Ed Corona Virus Conspiracy Theories....

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Lrrr said:
This is a total deflection that didn't answer my question at all. I'll repeat it again without the word 'skeptic':

Why do you keep posting links and demanding others read them when you won't read anything others ask you to read?
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And when we do "her" the common decency of reading the links none of them say what we are told they say. Strange, that...
 
Interestingly, i just got back from a visit to the allopathic mainstream dermatologist (just checking on a couple of things, all just fine), and among other things, he, like just about every other mainstream doctor I've met in recent years, recommended supplemental vitiamin D, and suggested E too. Now there's a dilemma. If it was recommended by the same doctor who recommends conventional medicine and vaccines and stuff, should I discount that too? Oh, what to do.

Of course one might conclude that this is not a black and white, this side and that side, kind of issue. Only an idiot would conclude that taking supplemental vitamins requires abandoning medicine.
 
bruto said:
Interestingly, i just got back from a visit to the allopathic mainstream dermatologist (just checking on a couple of things, all just fine), and among other things, he, like just about every other mainstream doctor I've met in recent years, recommended supplemental vitiamin D, and suggested E too. Now there's a dilemma. If it was recommended by the same doctor who recommends conventional medicine and vaccines and stuff, should I discount that too? Oh, what to do.

Of course one might conclude that this is not a black and white, this side and that side, kind of issue. Only an idiot would conclude that taking supplemental vitamins requires abandoning medicine.
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What, your dermatologist didn't recommend getting your vitamin D from sunshine? Oh yeah, I was forgetting. It causes cancer.
 
bruto said:
Interestingly, i just got back from a visit to the allopathic mainstream dermatologist (just checking on a couple of things, all just fine), and among other things, he, like just about every other mainstream doctor I've met in recent years, recommended supplemental vitiamin D, and suggested E too. Now there's a dilemma. If it was recommended by the same doctor who recommends conventional medicine and vaccines and stuff, should I discount that too? Oh, what to do.

Of course one might conclude that this is not a black and white, this side and that side, kind of issue. Only an idiot would conclude that taking supplemental vitamins requires abandoning medicine.
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What's the dilemma? Do both or do none and get to a nude beach, that will take care of 1.
 
Caroline13 said:
Everything I talk about is about my body and my health and so I post info that is published out there to back some of it up the experts who thankfully help to save a lot of people from sickness and deaths....

I've done my share of pharma drugs and surgery and living to regret and remember the trip to the ER from a drug...:rolleyes:

And my daughter's hospital ICU's from all the damage at the hands of a pharma drug pusher, legal, drug pusher... she paid....

Why even mention this all, but it helps me get out my anger...
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"Everything I talk about is about my body and my health" - proceeds to talk about her daughter's body and health. :)
 
Caroline13 said:
What's the dilemma? Do both or do none and get to a nude beach, that will take care of 1.
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Yeah, 'cause that extra surface area from my butt and my junk is going to make all the difference between super-health levels of vitamin D and being vitamin D deficient. What am I, Milton Berle?
 
Caroline13 said:
What's the dilemma? Do both or do none and get to a nude beach, that will take care of 1.
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Well, since the guy is a dermatologist who believes in reality, he would not likely recommend getting your D at a nude beach, because on the rare days when it's possible to do so in Vermont without freezing to death, there is a danger of skin cancer, and sunscreen blocks vitamin D.

It is true that in Vermont, unlike most other places, there is no law against public nudity. There is, for example, a famous nude bicycle race in the capital* every year. And as long as I don't disrobe in public I can legally go out and about with nothing on at all. A few years ago our then governor got quite a laugh from the news media when he thought, one night, that there was a bear at his bird feeder, and the rest of the state discovered that he slept in the nude.

But if you want a healthy amount of vitamin D hereabouts, it's probably better to put your pants on and take a pill.

*The town famously nicknamed "Montpeculiar" by columnist Peter Freyne, and, coincidentally, the only state capital that has no McDonald's restaurant.
 
Caroline13 said:
Maybe OPEN SOME MINDS...I know that's a big thought.
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It'd be nice if yours actually was an open mind. You've demonstrated that it isn't, repeatedly, though. Unfortunate.

jond said:
This from the poster who proudly proclaimed that her mind is not open to the possibility that she is wrong... As ever, when someone asks you to keep an open mind, they really mean "uncritically accept what I'm saying."
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As ever, I reject this. I think that requests to keep an open mind are very often done honestly and properly. However, in the more limited context of conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, and the like, you're largely correct.
 
