[sdiacom]

I find the idea that we no longer live in "an era where many of our ideas about the world [are] fundamentally wrong" quite amusing. It's not even been twenty years since the UK's leading medical institutions were thoroughly convinced that vaccines caused autism. Not through epistemological anarchism, but through good ol' numbers fudging, conclusion skewing and mass media induced panic, in serious-looking, play-by-the-numbers-seeming research papers.

The way you tell "epistemologically anarchist theories" from quackery is the same way you tell any other theories from quackery: you test them.

[haswell]

I find that idea quite amusing as well, and as I pointed out, there are areas, including the subject at hand, that we know very little about. Hell, much of medicine probably still falls under this umbrella.

I did not mean to imply that we no longer live in a world where many ideas are wrong, just a world where we’ve gotten a hell of a lot more right than the era in question. My issue was more with the claim that the success of “epistemological anarchism” of the past was a sufficient reason to justify it presently, with no acknowledgement of the major shift in the landscape that has occurred as a result of those breakthroughs and continuing progress.

I say all of this while still finding the ideas presented to be interesting, especially in light of others emerging research.

I just think the anarchism angle didn’t help the content much.

In areas that are sufficiently understood, such deviations should become increasingly rare. That doesn’t mean there is no room for this - there certainly is!

> The way you tell "epistemologically anarchist theories" from quackery is the same way you tell any other theories from quackery: you test them.

The problem here is not one of testing, but convincing someone that an idea is worth the $$$ required to carry out that testing.

It’s impossible to test every form of quackery, which puts the modern “anarchist” in a difficult position.

These are musings about the challenges presented, not conclusions about the state of things.

[collyw]

What do you think is causing the massive increase in autism seen in the US over the last few decades? I did buy the "better diagnosis" line, until I saw how much it had risen by. It's one in 50 in the US. It's lower in Europe (as are the number of vaccines administered to children). Not saying vaccines are the cause, but better diagnosis doesn't cut it for me.

[vkou]

> What do you think is causing the massive increase in autism seen in the US over the last few decades?

Tonnes of reasons. Parents being older before having children, spending your life surrounded by biologically active plastics (Hello, BPA, and its yet-to-be-banned cousins), changes in diet, Jupiter being in retrograde, etc, etc, etc.

Any one of them, even the wild-ass nonsense ones seem more plausible to me than one fraudulent study written by a doctor who wrote it in order to... Sell autism testing kits and litigation.

You should put less trust in proven, shameless liars, who have a simple explanation for all that ails you, that they will sell you a cure for.

[collyw]

The rates are significantly greater in the US than in Europe. (As are the number of vaccines on the schedule). Given that, you should be able to eliminate some of the reasons you suspect and be able to narrow it down. Any chance you can do that? Or do you just have a religious faith that it is anything but the vaccines, (the same as we see with the current excess deaths being anything but the covid vaccines).

[vkou]

Doing a cross-continental medical comparison and blaming only one factor, among many, many others, that doesn't even differ very much does not remotely pass the sniff test for a study.

It's not religious faith, but you're going to need a lot more than a shoddy argument.

The argument, by the way, is so shoddy (by failing to be rigorous about both diagnosis methodology, and of differences in environment) that we could trivially use it to conclude that vaccines actually reduce incidences of autism, if we look at America as the undertreated high-autism, under-vaccinated baseline, and at Europe as the properly treated gold-standard... But I don't think that's what you're interested in exploring, no?

There may be a reason why this question attracts so many frauds, quacks, and fools. I postulate: the people who run well-made studies, that we can actually draw meaningful conclusions from aren't finding the answers that the frauds, quacks and fools like.

[Cass]

The phrasing of this question seems meant to imply that because one explanation doesn't satisfy you (better diagnosis), it must be the other (vaccines). This sets up a false dichotomy, though--there's no reason it would have to be one or the other.

We know vaccines aren't the cause, because large-scale studies have been done that show that autism rates aren't higher in vaccinated children. This leaves us with basically every other possible cause, including not just better diagnostics (I personally find that explanation highly plausible), but also changes in nutrition, effects of some sort of virus, pollution, microplastics and everything else under the sun that's changed in the last decades.

[collyw]

You don't know that at all. There were no studies involving all the shots that kids in the US are getting together these days. You are in denial if you don't consider the correlation a possibility. Best take another booster and trust the $cience. Safe and effective.

(Did you have any idea other than "anything but the vaccines"?)

[sdiacom]

> There were no studies involving all the shots that kids in the US are getting together these days.

It's been decades; the kids are the study. Also, they're no longer kids. Do people who have taken the vaccines report higher rates of autism? It would be relatively simple to check for that.

> Did you have any idea other than "anything but the vaccines"?

Increased awareness of autism, increased medical attention on kids at large, increased medicalization of societal deviance, less socialization, less parental time, environmental factors (more CO2, more exposure to pollutants, more exposure to forever chemicals), dietary factors (more sugar, more carbs, more fat, microplastics), derived factors from any of the above (more screen time, earlier occurence of obesity and diabetes, higher prevalence and normalization of societal deviance).

All of those are as likely as vaccines; which is to say, extremely unlikely. We can test for them. Or we can keep testing this one thing we've already tested for, over and over, until as statistically expected, a study eventually happens to agree with your preconceptions about vaccines, proving the all-encompassing conspiracy of $cienti$t$ and $tati$tic$ and error margin$, and plunging us into another two decades of unvaccinated idiocy.