Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Heather Madrone]

harry wrote on 3/24/19 10:06 AM March 24, 2019> I have lived in

communities where polio was prevalent - and I have seen people from a
couple of generations crippled and maimed with the after effects of polio
(and not the unseen others who died for the lack of a vaccine). I know one
guy whose mother was unable to vaccinate him due to a death in the family
on the vaccination day at the primary health centre, and then forgot about
it. The guy fell sick in his 20s believing he had been vaccinated, and it
took very long for the doctors to diagnose polio, and eventually he did get
treated and recover, but has a terribly degenerative bone condition on his
spine because of the polio attack. 


Weirdly, polio is a clean water disease. Before sanitation was 
widespread, children contracted an almost-invariably mild case of polio 
in early life, recovered, continued to come into contact with the polio 
virus throughout their lives, and paralytic polio was unknown.


Enter sanitation, children don't encounter the polio virus until later, 
and you have sad epidemics of paralytic polio.



OPV has largely wiped out polio in most
such places. Now the reason OPV failed in some cases (not mentioned in that
article) is for other reasons:
1) when you had communities of people mixing with and without vaccines - it
is possible under some circumstances for the disease to spread from a
recently vaccinated person (typically via stool or sneezing) to a
unvaccinated person; this has been known some time - and the US switched
back to IPVs  because they have a large number of people who don't want any
vaccines who were at risk because of OPV ( I just hope those people dont
travel to india or any african countries ).


The OPV is a live, attenuated oral vaccine and unlikely to cause serious 
illness in the vaccinated person. One of the touted benefits of the OPV 
was that the presence of the live virus passively vaccinated family 
members. OPV is a more effective and longer-lasting vaccine than IPV 
(injected, killed virus), anyway, and the passive re-exposure 
strengthened immune responses that might be waning. Unfortunately, the 
OPV virus can become less attenuated as it reproduces, leading to 
second-and-third-level contacts encountering a more virulent, wild-type 
virus.



2) substandard vaccines, this is more common than you think - especially
when there is bulk ordering of millions of dosages of vaccines. those UP
vaccine deaths were most probably due to substandard vaccines.


Vaccine wear-off is a big issue as well. The immunity conferred by 
vaccines declines over time. This varies by vaccine and individual, with 
some vaccines wearing off in a few months while others might still be 
going strong after 50 years. It seems generally foolish for us to assume 
that vaccination against a disease in childhood will continue to protect 
us in mid-life, *but most people do exactly that*.



I see anti-vax as really a first world problem for people who have the
means to procure aseptic food and environments, and treat themselves in
proper hospitals when there is the eventuality of disease.  


It's a third world problem, too. In some places, vaccination programs 
have been sloppy enough that they've transmitted other diseases along 
with the vaccine. In others, vaccination programs have been infiltrated 
by bad actors. The combination of these factors has led to serious 
distrust of vaccine programs in some areas of Africa.



Polio is just
one of the many killers for the less fortunate communities i am talking
about (i saw a place where a rota virus killed every other child that was
born in the 6 month period that i was there, only because the vaccine was
not freely available at the primary health centre), and they are more than
happy to get the vaccine since it clearly improved survivability.


On the other hand, at some point the risk/benefit equation flips. When 
my second child was up for the DT vaccination, our doctor remarked that 
she was more likely to be bitten by a cobra (not endemic to the US) than 
to contract diphtheria. Shortly thereafter, the vaccine schedule changed 
to reflect the fact that diphtheria was no longer a threat to American 
children.


Diphtheria is a terrible disease, and the vaccine is quite effective. 
It's not risk-free though, and, as with the OPV, there's a point where a 
given vaccine causes more harm than it prevents.



I do see parents in my son's first-world-like school who have not
vaccinated their kids with *anything* on the basis of some celebrity video
or misleading article talking about the disease in statistical terms.


Statistics can cut multiple ways, can't they?

If we kept everyone's vaccines current on every disease that vaccines 
can prevent, it would be extraordinarily expensive and also likely cause 
more harm than good. Some vaccines (I can attest to this for the rabies 
vaccine) are just plain nasty, and only justified when there's a 
possible exposure to a much worse 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[harry]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2019 at 10:07, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 3, 2019, 9:37 AM Suresh Ramasubramanian  wrote:
>
> >
> > WHO has defined vaccine protocols that address your concern
> >
>
> "The politics of polio" by Dr. Pushpa Bhargava an eminent microbiologist
> who returned his Padma Bhushan in protest.
>
>
> https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/The-politics-of-polio/article15239258.ece
>
> Ground reality is messy and corrupt.
>

I find this whole anti-vax movement rather strange since I have lived in
communities where polio was prevalent - and I have seen people from a
couple of generations crippled and maimed with the after effects of polio
(and not the unseen others who died for the lack of a vaccine). I know one
guy whose mother was unable to vaccinate him due to a death in the family
on the vaccination day at the primary health centre, and then forgot about
it. The guy fell sick in his 20s believing he had been vaccinated, and it
took very long for the doctors to diagnose polio, and eventually he did get
treated and recover, but has a terribly degenerative bone condition on his
spine because of the polio attack. OPV has largely wiped out polio in most
such places. Now the reason OPV failed in some cases (not mentioned in that
article) is for other reasons:
1) when you had communities of people mixing with and without vaccines - it
is possible under some circumstances for the disease to spread from a
recently vaccinated person (typically via stool or sneezing) to a
unvaccinated person; this has been known some time - and the US switched
back to IPVs  because they have a large number of people who don't want any
vaccines who were at risk because of OPV ( I just hope those people dont
travel to india or any african countries ).
2) substandard vaccines, this is more common than you think - especially
when there is bulk ordering of millions of dosages of vaccines. those UP
vaccine deaths were most probably due to substandard vaccines.

I see anti-vax as really a first world problem for people who have the
means to procure aseptic food and environments, and treat themselves in
proper hospitals when there is the eventuality of disease.  Polio is just
one of the many killers for the less fortunate communities i am talking
about (i saw a place where a rota virus killed every other child that was
born in the 6 month period that i was there, only because the vaccine was
not freely available at the primary health centre), and they are more than
happy to get the vaccine since it clearly improved survivability.

I do see parents in my son's first-world-like school who have not
vaccinated their kids with *anything* on the basis of some celebrity video
or misleading article talking about the disease in statistical terms.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Kiran K Karthikeyan]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2019 at 16:49, Kiran K Karthikeyan <
kiran.karthike...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Or treating scientists as priests, which is possibly worse (Jordan
Peterson). Even worse is when reputation in one field somehow confers
scientific credentials (Gwyneth Paltrow).


Saw this [1] on my feed today and thought it relevant to this discussion.
Kudos to Hathaway.

[1]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2019/03/10/what-anne-hathaways-prank-on-the-ellen-show-said-about-pseudoscience/

Kiran

What Anne Hathaway's Prank On 'Ellen' Said About Pseudoscience

Y. Lee

Hathaway concluded by explaining,"The takeaway of this is do not put
something in your mouth just because a celebrity tells you to."

Here is one situation where you should definitely listen to a celebrity.
No, not the part about Dr. Q or citrus healing. There was no real Dr. Q.
No, not the part about blowing into fruit to help you meditate. What part
of "made the whole thing up," do you not understand? Rather, listen to what
she said about not simply swallowing anything that celebrities tell or give
you.

Hathaway could have easily used the show as a platform to launch some new
pseudoscientific health practice or potion. She certainly has the star
power to do so. Hathaway is a very accomplished actress, having won an
Oscar for her role in Les Misérables and starred in a wide range of movies
such as The Princess Diaries, Brokeback Mountain, The Devil Wears Prada,
 Rachel Getting Married, Love & Other Drugs, and The Dark Knight Rises.
Plus, how many people can say that they played the Catwoman, as she did?
She can sing too, as demonstrated by this segment on the Tonight Show with
Jimmy Fallon:

Heck, if she told people to converse with or even argue with fruit, you
might find some takers. After all, if a celebrity-run website can convince
you to buy and use coffee enemas, as I have written before for Forbes, why
not the Catwoman Clementine Colonic?

Instead, Hathaway used her time on the show to do something commendable:
warn people about celebrities peddling pseudoscience. As I have written
before, pseudoscience ain't a Phil Collins song (that's Sussudio) but
instead is defined by dictionary.com as "any of various methods, theories,
or systems, as astrology, psychokinesis, or clairvoyance, considered as
having no scientific basis."

