Why do people get vaccines? Don't they research the ingredients?

Fluoride is an industrial byproduct, and they put this stuff in our water, too.

Something else you want to avoid:

“Phenylketonurics: contains phenylalanine.”

If it says that on the label, don't eat it.

Its often found in chewing gum, and diet sodas, and artificial sweeteners.

Sugar isn't all that great for you, either, but it's better than phenylalanine.

"

MrSmiley21 wrote:

Fluoride is an industrial byproduct, and they put this stuff in our water, too.

Something else you want to avoid:

“Phenylketonurics: contains phenylalanine.”

If it says that on the label, don't eat it.

Its often found in chewing gum, and diet sodas, and artificial sweeteners.

Sugar isn't all that great for you, either, but it's better than phenylalanine.

damn so the human body is toxic, we have fluoride inside us too oh noes!!!! and formaldehysde too... omg we are all going to die!!!(eventually)

Fluoride clogs your Pineal Gland. Terrible stuff.

You're welcome, Charan :)

Also, if you haven't read it The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan

Legwork, hehe, I know what you mean - it's more fragments coming together and the knowing that someone out there will have far more insight and academic chops than me on the particular juncture (and will have done a lot of work on it).

If you ever want to employ me as a RA, you know where to find me.

"

codetaku wrote:

A very good post, erdelyii, but I feel obligated to point out two things:

1) A cult *is* much more likely to be "designed" than a conspiracy theory. Whereas a conspiracy theory can arise much more naturally from a group of like-minded paranoia junkies, a cult is usually founded with a clear goal in mind--unless the cult leader is quite literally schizophrenic, which I assume does happen.

Glad you found it thought-provoking codetaku.

I just dashed that paragraph about cults off, thinking doesn't "Cult and Conspiracy" sound just like a Jane Austen title?

Now you replied, it might be worth looking into some more.

Stephanie Wittschier believed in the Illuminati and chemtrails, and even tried to convert people online. But then she started to have doubts.

It Was Like a Cult': Leaving the World of Online Conspiracy Theories

"

To an outsider, what's especially revealing is the way Wittschier talks about how the conspiracy scene tries to recruit new allies. "In the past, when you met an ignorant non-believer, you sent them YouTube videos of excessively protracted contrails and told them things like: 'Look at the sky! It's obvious!' You don't even go into detail about the matter or the technical inconsistencies, you just give them any explanation that sounds reasonable, cohesive, and informed—in a word, scientific. And then you give them the time to think about it."

I'm not sure about the clear goal in mind part. Your point that cults focus around a charismatic leader, and conspiracy theories don't generally might be a point of difference, but then are conspiracy theories headed up by figures?

The Flat Earth Society is so big and benign it might more properly be compared to a religion these days?

12 Monkeys - Cult or Conspiracy?



Mentioning schizophrenia makes me think of what does happen with people experiencing extreme states of mind and what this does to patternicity

Apologies, quoting didn't code fofr some reason I can't fathom:

"Another common trait of people suffering from schizophrenia, and could be a factor in the need for conspiracy theorist to make almost compulsive connections, is abnormal levels of dopamine in the brain. The higher levels of dopamine keep telling the brain that something important is happening, causing the cognitive faculties of the brain to create paranoid tales in an effort to explain the constant alerts streaming from the over-stimulated dopamine receptors. Ordinary events appear intensely meaningful. That all black car? That ad on the tv? That guy wearing dark sunglasses? They could be part of a crazy, wicked huge international conspiracy."

article

Not just schizophrenia, but bipolar mania, meth high, too.

"Coincidentally, only three weeks ago I was reading Shermer’s latest book, The Believing Brain [3], which, along with some evidence-based practice related tweets from Bronwyn Hemsley (@bronwynah) of the University of Queensland, Australia, gave rise to the “Quackery” article.

Shermer’s thesis in this book is summarised in a couple of sentences he makes early on:

The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning.

What follows is a series of discussions and explanations about what this means for the way in which people behave when it comes to beliefs, whether that’s religious beliefs, scientific beliefs, political beliefs, or just whether to believe whether “Reality TV” is, in fact, “real.”

Shermer argues that this tendency to see patterns and meaning is fundamental to us as individuals and a result of our evolutionary heritage:

We are the descendants of those who were most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning and is fundamental to all animal behavior, from C. elegans to H. sapiens. I call this process patternicity, or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.

Shermer illustrates this tendency with many examples, as he has done in most of his books. He expands on this notion of patternicity by sub-categorising into different types.

As a companion to patternicity, he introduces the term agenticity, by which he means that not only do we find patterns and meanings in noise, but we tend to ascribe some type of agent to those patterns i.e. someone or something causes it.

