Dr Kurland echoes a long-standing concern of mine. Using bad or false information in an argument does two things. You lose the argument and you look like an idiot, thereby harming your own cause.
By Bob Kurland, PhD
“The most offensive is not their lying – one can always forgive lying – lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth – what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Most of you will recognize the title as a paraphrase of Mark Twain’s (or was it Disraeli’s?) aphorism about statistics. In this piece I’m using it to counter an internet falsehood about vaccines for the Wuhan flu. There are lots of reasons to choose not to be vaccinated, but let’s use the right ones if we’re not to look like fools. I don’t intend to be a Snopes (and wasn’t one of the original authors of that “fact-finding” blog caught out in lies?). However, in this instance I’m with the anti-vaxxers and want to preserve the force of their arguments by weeding out “misinformation.”
THE MISINFORMATION AND MY RESPONSE
Here’s the misinformation, which I came across in a message thread. It says liposomes used for covid-19 vaccines are magnetized and therefore cause damage if a vaccinated person undergoes an MRI. Here was my response:
MISINFORMATION IS BAD, ON THE RIGHT AND ON THE LEFT
Whatever one’s political leanings, one should seek to act on what is most likely to be true, not on pure conjecture. Misinformation about vaccines is as bad as misinformation about anthropic global warming. My good lady bemoans that the art of critical thinking is no longer taught at higher (or even lower) educational levels. When she was teaching history at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon), the required history course was a series of problems, big events in Western Civilization. Students were taught to question sources, the reasoning path from assumptions to conclusions, and ramifications. And I’ve always questioned prior work, and occasionally laid a brick in the building of science, by so doing. (And others have on work I’ve done.)
So here’s to critical thinking, no matter what the political or religious stance.
Here’s the misinformation, which I came across in a message thread. It says liposomes used for covid-19 vaccines are magnetized and therefore cause damage if a vaccinated person undergoes an MRI. Here was my response:
“As a quondam MRI physicist, supervised installation of 1st MRI at tertiary care rural hospital in 1985, prior to that, spent sabbatical semester at Cleveland Clinic teaching radiologists about MRI blacks and whites, I say that article is nonsense. Vaccine phospholipid vesicles are not paramagnetic or ferromagnetic/ferrimagnetic. There are lots of reasons to oppose vaccination; let’s not seem foolish by believing everything on the internet.”I believe the misinformation derives from the following two links: one, an article on use of paramagnetic iron oxide nano-particles to enhance vaccine effectiveness, published in 2014 (see here); the other, using as a springboard a conjecture about “magnetic hydrogels.”
MISINFORMATION IS BAD, ON THE RIGHT AND ON THE LEFT
Whatever one’s political leanings, one should seek to act on what is most likely to be true, not on pure conjecture. Misinformation about vaccines is as bad as misinformation about anthropic global warming. My good lady bemoans that the art of critical thinking is no longer taught at higher (or even lower) educational levels. When she was teaching history at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon), the required history course was a series of problems, big events in Western Civilization. Students were taught to question sources, the reasoning path from assumptions to conclusions, and ramifications. And I’ve always questioned prior work, and occasionally laid a brick in the building of science, by so doing. (And others have on work I’ve done.)
So here’s to critical thinking, no matter what the political or religious stance.
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