What do celebrities have to do with pseudoscience? Ask Timothy Caulfield, a
professor of health law at the University of Alberta, Canada, and author of
the book Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? He explained how
celebrities have fueled the amazing rise in pseudoscience in an article by
Wendy Glauser entitled "How celebrities have fueled the amazing rise in
pseudoscience," and appearing in the New Scientist. Just because someone is
a terrific actor, singer, or whatever reality stars do, doesn't mean that
he or she knows anything about science and health.

Therefore, you shouldn't buy a "health" product or do something "for your
health" just because a celebrity, who is not a real health expert, tells
you to do so. That would be akin to liking a song just because a Nobel
Prize winner in Medicine told you that it is a good jam. Instead, think
critically. Think scientifically. Look for real scientific explanations and
evidence that something works. "I am famous and therefore, you should
listen," should never be a reason to do something for your health.

Kudos again to Hathaway for raising more awareness about the growing
problem of pseudoscience. This suggests that Hathaway has a healthy respect
for science. Indeed, she once told Jonathan Heaf who was writing an article
about her for GQ magazine that "Any spare time I have I bury my head in a
physics textbook," which alone raises her several dozen points on the
coolness scale in my book. Her prank on The Ellen Show certainly added to
those points. Orange you glad that she didn't simply use her fame to get
you to buy some baloney, as in pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo and not the
lunch-meat? Or in this case, some clementines?

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Kiran K Karthikeyan]

On Tue, 5 Feb 2019 at 12:56, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

> So is the placebo effect science? It is greater than expected by chance,
> isn't it?
>

AFAIK, most (all?) drug trials have control, experiment *and* placebo[1].
Authorities don't approve drugs that underperform the placebo. I'm not sure
of the specific criteria with regards to statistical significance and
practices worldwide. Cursory reading tells me that there is significant
debate on the ethics of giving patients a placebo treatment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo-controlled_study

Kiran

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Charles Haynes]

On Tue, 5 Feb 2019 at 03:23, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

Things like vaccination are tricky because they are not strictly science.
> Science is repeatable, and things that don't work on everyone the same
> don't strictly deserve the label of science.


What? That's not right. It's perfectly legitimate to use statistics and
measures of uncertainty in science.


> That doesn't mean they should
> never be made mandatory, there merely has to be a very very high bar before
> that is done,


The bar is actually pretty clear - the benefits have to outweigh the costs.
We can have a discussion about how to measure the benefits (reduced
mortality is a simple one. Vaccines kill far fewer people than the diseases
they prevent.)

On Tue, 5 Feb 2019 at 05:09, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

> It is what keeps for example homeopathy in business so ..
>


> It is the favorite whipping boy of pseudo science for the moment.
>

Actually I thought "flat earthers" were the favorite whipping boy of
pseudoscience at the moment. You used them yourself. Homeopathy has been
out of fashion as a whipping boy for quite some time. Actually
"anti-vaxxers" and "climate change denialists" are the pseudoscience flavor
du jour.


> Which reminds me of the water memory experiments done by another Nobel
> Laureate, Luc Montagnier. I don't think the science is quite settled
> there.
>

You seem to be attracted to "famous names in science" as if that alone
conferred some kind of scientific authority.

That's not how science works. Those famous names are only as good as their
experimental results. Montagnier's results have not been replicated by
anyone. The publication of the results was in a non-peer reviewed journal
of which Montagnier is the chairman of the editorial review board.
Montagnier himself has said the results do not support homeopathy.

Homeopathy's lack of scientific basis is as settled as anything in science.

-- Charles

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 1:41 PM Deepa Agashe  wrote:
> On the other hand, where would any of us be without drug companies producing 
> antibiotics and painkillers?

I am not anti-science - obviously a great many things are better off
due to it, and I owe my own life to science but at the same time
science has to be like Caesar's wife, or Rama's wife - above suspicion
- since it is the champion of its age - and it isn't.

There must be a science multiplier effect to penalties - fraud in
science must be penalized higher than fraud in other fields. Those
scientists with a suspicious publication record must be outed. A
purge? A detox? Science needs something, or the force of public
opinion will shift to less desirable systems.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Deepa Agashe]

> On 05-Feb-2019, at 13:32, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 1:24 PM Deepa Agashe  > wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Scientists are not the same as pharma companies. I don’t understand exactly 
>> what would you like scientists to do.
> 
> A couple of Southernisms come to mind, you can't waller with the pigs
> and not get dirty, or you can't sleep with the dogs and not get fleas.
> 
> Scientists are not blameless either as the profusion of less than
> credible papers that fill more than half of the journals shows. A
> scientist or an artist or a monk is ideally a moral champion, but in
> none of these professions is it a certainty.
> 
> Drug companies would fold up if no scientist would go work for them for 
> example.
> 
> Science is not more vulnerable to human failings than other ventures,
> but because science holds the reins of power, it is capable of great
> violence. When religion held the reins it did the same, as did any
> other organized branch of progress.
> 
> In the end the nomenclature doesn't matter to me, but it does to a
> whole lot of people who defend that vaccination is science, because it
> immediately lends vaccination a gravitas that is far more than it
> deserves.
> 

Point taken. 
On the other hand, where would any of us be without drug companies producing 
antibiotics and painkillers? 
All of us need each other. The best we can do is sort through the evidence and 
try to prevent unfair gains.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

> It is what keeps for example homeopathy in business so ..

It is the favorite whipping boy of pseudo science for the moment.
Which reminds me of the water memory experiments done by another Nobel
Laureate, Luc Montagnier. I don't think the science is quite settled
there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8VyUsVOic0

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 1:24 PM Deepa Agashe  wrote:
>
>
> Scientists are not the same as pharma companies. I don’t understand exactly 
> what would you like scientists to do.

A couple of Southernisms come to mind, you can't waller with the pigs
and not get dirty, or you can't sleep with the dogs and not get fleas.

Scientists are not blameless either as the profusion of less than
credible papers that fill more than half of the journals shows. A
scientist or an artist or a monk is ideally a moral champion, but in
none of these professions is it a certainty.

Drug companies would fold up if no scientist would go work for them for example.

Science is not more vulnerable to human failings than other ventures,
but because science holds the reins of power, it is capable of great
violence. When religion held the reins it did the same, as did any
other organized branch of progress.

In the end the nomenclature doesn't matter to me, but it does to a
whole lot of people who defend that vaccination is science, because it
immediately lends vaccination a gravitas that is far more than it
deserves.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

It is what keeps for example homeopathy in business so ..

On 05/02/19, 12:56 PM, "silklist on behalf of Srini RamaKrishnan" 
 wrote:

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 12:22 PM Deepa Agashe  wrote:

> As I see it, scientific understanding means that we have greater
> repeatability than expected by chance- i.e. the signal to noise ratio is
> high.


So is the placebo effect science? It is greater than expected by chance,
isn't it?

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

As long as a Martin Shkrell-esque big pharma is a convenient whipping boy that 
nobody objects to why at all spoil the argument by bringing cold logic into it?

On 05/02/19, 1:24 PM, "silklist on behalf of Deepa Agashe" 
 wrote:


> On 05-Feb-2019, at 13:02, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 12:22 PM Deepa Agashe mailto:daga...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>> and the fact that vaccines fail in 1% (or some such small fraction) of
>> humans does not make this understanding unscientific.
> 
> 
> 1% of a 100 million children is 1 million. Even 0.1% is 100,000 kids that
> will definitely have an adverse reaction. It's one thing to accept such
> odds with a terminal disease like cancer, but another matter to infect
> healthy kids with a disease.
> 

So if we have a chance to save 90 million kids we should rather let them 
die? 
It is clear that this is not an ideal situation, but it is how things 
stand. There are too many variables and we must simply do what we can, given 
the overwhelming odds against us being able to identify each and every one of 
them, and worse still, being able to measure each variable for each kid before 
we vaccinate. (I note that none of this makes the research itself unscientific- 
these are practical challenges for which you cannot blame scientists).


> Ideally human beings would be honest and self governed with a love for all
> humanity, but since they are not, fear is what keeps them in line. We
> simply don't have any consequences that scientists and policy makers fear
> enough. Heck even when they are caught with their hands in the cookie jar,
> the fines don't bankrupt companies.

Scientists are not the same as pharma companies. I don’t understand exactly 
what would you like scientists to do. 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Deepa Agashe]

> On 05-Feb-2019, at 13:02, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 12:22 PM Deepa Agashe  > wrote:
> 
>> and the fact that vaccines fail in 1% (or some such small fraction) of
>> humans does not make this understanding unscientific.
> 
> 
> 1% of a 100 million children is 1 million. Even 0.1% is 100,000 kids that
> will definitely have an adverse reaction. It's one thing to accept such
> odds with a terminal disease like cancer, but another matter to infect
> healthy kids with a disease.
> 

So if we have a chance to save 90 million kids we should rather let them die? 
It is clear that this is not an ideal situation, but it is how things stand. 
There are too many variables and we must simply do what we can, given the 
overwhelming odds against us being able to identify each and every one of them, 
and worse still, being able to measure each variable for each kid before we 
vaccinate. (I note that none of this makes the research itself unscientific- 
these are practical challenges for which you cannot blame scientists).


