Why do people believe in things when the body of scientific evidence shows otherwise

[technodad]

This is not intended to be an attack on any denomination of belief. The aim of this thread is to try to understand why people choose to believe things, when there are far more likely explanations and why people choose to not trust the scientific opinion.

I am not particularly thinking about a discussion about religion because clearly "faith", some old books and preaching make a difference there (although, please discuss religion if it is relevant). I am thinking more about things like:

• People don't believe global is happening when the vast majority of the scientific community can provide evidence that it is.

• People believe in ghosts when their existance violates all the laws of physics and pretty much all "ghost events" (if not absolutely all) can be explained without mystery.

• People don't get their kids vaccinated (e.g. MMR), when it is clear that not vaccinating is orders of magnitude more dangerous than vaccinating.

• People think that palm reading, tea leaf reading, etc actually works...

• People believe in "alternative" medicines work, when every "alternative" medicine that actually works is now simple called "medicine"!

The rules are as follows:

1. You can say what ever you like, and I don't care if you insult me.

2. If you post something, you may have someone say something that challenges your deeply held beliefs, so please only post if this is acceptable to you.

3. No one is allowed to complain about anyone being horrible, or arrogant, based upon the fact that people will only post here if they are up for a debate (see 2).

4. There is no 4.

re the meds, some of it is anti-establishment, being part of a group (all anti vax), or sometimes experience of trad meds letting them down

in general, scientific ignorance enables a lot of beliefs to be held imo

We can all interpret scientific evidence in different ways.

the placebo effect is real though, so why not 'believe' in homeopathy if it works via placebo effect?

As I and other people pointed out earlier vaccination really is a different subject than the rest.

the body of evidence that is released generally may be one way but is that because that's how it is, that's the only research that is currently getting funding, or the evidence to the contrary isn't made available. There are just so many vested interests on both sides.

Why is homotherapy it clearly bollox? and actually does it matter if it is if people get relief from it? Might it be that we simply don't know how or why it works yet?

Your comment about the individual scientist vs science itself is inherently troubling. The cannings case in particular did represent scientific "knowledge of the time", not just one rough scientist. in both the cases where science has demonstrably got it wrong you have tried to minimise the error by blaming a rogue scientist

Female contraception is another area where the representatives of science (doctors) give out knowledge as fact, it doesn't fit with womans experience and scientific "fact" is later changed

I remember an tv documentary on the placebo affect and alzheimers. turned out the placebo stimulated (electrical connections) an area of the brain that helped ease some of the effects of of the disease. and we believed it was just a placebo, go figure

Sorry that was not precise enough, the emotions (still the wrong word) in hoping the thing worked was what stimulated the brain area

techno - re "I agree with your game theory assessment. Problem is, that the statistics change based upon the number of people who "play"."

Statistics don't change. What changes is the risk/reward profile of one's choice to vaccinate.

"If everyone vaccinated, then you are safe... If no one vaccinated, you are at risk and so need to vaccinate. It is a bit of a paradox really."

That is not a problem, nor is it a paradox. That is an elementary rule of the Game, which is of course factored into the analysis.

Here is a game theory analysis of vaccination choices. It is not an easy read, but the conclusion is plain enough:For any perceived relative risk r > 0, the expected vaccine uptake is less than the eradication threshold, i.e., P < p crit (Fig. 1). This finding formalizes an argument that has previously been made qualitatively (8, 14); namely, it is impossible to eradicate a disease through voluntary vaccination when individuals act according to their own interests. In situations where vaccination is perceived to be more risky than contracting the disease (r > 1), one would expect, even without the aid of a model, that no parents would vaccinate their children.*

"I take the risk with my DC, because it is better overall for society that I do. I am not selfish."

There is no definition of "selfish" that would apply to protecting one's baby and doing what is in her best interest. I am bolding this because it is an important point that often gets lost in vaccination debates. It is normal for parents to do what is in their baby's best interest, and it is normal for that to be more important for a parent than common good. You have no problem doing what is for the good of society because you perceive risk for your child to be zero. (Possibly because you think Risk = Probability and/or are not familiar with the severity of possible outcomes)

The problem in vaccination debates is that parents and the state have different goals that are in conflict, at least in part - parents want to do what is best for their child and state considers additional parameters like limiting spread of disease and financial considerations like NHS expenses and man hours lost when parents stay at home to look after a sick child for two weeks. For the parent, a permanently vaccine-damaged child is an unacceptably horrible outcome, the Risk of which can be considerable even where its Probability is very low. For the state, the cost of a handful of vaccine-damaged children can be acceptable or even insignificant when compared to the cost on NHS & the economy of unchecked spread of these diseases.

