The Hitchhikers Guide to arguing on the Internet - Part 1

This Friday afternoon a video came up on my YouTube feed called "The Card Says Moops", always a sucker for a Seinfeld reference I gave it a watch.  What it turned out to be was part of a series on rhetorical techniques popular among the Alt-Right...and before I knew it I had finished the entire playlist.  I've linked to the video below. Watching it isn't necessary to understand this post but it is well done IMHO.

While I rarely show much interest in politics . This video provided a plausible explanation for a question I often ask myself when talking with vaccine critics: Why don't they argue with each other?

...and just to be clear by "critics" I'm not talking about everyone who has a less-than-grounded-in-reality view on vaccination (the MMR is the cause of autism, etc..) but rather the argumentative people who either inhabit a specific group of online communities or actively go out looking for said places to disagree with people who hold beliefs of a more science-based variety.  They post prolifically often scouring a message board for anyone with a contrary opinion on the subject of vaccines.

The Big Question

These people are quick to disagree with just about anyone on the subject of vaccines but are all but incapable of disagreeing with each other. Even when their positions are mutually exclusive.  Hence my big question:  Why exactly is that?

Some might be quick to claim that people who have a pro-science view of vaccines do the same thing. Such a position would be objectively false.  Perhaps we are more polite about disagreeing with each other than the population of crazytown is when disagreeing with us but anyone who's willing to go through even my own post history can see me disagree with other pro-vaccine folks.  Some of these exchanges show me displaying considerably less than Standard Canadian Politeness too.   I'd say that this also goes for most of the frequent pro-science posters I see on Disqus.

But no matter how much we agree with each other, it really isn't the same as the weird détente that exists between vaccine critics.  Seriously. How does person A - who believes that germs do not cause disease not just happily fight alongside person B who believes they do but never, ever ends up disagreeing on this subject?

I suppose one could tell themselves that vaccines are the "bigger problem"  However that would be a significant self-deception.   Overuse of antimicrobials is a real problem and if bacteria can't cause disease then these people who think antibiotics work should really be considered "merchants of death" as much as people who think vaccines do.

Similarly the person who believes in homeopathy is fundamentally at odds with the person who advocates vitamins over vaccines...and that's not even touching those with more..uh... elaborate fantasies such as CDC agents spying on them or hacking into their machines.

So how do we explain this?

Shillary and sockpuppetry are both possible explanations.  However I have strong reservations about jumping to the former.  In fact, I'd love to do a post demonstrating just how ridiculous paid comment posting in online communities is for pharmaceutical interests and only marginally useful to the vaccine critics...and the later doesn't eliminate the problem only reduces it.

This makes me think of a statement that really resonates with me.  It's attributed to William James, a philosopher and psychologist from the late 1800s  

To that end the video above puts forth a better explanation than either shills or sockpuppets.  Namely that these people believe whatever they have to believe to get where they want to be. (ideologically). 

Am I saying they don't believe in anything?  Not exactly.  This isn't true nihilism but a more focused  "professing beliefs is simply an means to an end" sort of ideology.   In short: These vaccine critics  know what they hate but not much else.

The attractive thing about this hypothesis is that it handily explains a LOT of behaviors which are problematic for rational folk:

• People who are critical of vaccines embrace ridiculously anti-science ideas -- germs don't cause illness
• They can then later make statements which imply the opposite -- my friend the microbiologist who works with incredibly deadly germs, agrees that vaccines are nonsense
• The vast majority of their positions are trivially easy to refute -- you can't put formaldehyde in someones body in those quantities! It's a poison!
• ...and they have no trouble re-posting their positions even when they have just been refuted!

If professing a belief is merely a tool to achieve some rhetorical goal then espousing -- the sky is green -- carries with it no responsibility whatsoever.  Quote someone correctly or incorrectly. Read a study or misread it.  Right belief?  Wrong belief?  What's the difference to someone like that?

Not only that but people like that can do something which those with intellectual integrity can't.  They can defer how seriously they are making a statement.  That is, they can say "Doctors who vaccinate are no different than Josef Mengele".

