Let's say you're in a comment thread discussing these results and someone tosses this out there:
> "LIBERALS believe cops KILL MORE THAN 10,000 unarmed black people PER YEAR!!"
Would it be pedantic to respond with something like:
> "Actually, the poll indicates that only about 22% of highly liberal people believe that cops kill 10,000 or more unarmed black people per year, whereas 62% think the number is between 100 and 1,000, and 15% get it right by estimating the number is closer to 10."
Personally, I don't think so. It's just setting the record straight so that conversation can continue calmly on the basis of factual information. We're talking about order-of-magnitude level quantitative errors in both cases (not mere rounding errors), which are highly likely to negatively impact the tone of subsequent discourse.
Thanks. So all I'm saying is it's basically the same situation here. Misrepresentation of another person's views using an exclamatory tone and misquoted statistics that are off by an order of magnitude or more.
It is equally ridiculous to say "the vaccine killed 10 million people" as it is to say "the vaccine killed 100 million people" despite the order of magnitude difference. The claim is so wildly unrealistic that it's in the same category of ridiculous nonsense, and pedantry about the numbers will change absolutely nobody's mind about any of this. Now I'm feeling like a hypocrite because this conversation is also meaninglessly pedantic.
So you have a sense just from the sheer magnitude that neither of those numbers can possibly be right. And I agree with you. A little math shows that 10 million would imply a fatality rate somewhere around 0.2% which indeed is not supported by any evidence I'm aware of (though I haven't read Denis Rancourt's published article which performs the calculation that results in the 17 million number, I trust the judgement of some other professionals who have disputed his methods publicly).
Now let's say a public health authority says "the vaccines are absolutely safe and the risk of serious harm or death is 0". And then uses this claim as a justification for coercing healthy young people who have immunity from prior infection to take the vaccine.
Do you have a similarly strong sense that the claim is wildly unrealistic?
Do you expect to persuade anyone of anything with this style of pedantry?
Here's another scenario.
There is a poll showing that liberal-leaning Americans greatly estimate the number of unarmed black people have been historically killed by police: https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf
Let's say you're in a comment thread discussing these results and someone tosses this out there:
> "LIBERALS believe cops KILL MORE THAN 10,000 unarmed black people PER YEAR!!"
Would it be pedantic to respond with something like:
> "Actually, the poll indicates that only about 22% of highly liberal people believe that cops kill 10,000 or more unarmed black people per year, whereas 62% think the number is between 100 and 1,000, and 15% get it right by estimating the number is closer to 10."
Personally, I don't think so. It's just setting the record straight so that conversation can continue calmly on the basis of factual information. We're talking about order-of-magnitude level quantitative errors in both cases (not mere rounding errors), which are highly likely to negatively impact the tone of subsequent discourse.
No, that would not be pedantic.
Thanks. So all I'm saying is it's basically the same situation here. Misrepresentation of another person's views using an exclamatory tone and misquoted statistics that are off by an order of magnitude or more.
I think the difference is that it's not really any more ridiculous no matter how much the actual believed number is inflated.
I'm not sure I follow.
It is equally ridiculous to say "the vaccine killed 10 million people" as it is to say "the vaccine killed 100 million people" despite the order of magnitude difference. The claim is so wildly unrealistic that it's in the same category of ridiculous nonsense, and pedantry about the numbers will change absolutely nobody's mind about any of this. Now I'm feeling like a hypocrite because this conversation is also meaninglessly pedantic.
So you have a sense just from the sheer magnitude that neither of those numbers can possibly be right. And I agree with you. A little math shows that 10 million would imply a fatality rate somewhere around 0.2% which indeed is not supported by any evidence I'm aware of (though I haven't read Denis Rancourt's published article which performs the calculation that results in the 17 million number, I trust the judgement of some other professionals who have disputed his methods publicly).
Now let's say a public health authority says "the vaccines are absolutely safe and the risk of serious harm or death is 0". And then uses this claim as a justification for coercing healthy young people who have immunity from prior infection to take the vaccine.
Do you have a similarly strong sense that the claim is wildly unrealistic?
yes, I do think we should try to state the views of people we disagree with accurately, even anti-vaxxers.
"An unreasonably high number." That's all they mean. That's why I used the word pedantry.
I'm not trying to persuade, just to ensure accuracy.