> Ideally human beings would be honest and self governed with a love for all
> humanity, but since they are not, fear is what keeps them in line. We
> simply don't have any consequences that scientists and policy makers fear
> enough. Heck even when they are caught with their hands in the cookie jar,
> the fines don't bankrupt companies.

Scientists are not the same as pharma companies. I don’t understand exactly 
what would you like scientists to do. 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 1:15 PM Deepa Agashe  wrote:

> Yes, it is. And a very useful one, actually.


Indeed, yet medical systems that rely on it (in addition to other active
agents) are dismissed as quackery, unless it is from a big drug company of
course.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-power-of-drug-color/381156/

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Deepa Agashe]

> On 05-Feb-2019, at 12:56, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 12:22 PM Deepa Agashe  > wrote:
> 
>> As I see it, scientific understanding means that we have greater
>> repeatability than expected by chance- i.e. the signal to noise ratio is
>> high.
> 
> 
> So is the placebo effect science? It is greater than expected by chance,
> isn't it?

Yes, it is. And a very useful one, actually.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 12:32 PM Suresh Ramasubramanian 
wrote:

> Known measurable failure rates
>

It's not the same as building a bridge that comes crashing down - the
fundamental problem is understood in bridge building but due to human error
these failures can occur. However in medicine the science itself is unclear
and therefore the small fraction the 0.5% or 0.1% who fail could well be
the canaries in the coal mine who are succumbing to diseases well before
their brothers. In these cases fundamental changes will never occur unless
we can increase budgets by a hundred fold to account for DNA variations,
ethnic variations, dietary variations etc.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 12:22 PM Deepa Agashe  wrote:

>  and the fact that vaccines fail in 1% (or some such small fraction) of
> humans does not make this understanding unscientific.


1% of a 100 million children is 1 million. Even 0.1% is 100,000 kids that
will definitely have an adverse reaction. It's one thing to accept such
odds with a terminal disease like cancer, but another matter to infect
healthy kids with a disease.

Ideally human beings would be honest and self governed with a love for all
humanity, but since they are not, fear is what keeps them in line. We
simply don't have any consequences that scientists and policy makers fear
enough. Heck even when they are caught with their hands in the cookie jar,
the fines don't bankrupt companies.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 12:22 PM Deepa Agashe  wrote:

> As I see it, scientific understanding means that we have greater
> repeatability than expected by chance- i.e. the signal to noise ratio is
> high.


So is the placebo effect science? It is greater than expected by chance,
isn't it?

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Known measurable failure rates
Failure rates that reduce based on periodic improvements in a vaccine + in 
clinical protocols
I fail to see what is unscientific here.

On 05/02/19, 11:53 AM, "silklist on behalf of Srini RamaKrishnan" 
 wrote:

Thanks to the many who wrote in to say that science is not the last word on
reality, we now see that science can be wrong, is always only the partial
truth, and the key is to be open to new ideas.

If we see that all of us; scientists and non-scientists alike are in the
business of understanding reality, then we see an equality of purpose.
Nobody has the last word. Equality, like sincerity of purpose and humility,
goodness, peace, aspiration etc. is a very good idea indeed.

Logic is not the only tool with which the human can make sense of reality,
if it was, the human race would be very poor indeed. Science then is no
different from other systems that seek to understand the truth of the
reality we live in.

There was the old testament and then came the new one, and then the
numerous interpretations thereof. Religion too is open to new truths. As is
any knowledge - when the 4 minute mile was first run it was a big deal, it
shattered a myth, now it is not nearly as impossible. Businessmen, authors,
gardeners etc. are each making progress in humanity's understanding of
purpose and finding better solutions to the problem of existence, or
enacting better or newer experiences of existence, along with making plenty
of mistakes along the way.

Dogma is not exclusive to religion, scientists can be dogmatic too,
violently resisting new ideas, like for example, the continental drift
theory, until finally relenting under the weight of evidence. It is human
nature to resist giving up hard won spoils.

Violence is a common impulse in man, maybe too common. We saw during the
cold war the two sides were extremely dogmatic about their position, and
would jail or kill anyone who supported a different idea.

It would be far easier to live in a dictatorship, there would be none of
the messy debate, yet we choose free societies that permit freedom of
religion, freedom of opinion, freedom of the vote. Why is freedom to
question science exempt? I cannot make everyone love the Mona Lisa and I
should not be able to make everyone love my idea.

Things like vaccination are tricky because they are not strictly science.
Science is repeatable, and things that don't work on everyone the same
don't strictly deserve the label of science. That doesn't mean they should
never be made mandatory, there merely has to be a very very high bar before
that is done, and if there are other motives besides the wellness of
humanity then that dilutes the case. Especially because like the death
sentence, the effects of it cannot be reversed.

A child in the sandbox is making discoveries, she is a scientist in her own
world, and her discoveries are just as important as that of any Nobel
Laureate. When we can see every human endeavor as brilliant and necessary,
then we enter the realm of equality - because reality is always subjective.

///

"Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes,
where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we
enter the realm of Art and Science. If what is seen and experienced is
portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in science. If it is
communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the
conscious mind but recognized intuitively as meaningful, then we are
engaged in art. Common to both is the loving devotion to that which
transcends personal concern and volition."

Albert Einstein

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Deepa Agashe]

> Things like vaccination are tricky because they are not strictly science.
> Science is repeatable, and things that don't work on everyone the same
> don't strictly deserve the label of science. That doesn't mean they should
> never be made mandatory, there merely has to be a very very high bar before
> that is done, and if there are other motives besides the wellness of
> humanity then that dilutes the case. Especially because like the death
> sentence, the effects of it cannot be reversed.
> 

As I see it, scientific understanding means that we have greater repeatability 
than expected by chance- i.e. the signal to noise ratio is high. In biological 
systems, this “noise” is produced by a million things that make each being 
unique- their genetic code, the specific environment they're in, to their 
specific history (evolutionary and during its development). So if you want to 
say that science is 100% repeatable, then no biologist is a scientist because 
exceptions are the rule in biology. So I don’t agree that repeatability is a 
useful metric in of itself.

In the specific case of vaccination, we have very good understanding of the 
mechanisms involved in how and why vaccines work, and the fact that vaccines 
fail in 1% (or some such small fraction) of humans does not make this 
understanding unscientific. All it means is that there is an as yet unknown (or 
perhaps known) source of “noise” that means that our predictions are not 100% 
precise. So we can keep trying to figure out the sources of noise, and 
hopefully reduce the fraction of unexplained variation. Meanwhile, for 
practical purposes, if there are good data showing that a vaccine will “work” 
for 90% of the population, sign me up. 

 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

Thanks to the many who wrote in to say that science is not the last word on
reality, we now see that science can be wrong, is always only the partial
truth, and the key is to be open to new ideas.

If we see that all of us; scientists and non-scientists alike are in the
business of understanding reality, then we see an equality of purpose.
Nobody has the last word. Equality, like sincerity of purpose and humility,
goodness, peace, aspiration etc. is a very good idea indeed.

Logic is not the only tool with which the human can make sense of reality,
if it was, the human race would be very poor indeed. Science then is no
different from other systems that seek to understand the truth of the
reality we live in.

There was the old testament and then came the new one, and then the
numerous interpretations thereof. Religion too is open to new truths. As is
any knowledge - when the 4 minute mile was first run it was a big deal, it
shattered a myth, now it is not nearly as impossible. Businessmen, authors,
gardeners etc. are each making progress in humanity's understanding of
purpose and finding better solutions to the problem of existence, or
enacting better or newer experiences of existence, along with making plenty
of mistakes along the way.

Dogma is not exclusive to religion, scientists can be dogmatic too,
violently resisting new ideas, like for example, the continental drift
theory, until finally relenting under the weight of evidence. It is human
nature to resist giving up hard won spoils.

Violence is a common impulse in man, maybe too common. We saw during the
cold war the two sides were extremely dogmatic about their position, and
would jail or kill anyone who supported a different idea.

