Wednesday, April 23, 2014

A Note on Researching Vaccines (or anything else)

A lesson from my own experience: I've been looking at a lot of vaccine-related websites from both sides recently, for this blog and in general. Some provide lists of allegedly research publications that allegedly show some kind of problem with vaccines, some go through all those publications and allege that they are worthless and/or unrelated, and some are the same kinds of lists from the other side (that vaccines are safe and awesome).

And I've found that my feeling of the weight of the evidence depends on which kind of site I'm going through at the moment. If it's a list of allegedly anti-vaccine research, I feel the weight of the evidence is on that side. And vice versa.

Fortunately I recognize that making judgments and conclusions from such feelings would be highly biased and susceptible to error. It's not the number of studies that matters, but rather the quality and relevance, to make a fair, rational judgment of the evidence, one must go through it all and evaluate it all as objectively as possible.

Basically my point is, don't rely on feelings of which side has more evidence, because those feelings depend on what you have been exposed to (or even just been exposed to more recently), and you might've missed something. So instead of relying on feelings: compile, catalogue, and calculate, whenever possible.

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