The person who says that isn't right.   They haven't even thought about it and technically speaking they don't even care if they're right. Once they're demonstrated to be incorrect they'll just mentally file that away as something they said "Just to rile them up".  Even though if they had conversed with a friendly vaccine critic on this subject they would happily have expounded upon their pet theory as if it was true.

See the problem?

If it was really a joke, then duping someone on their own side is hardly rational.  If it was really a belief then you wouldn't repost it once it's refuted.

Which of course perfectly explains why there's no debate between these folk.   These people don't really hold a belief in any significant sense.   Thus when prolific vaccine critic Boy Dodgers says that he thinks that homosexuality and non-cis gender identity are caused by vaccines**  It doesn't matter to the rest of his ilk.

When professing a belief is simply a means to an end.  There's nothing there to challenge when the end is the same.

**Incidentally that is an actual opinion I've seen go utterly unchallenged on the Facebook page of Thinking Mom's Revolution (quite possibly the most inappropriately named website on the Internet.).

So what does this mean?

Well...in part it kind of validates a tactic that I've applied when arguing with some folk on Disqus.  I simply express skepticism that they truly possess the belief they claim.

For example when people call those with pro-science views "shills".  I could say:  "I don't think you really believe that.  If you did, it would be pretty easy to show you were you're wrong.  However until you can convince me that this is a belief of yours. I don't see how talking about it could be worth anyone's time."

As far as I can tell.  That pretty much ends the argument...and why wouldn't it?

One would have to believe something to argue to the contrary.

Cheers.

Taking time off from Disqus

So... 

There's an event that has been on the horizon for a while now. Something I've been preparing for.  This particular "thing" promised to be rather time intensive.  So as it approached I decided to make some significant lifestyle changes. I had already started negotiating with my workplace to make accommodations in my schedule.  In doing so I started to re-evaluate what I do with my leisure time.  While the time I spend on Disqus doesn't amount to much. When combined with a few other non-essentials there were some definite advantages to becoming much less active here. 

I'm not about to delete my account or anything but I rather suspect I'll not be doing much posting for the foreseeable future. 

That said, I'd like to just say that in the last few years.  I've met quite a lot of pretty amazing folk here. If any of you are at all interested in keeping up with me. There's a simple way to accomplish this. FIRST send an email to keepingupwithborednow@gmail.com containing (or from) whatever email /facebook/carrier pigeon account you want me to respond to you with. Along with three random English words. Then then post a Disqus comment below containing those selfsame words. As long as the timestamp of the email is earlier than the post. I'll know who you are.

Thanks again to everyone who made Disqus a great place to be...

Does HPV have more VAERS events than any other vaccine?

tl;dr - No it doesn't, but here's why this fact is important.

It began with a post someone linked to on vaccineimpact.com it reads:

There are over 80 vaccines approved for use in the United States. HPV vaccines account for nearly 25% of the entire Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database. This is particularly disturbing because the VAERS system was established in 1990 and HPV vaccines were not introduced until mid-2006.

Now this isn't a very widely spread meme - Google only displays about eight sites which carry close to verbatim copies of it (some of those might just be mirrors of other anti-vaccination sites).  One of them is rather entertainingly a record from the UK House of Lords.  Where Margaret of Mar uses this completely incorrect factoid.

The Countess of Mar (CB): My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Bradford, for bringing this question to our attention this evening. I am afraid that I do not share his enthusiasm or that of my noble friend Lady Gould for HPV vaccines.... In the USA, HPV vaccines account for nearly 25% of the entire Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a system that was established in 1990—and HPV vaccines were not introduced before mid-2006. 

 ...and about another six which reference a similar meme apparently started by sanevax which says that HPV vaccines are responsible for "60% of the entire VAERS database of adverse events".

So what does the data really say?  

See for yourself...

Do we see HPV leading the pack?  Nope! FLU3 - The trivalent influenza vaccine is far and away the leader in VAERS reported adverse events but even holding that title it only covers 11.8% of the events.  HPV4 (Quadrivalent vaccines like Gardasil) are responsible for a mere 4.2% and HPV9 (Nonavalent vaccines like Gardasil9) sits at at a puny 1%.  There is also an HPVX vaccine in VAERS when the type of HPV vaccine was unknown. This is just under 1%.  Even adding all those together puts us at a mere 6%.

