Sealioning

A subtle form of trolling involving "bad-faith" questions. You disingenuously frame your conversation as a sincere request to be enlightened, placing the burden of educating you entirely on the other party. If your bait is successful, the other party may engage, painstakingly laying out their logic and evidence in the false hope of helping someone learn. In fact you are attempting to harass or waste the time of the other party, and have no intention of truly entertaining their point of view. Instead, you react to each piece of information by misinterpreting it or requesting further clarification, ad nauseum. The name "sea-lioning" comes from a Wondermark comic strip.

That's a new one to me, usually when I encounter someone who can't support an argument despite "all the facts being in their favor", the charge is typically gaslighting.

This reaction should not be surprising at all - if your beliefs are based on what you think are facts, but are actually something else (best guess generalizations with a lack of honest disclosure about the true underlying details, for example), a feeling of ~cognitive dissonance should be logically expected. "I know I'm right, yet I'm unable to explain how I know this. However, everyone else agreeing with me proves that I'm right, so therefore this person must be playing some sort of mind tricks on me."

This is a heuristic. Heuristics evolved because they are genuinely useful. But while often very useful, heuristics are not always correct. The history of medicine, or any other scientific field, is filled with examples of this (washing of hands, checklists, causes of ulcers, etc). And not just mild, honest mistakes, but strong, institutional resistance to the actual truth.

Perhaps there are some heuristics in play in this very conversation? Specifically, perhaps your evaluation of what the nature of the horse I have in this race is.

> may engage, painstakingly laying out their logic and evidence in the false hope of helping someone learn

I'd like to point out that in this case you haven't done this, which raises what I think is a fair question: what gives you the right to dismiss someone who disagrees based on factual statements and reasonable questions? How does one counter "sealioning" being played as a trump card? Do you think "sealioning" would be considered an acceptable form of disagreement in the field of physics? If not, then why do you believe it is acceptable in medicine?

> you are attempting to harass or waste the time of the other party, and have no intention of truly entertaining their point of view

Sometimes the case no doubt, but is that the case here? In fact, I have literally "truly entertained your point of view", and I happen to have some legitimate issues with it. If you believe my issues are unsound, why do you not demolish them with facts and logic? Perhaps you are not able to see a way to do that, so you have resorted to rhetorical techniques.

"When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on your side, pound the table."

> Instead, you react to each piece of information by misinterpreting it

I haven't done this.

> or requesting further clarification

If it is warranted (for example, when something is presented as fact, when it is actually just a generalization that happens to be very popular among people who haven't actually read "the science"), I will always do this. To me, this seems consistent with the scientific process, not opposed to it.

>> We do not know that vaccines do not cause autism.

> I get what you're trying to say, but no. In this case yes, we do.

This statement is epistemically flawed, which is why doctors and scientists do not make that claim.

Your stance is also inconsistent with what the authorities in the field say.

I will pose (a slightly refined version of) the same question that I asked of someone else, to you:

>> In both cases we only can show that the correlation is so small that we can't reject the null hypothesis.

> And by what means has any correlation been studied? What specific data is used? Are there any flaws in the current system? Have you even done any reading on what the system actually consists of, as opposed to what is implied, but never (or rarely) explicitly disclosed/described on authoritative websites?

> Has a machine learning approach that examines all vaccination records and compares it to all subsequent patient medical issues, of all kinds, not just autism, ever been performed? Does the necessary data for this even exist? If not, why not? And has this this shortcoming (with accompanying reasoning) been disclosed with complete transparency on official websites and within authoritative academic studies? Is it part of the "comprehensively truthful, completely science-based" discussion that everyone believes is the state of affairs, and considers themselves to be fully up informed about, or can a person only learn such interesting factual details in the conspiracy community?

What I'm doing here is checking to see if you have as much background in this topic as you imply (and possibly truly believe). These sorts of questions should not be threatening, and they shouldn't be very difficult to answer, if you have actually done a lot of reading and critical(!) thinking on the topic.