It would be far easier to live in a dictatorship, there would be none of
the messy debate, yet we choose free societies that permit freedom of
religion, freedom of opinion, freedom of the vote. Why is freedom to
question science exempt? I cannot make everyone love the Mona Lisa and I
should not be able to make everyone love my idea.

Things like vaccination are tricky because they are not strictly science.
Science is repeatable, and things that don't work on everyone the same
don't strictly deserve the label of science. That doesn't mean they should
never be made mandatory, there merely has to be a very very high bar before
that is done, and if there are other motives besides the wellness of
humanity then that dilutes the case. Especially because like the death
sentence, the effects of it cannot be reversed.

A child in the sandbox is making discoveries, she is a scientist in her own
world, and her discoveries are just as important as that of any Nobel
Laureate. When we can see every human endeavor as brilliant and necessary,
then we enter the realm of equality - because reality is always subjective.

///

"Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes,
where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we
enter the realm of Art and Science. If what is seen and experienced is
portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in science. If it is
communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the
conscious mind but recognized intuitively as meaningful, then we are
engaged in art. Common to both is the loving devotion to that which
transcends personal concern and volition."

Albert Einstein

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Heather Madrone]

Last bits of information on vaccines:

My kids are grown, and current on their MMR, chickenpox, HPV, tetanus, 
and flu shots. They've also had the rabies series.


I have severe egg allergy and am delighted that egg-free flu shots 
became available a few years ago.


The co-evolution of infectious disease and human beings is a fascinating 
topic. Ewald's _The Evolution of Infectious Disease_ is a little long in 
the tooth, but still a great overview.


I am concerned that we are creating large susceptible adult populations 
with our current vaccination practices and that this will lead to deadly 
epidemics of diseases that used to be endemic in much the same way that 
wildfire suppression has led to much deadlier wildfires.


--h, "stick a fork in me; I'm done," mm

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Charles Haynes]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 at 00:23, Suresh Ramasubramanian 
wrote:

As for crowd diseases being benign and immunity, I'd suggest looking at
> either whooping cough or polio for counter examples.  Or German measles
> (rubella) - which, if a pregnant woman contracts it, is mild for her, but
> can and will cause severe retardation in her child.
>

Chicken pox is mild for (most) children but can lead to later shingles in
adults, and while chickenpox is mild and the risks are low, the risk of the
vaccine is even lower and it contributes to protecting those who can't get
vaccinated.


> Young children ... are repeatedly vaccinated ... against hepatitis B
> and HPV, which they are
> extremely unlikely to contract. Meanwhile the adults who should be
> vaccinated against those diseases mostly aren't.
>

It's important to vaccinate against HPV, and it should happen early.
Granted young children are unlikely to be exposed to HPV, but I think the
risk/reward is clearly on the side of early vaccination.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Kiran K Karthikeyan]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 at 01:50, Heather Madrone  wrote:

> It's also the reason to question science and its findings, warts and
> all. It's the scientific method all the way down. Checking past work and
> assumptions is part of it.
>
> "Measure three times and cut once" is from carpentry, not science, but
> it's a valid practice when making any irreversible change. New evidence
> comes in all the time. It's worth taking a breath to ask whether we are
> on course.
>
> This gets muddier when you have interested actors (and we always do) on
> both sides of the scientific equation. There are always people who try
> to force-map available data to get the conclusions they want, and it can
> be very difficult to tell when they're doing so.
>
> Pharmaceutical companies have a long history of massaging, suppressing,
> and manufacturing results so they can bring drugs profitably to market.
>
> I did my vaccine research after my daughter had a life-threatening
> reaction to the whole-cell pertussis vaccine.
>
> I discovered that vaccines are not a monolithic issue. The tetanus
> vaccine, for example, is a safe and effective preventative of a horrible
> disease that lies in wait in the soil everywhere around us. It's usually
> quite long-lasting as well. WWII soldiers who were vaccinated against
> tetanus exhibited immunity over 50 years later.
>
> The crowd disease vaccines, on the other hand, share the distinction of
> being much less effective at conferring immunity, shorter-lived, and
> with more side effects. Many of the crowd diseases are largely benign in
> healthy children and confer lifelong immunity. The diseases are bad news
> for pregnant women and people with immune disorders, but it's not clear
> that vaccinating healthy children against these diseases is our best
> public health option.
>
> Some public health officials agree that it might be better policy to
> vaccinate against many diseases at puberty and again in early adulthood,
> but they can't enforce vaccination of teens and adults. Young children
> are a captive audience, though, so they are repeatedly vaccinated
> against the crowd diseases, which don't pose a particular threat to
> their health, and also against hepatitis B and HPV, which they are
> extremely unlikely to contract. Meanwhile the adults who should be
> vaccinated against those diseases mostly aren't.
>
> We don't yet have longterm data on the effects of our current aggressive
> vaccine policy. How do repeated doses of a wide variety of vaccines
> affect the health of individuals over 50, 75, 100 years? How long do the
> vaccines confer immunity? What percentage of the population remains
> susceptible to the disease after aggressive vaccination as opposed to
> after natural immunity to the endemic disease?
>
> About 15 years ago, we discovered a bat colony inside our chimney as
> well as a bat bite on my shoulder. The rabies vaccine is not
> particularly safe. It requires 6 doses that cause flu-like symptoms over
> the course of a month. Rabies was then invariably fatal. The whole
> family received all six doses of the rabies vaccine, and we were
> grateful for it, flu-like symptoms and all.
>
> When I was a child, doctors ordered up x-rays for every minor mishap and
> handed out antibiotics like candy. "Better safe than sorry," they'd say,
> completely unaware of the effects of overindulgence in those particular
> kinds of medical technology.
>
> So let's see, what is the experiment and what is the control? In
> adopting a new medical technology, should we err on the side of over- or
> under-prescribing it? How much data do we need before we decide that a
> technology is safe and effective? How long do we need to follow patients
> to determine whether there are deleterious side effects?
>
> These aren't easy questions to answer.
>
> It's not unscientific to want new medical technologies to prove
> themselves before submitting one's self and one's children as
> experimental animals. We do our research and make the best choices we
> can, knowing that Mother Nature always bats last.
>
> --hmm


It is not unscientific, but then we are faced with the question of whether
we have time. While an individual might hold oneself responsible for making
choices for their children, I'm not sure there are serious enough
repercussions if they cause the death of somebody who is immune compromised
because of their decision. So are the individual parent(s) the best place
to make the decision on whether to vaccinate or not?

We could legislate so that vaccination is mandatory like Australia, but
legislation numbs the debate paving the way for somebody to make that their
campaign platform against government overreach. They might win, and over
time get the legislation revoked and then round and round we go.

I agree there aren't easy answers, but unless everybody is as concerned
about the rest of humanity as they are about their own children - all kids
should be vaccinated. We can debate individual 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

The rabies vaccine has gone a long way from the 6 dose goat brain cultured 
vaccine to the new (as of 3 decades ago or more) chicken embryo cultured ones.

As for crowd diseases being benign and immunity, I'd suggest looking at either 
whooping cough or polio for counter examples.  Or German measles (rubella) - 
which, if a pregnant woman contracts it, is mild for her, but can and will 
cause severe retardation in her child.

Do update your research on pertussis though, the vaccine given these days is, 
in general, acellular.  Less long lasting than the whole cell one so needs 
booster shots, but much less likely to provoke reactions.

On 04/02/19, 1:50 AM, "silklist on behalf of Heather Madrone" 
 wrote:

Kiran K Karthikeyan wrote on 2/3/19 2:44 AM February 3, 2019:
> This leads me to the point I'm trying to make - the reason to accept
> science and its findings, warts and all, is simply because we are human 
and
> the scientific method is the best method of enquiry we have at our
> disposal. This obviously doesn't mean blind acceptance, but it does mean 
we
> ask for a preponderance of evidence which peer review (sometimes) 
supplies.
> The system is not perfect but that is a problem with actors in it who are
> unfortunately human. Add to this the last para of Heather's response on
> whether we can ever truly know something.
> 
> [1]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision

It's also the reason to question science and its findings, warts and 
all. It's the scientific method all the way down. Checking past work and 
assumptions is part of it.

"Measure three times and cut once" is from carpentry, not science, but 
it's a valid practice when making any irreversible change. New evidence 
comes in all the time. It's worth taking a breath to ask whether we are 
on course.

This gets muddier when you have interested actors (and we always do) on 
both sides of the scientific equation. There are always people who try 
to force-map available data to get the conclusions they want, and it can 
be very difficult to tell when they're doing so.

Pharmaceutical companies have a long history of massaging, suppressing, 
and manufacturing results so they can bring drugs profitably to market.

