> the people who bought into the scare never came back and revised their beliefs based on new evidence. What's missing is the capacity for self-correction. Mathematics was never involved.
I don’t think there’s much daylight between our positions. You’re correct that mathematics was never involved. Any trust most people had in vaccines was always social, not analytical. They never understood Wakefield’s original paper, except insofar as it was reported by trusted organizations as credible. That broke people’s trust in those organizations, who had previously told everyone that vaccines were very safe.
When the retractions and follow-ups came, people weren’t able to understand them, because they were never capable of understanding the analysis in the first place! And now, they didn’t trust the bottom-line conclusions being reported by the Lancet and the media.
It doesn’t help that there’s a bunch of other confounding factors: rising parental age and possibly assortive mating increasing actual autism rates, changing norms around diagnosing autism, and changing incentives for autism diagnoses. We took our four year old to be evaluated, and the folks at the county told us they didn't really think any diagnosis was justified, but would have given us one if he was going to public school (where it would lead to additional services) instead of private school. They told us that point blank.
> And now, they didn’t trust the bottom-line conclusions being reported by the Lancet and the media.
That's the funny thing, though. Logically, distrusting The Lancet means distrusting Wakefield's paper too. It makes no sense to claim that The Lancet is untrustworthy while you still base your beliefs on a paper because it was published in The Lancet. If the journal goes down, the journal articles have to go down with it.
The difference is that these people had spent years building a personal identity around vaccine skepticism, as embattled fighters for the safety of children. Retraction of their beliefs would have been very painful, a blow to their self-image. Thus, it was easier to invent conspiracy theories about how their beliefs are still true, and now there's a cover-up.
Why do you think it would work symmetrically like that? Say you trust your spouse. Then they admit they cheated on you. Years later they say, actually, that earlier statement was a lie. What do you believe now?
Obviously you should be skeptical of anything they said. There was indisputably one big lie, whether then or now. If you really want to know which is the lie, you'd need to get independent confirmation.
The explanation of the lie matters. If it's, "I lied about cheating on you, and now I want you back", then lolno. If it was more like, "I was just sick of you, but you wouldn't have left me unless I drove you away", that's more plausible.
I’m not asking what someone should do, but what your average person would do. They would believe the spouse had cheated, and was lying when the spouse retracted the statement. Even though that requires believing the first statement by the spouse and not the second.
To circle back to the point, people aren’t capable of understanding any independent confirmation, nor are the capable of understanding the explanation for the change in position. The operation of science is incomprehensible to most people.
> I’m not asking what someone should do, but what your average person would do.
I guess I misunderstood your question then. I thought you were responding to, "Logically, distrusting The Lancet means distrusting Wakefield's paper too."
I think we've already established what an average person would do: not revise their beliefs in light of new evidence.
> To circle back to the point, people aren’t capable of understanding any independent confirmation, nor are the capable of understanding the explanation for the change in position. The operation of science is incomprehensible to most people.
I think this overcomplicates the situation, which is just about beliefs, evidence, and changing your mind. And people do change their minds in light of new evidence... about topics to which they're not emotionally attached. It's the emotional attachment to beliefs that causes people to perform mental cartwheels and stand on their heads just to avoid admitting the obvious truth.
For the most part, professional science, its complex math and statistics, operates in a parallel universe to our daily lives. A paper is published in a scientific journal? Shrug. A paper is retracted? Shrug. It may be interesting, a curiosity, but it's largely irrelevant to the average person. They're not emotionally committed to any of it. The problems occur when professional science somehow overlaps with something that they do care deeply about. And their interaction with that scientific work is not even an attempt to analyze it; rather, they simply want to cherry pick scientific results that agree with their preconceived notions, and use (abuse) scientific authority in order to argue for their preconceived notions.
But independent confirmation is not that difficult to understand. Is Jane lying or telling the truth about a particular situation? If you're skeptical of Jane's claims, then you ask John, someone else you know who also has first-hand knowledge of the situation. Average people can't design a scientific experiment, but they can certainly dig deeper into some question. However, you've got to be motivated to dig deeper. Some people want to be lied to, because the truth would be uncomfortable.
I don’t think there’s much daylight between our positions. You’re correct that mathematics was never involved. Any trust most people had in vaccines was always social, not analytical. They never understood Wakefield’s original paper, except insofar as it was reported by trusted organizations as credible. That broke people’s trust in those organizations, who had previously told everyone that vaccines were very safe.
When the retractions and follow-ups came, people weren’t able to understand them, because they were never capable of understanding the analysis in the first place! And now, they didn’t trust the bottom-line conclusions being reported by the Lancet and the media.
It doesn’t help that there’s a bunch of other confounding factors: rising parental age and possibly assortive mating increasing actual autism rates, changing norms around diagnosing autism, and changing incentives for autism diagnoses. We took our four year old to be evaluated, and the folks at the county told us they didn't really think any diagnosis was justified, but would have given us one if he was going to public school (where it would lead to additional services) instead of private school. They told us that point blank.