Here's the thing about open minds. A lot of people think it means something that it doesn't mean.

People who practice a skeptical mindset are always open to the possibility that they might be wrong. Always. It's a fundamental part of skeptical philosophy - to self-reflect and examine our own biases, and to change our opinions when given sufficient reason to do so. It's absolutely baseline 101. If you are interested in skepticism, this is the first thing you need to know.

People who say to skeptics "you should have an open mind" almost never do this. They never consider the possibility that they might be wrong. Maybe they have what they believe to be a good reason to think they might be right. Maybe they're just stubborn. But whatever the reason, the idea that they might be wrong is never seriously considered.

And here's where it gets tricky. Most of the things that people say "you should have an open mind" to skeptics about are things that have already been seriously considered and rejected, usually a long time ago. This looks like dismissal. This looks like the skeptic is not open to the possibility that they are wrong. But that's not what's happening. Almost everything that people challenge skeptics with are things that we (collectively as skeptics) have been open minded about, seriously considered, and rejected on the basis of logic and plausibility. And the ones that aren't are the ones that are just patently ridiculous or are clearly the product of mental illness.

We don't need to seriously consider the possibility of ESP, because ESP has been seriously studied for decades and no-one has come up with anything substantial. So skeptics don't need to "keep an open mind" about ESP. We've already done that and the hypothesis was rejected.

We see the same thing with creationism. "But what if you're wrong?" Yeah, we've considered the idea that we may be wrong about creationism, decades ago, and the overwhelming evidence in favour of evolution and the complete lack of evidence in favour of creationism is sufficient to draw a conclusion that we can be pretty sure is reliable.

For homeopathy in particular it's even worse. Not only is there no good evidence that it works, there's plenty of good evidence that it doesn't work, and furthermore there is a lack of any plausible mechanism for how it might work. Any proposed mechanism would require the laws of chemistry and physics as we know them to be fundamentally incorrect, and we are pretty sure that they aren't. We've considered it. We've looked into it, we've studied it, and we've determined that it is not real. We could continue to do so (and there are indeed some who do) but for the rest of us, there's really no need to rehash old ground. It's been done before.

If this looks to you like we're not being open-minded, then all I can say is that it isn't that. It isn't that at all. It's us having already been open-minded, having already studied and examined, and having drawn a conclusion based on logic, reason, and evidence.
 
arthwollipot said:
We see the same thing with creationism. "But what if you're wrong?" Yeah, we've considered the idea that we may be wrong about creationism, decades ago, and the overwhelming evidence in favour of evolution and the complete lack of evidence in favour of creationism is sufficient to draw a conclusion that we can be pretty sure is reliable.
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Good explanation, arthwollipot. I'm quoting this bit just to add something to it. Back in the days when I was seriously examining the case for Christianity, I came across creationist arguments en masse, which I duly examined. One of my general conclusions after doing so was that the ubiquitous presence of fundamental dishonesty, ignorance, and fallacies in the arguments served as actual evidence against believing in creationism, on a different line than the lack of valid evidence for it and overwhelming evidence for the theories that actually had earned a scientific consensus favoring them the hard way.

The anti-vax movement is little better than creationism, at last check, though it does have a slightly better bedrock to rest upon, given that vaccines are not 100% safe, even if they reduce the total damage done to a population immensely.
 
Aridas said:
The anti-vax movement is little better than creationism, at last check, though it does have a slightly better bedrock to rest upon, given that vaccines are not 100% safe, even if they reduce the total damage done to a population immensely.
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Most people have very poor risk evaluation skills.
 
Aridas said:
It'd be nice if yours actually was an open mind. You've demonstrated that it isn't, repeatedly, though. Unfortunate.
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Something I've noticed about people who lack critical thinking skills is that their willingness to accept a claim seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of actual objective evidence for it. My late brother-in-law was like that - proudly telling me he didn't believe in evolution or in a link between smoking and cancer, whilst simultaneously trying to convince me that there were aliens living among us and that the world would end in 1999 because Nostradamus said so.

So unquestioningly accepting the unevidenced claims of the cranks she quotes is having an open mind, whilst carefully evaluating and then accepting claims from experts for which there is loads of objective evidence (e.g. that vaccines are a huge net benefit to public health) is having a closed one.
 
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