I did my vaccine research after my daughter had a life-threatening 
reaction to the whole-cell pertussis vaccine.

I discovered that vaccines are not a monolithic issue. The tetanus 
vaccine, for example, is a safe and effective preventative of a horrible 
disease that lies in wait in the soil everywhere around us. It's usually 
quite long-lasting as well. WWII soldiers who were vaccinated against 
tetanus exhibited immunity over 50 years later.

The crowd disease vaccines, on the other hand, share the distinction of 
being much less effective at conferring immunity, shorter-lived, and 
with more side effects. Many of the crowd diseases are largely benign in 
healthy children and confer lifelong immunity. The diseases are bad news 
for pregnant women and people with immune disorders, but it's not clear 
that vaccinating healthy children against these diseases is our best 
public health option.

Some public health officials agree that it might be better policy to 
vaccinate against many diseases at puberty and again in early adulthood, 
but they can't enforce vaccination of teens and adults. Young children 
are a captive audience, though, so they are repeatedly vaccinated 
against the crowd diseases, which don't pose a particular threat to 
their health, and also against hepatitis B and HPV, which they are 
extremely unlikely to contract. Meanwhile the adults who should be 
vaccinated against those diseases mostly aren't.

We don't yet have longterm data on the effects of our current aggressive 
vaccine policy. How do repeated doses of a wide variety of vaccines 
affect the health of individuals over 50, 75, 100 years? How long do the 
vaccines confer immunity? What percentage of the population remains 
susceptible to the disease after aggressive vaccination as opposed to 
after natural immunity to the endemic disease?

About 15 years ago, we discovered a bat colony inside our chimney as 
well as a bat bite on my shoulder. The rabies vaccine is not 
particularly safe. It requires 6 doses that cause flu-like symptoms over 
the course of a month. Rabies was then invariably fatal. The whole 
family received all six doses of the rabies vaccine, and we were 
grateful for it, flu-like symptoms and all.

When I was a child, doctors ordered up x-rays for every minor mishap and 
handed out antibiotics like candy. "Better safe than sorry," they'd say, 
completely unaware of the effects 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Heather Madrone]

Kiran K Karthikeyan wrote on 2/3/19 2:44 AM February 3, 2019:

This leads me to the point I'm trying to make - the reason to accept
science and its findings, warts and all, is simply because we are human and
the scientific method is the best method of enquiry we have at our
disposal. This obviously doesn't mean blind acceptance, but it does mean we
ask for a preponderance of evidence which peer review (sometimes) supplies.
The system is not perfect but that is a problem with actors in it who are
unfortunately human. Add to this the last para of Heather's response on
whether we can ever truly know something.

[1]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision


It's also the reason to question science and its findings, warts and 
all. It's the scientific method all the way down. Checking past work and 
assumptions is part of it.


"Measure three times and cut once" is from carpentry, not science, but 
it's a valid practice when making any irreversible change. New evidence 
comes in all the time. It's worth taking a breath to ask whether we are 
on course.


This gets muddier when you have interested actors (and we always do) on 
both sides of the scientific equation. There are always people who try 
to force-map available data to get the conclusions they want, and it can 
be very difficult to tell when they're doing so.


Pharmaceutical companies have a long history of massaging, suppressing, 
and manufacturing results so they can bring drugs profitably to market.


I did my vaccine research after my daughter had a life-threatening 
reaction to the whole-cell pertussis vaccine.


I discovered that vaccines are not a monolithic issue. The tetanus 
vaccine, for example, is a safe and effective preventative of a horrible 
disease that lies in wait in the soil everywhere around us. It's usually 
quite long-lasting as well. WWII soldiers who were vaccinated against 
tetanus exhibited immunity over 50 years later.


The crowd disease vaccines, on the other hand, share the distinction of 
being much less effective at conferring immunity, shorter-lived, and 
with more side effects. Many of the crowd diseases are largely benign in 
healthy children and confer lifelong immunity. The diseases are bad news 
for pregnant women and people with immune disorders, but it's not clear 
that vaccinating healthy children against these diseases is our best 
public health option.


Some public health officials agree that it might be better policy to 
vaccinate against many diseases at puberty and again in early adulthood, 
but they can't enforce vaccination of teens and adults. Young children 
are a captive audience, though, so they are repeatedly vaccinated 
against the crowd diseases, which don't pose a particular threat to 
their health, and also against hepatitis B and HPV, which they are 
extremely unlikely to contract. Meanwhile the adults who should be 
vaccinated against those diseases mostly aren't.


We don't yet have longterm data on the effects of our current aggressive 
vaccine policy. How do repeated doses of a wide variety of vaccines 
affect the health of individuals over 50, 75, 100 years? How long do the 
vaccines confer immunity? What percentage of the population remains 
susceptible to the disease after aggressive vaccination as opposed to 
after natural immunity to the endemic disease?


About 15 years ago, we discovered a bat colony inside our chimney as 
well as a bat bite on my shoulder. The rabies vaccine is not 
particularly safe. It requires 6 doses that cause flu-like symptoms over 
the course of a month. Rabies was then invariably fatal. The whole 
family received all six doses of the rabies vaccine, and we were 
grateful for it, flu-like symptoms and all.


When I was a child, doctors ordered up x-rays for every minor mishap and 
handed out antibiotics like candy. "Better safe than sorry," they'd say, 
completely unaware of the effects of overindulgence in those particular 
kinds of medical technology.


So let's see, what is the experiment and what is the control? In 
adopting a new medical technology, should we err on the side of over- or 
under-prescribing it? How much data do we need before we decide that a 
technology is safe and effective? How long do we need to follow patients 
to determine whether there are deleterious side effects?


These aren't easy questions to answer.

It's not unscientific to want new medical technologies to prove 
themselves before submitting one's self and one's children as 
experimental animals. We do our research and make the best choices we 
can, knowing that Mother Nature always bats last.


--hmm

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Kiran K Karthikeyan]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2019 at 16:25, Alok Prasanna Kumar 
wrote:

> Thanks Kiran. I think that's a really great way to put things. I've been
> thinking about this in multiple contexts, especially when scientific
> research and findings are reported in mass media. It's quite easy for
> people to "debunk" claims when they haven't understood them in the first
> place and that's why I guess it's really important to understand how the
> scientific method works.
>
> Although the scientific world has made the world comprehendable, I do feel
> a section of the populace have replaced priests in their lives with
> scientists.


Or treating scientists as priests, which is possibly worse (Jordan
Peterson). Even worse is when reputation in one field somehow confers
scientific credentials (Gwyneth Paltrow).


> That instead of understanding the method and the principles
> behind a finding, they rely on the authority of the person or the prestige
> of the institution carrying out the research.
>

Name dropping should prick up everybody's ears. Being a successful
practitioner of the scientific method does not (and should not) allow you
to subvert it at your convenience or to your advantage.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Kiran K Karthikeyan]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2019 at 16:14, Kiran K Karthikeyan <
kiran.karthike...@gmail.com> wrote:

> This thread has had me huffing and puffing (or perhaps hand wringing) for
> a while, but the topic is such that any response can be countered. A proper
> discussion on the various nuances of each cited instance where science has
> apparently failed is one I am woefully inadequate for. Therefore, I say my
> piece:
>
> One of the few things that has stuck with me since my school days is the
> concept of significant figures [1]. There are more details to this concept,
> but in the context of this discussion what is relevant is that an accurate
> measurement [2] would run into infinite significant figures. In other
> words, we would need infinite resolution in the measuring instrument to
> make an accurate measurement.
>
> So the fact that science is approximate, imprecise etc. is a fair
> complaint if the goal is accuracy, but accuracy is not practical. I am glad
> some wise humans decided I should be told this sooner than later. Instead
> we have the scientific method, peer review etc. which is probably the best
> that we humans have come up with to deal with the infinitely complex
> universe we live in.
>
> This leads me to the point I'm trying to make - the reason to accept
> science and its findings, warts and all, is simply because we are human and
> the scientific method is the best method of enquiry we have at our
> disposal. This obviously doesn't mean blind acceptance, but it does mean we
> ask for a preponderance of evidence which peer review (sometimes) supplies.
> The system is not perfect but that is a problem with actors in it who are
> unfortunately human.
>

Should add here, just in the interest of completeness, that time is also an
actor here that leads us to accept approximations i.e. should we wait 10-20
years for conclusive data on a vaccine for a disease that will become a
pandemic in months.


> Add to this the last para of Heather's response on whether we can ever
> truly know something.
>
> [1]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Alok Prasanna Kumar]

Thanks Kiran. I think that's a really great way to put things. I've been
thinking about this in multiple contexts, especially when scientific
research and findings are reported in mass media. It's quite easy for
people to "debunk" claims when they haven't understood them in the first
place and that's why I guess it's really important to understand how the
scientific method works.

