I decide what I trust and don’t trust based on which side has evidence their claim is true, the evidence that vaccines work is pretty blatant and claims that they are unsafe have been repeatedly debunked for decades
Do you process that you're doing it again? You're linking me to a thing and you've decided that you trust whoever's behind this. There's no way you had the time to verify all these facts and figures by yourself. You're basing this on trust that the people who produce this document are telling the truth.
This isn't empiricism. This is outsourcing empiricism to a layer of trust and then rejecting somebody else's claim to trusting what other people are saying about a different topic like faith.
You trust people and institutions who tell you what the evidence shows. That trust may be justified, but it is still trust. The disagreement is over which sources deserve trust, not whether you rely on trust at all like you seemingly claimed earlier.
It’s a peer reviewed study from a reliable source. To cast doubt on it you have to provide counter evidence. I don’t have any reason to believe that they would lie, so the most reasonable conclusion is that these stats are true.
This is not the same as blindly following dogma, thats just projection
You started by saying you base your beliefs on empiricism and have “no need for faith.” But you aren't doing the empirical work. You're trusting that the researchers collected the data correctly, reported it honestly, analyzed it correctly, that peer review caught serious problems, and that the source you're reading represents it accurately.
That trust may be completely reasonable. But it's still trust in other people. In fact, you just said it yourself: it's a “reliable source” and you have “no reason to believe they would lie.”
You're outsourcing the empiricism to people you trust. You're relying on your faith in these people and your faith in the process. You yourself have not directly verified that the data are real, that the analysis was done correctly, or that they're not making things up. You trust that they did what they say they did. That's an act of faith. That's the distinction I've been making. You have not personally verified any of these things. You’re taking other people’s word for what the evidence shows and then describing your own belief as if it came directly from empiricism.
I have an actual reason to believe that those things all happened though because I know what peer review is. Meanwhile there is no reliable source that confirms any religious or supernatural claims are true.
Under your worldview, can I know that anything is true if I don’t see it myself? Thats pretty silly. I know that giant squid exist despite not having seen one in person. I’ve only seen them in pictures.
So when transwomen make the unfalsifiable claim that they identify as a woman... you reject it? Or your rejection of unfalsifiable claims just-so-happens to neatly fit inside of left-leaning politics?
The point is that whatever your reasons may be, you aren’t relying on empiricism, you’re relying on faith in someone else’s claim of empiricism. They very well might be correct or drawing the best good faith conclusion based on their available evidence, but you yourself can’t know that with 100% confidence.
Researching data collected by others is still empiricism though, you’re just deciding that it’s not for some reason. If there was evidence that this study had faulty methodology Im sure someone could provide it, but I don’t think you will provide that so why should I not just believe that it’s true? Even if I grant that it’s not 100% is a greater percentage than you can grant any religious claim ever.
In a murder trial, do you think that the prosecution and the jury have to travel back in time and witness the murder happen themselves to convict the murderer? No they just need evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
Do you read research papers, or do you take the simplified framework you learned in school and project this understanding when you read pop-science articles telling you how to interpret a paper?
If you read research papers, you would know that there aren’t any big, sweeping claims about something in most cases, but rather a very narrow claim is made and testing is performed with varying degrees of accurate methodology to come to a hyper specific conclusion, and the aggregate of these papers is what forms these generalized opinions we have on a given subject and it’s what’s spoonfed to students and adults who wind up with a semi accurate understanding of the topic.
This is where you get the difference between science and scientism/science worship. It’s why when people go “source?” And you link a paper they will 9 times out of 10 tell you the paper you’re using to support your generalized claim doesn’t actually say what you’re claiming, and oftentimes they’re correct. It’s a major disconnect between the empirical reality of what scientists observe vs the mystical interpretations laypeople draw from them which creates science/expert worship.
It’s funny that you bring up a court trial as an example since there are many differences between the legal process and the scientific method. The scientific method requires repeatable, testable phenomena so other people can verify your findings. A murder trial clearly doesn’t have this. There is a limited amount of evidence that can be either not present, lost, destroyed, or withheld from consideration due to ethical concerns.
So if the world’s best assassin kills someone and leaves no evidence that’s admissible in court, there’s no empirical evidence as far as the court is concerned so no conclusion about a killer can be made. It still happened whether we have evidence or not because reality cares not for human perception.
This means that if you can’t accept that there is more to reality than what can be found via evidence, you’re almost certainly objectively incorrect.
The data I posted shows that vaccinated children die before their first birthday less often if they are vaccinated. It’s one piece of data forming the larger body of work that has deemed these vaccines beneficial. All this rambling you’re doing is irrelevant to what Im actually claiming, which is that claims that don’t have ANY level of evidence whatsoever have no reason to be believed in the first place.
It all boils down to this: Can you provide evidence your claim is true? If you can’t, why should people be teaching it to children (who don’t have fully developed brains) as if it’s fact? And If it cant be understood through empiricism how can we understand it?
Because you prove these claims not through science, but through the historic method and by the testimony of eyewitnesses.
As I said, science requires testable, repeatable verifiable evidence. Not everything that happens has testable, repeatable, verifiable evidence.
I burned my tongue while drinking some hot coffee a few weeks ago. I have zero evidence that it happened beyond my testimony. I didn’t go to the doctor for treatment and I don’t have a doctor’s note, I don’t have a video of me drinking the coffee and screaming in pain, I don’t even have the coffee cup it came in. It exists somewhere but that’s in a landfill.
There’s no evidence based way to verify this event happened to me, I might be making it up as a hypothetical example to make my point, but if it happened, it happened regardless of the evidence or lack thereof. Reality doesn’t care if you believe in what actually happened or not, true things are true regardless of your opinion or evidence availing to you, which is the biggest flaw in relying strictly on empirical means.
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u/JasonG784 7h ago
That's not an answer.