It shows how information gets distorted from research, through op-eds, newspaper articles, and ulimately to the facebook entiries of the lay public reading these articles.

It gives an example where the research is about the effect of toxins on neurodeveolpment – in which no conclusion is reached except that more research should be done on ten most likely suspects – and ends with the public reading a newspaper article on that research, titled “Top 10 Chemicals Most Likely to Cause Autism and Learning Disabilities”, and concluding that vaccines causes autism in their facebook commentary.

The Somalis in Minnesota are an interesting case. I live in the Twin Cities, and I see Somalis every day. We have a disproportionately large Somali population compared to other states. They are a refugee immigrant population, which in and of itself is going to increase the rate of undervaccination simply because of the inherent challenges facing a refugee immigrating to a strange (and cold!) land where they don’t yet speak the language. Like all large immigrant groups, they tend to congregate, for fairly obvious reasons — it’s nice to have somebody to talk to who understands you. When they first came over, they were not generally opposed to vaccination. Nor to education; in fact, Somalis historically are in favor of universal education, including of girls, and historically have had a very high literacy rate compared to neighboring countries, and prior to the collapse of their government and the explosion of civil war, sent a lot of young people to higher education, in Mogadishu and abroad. Today, a lot of them are attending the University of Minnesota.

So what happened? Well, Andrew Wakefield happened. The timing was spectacularly bad — Somali parents were just coming to grips with the concept of autism (education is revered in Somalia, but mental health care is less than primitive; the mentally ill or developmentally delayed are shunned there) and expressing shock when public school early education screening programs revealed likely problems. (Our public schools screen all children by age 4, preferably 3, to see if they qualify for early intervention, and they will do full-up autism screenings. It is not considered a diagnosis, and they encourage seeking a psychologist for a real diagnosis, but it’s a major boon to those who cannot afford that sort of screening.) So here they were, in a strange land, homesick, and being told their child has autism.

Then Andrew Wakefield showed up. I don’t recall which of the vaccines-cause-autism groups had arranged his lecture, but he went to one of the major Somali community centers and gave a lecture telling all of these parents how qualified he was and about his research showing that the MMR vaccine causes autism. The results were predictable. It didn’t take long for a backlash; there are already Somali parents furious with him because they trusted his stated credentials, believed his story, didn’t vaccinate their children, and then had to sit in the hospital while the kids recovered from the measles. They were lied to, and many of them recognize it. But it will take a while for the damage to be undone.

Critical thinking should not be taught as a weapon. Its value is not in being able to destroy a target idea. The point is to be able to weigh competing ideas, including taking a stab at weighing hypothetical ideas that we haven’t even had yet (“is this an X, a Y, or something we haven’t even thought of yet?”), and a sense of intellectual “fairness” is absolutely vital to the process. No sacred cows and all that. Unfortunately, it’s often the case that when people develop a bit of sophistication they turn their critical faculties on only the things that they’re predisposed to disagree with.

“How can you be good without God?” is a great example. The claim is that an atheist has no reason to think that there is such a thing as a moral fact, or at least that an atheist couldn’t discern a moral fact, and therefore those who are committed to moral facts should prefer theism. The first half of that is an interesting and not obviously wrong claim (well, it’d be interesting if it weren’t thousands of years old). But we’ve recognized since the Euthyphro that, really, the theist has no better reason, and so we know that the “therefore” is completely unjustified. That this so often goes completely unrecognized is a failure to think critically (or to have even a basic familiarity with the history of philosophy of religion).

I’m not sure how you’d go about teaching critical thinking other than by having students debate, with an instructor stepping in to moderate and critique. Students /have/ to have their own ideas challenged and set up as being the same sort of thing as the ideas that they disagree with. Students should be confronted with undeniable examples of their own wrongness, and they have to be made to understand why they were wrong. This could be coupled or introduced with teaching about cognitive biases – set up situations where cognitive biases will often cause students to reach the wrong answer and then pull back the curtain and /show/ them that they were wrong. Probably doing that well would take many semesters, though I think it’s valuable enough to be worthwhile. Unfortunately it’s also going to be very hard to test and see if students are learning well and then if what they’re learning is valuable.

Well learning critical thinking skills certainly is no guarantee that one will think actually think critically, but it would at least give a person access to the tools to do so. I think this issue is relevant to education in general in that a person may feel more confident that their opinion on a topic is more informed than it really is just based upon that education.

I think the key in the case of the person with the “entrenched misconception” is that the learned critical thinking skills must also be applied inwards. Perhaps that is an important lesson for teaching such a class… not to just give examples of errors in other people’s arguments, but to force people to look within for errors in thinking. But after such a class is over, each individual must value intellectual integrity enough to continue to apply it to their lives. Realistically most will not, but some will and that is all you can hope for.

We had a couple we know go down the semi-anti-vax route after reading a quacky anti-vax book (something like what your doctors are not telling you about vaccines).

