North and South Dakota have an awful lot in common; their demographics, socioeconomics and climate are virtually identical. Even their crime stats are the same, which is weird… because they have radically different justice systems.
One has the death penalty, one does not. Yet both get the same result. Clearly, capital punishment makes no difference in Dakota.
It’s one of the ways science tests its ideas: two groups, one difference. If the variable produces a different result then you’ve found the culprit… and if it doesn’t, you haven’t.
Either way, you’ve learned something important.
It’s how we know the MMR (Measles/Mumps/Rubella) vaccine does not cause autism: Japan stopped giving the shot in 1994 and two decades later their autism rates are as high as everyone else’s… and their measles fatalities are through the roof.
Americans blamed an ingredient within the vaccine, a preservative called Thimerosal, which they removed in 2001. Interestingly, Poland still uses the original formula yet neither country has seen any change in their autism rates. So it ain’t the formula, either.
Clearly, we haven’t yet figured out what causes autism but 20 years of hysteria over vaccinations has turned the world into a gigantic clinical trial. And the results are in:
Communities with high vaccination rates have low disease rates.
Communities with low vaccination rates have high disease rates.
It’s time we call off the experiment and start immunising our kids.
dave isles
agree wholeheartedly Jason… it is so important to table all of the evidence and see which hypotheses are consistent with the evidence and which are not.. human tendancy is to hang on to favoured hypotheses, even when they are shown to seriously flawed… how do we overcome this?
punters, journalists and scientists themselves are guilty… the dissident bods are usually ostracised, even when it is ‘obvious’ that the weight of evidence is on their side…
i am a geoscientist… heeeeellllppp!
regard, Dave Isles
Jason
Hey Dave, thanks for the comment. My guess is that most of us latch onto ideas that a) conveniently firm our pre-existing opinions – especially about ourselves – and b) give us certainty about the world, no matter how true or false. This might explain why we quibble over the evidence for climate change but happily declare war on two nations in order to destroy WMDs for which we had exactly ZERO evidence. There’s a lot to learn from studying the tricks and techniques of advertising, which effortlessly gets people to embrace (and next week reject) any idea by coaching the nonsense in a form that redirects our behaviour while making us feel good about ourselves and the world. I’ve seen the same tricks used for good as well as evil, for smart as well as stupid. There’s plenty of great textbooks on this sort of trickery but unfortunately, very few people outside of the ad-biz have read a single one of them. That’d be my first step.
dave isles
tks Jason.. can you recommend one of the books.. short/simple ‘for dummies’ is probably best.
cheers, Dave I