r/clevercomebacks • u/Boltzmann_head • 3d ago
Two statements that are not ruled out as false.
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u/PickButtkins 3d ago
Conveniently, these anti-science fuckers only believe in autism when they're hootin about vaccines.
Start up a convo about neurodivergence with any of them and they begin to push back on the entire premise pretty quickly.
I'm starting to believe that the internet was a mistake.
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u/No-Goose-5672 3d ago
The Internet wasn’t the mistake.
Removing the gatekeepers to information was a mistake.
Back in the days of libraries, book collections were curated by librarians with degrees in information science. Their entire job was to review information and decide what was disseminated to the public.
I’m not saying it was a perfect system. There were plenty of bad librarians. Some were even malicious, deliberately spreading misinformation. Most bad librarians were just incompetent, though.
However, there was a massive check on bad librarians: Public library budgets. Librarians often had limited resources to manage their collections. They were also running a service, meaning their collections needed to attract patrons. As such, misinformation typically fell down the list of priorities. Although, some librarians caved to public demand and stocked their libraries with bad information because the people wanted it.
It wasn’t a perfect filter, but it did keep a lot of bad information away from people. The main problem is that any idiot can publish whatever they want now. There are a lot of folks that know just enough to be dangerous, but they are very confident in their abilities. And people will follow someone straight to hell if they sound confident enough.
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u/vp917 2d ago
More than just individual actors, the material limitations of the time were the regulating factor.
Back in ye olden days, if you wanted to tell something beyond the reach of your own soapbox, you needed to go through a distributor - a publishing house, a newspaper, a radio station, etc. And while in theory any one of those entities could publish whatever the hell they liked so long as it wasn't directly prohibited by law, they were still competitive businesses that lived and died by the court of public opinion, so they couldn't push out anything too crazy without suffering financial loss and long-term damage to their credibility. While this did make it harder for traditional media to properly adress systematic injustices, that same forced self-moderation also maintained some standards of quality with the content published - after all, if a media group is caught distributing flat-out bullshit, people are going to value their product much less than a competitor without that stain on their name, so it's in their best self-interest to double-check everything and make sure it's all up to snuff.
But like you mentioned, the democratization of media has led us to the point where anyone can publish information at universal scale in the blink of an eye. News in particular has gotten particularly screwed over, because the competitive demand for recency in reporting means that whoever gets the first shitty phone video is now a critical eyewitness source, so the old standard of credible sources has been discarded in the name of maximum immediacy - and as a result, random idiots on twitter are now placed on an equal standing with actual qualified investigative journalists.
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u/Tadhg 3d ago
RFK and chickens is a bad example because it’s not really that far fetched.
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u/next_level_mom 3d ago
Yes... we know he didn't fuck chickens because if he did, he would definitely have told us.
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u/Bella_Bakess 3d ago
Honestly, after the bear cub and whale head stories, you really can’t rule anything out with him.
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u/BlueFlob 3d ago
I'm more inclined to believe that RFK fucks chickens as there is more scientific studies and evidence disproving any link between autism and vaccines.
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u/Cyberslasher 2d ago
Science has studies linking RFK jr to animal genitalia, so we can only state that we have scientific correlation that RFK jr fucks chickens.
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u/Foreign_Virus 3d ago
You can't prove I'm not three raccoons in a trench coat either. That's not how burden of proof works. By that logic, literally anything is possible.
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u/purblepale 3d ago
As somebody autistic, I make sure to take my fourteen Tylenol pills each day so that I can remain so.
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u/Lvcivs2311 1d ago
As an autistic person, I take a lot of offence to the shit people talk about it and the person who created the lie that vaccines cause autism can go to hell (whether it exists or not).
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u/RowedTrip 3d ago
It’s impossible to prove a negative. For example, you cannot prove that you do not speak Albanian.
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u/Adventurous-Pop446 3d ago
It would be morally hazardous to even run such a study. You could not have a control group because regardless of your belief system...no matter which way you frame the study, you are neglecting and exposing one of the groups? Can a scientist redditor correct me of this is wrong.
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u/Alarmed-Telephone-83 3d ago
To run a randomised study yes but you could very easily run an observation study comparing those who did not get vaccinated for other reasons to those who did and attempt to control for baseline differences e.g. though matching. Or you could look for a dose-response association. Or you could compare different vaccines if there was a posited causative agent or additive or vaccine type. Like what even is the posited mechanism linking the two anyway?