But wait! We don't exactly know when that report was written.  Isn't it possible that for some interval between 1990 and 2016 it WAS true.  Well here's a plot of HPV (HPV4, HPV9 and HPVX) and FLU3 and their percentage of the total number of VAERS events up to that point over time.  

As you can see the answer is a big, fat NOPE there too!  So not only is this not true now but it has NEVER been true at any point EVER!

So why is this important?

Personally I'd break down talking with people who are critical of vaccination into a number of different categories but two big ones are:

Knowledge gap - Sometimes you simply can't get them to understand something.  Like how you can have a large number of people have a serious problem shortly after vaccination and have it not be related.  People make these kind of statistical errors all the time.  People seem almost designed to take coincidence as a sign.  So to me, it's not unreasonable that some people would make that same kind of mistake with events that happen close to vaccination.

Trust gap - Some people simply can't bring themselves to trust some information.  Sometimes it's information from pharmaceutical companies, or the government.  Sometimes the position is very contrived and they simply don't trust any information that doesn't support their position but at least the pretense there is about trust.

Here we have an example of something that not only anyone can understand - literally everyone who has a computer has access to the VAERS data and could do a similar (but much less fancy) analysis to what I did above.  Not only that but it requires absolutely zero trust (assuming you already trust VAERS data which I assume these people would).   You can download the data, put it into a spreadsheet and figure out these things on your own.  IMHO anyone could have fact checked this in a mater of minutes.

Yet it's still there and I would defy anyone to try and get them taken down.  I've already made a request to at least one site which has gone unanswered and unfulfilled.

I'm not sure if this is just a "what we post online is forever" effect or if there's just a culture of expediency around those who are critical of vaccine.

Sources, Reference and Data:

You can get all the VAERS data in easy to process CSV files right here.  Annoyingly separated by year so if you have to work on the entire dataset you're stuck downloading 26 files.

My R code for generating the above charts can be found here.  If you want to use this code yourself please link back to my blog.  If you have any trouble with it or want to adapt it.  Feel free to leave a comment.

# Make sure your working directory is set to wherever you put the VAERSVAX csv files.
# You can set this with setwd("c:/where/you/put/them")
allData <- data.frame()
for (year in 1990:2016) {
temp<-read.csv( paste(year,"VAERSVAX.csv",sep=""))
temp <-cbind(temp[,1:2],year)
allData <- rbind(temp,allData)
}
library(ggplot2)
newData <- data.frame(table(allData$VAX_TYPE))
newData <- cbind(newData,newData$Freq/sum(newData$Freq))
names(newData) <- c("Vaccine","Count","Frequency")
newData$Vaccine <-factor(newData$Vaccine, levels=newData[order(newData$Frequency,decreasing = TRUE),"Vaccine"])
allvac <- ggplot(newData,aes(x=Vaccine,y=Frequency,fill=Vaccine))+geom_bar(sta="identity")+theme(axis.text.x=element_text(angle=90,hjust=1,vjust=0.5,size=11))+scale_fill_hue(guide=FALSE)+labs(x="Vaccine",y="Percent of Adverse Events")
hpv <- data.frame()
for (testyear in 1990:2016) {
temp <- allData[allData$year %in% 1990:testyear,]
temprow <- data.frame(vaccine='HPV',year=testyear,frequency=length(temp[temp$VAX_TYPE %in% c('HPV9','HPV4','HPVX','HPV'),1])/length(unique(allData[,1])))
hpv <- rbind(temprow,hpv)
temprow <- data.frame(vaccine='FLU',year=testyear,frequency=length(temp[temp$VAX_TYPE %in% c('FLU3','FLU4'),1])/length(unique(allData[,1])))
hpv <- rbind(hpv,temprow)
}
hpvflu <- ggplot(data=hpv, aes(x=year, y=frequency, group = vaccine, colour = vaccine)) + geom_line(size=4) + geom_point( size=4, shape=21, fill="white")