Although the scientific world has made the world comprehendable, I do feel
a section of the populace have replaced priests in their lives with
scientists. That instead of understanding the method and the principles
behind a finding, they rely on the authority of the person or the prestige
of the institution carrying out the research.

On Sun, Feb 3, 2019, 4:14 PM Kiran K Karthikeyan <
kiran.karthike...@gmail.com wrote:

> This thread has had me huffing and puffing (or perhaps hand wringing) for a
> while, but the topic is such that any response can be countered. A proper
> discussion on the various nuances of each cited instance where science has
> apparently failed is one I am woefully inadequate for. Therefore, I say my
> piece:
>
> One of the few things that has stuck with me since my school days is the
> concept of significant figures [1]. There are more details to this concept,
> but in the context of this discussion what is relevant is that an accurate
> measurement [2] would run into infinite significant figures. In other
> words, we would need infinite resolution in the measuring instrument to
> make an accurate measurement.
>
> So the fact that science is approximate, imprecise etc. is a fair complaint
> if the goal is accuracy, but accuracy is not practical. I am glad some wise
> humans decided I should be told this sooner than later. Instead we have the
> scientific method, peer review etc. which is probably the best that we
> humans have come up with to deal with the infinitely complex universe we
> live in.
>
> This leads me to the point I'm trying to make - the reason to accept
> science and its findings, warts and all, is simply because we are human and
> the scientific method is the best method of enquiry we have at our
> disposal. This obviously doesn't mean blind acceptance, but it does mean we
> ask for a preponderance of evidence which peer review (sometimes) supplies.
> The system is not perfect but that is a problem with actors in it who are
> unfortunately human. Add to this the last para of Heather's response on
> whether we can ever truly know something.
>
> [1]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Kiran K Karthikeyan]

This thread has had me huffing and puffing (or perhaps hand wringing) for a
while, but the topic is such that any response can be countered. A proper
discussion on the various nuances of each cited instance where science has
apparently failed is one I am woefully inadequate for. Therefore, I say my
piece:

One of the few things that has stuck with me since my school days is the
concept of significant figures [1]. There are more details to this concept,
but in the context of this discussion what is relevant is that an accurate
measurement [2] would run into infinite significant figures. In other
words, we would need infinite resolution in the measuring instrument to
make an accurate measurement.

So the fact that science is approximate, imprecise etc. is a fair complaint
if the goal is accuracy, but accuracy is not practical. I am glad some wise
humans decided I should be told this sooner than later. Instead we have the
scientific method, peer review etc. which is probably the best that we
humans have come up with to deal with the infinitely complex universe we
live in.

This leads me to the point I'm trying to make - the reason to accept
science and its findings, warts and all, is simply because we are human and
the scientific method is the best method of enquiry we have at our
disposal. This obviously doesn't mean blind acceptance, but it does mean we
ask for a preponderance of evidence which peer review (sometimes) supplies.
The system is not perfect but that is a problem with actors in it who are
unfortunately human. Add to this the last para of Heather's response on
whether we can ever truly know something.

[1]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Sun, Feb 3, 2019, 9:37 AM Suresh Ramasubramanian 
> WHO has defined vaccine protocols that address your concern
>

"The politics of polio" by Dr. Pushpa Bhargava an eminent microbiologist
who returned his Padma Bhushan in protest.

https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/The-politics-of-polio/article15239258.ece

Ground reality is messy and corrupt.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Ra Jesh]

How easy is it for parents (ALL parents) to find the UN protocol?

If an organization had sexual harrassment protocol on paper and it was not
very easy to find it, and there was an instance of sexual harrassment in
that organization, what happens?

On Sun, Feb 3, 2019, 09:37 Suresh Ramasubramanian 
>
>
>
>
> WHO has defined vaccine protocols that address your concern
> Also the supposed individual risk from vaccines is vanishingly rare and
> this is well documented too
> Plus some of the things most vaccine deniers allege have never yet been
> backed with data
>
>
>
> --srs
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 9:33 AM +0530, "Ra Jesh" 
> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I think the main problem in the vaccine 'system' is that there is the
> collective societal benefit and risk and there is individual benefit and
> risk and the two are conjoined.
>
> But unlike some other systems, the collective societal benefit can only be
> realized by people forcibly taking on the individual risk. If individuals
> opt out because the individual risk benefit equation doesn't work for them,
> the collective societal benefit ceases to exist.
>
> I can't think of any other similar system that doesn't become oppressive at
> some level. E.g. Nation state, armed forces, universal education, etc etc.
>
> So, if the above is true then the vaccine system is oppressive at least to
> some people.
>
> When you layer this with the fact that the societal necessity for vaccines
> is discussed as an absolute with not much nuance about what vaccines are
> absolutely necessary and what vaccines are kind of optional, then the
> oppression becomes more insidious.
>
> If a parent is 'encouraged' to give their child a vaccine that's actually
> not mandatory but it's couched in a list of other mandatory vaccines to
> make the parent believe it's mandatory...
>
> At this level, it is a breakdown of the system. 'Science' cedes this
> terrain to politics and claims innocence. But when people fight back about
> the politics, science is held up as the holy cow to be protected.
>
> On Sun, Feb 3, 2019, 09:17 Udhay Shankar N  On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 10:36
> PM Srini RamaKrishnan
> > wrote:
> >
> > Similarly there are kids who get polio solely because of the vaccine,
> > > Vaccine-derived
> > > polioviruses (VDPVs). No one disputes this, but now it becomes a
> > > philosophical question whether even one victim is one too many. Guess
> > which
> > > side the drug companies are on?
> > >
> >
> > Any risk analysis needs to start with the question "what is the threat
> > model?". Similarly, any solution design needs to start with "Don't make
> > things worse" (the Hippocratic principle can be viewed as a special case
> of
> > this).
> >
> > In the above context, the threat model is not "one victim", but
> "potential
> > pandemic".
> >
> > Without going into attenuated vs. killed vaccines, I agree that kids
> > getting polio from vaccines is a bad thing. It is a special case of "kids
> > getting polio" which the vaccine is an attempt to fight against. Can that
> > be improved? Sure. I believe you are sincere in dismissing it. I just
> don't
> > happen to agree.
> >
> > Udhay
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

  
  
  

WHO has defined vaccine protocols that address your concern 
Also the supposed individual risk from vaccines is vanishingly rare and this is 
well documented too 
Plus some of the things most vaccine deniers allege have never yet been backed 
with data 



--srs

  




On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 9:33 AM +0530, "Ra Jesh"  wrote:










I think the main problem in the vaccine 'system' is that there is the
collective societal benefit and risk and there is individual benefit and
risk and the two are conjoined.

But unlike some other systems, the collective societal benefit can only be
realized by people forcibly taking on the individual risk. If individuals
opt out because the individual risk benefit equation doesn't work for them,
the collective societal benefit ceases to exist.

I can't think of any other similar system that doesn't become oppressive at
some level. E.g. Nation state, armed forces, universal education, etc etc.

So, if the above is true then the vaccine system is oppressive at least to
some people.

When you layer this with the fact that the societal necessity for vaccines
is discussed as an absolute with not much nuance about what vaccines are
absolutely necessary and what vaccines are kind of optional, then the
oppression becomes more insidious.

If a parent is 'encouraged' to give their child a vaccine that's actually
not mandatory but it's couched in a list of other mandatory vaccines to
make the parent believe it's mandatory...

At this level, it is a breakdown of the system. 'Science' cedes this
terrain to politics and claims innocence. But when people fight back about
the politics, science is held up as the holy cow to be protected.

On Sun, Feb 3, 2019, 09:17 Udhay Shankar N  On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 10:36 PM 
Srini RamaKrishnan 
> wrote:
>
> Similarly there are kids who get polio solely because of the vaccine,
> > Vaccine-derived
> > polioviruses (VDPVs). No one disputes this, but now it becomes a
> > philosophical question whether even one victim is one too many. Guess
> which
> > side the drug companies are on?
> >
>
> Any risk analysis needs to start with the question "what is the threat
> model?". Similarly, any solution design needs to start with "Don't make
> things worse" (the Hippocratic principle can be viewed as a special case of
> this).
>
> In the above context, the threat model is not "one victim", but "potential
> pandemic".
>
> Without going into attenuated vs. killed vaccines, I agree that kids
> getting polio from vaccines is a bad thing. It is a special case of "kids
> getting polio" which the vaccine is an attempt to fight against. Can that
> be improved? Sure. I believe you are sincere in dismissing it. I just don't
> happen to agree.
>
> Udhay
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Ra Jesh]

I think the main problem in the vaccine 'system' is that there is the
collective societal benefit and risk and there is individual benefit and
risk and the two are conjoined.

