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by Lutger 995 days ago
Respectfully, I believe you are in the wrong here.

Covid and climate science denial can be strengthened by having a 'discussion'.

This is because conspiracy thinking is actually immune to evidence. The denialist will subvert your evidence in a way that it proves the conspiracy. In here they will probably complain that 'correlation is not causation' or some other methodology 101 trope, whereas the audience will think "oh, yeah, this is complicated, smart people are debating it, I guess the jury is still out and we don't know for certain if climate change is real or not, and the vaccines are not a silver bullet either, lets just wait until the debate is over'.

But, in fact, the debate is over.

So no, in this case the onus is one the person attacking a vast body of scientific literature proving beyond reasonable doubt that vaccines are effective to come up with something supporting those wild claims. It is not up to me to provide a literature list that nobody will ever read anyway, and anyone who is even remotely interested in finding the truth can google such a list in 5 min.

2 comments

Thank you for your post. And I mean it. I've fallen into this trap so often myself, because nothing grinds my gears as conspiracy theorists do. I think next time I'll stop before I answer, think of your post and maybe copypaste it.
All I did was asking for information. After all, science is about studies and data, not about opinion.

It would just be nice to get a finger pointing in a direction, not the middlefinger.

At this point, anyone still "asking for information" knows full well where to find it. It's not March 2020 any more.

"Actual data from US prisons" took me about 20 seconds to find a reputable source for (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37736396), likely less time than your comment asking for it took to type.

> At this point, anyone still "asking for information" knows full well where to find it. It's not March 2020 any more.

Do you really think that behavior will improve the knowledge gap?

I don't think any behavior will help the willfully ignorant.