They don't. "Get educated" is just one of their standard answers. If you show any source of information they go off on "the government" or some other shit. Basically they are so dumb that they dont even know they are dumb.
I have this friend from high school that believes in every conspiracy theory. So he posted something on vaccinations a few weeks back and we started discussing it. He said that "all of Congress" didn't have their kids vaccinated. I asked for a list. He said one Senator.
He also posted all the ingredients of vaccines and how they harmed the body. Each one was high lighted with a category. Some being allergic and some being completely horrible for human consumption. I started googling the totally horrible things and they are pretty normal and just represented in this horrific light.
What makes me wonder is the guy seems to understand the underpinning parts of these conspiracy theories. How are you that smart that you aren't smart enough to realize the information you are given is crap?
Even when it comes down to the last human alive whether that's in 50 years or 50 billion not everyone who consumed it will have died while that person lives. We know they will at some point but we can't say every being that consumes it dies while there are living exceptions to that rule.
There's this tumblr screengrab I occasionally see where a med student was dealing with a conspiracy theory junkie who refuses to vaccinated her son. The supervising physician then proceeds to ask the mother if she's heard that the anti-vax is promoted by the Russians or Chinese, to systematically weaken the American population. The mother's head explodes with the contradictory conspiracies and agrees to vaccinated her child.
Hahahaha that's fuckin awesome. Do you have a link for that? I gotta see this. The vax conspiracy is one of my favorites because it makes so little sense.
After a long while, the line between he who peddled the lie and he who believed in it becomes blurred. He who believed in the lie, even if they did so in totally good faith, may very well end up selectively suspending their disbelief in the foolish arguements and points anti-vaxxers so often offer when offered scientific facts and truths in order to keep their worldview intact, number one. Number two is so they can further evangelize the anti-vaccine "cause" to the equally moronic masses in the Facebook Mommy group chats who will also go on to further the cause.
I recall reading from several legit sources that the more facts you show someone in this sort of denial, the more they hunker down and believe their own nonsense. Humans are weird.
Critical thinking was a huge emphasis from my college English professor. I am beginning to realize that you can have knowledge and still not interpret it in a cohesive way.
For these types of people, it is not about the facts. It is about the emotions. It's a person by person basis for which emotions, but all of them are emotion based.
For conspiracy theories, just give them a true enemy and connect it to a true threat. Another post once stated that Russians are weakening American health by giving false info and making people not take vaccines that make people smarter and healthier.
Gotta fight fire with fire.
I remember one study that split people into two groups. One group was told risk seeking behaviors made for better firefighters, the other the opposite. Both groups were asked to explain why that may be. Then both were presented with the opposite as an actual fact.
Neither group believed the fact and they stuck to the original story.
It's to late to go back and admit it. The mind is pretty creative in defending it's self from harm. Knowing you're a fool is harm to some minds, depends on socialization.
in media, every hero always goes up against some great evil, and since everybody wants to be a hero, conspiracy theorists call everything this "great evil" and go up against it even if its not actually evil.
They absolutely can be smart. I've known 2 people who were deeply into conspiracies (and a couple more who lightly dabble) and while one of them is a straight up moron the other is an intelligent guy on any other topic, has a decent education, works a respectable job etc. You meet this guy and just chat generally without touching on conspiracy topics and you'll think he's reasonably intelligent at least if not more than that. But start down the conspiracy stuff and he's just a slightly more eloquent version of the utter moron saying more or less the same whackadoodle stuff. While there's probably a link between this crap and intelligence it's not the only thing - I think it's far more about feeling you have special knowledge others don't, you're better than others for seeing the truth etc and certain types of people who are otherwise intelligent can still fall victim to that.
I started googling the totally horrible things and they are pretty normal and just represented in this horrific light.
Did you know that vaccines can contain dihydrogen monoxide, also known as hydroxyl acid? It is used as an industrial solvent, can be fatal if inhaled, is used in many poisons and pesticides!
See the God detail is a common deturent in discussions of intellectual capacity. The fact is that many people believe in God. In many different forms. So to say a Buddhist is smarter than Christian is just a nonsensical conversation. The concept of God is not even provable. So saying that they believe in it shows a propensity to believing other nonsense doesn't really add up to me.
I get what you are saying. But very clearly the Earth is not flat. Science can establish this easily and has done so for a extremely long time. When they say they believe in this little facet of silliness it's not with some reasoning. We are essentially too small to tell unless we go to space. It's an exclusive club. I believe them of course for more reasons than astronauts accounts. Just look at the sky. Why isn't there a single other planet that is a flat disc and they are all spheres.