But unlike some other systems, the collective societal benefit can only be
realized by people forcibly taking on the individual risk. If individuals
opt out because the individual risk benefit equation doesn't work for them,
the collective societal benefit ceases to exist.

I can't think of any other similar system that doesn't become oppressive at
some level. E.g. Nation state, armed forces, universal education, etc etc.

So, if the above is true then the vaccine system is oppressive at least to
some people.

When you layer this with the fact that the societal necessity for vaccines
is discussed as an absolute with not much nuance about what vaccines are
absolutely necessary and what vaccines are kind of optional, then the
oppression becomes more insidious.

If a parent is 'encouraged' to give their child a vaccine that's actually
not mandatory but it's couched in a list of other mandatory vaccines to
make the parent believe it's mandatory...

At this level, it is a breakdown of the system. 'Science' cedes this
terrain to politics and claims innocence. But when people fight back about
the politics, science is held up as the holy cow to be protected.

On Sun, Feb 3, 2019, 09:17 Udhay Shankar N  On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 10:36 PM Srini RamaKrishnan 
> wrote:
>
> Similarly there are kids who get polio solely because of the vaccine,
> > Vaccine-derived
> > polioviruses (VDPVs). No one disputes this, but now it becomes a
> > philosophical question whether even one victim is one too many. Guess
> which
> > side the drug companies are on?
> >
>
> Any risk analysis needs to start with the question "what is the threat
> model?". Similarly, any solution design needs to start with "Don't make
> things worse" (the Hippocratic principle can be viewed as a special case of
> this).
>
> In the above context, the threat model is not "one victim", but "potential
> pandemic".
>
> Without going into attenuated vs. killed vaccines, I agree that kids
> getting polio from vaccines is a bad thing. It is a special case of "kids
> getting polio" which the vaccine is an attempt to fight against. Can that
> be improved? Sure. I believe you are sincere in dismissing it. I just don't
> happen to agree.
>
> Udhay
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Udhay Shankar N]

On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 10:36 PM Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

Similarly there are kids who get polio solely because of the vaccine,
> Vaccine-derived
> polioviruses (VDPVs). No one disputes this, but now it becomes a
> philosophical question whether even one victim is one too many. Guess which
> side the drug companies are on?
>

Any risk analysis needs to start with the question "what is the threat
model?". Similarly, any solution design needs to start with "Don't make
things worse" (the Hippocratic principle can be viewed as a special case of
this).

In the above context, the threat model is not "one victim", but "potential
pandemic".

Without going into attenuated vs. killed vaccines, I agree that kids
getting polio from vaccines is a bad thing. It is a special case of "kids
getting polio" which the vaccine is an attempt to fight against. Can that
be improved? Sure. I believe you are sincere in dismissing it. I just don't
happen to agree.

Udhay

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Add to what Charles said - Science is observable, testable and repeatable.  
Which means you can observe x, test your hypothesis of what (y) causes x and 
you can + others can repeat y leading to x.

This means that for something like vaccination for which you have several 
generations of scientific data, you had better come up with actual data 
supporting a different hypothesis rather than a rational seeming request to see 
all sides of a particular situation.

On 03/02/19, 2:08 AM, "silklist on behalf of Charles Haynes" 
 wrote:

On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 at 14:23, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

The goal of applied science is not the truth. Since world war 1 the goal of
> "science" has been subverted to find applications that can be monetized:
> this can be called technology or engineering but not science.
>

So you're saying the goal of technology or engineering is to make money, I
can agree with that. The "goal" of science is still to try to make testable
predictions about the observable world. Always has been.


> Those with the real scientific temper cannot accept a solution that still
> has open questions,


What you call "open questions" I would call "unexplained observations" or
"untested hypotheses."


> We largely don't fund "science", worldwide, we fund technology 
development.
> We've hardly made any fundamental breakthroughs in understanding reality 
in
> the last few decades


It's not at all clear that science "attempts to understand reality." The
idea that there is an underlying "reality" to be understood is an
interesting hypothesis, but it's sounds like "hidden variables" which has
been conclusively disproved.

In any case, while the claim is subjective, I'd argue that we've actually
made quite a few fundamental scientific breakthroughs, especially in
nuclear physics, astrophysics, medicine, and mathematics.


> Science is fundamentally about healthy disagreement and debate over the
> truth until it is conclusively found with no room for argument.
>

That's flat out wrong. Science *never* "conclusively finds truth." Not
ever. That's religion, not science. Science merely comes up with "the best"
explanation for current observations and makes predictions about the
results of future observations. Science *always* includes the possibility
of observations that contradict our current understanding.


> There's a club of 500 eminent researchers in the field and doctors
> including Nobel laureate Kary Mullis (the inventor of the PCR test) who
> insist, vehemently so, that there's no proof that AIDS is caused by HIV.
>

Kary Mullis has never actually done any scientific research in AIDS or HIV.
He also believes in Astrology.


> These are unquestionable experts in the field
>

They are not experts in the field of HIV or AIDS.

These are not crazy flat Earthers.
>

Actually they are. HIV as the causative agent of AIDS is solid science.


> Such open questions are routinely brushed under the carpet,


Nope. They've been addressed, and in the case of HIV/AIDS thoroughly
refuted.


> Science must also look seriously at the idea that there's no such thing as
> objective reality,


It does, depending what you mean by your definition of "objective reality."
The Copenhagen interpretation says that "reality" is created by
observeration. I'm personally not a fan of the Copenhagen interpretation
but it's certainly a part of mainstream science.

-- Charles

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Charles Haynes]

On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 at 14:23, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

The goal of applied science is not the truth. Since world war 1 the goal of
> "science" has been subverted to find applications that can be monetized:
> this can be called technology or engineering but not science.
>

So you're saying the goal of technology or engineering is to make money, I
can agree with that. The "goal" of science is still to try to make testable
predictions about the observable world. Always has been.


> Those with the real scientific temper cannot accept a solution that still
> has open questions,


What you call "open questions" I would call "unexplained observations" or
"untested hypotheses."


> We largely don't fund "science", worldwide, we fund technology development.
> We've hardly made any fundamental breakthroughs in understanding reality in
> the last few decades


It's not at all clear that science "attempts to understand reality." The
idea that there is an underlying "reality" to be understood is an
interesting hypothesis, but it's sounds like "hidden variables" which has
been conclusively disproved.

In any case, while the claim is subjective, I'd argue that we've actually
made quite a few fundamental scientific breakthroughs, especially in
nuclear physics, astrophysics, medicine, and mathematics.


> Science is fundamentally about healthy disagreement and debate over the
> truth until it is conclusively found with no room for argument.
>

That's flat out wrong. Science *never* "conclusively finds truth." Not
ever. That's religion, not science. Science merely comes up with "the best"
explanation for current observations and makes predictions about the
results of future observations. Science *always* includes the possibility
of observations that contradict our current understanding.


> There's a club of 500 eminent researchers in the field and doctors
> including Nobel laureate Kary Mullis (the inventor of the PCR test) who
> insist, vehemently so, that there's no proof that AIDS is caused by HIV.
>

Kary Mullis has never actually done any scientific research in AIDS or HIV.
He also believes in Astrology.


> These are unquestionable experts in the field
>

They are not experts in the field of HIV or AIDS.

These are not crazy flat Earthers.
>

Actually they are. HIV as the causative agent of AIDS is solid science.


> Such open questions are routinely brushed under the carpet,


Nope. They've been addressed, and in the case of HIV/AIDS thoroughly
refuted.


> Science must also look seriously at the idea that there's no such thing as
> objective reality,


It does, depending what you mean by your definition of "objective reality."
The Copenhagen interpretation says that "reality" is created by
observeration. I'm personally not a fan of the Copenhagen interpretation
but it's certainly a part of mainstream science.

-- Charles

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Heather Madrone]

Srini RamaKrishnan wrote on 2/2/19 9:06 AM February 2, 2019:

I don't think I'm qualified to make sense of all the medical literature,
but here's what is obvious to me.

Science is fundamentally about healthy disagreement and debate over the
truth until it is conclusively found with no room for argument.


I don't think such certainty is ever the provenance of science. Even 
after we think we know what's going on, some Einstein can come along 
with a more descriptive model.