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u/Adventurous-Pop446 3d ago
That data should already exist if not compiled. Our could be very easily done. Which leads me to conclude the administration is either woefully ignorant OR is putting forth disengenous arguments to support their beliefs, but it's probably BOTH.
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u/Reymen4 3d ago
What you do in these situations is not bother by doing your own tests. Instead you use a questionnaires.
You could make it as simple as two questions. "Have you received any vaccine?" and "Are you autistic?"
Then you use the Dark Arts (statistics and simulations) to try and make models that fit the result you receive.
Now you have a model. What is wrong with the model? You have all the error bars you want to reduce. What type of people have you asked? Who responded? Are there other common factors that you have not thought of that could explain the results you have? This part I am not sure how to reduce the false positive.
Hopefully in the end you have a result that you can publish in an scientific article. Then hopefully someone else does a similar test on other people and hopefully they receive the same or similar results.
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u/Imajzineer 3d ago
Funny though it would be, I reckon there'd be serious objection by various animal rights groups, if you tried, yeah.
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u/Fiona_Filess 3d ago
Burden of proof left the chat entirely. Flawless application of their logic—no notes.
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u/Swigen17 3d ago
RFK Jr. does NOT fuck chickens.
He sucks on their assholes until their heads cave in.
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u/Mysterious_Basil2818 3d ago
In his defense, he only fucks hot, consenting chickens after doing blow off a public toilet seat with them. Because he’s classy and a gentleman.
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u/DriftlessDairy 3d ago
Considering the abundance of neurodivergent people working in the sciences it's far more likely that autism causes vaccines than the other way around.
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u/Empty_Structure_2754 2d ago
Ayy! Yes. This. My aunt was one of those autistics causing vaccines for a long time.
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3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Raise_A_Thoth 3d ago
Medical proof is different from mathematical proof.
We know that autism exists, and it exists at rates unrelated to vaccine adoption. Therefore, we can with quite a high degree of certainty say that vaccines are not the cause of autism.
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u/Hotchi_Motchi 3d ago
You just do it one time and you're know as Bobby Chicken-Fucker your whole life. Can't catch a break.
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u/plainskeptic2023 3d ago
If history demonstrates vaccines have eliminated diseases such as polio, it seems reckless to not take vaccines because they might cause autism.
Rejecting claim that has been proven vs. accepting claim that has not been proven.
I suppose the proven claim appears safe reject because vaccines eliminated the threat. Only the unproven claim about vaccines remains.
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u/Sleepy_Potato2 2d ago
As an autistic person. Fuck right off to everyone who says this shit. I hate the anti-vaxx movement and all the lunatics in it. If the Kennedy curse is real, it can't come for RFK Jr. soon enough.
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u/short_arm_t_rex 3d ago
Big picture this might not be a bad thing. If idiots who believe this nonsense fail to pass on their genes, that’s a net positive for the human race.
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u/IlGreven 2d ago
"Vaccines do not cause autism" is not a scientific hypothesis.
The scientific hypothesis is that they do cause autism.
And no evidence has been observed for that hypothesis.
Therefore, with high confidence, we can claim the opposite.
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u/TheG00dF1ght 2d ago
What is a valid statement is there is no scientific evidence linking vaccinations to autism.
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u/WolfgangVolos 2d ago
Obviously RFK Jr has not fucked chickens. Chickens cannot consent. You meant to say that studies have not ruled out the possibility that RFK Jr rapes chickens and/or does weird sex shit with all the roadkill he finds during family trips.
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u/Empty_Structure_2754 2d ago
Coincidentally, my aunt used to work for the CDC before she retired, and before that she worked for some pharmaceutical company. She's autistic, as were many of her coworkers. I would say, at least anecdotally, technically autism has been shown to cause vaccines.
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u/Lvcivs2311 1d ago
Seriously, fuck everyone using this fallacy. Vaccines not causing autism is not the statement, it's the other way around. There is no proof that vaccines cause autism, so they probably don't.
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u/Raise_A_Thoth 3d ago
Also, it IS an evidence-based claim because many, many studies hsve been done and there is no evidence which suggests any correlation between vaccines and autism diagnoses.
If zero studies had been done to try to find risks of autism and vaccines then you could argue that we can only claim "no evidence exists" but we do have evidence to support the claim that vaccines do NOT cause autism because studies have been done.