"High risk groups are defined to doctors. If your DC is in a high risk group, you will know."

Defined how? There is no such definition and nobody knows which child is high-risk until they react. Or if one of their siblings gets vaccine-damaged. Many people on here with vaccine damage in the family have been searching high and low for such a definition, to see if other children can be vaccinated. Their doctors cannot give them clear answers, because the necessary research is just not done yet.

For example, it looks like children with mitochondrial disorders are high-risk for vaccines. If true, and if one day a DNA test for this condition is done before children are offered vaccines, then you can say doctors know who is high-risk and berate people who don't vaccinate their children outside this group as unscientific on a similar level to homeopathy fans.

Scientific evidence isn't just one body or monolith, but thousands of unfinished bodies that are made - and often bent - by people and their interpretation of observations. No individual could know all of it - we likely all hold beliefs against current evidence - and any new knowledge still needs to be balanced against other types of knowledge. It still has to be critically assessed no matter whether or not it's been put under the label of 'science' and some things are likely never to be show to a sufficient enough extent.

Science isn't an unbiased source of knowledge, it has always been part of the wider systems of society that has been used to control wider public thought. We still have studies getting funding and public press to give 'scientific reasons' for the discrepancies between people of different races, different sexes and genders, even socio-economic groups (which completely ignore history and social knowledge of modern power dynamics and try to prove that modern issues have genetic basis). We still have people trying trying to show that genetically White women are the most attractive and that some groups are genetically predisposed to being criminals - disgusting as they are, they're still science no matter how much other people try to handwave them away as individual scientists (when they get the backing, funding, and awarded by the community, it's hard just to blame one person or one team). Science, and especially the media's explanations of scientific findings, cannot be absorbed uncritically as correct just because that is what "bodies of scientific studies show". What gets studies, how it's studies, how it gets reported, and so on and so forth all have biases. How many studies on the issues of WOHM vs SAHMs are there, do we really think they are for the benefit families or are they more about social control?

Right now there is a study being discussed on the news about poor women having high breast cancer death rates, and they're banging on about poor women not knowing symptoms and not going to the GP (so their fault), nothing discussing how stress factors of poverty and systematic oppression (which have not only been connected to cancer but also to mistreatment by GPs) or access to resources or anything that might require society of healthcare to change. Who does this report really benefit, educating or making other people feel better that that would never happen to them? (because none of the reports I've seen have shown the symptoms or what women should look out for at all).

There is also the major problem that science education is severely lacking, and the education system as a whole has massive problems because having an undereducated mass workforce has benefits in our current society to those at the top. It doesn't bother them if they die or believe in divisive stories, in fact it is to their benefit that people remain undereducated, even if they die from it. And really, I'm not sure even critical advocates like myself really care if people believe in ghosts, UFOs, or divination.

Science doesn't have all the answers. It may hold answers to the physical laws of the universe and of course as humans we are very limited by our understanding and intelligence so therefore even scientific evidence does not necessarily prove something is true but more that it fits our understanding of it. There are spiritual laws as well as physical laws and science is not necessarily able to explain those. For those who can only exist within the scientific meaning of life they will be limited in understanding and quite dismissive of anything which can not be proved which is fine but its the arrogance that tends to accompany such beliefs that I find as distasteful as somneone who feels pity for those who don't have God in their life.

Spiritual laws? Can you explain more?

I could bore you for a long time as to why acupuncture is not best tested using the current system of Randomised Control Trials. RCTs are great for testing straightforward medicines, and hence can discredit homeopathy, as it is very easy to set up a good trial to compare homeopathic treatment to a placebo.

Setting up a decent acupuncture trial is fraught with difficulties.
The main problems include poor quality of acupuncture/length of treatment/number of treatments/types of treatments/lack of adjunct treatments allowed to be used/dietary advice which is integral to acupuncture not being given./often each treatment is the same for each patient at each treatment. This never happens it changes person to person treatment to treatment.

Also there is No decent placebo, often the placebo includes inserting a needle into the body but not at the same point. This still has a physiological response. As the actual physiological responses to acupuncture are not understood how can we work out which are placebo and which ones acupuncture. In fact often non acupuncture points are used by acupuncturist as local points.

Modern science is amazing but to accept it as the holy grail and not to question The motives of the pharmaceutical companies who now run the vast majority of research and their cherry picking, figure massaging ways is naive.

yes the problem with 'science' is that certain people treat it just as another religion, yet an infallible one.
For example I remember someone telling me that it had been 'scientifically proven' that black people had smaller brains than white people?
My questions 'by whom?' 'how?' and 'with what agenda/motivation?' were of course dismissed ......after all you cannot argue with 'science' right?

