/sci/ - Science & Math

The overwhelming reason why more people die of cancer now compared to the past is because we have cured most infectious disease but not cancer. Life expectancies have risen as you would expect.

The probability of getting cancer in a given year has barely changed, assuming you don't smoke of course. Other causes are old age, sunburn, obesity and sodium nitrite preservative, but these are minor factors and don't seem to have changed things much overall.

To be frank, OP is patently wrong. You'd need some pretty creative sophistry to muddle the basic mathematical concepts of proportion and frequency.

The real question is what drives conspiracy theorists. They could be trolling of course, or dare I say have low intelligence, however they do spend a lot of time on it, enough to make a troll bored and enough for anyone to eventually understand the basic concepts mentioned.

Emotions play a role. Spooky frightening angering conspiracy theories are abound. Perhaps more sadly a loved one has cancer or they have cancer and they don't know quite how to deal with it. Logical fallacies play a role, perhaps like UFO conspiracy theorists they think a large volume of spurious evidence like blobs in grainy photos is proof, a kind of filibustering such that even if someone spent days meticulously disproving every tiny detail they could find a huge pile more. As long as 1 thing remains unexplained in their minds the explanation must be their theory. Confirmation bias. Could a common mental illness affect people's ability to reason?

A good question is why are they unwilling to critically analyze the evidence on their own? They demand others be skeptical of the government but they complain about skepticism aimed at themselves or the conspiracy theorist they got the idea from. Emotions are a motive but a fully fleshed out explanation of the mechanism behind it would be good.