(W)e often impart the patterns we find with agency and intention, and believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down, instead of bottom-up causal laws and randomness that makes up much of our world.

Shermer takes some time to talk about the neurochemistry of belief, with dopamine being the top contender for being “the belief chemical.” Citing research from a number of sources, he proposes that higher concentrations of dopamine in the nervous system enhances the “signal-to-noise” ratio, which means you find more “signal,” or meaning, amid what is really “noise,” or meaninglessness. Studies he cites show that people with high levels of dopamine are more prone to be superstitious, believe in the paranormal, and more likely to see patterns when there are none there. In contrast, skeptics have lower dopamine levels.

Exploring the neurochemistry of superstition, magical thinking, and belief in the paranormal, Brugger and Mohr found that people with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none.[4]

There are chapters on belief in the afterlife, belief in God, belief in aliens, and belief in conspiracies. Readers of earlier Shermer books, or skeptical literature in general, will find little new here, but those new to Skepticism will be entertained.

For me, the weakest chapter is the one entitled The Politics of Belief, where he essentially tries to marry his own political stance (Libertarianism) with the “evidence,” which, not surprisingly, hints at Libertarianism being more consistent with “facts.” It’s worth the read but you might come to different conclusions.

And reaching you own conclusions is what the chapter Confirmation of Beliefs is all about. Here Shermer lists and explains a number of the more common psychological biases to which we are all subject. For example, he mentions the confirmation bias as the “mother of all biases,” and how it serves to filter incoming information so as to accept all that supports our beliefs and rejects all that disconfirms our beliefs. I’ll leave these biases to another Speech Dudes article.

If you’ve never read any of Shermer’s books, this is a good one with which to start. Otherwise, there are elements of the text with which Shermer readers will be familiar. The discussions on patternicity, agenticity, and dopamine are worth the read but the rest is more recap than “new.”

It’s worth concluding with three sentences that new skeptics might want to jot down and commit to memory. They pretty much summarise what the scientific method is about:

A null hypothesis states that X does not cause Y. If you think X does cause Y then the burden of proof is on you to provide convincing experimental data to reject the null hypothesis.

The null hypothesis also means that the burden of proof is on the person asserting a positive claim, not on the skeptics to disprove it.

The principle of positive evidence states that you must have positive evidence in favor of your theory and not just negative evidence against rival theories."

article

"codetaku" 2) in the modern era, conspiracy theories are a bit more likely to be planted with political goals in mind. While "the government is responsible for 9/11" seems like a natural "highly paranoid" extension of "the government both failed to stop and then benefited from 9/11" (because the bush administration did *hugely* benefit in popularity after 9/11. And no, I don't think they did anything even remotely like organizing it, but according to declassified intelligence reports, they vaguely knew about such a threat and could've taken it more seriously beforehand, much like FDR with pearl harbor), and even "benghazi" is arguably a natural paranoid conspiracy theory for people afraid of Hillary Clinton in particular... "pizzagate"? Come on, that takes a very targeted pathological reading of Podesta's emails. Some conspiracy theories are clearly designed for political purposes by people who know how to take advantage of the paranoid delusions of the masses.

So they do have a clear goal in mind sometimes?

Do you guys think this would sell well?

https://www.customink.com/designs/dsvaccines/apw0-00bp-76ed/share?pc=EMAIL-40778&utm_campaign=shared%20design&utm_source=share%20link&utm_medium=shared%20design&utm_content=shared%20desktop

No idea, faerwin.

Personally, it doesn't do it for me. Dare I say I'm immune to its charms? It's just not the sort of thing I wear, opinion t-shirts.

If it was a sticker, I might put a few in strategic places.

https://ia802703.us.archive.org/31/items/b2136140x/b2136140x.pdf

More proof vaccines are dangerous and otherwise useless.

good job digging a document that's 130 years old. That document is sure to stand up to today's standard of medicine and knowledge.

Go back in your rabbit hole please.

I wish this thread would go away.

"

faerwin wrote:

good job digging a document that's 130 years old. That document is sure to stand up to today's standard of medicine and knowledge.

Go back in your rabbit hole please.

When I saw that the OP had linked to a 130 year old document, I laughed out loud. Then I saw your post and had to laugh out loud again. Thank you.

I would have thought the OP was just trolling but based on previous posts the OP has made I think the sad truth is that it wasn't a troll at all.

"

TheLightShinesOn wrote:

https://ia802703.us.archive.org/31/items/b2136140x/b2136140x.pdf

More proof vaccines are dangerous and otherwise useless.

Your flat earth nonsense was stupid but at least it didn't hurt anyone. The antivax shit is a danger to society though. Lock him up.