Imperator wrote on March 15, 2021 at 2:11 PM

Reply to comment by burnerben in Have you gotten your COVID vaccination? Do you plan to? Why or why not? by Rambler

Same. It is rather interesting to read how many people on the internet consider themselves to be experts on virology and pharmacy and believe that they are more knowledgeable on matters of science than the experts in the global academic community. There's been a metric fuckton of peer-reviewed research, both theoretical and practical on the various vaccines and the vast majority consider them to be safe. Only incident I've heard of recently was a small minority of people getting trombosis from the AstraZenic vaccine, but that's already being disputed.

Wahaha wrote on March 16, 2021 at 3:27 PM

Because an appeal to authority isn't an argument and scientists have a whole replication crisis going on, so they lost lots and lots of credibility over the past decades.

Now, if you trust your government and what the high priests tell you about sacrificing virgins to appease the thunder god, that's fine, but not everyone can be naive and trusting like that.

Especially not with how weird this whole situation has been handled over the past year.

Imperator wrote on March 19, 2021 at 9:29 AM

Oh man, I'm a bit ashamed of myself that throughout our entire discussion I hadn't once thought of the replication crisis in contemporary science. I had a course that covered that last semester quite thoroughly, including p-value-hacking to get statistically significant results. Well, so much for my university education.

Thank you for reminding me of it, you are absolutely correct that many research findings nowadays cannot be replicated when reproduced! If anything, it makes the need for a truly independently funded scientific agency more imperative. The publish-or-perish mentality nowadays is absolutely destructive for scientific integrity and makes researchers susceptible to publishing inherently biased findings.

Anyway, regarding your claim that I make an appeal to authority: although I agree with you in principle that:

Claim B is true, because Authority A says so

is a logical fallacy, some subjects (including medical science and pharmacy) are expert topics that require multiple years of dedicated study to get a good grasp of. It is idiotic to think that any layman can make the same informed judgements that a researcher can. The best we have is peers of said researcher checking the validity of their methods before and after publication. Hence peer-review (but as you pointed out, replication crisis throws that in the dirt)

Plato himself pointed that out when he asked someone if they'd rather vote on how a ship is steered or let the helmsman handle it.

Closely related is the argument from ignorance: because you don't understand how something works, doesn't mean that it is false. Or in this case, because a layman (including myself, I'm in the field of AI and CS, not biology) doesn't completely understand how mRNA vaccines work, doesn't mean that they're therefore dangerous.

Wahaha wrote on March 19, 2021 at 10:03 AM

The way I see it Socrates was right. I know that I know nothing.

burnerben wrote on March 15, 2021 at 3:15 PM

I just refuse to take anything from china. But people have good reason to not want to take it, politicians just want to create narratives and now days its hard to know who you can trust.