The wife was indeed the person motivated about the issue…happened to be some friend of her’s has an autistic child that “got the shot, then had terrible autism”.

Motivated reasoning indeed! The fallacy in the whole beginnings and fear she experienced that created the initial basis for what became a big series of “research” that consisted of cherry picking sources that confirmed the suspicion she had rooted in the anectdote.

Most discussion of pseudoscience in soooo many cases gets back around to discussion of anectdotes….and in her case her inability to be properly knowledgeable about the limitations of the anectdote was the root cause.

She eventually got around to asking me about it…then I quickly learned that she only wanted to validate all the reading, research, and poor decision making made to date. In 2 minutes I effectively invalidated the book…without knowing anything about the book, I asked her if the book cited compelling scientific research that would show evidence based concerns for thiomersal and/or MMR to cause autism….she replied that it did (although I guarantee she never read the references) – then I asked her for the book and very quickly found the like 12 pages on thiomersal and we looked at their references…a) it had like 3 in vitro weird study references and b) zero mention of the RCT’s related to MMR and thiomersal and not even an attempt in the book to address that research.

After pointing this out, then we had reliance on the anectdote.

She and his wife also seemed to think this a bit like pascal’s wager…the husband at one point downplayed the significance of getting a viral infection…..I pointed out some of the states pre and post various vaccinations and the sequelae of these….

Of course, the books and other mis-information, build such massive straw men that a loving caring and otherwise not sufficiently critical parent will think they are making the more prudent decision, and attempts to point out the fallacy in this are viewed as ideological rants from those that are not sufficiently critical (from their viewpoint).

I offered her to read Paul Offit’s book as giving due diligence to both sides of the argument…seems like a reasonable request for a concerned parent to compare the reason, logic, and evidence…but again, it seemed that motivated reasoning won the day..

She did end up getting some modified series of vaccinations that the book recommended….bunch of horse shit.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/05/10/somalis-autism/

From the article:

“Somali parents of children with autism and the Minnesota Department of Health are at a standoff over vaccines. The parents suspect vaccines have caused autism in their children, while the Health Department says there’s no evidence of a link. … Measles was once almost wiped out in Minnesota, but so far this year 23 cases have been reported — a third of them among Somalis.”

I don’t know education rates among the Somali population. But I do know the state has one of the widest “achievement gaps” between white students and minority students (a major concern among educators in the state) and that it is plausible that an immigrant community would have lower education rates than established populations. So it’s, again, plausible that the Somali community has lower education rates than the population at large.

The 32,000 Somalis in Minnesota accounted for just .6 percent of the state’s 5.3 million people in 2011. Yet they made up a third of the measles cases that year. So we’ve got a population that appears to be going against the trend of more education=greater susceptibility to pseudoscience.

*My* untested hypothesis would be that humanity as a whole has a fixed level of gullibility. Development of critical thinking skills may reduce that gullibility, but bad education isn’t going to make it much worse — because it’s already so bad. Any relationship we see between belief in a particular pseudoscience and education has more to do with how that pseudoscience meshes with the existing ideology prevalent among that group.

In this case, anti-vaccination belief stuck among the educated crowd because it aligns so closely with other natural fallacy beliefs prevalent on college campuses. But it would be unlikely to stick among those who reject the natural fallacy — even if they embrace other pseudosciences, such as global warming denial.

For other pseudoscientific beliefs, you’d see the opposite. The point is that the underlying link is not education; it’s culture and ideology. Education in this case is just one variety of culture and ideology.

That’s why you see the Somali population embracing a pseudoscience despite what is likely a below average education among that population. There is a significant level of distrust toward the government — hence, they distrust the Health Department’s vaccine recommendations. Similarly, anti-vaxers reject vaccines not because of their education, but because they already have a bias against non-natural remedies.

@Sanctus. I agree. Particularly regarding the self doubt. I don’t think knowing whether teaching critical thinking helps people make more rational assessments on a daily basis will change it’s value to science. I think (without any evidence) that knowing which lessons help people incorporate critical thinking in their daily life and which don’t is the best chance we have to turn the tide of human ignorance.

Are the more-educated non-vaccinators tilted towards being a “pocket” member (via proximity or communication), drawing from independent conclusions/research, or do they have no special tendency in that way?

What is the actual range of education involved? (e.g., what level of education above average makes someone 50% more likely not to vaccinate)

If post-hoc rationalization plays a part, that doesn’t explain the acquisition of the belief. But supposing it is involved (and established evidence of intelligent rationalizers suggests it might), I would suppose that it would have to go something like a certain % of all people believe the rumors, but only those with rationalizing skills are confident enough to refuse vaccines in the presence of a doctor. That leaves the rather sad question: Are there parents vaccinating their kids while simultaneously suffering under a fearful belief?

Depending on the strength and range of the education/refusal correlation, is the jump from education to intelligence reasonable here? I recall (recklessly not researching here) there being a general correlation between intelligence and education level, but I thought it was inconsistent.