It's fine to be skeptical, but far too many people turn it into blind contrarianism. Far too many people talk about the flu vaccine in terms of conspiracy theory, which is not productive for anyone.
>Far too many people talk about the flu vaccine in terms of conspiracy theory, which is not productive for anyone.
Well, it's productive if there's really a "conspiracy", right? Short of "blind contrarianism", there is certainly reason enough to be skeptical. At a minimum, public health officials have been putting forth an annual vaccine campaign PR effort that seems significantly overstated with regard to the true efficacy of flu vaccines, and this hasn't been bad for big pharma.
Now, we can say they were doing it for the right reasons, but we can't ignore the credibility gap they are creating.
More generally, I am not sure why we have a notion that anything that counters the mainstream version of events is automatically to be dubbed conspiracy theory in the dismissive sense. It's actually even weirder to encounter so much of that sort of attitude on a site called HackerNews, where there have been routine calls to keyboard arms over domestic surveillance and the like.
But, I've also noticed here an adherence to scientific dogma that borders on the religious at times. It creates blind spots and a certain overstated assuredness. Overall, it's hard to put into words, but it is very real.
Contrarianism and conspiracy theories are about how you think, not about what conclusions you reach. Sometimes they reach the correct conclusions by coincidence, but that doesn't make them good. Conspiracy theories aren't validated by the existence of conspiracies, any more than astrology is validated by your horoscope coming true on any given day.
Conspiracy theories are about faulty reasoning. In particular, they involve highly inconsistent evaluation of evidence, and rely heavily on post-hoc rationalization.
You say that "anything that counters the mainstream version of events is automatically to be dubbed conspiracy theory in the dismissive sense." That's simply not true. What's happening is that the only people who happen to be countering the mainstream version of events are doing so with conspiracy theories.
Show me some good arguments that counter the mainstream version of events and we can talk. Nobody has done so thus far.
When I talk about conspiracy theories, it's not because people are saying the flu vaccine is ineffective. It's because people are talking about crazy stuff like how vaccines have been pushed hard in the past decade because of a non-existent provision of the PATRIOT act.
