September 26th, 2007 @ 7:45 am
When I was in college I had the incredible opportunity to take a seminar with Walter Mischel, a prominent psychologist. One thing he said about the process of evaluating what we read or were told has stuck with me ever since. He said the key question to ask ourselves was this: how do you know?
I wish someone had told me that a long time before. But we don’t seem to cover critical reasoning in school. I had a top notch education, and I didn’t hear this till college. Many people never do, and as a result most people just don’t seem to understand science at all.
I was flabbergasted recently when another mom, an intelligent and educated woman, asked me if I believe that vaccines cause autism. What does belief have to do with it? Facts are. They don’t give a damn about our belief. Try disbelieving in gravity sometime and see how that works for you.
The facts are that as of this writing there is no causal relationship established between vaccines and autism. I’m sorry if that steps on anyones toes, but that’s the reality. The relationship is correlational, which is as far from causal as Latin is from Urdu. Might we discover that there is a causal relationship? Perhaps–though I suspect that this isn’t the case, I am perfectly willing to be convinced otherwise by data. And by data I mean evidence, not opinion.
I have no agenda here either pro or anti vaccine. I could not care less what the cause of the rise in autism is, though I very much want it found and fixed. But it cheeses me off to hear people debating supposed facts and evidence, when they don’t have the slightest understanding of what those are.
Here’s a definition of “evidence” from wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn:
your basis for belief or disbelief; knowledge on which to base belief
In other words, evidence is what answers the question of how you know. What that means is that no one will ever convince me of something just by saying it a lot. I can scream 500 times at the top of my lungs that its raining, but that won’t make it so. It also means providing me with 50 different links to opinion pieces as “evidence” that vaccines cause autism (or that there were WMDs in Iraq, or whatever) won’t convince me. Because that isn’t evidence. It’s opinion.
Life
said,
September 26, 2007 at 8:45 am
I find there are many people who, when answering the “how do you know” questions, reply (basically) with “because I read X amount of articles that say so”.
Melissa
said,
September 26, 2007 at 9:33 am
I know it is anecdotal but I have a friend who has a son who is Aspie. I asked her opinion since she has an informed opinion, reading all the literature and researching the subject. She has noticed that in every case she knows about, it has a genetic component. In her case, it is her dh that is a Aspie.
Her dh was never diagnosed as a Aspie until he went to the doctor on one of their sons visits. The doctor told the dh that he was a classical Aspie. So is the rise in the number of cases due to doctor actually knowing what to look for??
BTW: Her son never received any of the vaccines that contain the mercury or thermesol.
It is always good to ask, “How do you know??” There may be an alternate explaination.
said,
September 26, 2007 at 2:47 pm
I also know someone online (auspie herself) with an unvaxed daughter, who has been told by others (online) that she MUSt be lying about no vaxes otherwise how could her child be auspie?
said,
September 26, 2007 at 7:19 pm
It seems to me that the question of whether there is a link between autism and vaccines is far from settled. As you mentioned, correlation does not equal causation, but there are questions yet to be answered. Similarly, I think charges that environmental toxins contribute to neurological differences have yet to be fully explored. I have never probed it deeply, because I see a clear genetic link with my daughter’s Asperger’s as with most cases of autism spectrum issues with which I am familiar. Besides, the “why” is not the biggest issue to me.
I agree with the overall point of your post. When people hear something a number of times, they start believing it, without ever probing or analyzing the evidence for themselves. They often don’t even ask themselves “does this make sense?” This tendency among people in our country scares the heck out of me on many levels.
lisa
said,
September 27, 2007 at 9:11 pm
People are very good at believing what they hear whether theres any evidence or not. Look at religion.
said,
September 28, 2007 at 7:09 am
Andrea–If I read it somewhere it must be true. Yah, I’ve had that conversation.
I’m sorry your friend has to deal with that kind of attitude. Having an aspie child is difficult enough without people making it harder.
Tribe– I totally agree that issue of cause is not resolved, and for all I know it may turn out to be vaccines. Heck, even my deities aren’t omniscient, so I KNOW I’m not
Melissa and Lisa–Yes, exactly.
I used a hot-button topic as the illustration of my point, because that was the topic that most recently had me ranting to myself on this very subject—I’m overjoyed to see there are so many sensible and intelligent people here who understand that autism was only an example of a larger point.