Michael Lewis' (author of Moneyball, The Big Short) podcast Against the Rules had an episode about why we question experts, this was during the tail end of COVID. He asked, I'm paraphrasing from memory here, why is it we don't have people who argue that you could jump off bridges and tall buildings and lived, but so many people arguing that you don't need the vaccine. Perhaps because no one had jumped off tall structures and lived, but there are lots of stories about how someone who got the vaccine died anyway, or didn't get the vaccine, got COVID, and is still alive and thriving. There's also a lot of "Dad was a pack-a-day smoker and lived to be 95", "Every year that I got the flu shot, I got the flu, this year I said the hell with it and skipped the shot, no flu." Every time I hear that I desperately want to correct the person, but nobody wants to hear the "akshually ... there's no correlation" bit. I don't want to be "that guy". But the more these pithy sophism are said and heard, the more it becomes ingrained in the aggregate of common beliefs. There's not even a scientific nuance there, it's utterly wrong. To erase those beliefs one has to wipe away years of repeated exposure and reinforcement to this casual sort of ignorance. No one has the time to do that. In this story, the son also exposed the father to ChatGPT hoping it can overcome his father's beliefs with an overwhelming amount of facts, and it didn't work.

Sometimes a hot stove must be touched. If I were the son, I would ask the father to double down for another $10K, or even $20K. I believe that somewhere deep inside the father, there is a ghost of an understanding where the line of reality exists. He's just so deep into his world that he can't see where he mixes up the hope that these things will happen, vs the belief that these things will happen. But if you ask him to put real stakes on the line, say, even $100K if he has it, he will not be so unwavering in his belief.

the problem with engaging with them using tests is they can deny the results. they can say X politician was killed, but was replaced by a body double. A flat-earther, or holocaust-denier, or moon-landing-conspiracist will always have another counter-claim to whatever challenge they accept. There's always an out, due to the number of "variables in the equation", or the number of theories and posts online. One quote I read here (regarding flat-earth) was "If you engage them, you've already lost". :(

In answer why arguments like jumping or falling off something fatally high don't really exist in any serious form, is for the simple reason typically there's an easily recognised clear starting and end point, where chances of fatality can faithfully derived from extrapolation and correlation of injury due to falling from various heights, as well as statistics of previous incidents from similar heights. On the other hand more fluid situations generally, such as if a vaccine or some substance works to a suitable effectiveness, in reality have no clear firm starting point, more often a blurred end point and wide range of exceptions in between. However there are those who think the starting point is fixed ... or close to fixed with or without caveats -- exempting really old people in poor health for example.

Trying to explain to the naysayers were hard if not near impossible when it came to vaccinating for covid in my locale. Eventually I ended up on simple little fictional story of whether to stay put in a small boat, or evacuate from the coast inland from a large few hundred foot tidal wave, to demonstrate that someone's starting point wasn't all that clear and could not be taken for granted

Oh yes on the people who whine they still got a bit of the flu, the jab didn't work ... that's the other thing about vaccines that few people (even well educated) have understood well, is that a vaccine is not a force field that pushes or repels, it's actually more an opportunity for the body to get some practice, develop the proper weaponry to counter with when the problem arrives ... but not everyone's body is that good at creating a sufficient defence, and a lot of factors come into play. Some people need more practice to get it right.

The last paragraph on denial ... and deep down. When it comes to gambling with life, yes, I think to some extent we've witnessed it with the ivermectin cure BS. I know for instance that when it was used to treat heart worms in dogs, a small percentage did not react that well to the normal dosage. Humans tolerate iirc a little bit better and have a similar percentage of reaction to a normal dosage but no where near as severe. At 6 times the rate, the product crosses the blood brain barrier to a point that in those dogs that were accidentally dosed incorrectly, most survived but it was touch and go, they were for a time afterwards unable to walk and then had staggers until eventual recovery. We do not hear any real reports of any person getting even a few multiple of the regular dosage ... except for the wordsmithed papers giving that impression of really high dosage rates, but digging deeper, they were in fact actually not receiving an at once dose but a number of small doses over a few days minding ivermectin's half life. I had calculated regular cattle /horse rated ivermectin would need 100x dosage to achieve the level that was said to stop covid ... a Canadian hospital examined how much imvermectin was active from the oral product they used to treat humans and the amount of dose required to achieve the mythical level to stop covid was approx just 55 times the regular dose. We, the world, never heard any certified instances where it was used at 50x regular dosage rates ... in fact, when the BSers were nailed down, they instead claimed the regular low dose must have worked so there ... if only I could get away with only paying a dollar for every 50 or 100 I owed.