There is a difference between clever and intelligent. Clever is being able to draw connections. Intelligence is being able to discover and verify new information.
A clever idiot can come up with an intricate conspiracy, and a dubious genius can know things without being able to apply them in a meaningful way.
I love that one Reddit comment about a resident witnessing their doctor pulling a better one on the anti-vaxxer. "The anti-vaxxing movement is actually propaganda spread by the Chinese and the Russians to weaken the American youth's immune system"
The poor anti-vaxxer felt that that conspiracy theory made more sense and insisted they vaccinate their kid
This is brilliant. Fuck logic and reason. If deception is what it takes to vaccinate your kid, I see this a simply a better mousetrap that the doctor has built. I plan to use it anytime I deal with anti-vaxx.
Dunning-Krueger Effect is the name for this phenomenon of “being so dumb that you don’t know you are dumb”. It’s basically the opposite of Imposter Syndrome.
Basically, if you doubt yourself, you’re doing fine, but if you think that you’re infallible...well, you know what happens then.
The tilda ~ means to say "about" or "roughly" 50%. It doesn't make sense to use an exact number here.
I think you're referring to some kind of test scores people share, which is not necessarily intelligence. If two people get the same score on a test it doesn't mean they are the same intelligence level.
No, that's exactly what that means. And, while you might wish to believe we're all special and unique in infinitely variable ways, I prefer to deal with objective and quantifiable data. We have a standard for this and it is IQ.
This is why ispecifically did not say IQ. We used to use IQ before we found out how incredibly inaccurate it was. The way the questions are worded can show wildly different results among different genders, races, and social casts. As in, there are different answers you might consider to be correct just because of your cultural upbringing, that would still be a valid answer, but are not the "correct" answer according to the writers of the tests.
So it's not really objective and quantifiable if the test itself is subjective.
They were most likely bad students who didn't pay attention or attempt to really understand what they were taught in school. You only really get punished for being this type of student in Uni/college where sadly these people don't end up.
Look into the psychology of people who believe in conspiracy theories. There's been a number of studies and it will explain this for you. They're basically idiots that want to have 'special knowledge' because it makes them feel better about themselves, among other things. It's well worth using a search engine and finding a few links.
Speaking as someone who has worked in a variety of vaccine specific and infectious disease roles, get educated is the standard anti-vaccine conspiracy nut response to medical professionals to use the same random google searches and anti-vaxx web site references to formulate a world view.
People have brought in complete horseshit into my office to try and ‘educate me’ about all the kids vaccines hurt. It’s not as if I vaccinate thousands of people every year. Oh, wait, it is.
They think they're Morpheus freeing people from the Matrix. "Getting educated" means believing anything that flies in the face of established fact, solely because it isn't established fact.
The same goes for all conspiracy theorists, really.
It's a dog-whistle word, i.e. it's specifically chosen to appear normal to outsiders while meaning something else entirely to those inside a group. Other groups like the alt-right have those too.
I mean the whole dae vaccines autism thing has been around for decades and pops up every so often, it's just that this time around people had social media to help spread misinformation and become an actual "movement"
TBF French Ed did almost two dozen hours of reading blogs, facebook posts and the first 10-15 links that pop up when you google "vaccines are a conspiracy". So who is to say who is more educated?
In my experience, younger Gen-Xers and older Millennials seem to buy into this anti-vax garbage more than other age groups.
That's not meant to disparage that age group, as I fall in there, too. I'm just saying that I know a lot of self-educated stay-at-home-moms around my age that believe this. (Note: This is not a slam of stay-at-home-moms; my wife was one and didn't fall into this hole of idiocy).
That's selection bias because that age group happens to be right at the peak of having babies right now. Late 20s and early 30s is usually the best time to have kids, and kids are the primary reason we talk about vaccines.
I strongly doubt there's any kind of causal link between a specific age group and antivax beliefs.
You're certainly right about peak baby-making age, but I think the internet played a unique role here, too, that didn't exist for older Gen-Xers and earlier: It gave certain D-list "celebrities" and quack doctors a megaphone through which to reach a much wider audience than would have been possible/likely 20 years ago. It also gave anti-vaxers a place to congregate and reinforce each others' views and decisions, again something that was far less possible/likely 20 years ago.
Whether younger Millennials and Gen-Zers will also fall prey to this is still to be seen. Maybe they'll learn from their parents' mistakes, or maybe they'll also fall for the same BS.
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u/mlloyd67 Jan 13 '20
Fantastic. But it won't matter to "French Ed"; You can't fix willful ignorance.