’re fighting is actually the discursive mass media and education aspects of capitalism. e.g. on COVID’s origins, the common understandings and claims in the West are simplistic and unscientific, and only exist for political reasons, to scapegoat why a given country did so poorly at handling the pandemic, to isolate China in a new cold war. You could become an expert in the science, follow geographic phylogenies and the terminology of epidemiology, but you don’t really need to: you really just need media criticism skills, which is all about politics, economics, and being a big nerd.
It’s not poorly written. I understand it bc I feel this way, but I’ve come to a different conclusion.
I’m OK not knowing everything. I’m not ecstatic about it, but I’ve settled with the idea. Experts exist for a reason and I have to trust in that. I can’t research every issue to a college degree level. I gotta make dinner for the kids.
Let your friend have their vaccine research but just don’t bother talking about it to them. Accept the fact that you don’t need to understand every facet of reality to live thru it.
