Sure, my neighbour Joe knows best

an article by Karoliina Knuuti for ELM Magazine Theme Issue: Adult Education and Megatrends 3/2019


In an age emphasising the freedom of the individual, from all the available information people select what supports their own prejudices. In the science community, this phenomenon is called cherry-picking. Picture: Unsplash.

An increasingly vocal section of Europeans believe in themselves or their neighbour more than they do researchers. Why does talking from experience outdo scientific knowledge?

First the good news: in Europe the faith of citizens in the scientist continues to be very good. We perhaps doubt politicians but not scientists.

Now the bad news: an increasingly vocal section of population throughout Europe believes more in their own experience or that of their neighbour than in experts or researched knowledge.

In discussing science, a split into different camps is evident. There are climate sceptics and vaccine critics. Creationists question the theory of evolution. Smear campaigns are being targeted at scientists, the aim of which is to eat into their credibility.

Stridency and confrontation reflect the current culture of discussion.

The rules of persuasion and assertion have changed

In his classic work, Rhetoric, Aristotle named three factors that form the foundation of all speech and persuasion. They are ethos, logos and pathos, in other words the credibility, reasoning and emotions of the speaker.

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A Historical Look At Vaccine Skepticism

a post by David Crotty for The Scholarly Kitchen blog

In New York, home to a recent measles outbreak, vaccines are at the forefront of many people’s minds as children begin the school year under new regulations eliminating most exceptions that allowed attendance at public and private schools by the unvaccinated. On the eve of Peer Review Week 2019, one can’t help but be reminded of the greatest failure of peer review in recent memory, the infamous Wakefield paper in the Lancet that has had such a long-running pernicious effect on public health.

Although the thoroughly disproven links between vaccines and autism remain prominent in the current rationale for vaccine skepticism, it’s worth noting that the phenomenon is nothing new, and in fact dates back to the 19th century (and in light of vaccine requirements, also worth acknowledging that George Washington mandated that the Continental Army be inoculated against smallpox even in the days before vaccines were invented, via a process called “variolation“). The Washington Post has put together an informative video series on vaccines, and the first chapter looks at the history of such skepticism.



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If you follow all the potential rabbit holes you will be on this post for quite a while but you will certainly know more about what people think of vaccination in the USA.
I wonder if it is the same in the UK. That is yet another rabbit hole and I am not going down it today. My name is Hazel, not Alice.

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