The red flag Ancient Wisdom is one that refers to ancient knowledge, ancient people or beings and ancient practices. It is often used to claim that something is better than conventional or modern products or practices, since it has been used since ancient times. 

 

There is the practice of bloodletting that certainly fits the category of ancient wisdom. The practice of bloodletting is an ancient form of “medicine” that can be traced back as far as the ancient Egyptians over 3,000 years ago. The practice involves withdrawing a patient’s blood, either through the use of blades from a physician or leeches, with the expectation that the withdrawal of extra blood would aid in curing the illness. The use of bloodletting is believed to help cure many forms of disease, even small ailments such as minor infections, nose bleeds, sore throats and many others. There are those who still use this practice with the belief that they can essentially extract the disease or illness out of them by releasing enough blood. There are many things that are far better to cure you than bleeding, but sine the idea that it has been used for thousands of years, there are still those who believe that because it has lasted so long it must be correct on some level and must be better than many modern medicines.

 

The red flag Confirmation Bias is when people tend to seek out or only pay attention to results and news that confirms the beliefs they already hold, despite there at times being lots of information contradicting their ideas.

 

 

Psychics are people whose businesses thrive off of confirmation bias. The people who visit these psychics are people who are already convinced that they will get the answers that they are looking for. Most times when people go, they will only remember what the psychic got right during their session and ignore what they didn’t, as the ones they got right were the answers that the client was looking for and the ones they were sure they would get already.

The red flag of Ideological Support is the use of a set of ideas or beliefs that a person or group of people already hold that they use to justify their opinions. A prominent example and one that this is often tied to is religious beliefs.

 

There are many people who don’t believe that they should seek out many kinds of medical treatments due to their religious beliefs. This website goes into some detail into what some religions believe they can’t accept as far as medical treatment. They vary from simple things like not getting flu shots or just normal everyday medicine, saying that prayer is their medicine, to not doing more substantial procedure like surgery, transfusions or transplants. 

The red flag of mystical energy is using the claims that things like aura, crystals and other supernatural things have an effect on us and can benefit us through proper use.

 

In my experience, one of the most common things that I have heard of that are connected to the red flag of mystical energy is the use of healing crystals. Below I have attached an image of a handful of different crystals that may be used for this practice, there are many, many more types of them out there all with different uses. The idea is that all the moods, emotions and even how we handle ourselves on a daily basis is connected to various energies in our body and how they interact with the energies in our environment. You can supposedly use these crystals to boost your mood, better your emotions and maybe even change how your day would go. This whole practice seems very vague and relies mostly on the idea that there exist “energies” that we can’t actually see or even really explain, but we can feel them if we really try and they control who we are and how we act. This also seems like a way to fool people into buying these things as they look for a simple solution to what might otherwise be larger problems affecting them in their lives and promising a quick solution.

The red flag Confusion of Correlation and Causation is misinterpreting or claiming that something that has nothing to do with and issue is actually the cause of the issue.

 

The website that I that I have found for this goes into a bit of detail about how the anti-vax movement is essential fueled by these red flags, such as confirmation bias and most notably the confusion of correlation and causation. It briefly touches on the idea that are brains will naturally try to connect two events that are otherwise totally unrelated. This comes into play as often the age a child will start to shows symptoms of autism also tends to happen around the same age as they would be getting vaccines. Parents will see this happen at around the same time and be very confused or upset about the situation and will connect the fact they just got their vaccines, so it must have caused this. 

The reason for belief of Simplicity is the idea that we will try to seek out or explain things we don’t understand with a simple easy to understand answer, even if its wrong and there is a reasonable or scientific answer to the unexplained. 

 

We tend to look for easy answers to things in life and when it comes to the paranormal, we are looking for an answer to be able to easily explain what is going on. It can happen with simple things even, we might have been thinking of something, like a particular person and suddenly we see them, so the simple answer is maybe we’re a little bit psychic and must have been able to sense they were coming. Really all these coincides are just that, coincidences. While unlikely they are bound to happen, they aren’t paranormal and this ties into the confirmation bias, as you have probably thought of this person many times before but not then seen them. You only remember the time they coincidently showed up at the same time and attribute it to potentially having some sort of sense they were coming. The below link is a story about a woman who has exactly these experiences and wonders if she is psychic or if its coincidence it seems to show perfectly how the simple answer is appealing and how we often just confirm the things we think or dream of.  

The reason for belief of Unknown means that we really don’t know what the cause of something was so we attempt to try and explain in ourselves.

 

 

This reason for belief is one that I know I definitely still do a lot. I think that we even may do this one unintentionally at times. When faced with someone that we can see or find no immediate explanation for we tend to start thinking up our own explanations as to what it could be. This most notably would happen with experiences relating to ghosts or UFOs. Often times people will hear or see things that they wouldn’t think are normal or they may be seeing something that rarely happens or a set of things just line up perfectly to make something appear paranormal. Since they don’t know what the actual cause is, and especially in some cases could be freaked out or scared of the experience, they jump to the conclusion that it is something paranormal. 

Patternicity is the tendency people have to find patterns in noise.

 

We have a natural tendency to look for patterns where there otherwise may not be any. One great example of this is in the phenomenon known as pareidolia. Its when people tend to see things, especially faces in everyday objects or their environment. The below image is an example of this, it shows various objects that appear to have faces on them and even when you know what it actually is you still can’t help but see the faces in them. This makes it easy to see why people might incorrectly see people, faces or other “paranormal” things around them, their brains have a tendency to do this even when they know what they are looking at couldn’t possibly be something paranormal. 

Do vaccines cause autism?

 
Gather Information:

This is an article written by The Atlantic. It is an article written briefly describing the problem of people refusing to vaccinate their children and how many parents seem to incorrectly connect their child’s diagnosis of autism to vaccinations.

The evidence supporting that vaccines cause autism is brought forward by parents who have no medical background and often try to discredit the claims from real medical professionals and scientists by saying that they must be wrong because they are working with “Big Pharma” to cover it up. While real medical experts are urging them that this way of thinking is very dangerous to their child and that no study has found a real connection between these two things.

 

Many of these claims are coming from parents who have seen their child’s autism begin to present itself around the same time they get their vaccinations, so with such a dramatic diagnosis some parents may think that the easiest thing to do is say that they were fine before this and the vaccinations are what caused it. They have a strong emotional connection to what happens to their child and want to believe that something caused this instead of their child being born this way.

Alternative Solution #1: Vaccines do cause autism; this is supported by parents’ personal beliefs and numerous of poorly conducted and disproved experiments to prove it.

Alternative Solution #2: Vaccines do not cause autism, this is supported overwhelmingly by the medical and scientific community and multiple studies that followed the scientific method.

The best conclusion after reviewing alternatives and the evidence is that vaccines do not cause autism.