Even though I agree in principle I think you picked some terrible examples to support your case this time.

Take Global Warming for example. It is probably happening, but I don't know how much or exactly why, because some people were so sure they were right they decided to save time by making stuff up. As far as I can tell both sides made stuff up. Then we got politicians picking a side and declaring it to be true and the media misreporting what everyone supposedly said.

Now unless I spend 20 years becoming an expert I can't tell which is real and which is exaggerated. I expect as time passes there will be clearer evidence, but in the meantime I'm not going to pick a side based on faith.

Others have pointed out the flaws in the MMR argument better than I could. Again emotion and politics have muddied the water so I don't have reliable information to base a decision on.

I hear people say things like "oh now they have proved that Andrew Wakefield was just lying" and I think who told you that?

I remember he had a hypothesis (which can by definition turn out to be incorrect) and I remember the fury and vilification. It would be interesting to know if anyone genuinely tested that hypothesis, but I seriously doubt anyone could have got funded to do so in that climate - maybe once things settled a bit they did, but I can't be sure now as it's still a contentious issue.

So once again, science - which all rational people should base decisions on - is filtered through emotion and political bias and I have to mark all MMR 'facts' as 'uncertain'.

It's frustrating. But still better than navigating through life using faith as a compass.

When I read your post Techno, I was reminded of a conversation between my gran and my uncle some time in the early 80s. Gran told him to put on a coat and take an umbrella with him or "you'll catch a cold". My uncle said that The Cold was a virus and not something that happened because a person was cold.

It has since been shown that being cold
contributes to the risk of catching cold. My gran didn't need science to validate what she knew to be true from experience.

Techno, do you think that people should not do or share what they know works from experience, unless it has scientific validation behind it?

the problem with pure experience is it can create a false link. If the stakes are low, i.e. a cold I don't suppose it matters too much if the pattern is correct or not but when they're high the results can be devastating, such as not seeking medical help for your very sick child because you've heard/believed you've seen god healing people.

And the probkem with pure science us that it is nowhere close to having all the answers. Fortunately the vast majority of people are not purists and manage to combine all that they know in a way that is sensible and works for them.

"There are spiritual laws as well as physical laws"

Like what?

"I remember someone telling me that it had been 'scientifically proven' that black people had smaller brains than white people?"

And you conclude that the entire science of Biology is at fault here?

Or could it be that your friend is a bigot who is parroting something he has overheard or read in a dubious rag?

I think you're very arrogant.

There are lots of alternative remedies proven to work through double blind testing - chamomile tea, raspberry leaf tea.

If you took time to actually SPEAK to real life people who have had their lives directly affected by something other (or even in conjunction with) modern medicine your opinion may change.

Milkhell, do you know the term for alternative medicine that has been proven to work?

Medicine

What has 'chamomile tea' or 'raspberry leaf tea' been proven to cure?. If you can say I can look it up, but if it has a tested use then it is no longer alternative.

Chamomile tea - anxiety

Raspberry leaf tea - shortening the second stage of labour

Wasn't raspberry leaf tea supposed to bring on labour? Several friends were drinking it by the jug from 39 weeks. It eventually "worked" when their babies arrived

Drinking a hot cup of fragrant tea calms me down, too, even though there is no camomile in my tea.

Thanks Milkhell.

The latest double blind test I could find reports that in tests Chamomile extract shortened second stage labour by an average of 9.59 minutes.

Okay not a lot, but I imagine that about 9.59 minutes before it was over you'd be wishing you'd had the course of Chamomile :)

Ok so that's a medicine. Not sure about in tea though. You might have to have it in tablet form to get enough of it.

Raspberry leaf tea. I found one that discovered a decrease in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) so that's another medicine in our arsenal.

So why are you still calling it alternative?

Oh and Willow bark extract helps with headaches, but we all knew that one.

Echinacea found to be efficacious against the common cold:

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6231190.stm

I have been recommended St. John's Wort by my GP;- he told me that trials had found it effective for mild depression.

I would argue that neither of these herbal medicines had become "just medicine", as you can't get them on prescription.

Some very good posts about science here; there was a thread recently about the paranormal, with loads of posters piling in with insightful comments like "of course ghosts don't exist, it's not science".

As if "science" was some monolithic, unchanging thing that was created in a vacuum. Scientific opinion and theory is changing all the time. In the 1930s my grandma was told to smoke Woodbines for her bronchitis by the doctors. At about the same time, women with mental issues had to undergo hysterectomies to cure their "hysteria".

Take everything with a pinch of salt and look at all available evidence, whether woo or "infallible science", I should.