Letter To The Skeptics Guide To The Univerise Podcast

Dear SGTU Members:

I want to thank you and let you know your efforts are not in vain.  I credit you with directly contributing to the turning of an autism-comes-from-vaccines believer.  Here's the story:

I was at work the other day and someone asked what the device was on my arm.  I told him it was my iPod.  He asked what I was listening to and I said "The Skeptics Guide To The Universe".  He asked what it was about and I gave a brief summary that included something to the effect of "using science and skepticism to debunk popular myths and pseudo-science".  He said something like "you mean like how vaccines cause autism?"  I rolled my eyes and immediately launched into a tirade of how that just isn't true.  He started quizzing me.  To my surprise, I was able to answer each point and counterpoint he threw at me clearly, concisely, and rationally.

At the end of the conversation (which lasted about an hour), he confided in me that he had a son with autism and that it was his son's physician who identified the cause as vaccines.  I immediately blushed and frantically reviewed the conversation to see how insensitive I had been in my debunking statements.  But he said that, having a personal interest in the matter, he has gone out of his way to review every claim made on the issue and he often goes back and forth over whether or not vaccines are linked to autism.  He was currently on the side of "yes they do" when he met me.  His doctor was the primary reason for this.  The doctor pointed to images of his son's blood, identified elements as various heavy metals in the blood, and said, conclusively, "this is the cause of your son's autism and it came from vaccines".  This coworker didn't see any reason why a medical doctor would say something conclusively like that if there was any question that it might be wrong (I pointed out that any individual in the scientific community is just as likely to be prone to biases and misinformation, and that it's the community as a whole, and their consensus, that should be given more weight).

He said that I was the first person he had met who had clear answers for all his challenges, and that I seemed informed, whereas everyone else was simply repeating what they had heard without understanding why it was true, much like those they accuse in the True Believers side (my words, not his).  He said that I had swung him back to the No side with my arguments.

And all those arguments I got from you guys.  Thank you!

Some backstory:

I was already on this side of the argument before I began listening to your show.  But I couldn't argue my position.  The way my brain seems to be working as I get older is that I can understand what I'm being taught, and I can understand it pretty thoroughly, but over time (and it's not a very long time), if I don't re-teach or use the information regularly, the details of the lesson will begin to get fuzzy and eventually I'm left with just my impression of the conclusion, not how I arrived there.  This makes debating difficult, since all I can say is "I can't tell you why, but trust me, the evidence was convincing!"  It's a bit distressing, because when I was school-age, I had a nearly-photographic memory and could recite just about anything I read, word for word, and could often even repeat things I heard, down to the vocal inflection, making all my boyfriends at that age dread any kind of argument with me.

I am a civil rights activist (I promise, this is related), and my areas of special interest are sexuality and personal freedoms.  I am gradually becoming a leader in the local community in this fight.  The strategy that I believe is the first, and most important step, is education.  I engage people in conversation that challenges their assumptions and educates them on the myths of their ideas, such as, humans are naturally monogamous and heterosexual and that the opposite orientations are "choices" (I'm making sweeping statements for the sake of simplicity, since this letter isn't about these topics).  I also am a female in a male-dominated industry, so I am constantly challenging assumptions made about gender, using scientific studies to back up my claims, not just saying what I want to be true since I am female, or anecdotal evidence.  The goal with civil rights education is not necessarily to "convert" someone into whatever minority group I'm defending, since that's really not possible, but to clear up misconceptions so that people do not fear the minority group and accept that they have equal rights and responsibilities as American citizens.

So, in the process of growing into this role as educator and community leader, I've had to tackle issues of politics and science as my debate opponents get progressively more sophisticated as I move up the ladder.  My journey has even taken me in the direction of media attention, so I've been attempting to polish my presentation to soundbite answers that are more palatable to the media and also harder to take out of context.  This, I found, makes my overall debate tactics more difficult to penetrate, although I feel I am still a novice with much to learn.  I've also been working on some attempts to handle amateur Gish Gallop tactics, which is what a great deal of uninformed people use.  I think it's because of their lack of understanding of the subject, they string together all sorts of unrelated issues to form one big ball of stupid, although I think Gish uses his tactic intentionally to confuse and disorient his opponent.

In this journey of mine, I have come to broaden my interests to other scientific topics, such as the vaccine debate, evolution, bigfoot, etc.  I've reached the position where credulity pisses me off.  So in the meandering way of the amateurs, these other topics come up in debate too, but these are topics that I do not have regular practice in defending.  When I started getting into them, it was mainly online and I could just send people links, so I would refer them to my friends and partners who were polished in these subjects.  I began listening to your show, going all the way back to the beginning (and I'm still only in 2006), because it came so highly recommended by those friends I was routinely referring to in science debates.  As your show matured, it seemed to emphasize skepticality as a skill, a tool to use in the fight against ignorance and began to actually teach us some of those skills, rather than just advocate them, starting with your 10 Most Common Logical Fallacies and adding segments to your show that honed those skills, like the logic puzzles and Guess That Logical Fallacy and even with the first one, Science Or Fiction.  I made a conscious decision that I needed to work on my presentation and my debate skills in all of these areas.

So by the time this debate happened a few days ago, I had already heard several episodes that touched upon the vaccine debate, and I had just decided to start studying the logical fallacies.  I was able to use more thought-out responses, in a clear manner that my opponent could understand, and I was able to point out the flaw in his own positions.  He left the debate with a strong interest in finding your podcast and website, and a renewed belief that vaccines do not cause autism.

So, thank you, and here's hoping you get a new listener soon!

**UPDATE**

Joreth,

Thanks for the great e-mail. We liked it so much we posted it up on Rogues Gallery.
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/sgublog/

Regards,

Steve