You're not presenting your opinion on the subject of vaccines though, you're presenting your opinion on the subject of having opinions about vaccines. Give me your nuanced thoughts on vaccines if you want to have a productive discussion with someone.

I think we're seeing a completely different trend, spurred on by social media and the ability for people to broadcast their own messages/opinions about a topic, and that is, everyone has a loud, and often spurious, opinion about everything. This is something that's always been true, social media is just amplifying this aspect of human nature.

It's so wild how certain topics will trigger a response. Your comment was about nuance, and I replied with (what was meant to be) a mostly complimentary comment, expanding on that topic. But you latched on to the vaccine part of it that was meant only as an example. Something about that subject really gets people's blood pressure up; I notice my comment above was downvoted as I predicted - although not by you, as far as I could tell. (FWIW a nuanced discussion about vaccines isn't germane to this topic, so I will respectfully pass on that.)

Anyway, I think you're right about social media amplifying human nature, but I don't think it's about opinions. I think most people don't really care too deeply about most things -- one major reason why voting turnouts are so low! Sure, they care about one or two things passionately, but they're mostly moderate on most things. More universally though, people care about attention. They love attention. It's wired into our DNA; babies do everything they can for attention, because attention is survival.

But it turns out that having moderate views isn't really all that interesting. It doesn't demand attention the way having (or representing to have) extreme views does. So are the extreme views genuine, or just a show for attention?

My problem with your previous comment is that while on the surface it's perfectly reasonable, it's also unsubstantial and the type of fluff you hear as an introduction to a flat earther youtube video. The good old "show both sides of the issue" that's used by all fringe theorists ever to get people to discuss their side of the story.

Of course that's a complete strawman on my part here, you didn't say any of this. But consider this for instance:

> For instance, the GP mentioned young earthers. There are many different kinds of "alternative" stances on the age of the earth, and only one (very) extreme position is "earth is 6000 years old". But if you mention anything about the age of the earth that isn't exactly *the universe is 13.8 billion years old and the earth was formed around 4.5 billion years ago" you are considered a "young earther", lumped in with the creationist crazies.

I could do the same thing about flat earth or, if I wanted to heat up the discussion even more, the holocaust.

You can and you should question everything all the time, but at some point we have to reach a consensus and move on. We can't spend all of our time proving again and again and again that the earth is round, that Earth is not 10000 years old and that vaccines do not cause autism. If new evidence surfaces it should be reconsidered of course but the case for the anti-vaxxers is pretty weak as far as I can tell.