A lot of medical practices become universal before they have been 
rigorously tested. We can't make good risk/benefit analyses of medical 
interventions if we don't have good data, and it takes many decades of 
general use before longterm data is available.


If you have any questions (and I have many) about public health 
vaccination practices, there are many who dismiss your concerns out of 
hand, because any issues with vaccines make a person an ignorant 
anti-vaxxer.



Similarly there are kids who get polio solely because of the vaccine,
Vaccine-derived
polioviruses (VDPVs). 


Kids get polio from the live, attenuated oral polio vaccine. They don't 
get it from the killed, injected vaccine.


There is good evidence that the OPV provides better and longer-lasting 
immunity than the IPV. The current US vaccine schedule requires the IPV, 
and the OPV is no longer available.


I wonder whether this is a good thing. Sure, polio is rare now, but what 
happens if there's an epidemic and huge swathes of the population are no 
longer immune to polio?


My concern about many of the vaccines against the childhood diseases 
have to do with the fact that the vaccines are worse at conferring 
immunity than the disease. Thus, we now have a pool of adults who are 
susceptible to measles (I'm likely in that demographic), rubella, 
chicken pox, mumps, etc.


I fear that we are setting the stage for some truly devastating 
epidemics. When the crowd diseases first hit populations, they decimated 
them. Over time, we domesticated the diseases (as it were). Their 
virulence decreases and they became nuisances for children rather than 
epidemics that killed substantial portions of the adult population.


So now we vaccinate against those disease, conferring temporary partial 
immunity on the population. Perhaps eradicating these diseases is a 
mistake and we would do better keep them endemic and try to reduce their 
virulence, as we are attempting to do with bed nets and malaria.


One of the advantages to endemic childhood diseases is that adults whose 
immunity might be waning are re-exposed to them many times over the 
course of their lives, thus refreshing and strengthening their immune 
responses to the organism.


I've wondered whether the current shingles epidemic in young adults is a 
side effect of vaccination against chicken pox.


Vaccination and pesticides have a lot in common. In both cases, we're 
trying to eradicate organisms we don't like instead of learning to live 
with them.


When that boomerang comes back, it can give us a nasty clout on the head.


No one disputes this, but now it becomes a
philosophical question whether even one victim is one too many. Guess which
side the drug companies are on?


Medical treatments typically come with a business agenda. Should we 
trust that our health rates higher than the profit motive for the 
pharmaceutical and medical tech industries?



Such open questions are routinely brushed under the carpet, and that raises
the question - what is the role of profit motive and wanting to be seen to
be doing something? It should be discussed with more seriousness than I see
currently.


Yes, I agree.


Instead what I do see is a lot of hoarse rhetoric from those living in the
majority consensus reality.


And a lot of discrediting the loyal opposition.


Undoubtedly some good continues to come from drug companies and medical
research,


I'd go further and say that modern medicine indisputably saves and 
improves many lives. There is a lot of great research and practices in 
amidst the scientism.



it's not all bad, but there's an air of confidence that's
unearned. They are not doing anything about wellness, they don't even cure
diseases most of the time, only dealing with eradicating symptoms.


This is a bit too dismissive of medical care that helps many people stay 
well a lot longer.


My husband was diagnosed with pre-diabetes and some other worrying signs 
that his high-simple-carb diet was affecting his health. His doctor 
encouraged him to change his diet. He has lost weight, his blood sugar 
is in the normal range, and his blood pressure has dropped 
significantly. The doctor could have given him pills to manage all of 
that, but the HMO we belong to values wellness over pharmaceutical profits.


I know quite a few older adults whose lives are better because their 
doctors have recommended lifestyle changes that have improved their 
overall health and functional mobility.



Putting down 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

The goal of applied science is not the truth. Since world war 1 the goal of
"science" has been subverted to find applications that can be monetized:
this can be called technology or engineering but not science.

Those with the real scientific temper cannot accept a solution that still
has open questions, they don't care about time to market - but the
engineers and technicians among them say, perfect is the enemy of good, and
vilify the opposition because persistent doubt gums up the marketing
machine.

We largely don't fund "science", worldwide, we fund technology development.
We've hardly made any fundamental breakthroughs in understanding reality in
the last few decades compared with what we did in earlier centuries when
most science was theoretical. There's almost no appetite for it.

Nobody has the patience to do real science, which is par for the course for
the attention deficit generation we have become.



On Sat, Feb 2, 2019, 10:36 PM Srini RamaKrishnan  I don't think I'm qualified to make sense of all the medical literature,
> but here's what is obvious to me.
>
> Science is fundamentally about healthy disagreement and debate over the
> truth until it is conclusively found with no room for argument.
>
> There's a club of 500 eminent researchers in the field and doctors
> including Nobel laureate Kary Mullis (the inventor of the PCR test) who
> insist, vehemently so, that there's no proof that AIDS is caused by HIV.
> These are unquestionable experts in the field who chose to swim against the
> current of consensus, risking their careers. They've been writing papers
> for the last thirty years, but the amount of hate they've got from the
> larger medical community reminds me of the dark ages when scientists met in
> secret societies.
>
> These are not crazy flat Earthers.
>
> Similarly there are kids who get polio solely because of the vaccine, 
> Vaccine-derived
> polioviruses (VDPVs). No one disputes this, but now it becomes a
> philosophical question whether even one victim is one too many. Guess which
> side the drug companies are on?
>
> Such open questions are routinely brushed under the carpet, and that
> raises the question - what is the role of profit motive and wanting to be
> seen to be doing something? It should be discussed with more seriousness
> than I see currently.
>
> Instead what I do see is a lot of hoarse rhetoric from those living in the
> majority consensus reality.
>
> Undoubtedly some good continues to come from drug companies and medical
> research, it's not all bad, but there's an air of confidence that's
> unearned. They are not doing anything about wellness, they don't even cure
> diseases most of the time, only dealing with eradicating symptoms.
>
> Putting down traditional medicine as alternative is also definitely kind
> of majoritarianism that is aided by the rich pharma giants. Which is a
> tragedy because they actually were developed in ages when profit motive was
> absent.
>
> Science must also look seriously at the idea that there's no such thing as
> objective reality, as I outlined in earlier messages. Limiting precision is
> what enables objective reality.
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 2, 2019, 7:27 PM Suresh Ramasubramanian  wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> one study indicates that measles can "erase" a person's other
>> immunities, leaving them vulnerable to infections for 2-3 years
>> afterwardhttps://
>> www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/07/404963436/scientists-crack-a-50-year-old-mystery-about-the-measles-vaccine
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --srs
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:22 PM +0530, "Suresh Ramasubramanian" <
>> sur...@hserus.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Research says that even malnourished kids benefit by the  way
>> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4527386/
>> And that's not the only nonsense hegde spouts besides quoting other
>> charlatans in this space like Gary Null
>> Here are a couple of rebuttals you can read
>> http://nirmukta.com/2012/06/17/science-is-not-the-enemy-dr-hegde/
>> And then this by Dr Balasubramanian of LV Prasad Eye Institute and former
>> head of the CCMB in Hyderabad for decades - one of the most articulate
>> writers on science in india
>> https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/medicinebashing-is-too-much-with-us/article4728002.ece
>> Hegde is a fraud - no question about it
>>
>>
>> --srs
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:06 PM +0530, "Srini RamaKrishnan"  wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> https://www.moneylife.in/article/science-and-politics-of-vaccines/36886.html
>>
>> The more I read I find his stand on vaccination very reasonable, he merely
>> says giving vaccines to malnourished children is dangerous. A full stomach
>> is better than a vaccine at preventing infection.
>>
>> I thought you had done your research Suresh, so I didn't check earlier.
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 3:50 PM Srini RamaKrishnan  On Fri, Feb 1, 2019,
>> 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

I don't think I'm qualified to make sense of all the medical literature,
but here's what is obvious to me.

Science is fundamentally about healthy disagreement and debate over the
truth until it is conclusively found with no room for argument.

There's a club of 500 eminent researchers in the field and doctors
including Nobel laureate Kary Mullis (the inventor of the PCR test) who
insist, vehemently so, that there's no proof that AIDS is caused by HIV.
These are unquestionable experts in the field who chose to swim against the
current of consensus, risking their careers. They've been writing papers
for the last thirty years, but the amount of hate they've got from the
larger medical community reminds me of the dark ages when scientists met in
secret societies.

These are not crazy flat Earthers.

Similarly there are kids who get polio solely because of the vaccine,
Vaccine-derived
polioviruses (VDPVs). No one disputes this, but now it becomes a
philosophical question whether even one victim is one too many. Guess which
side the drug companies are on?

Such open questions are routinely brushed under the carpet, and that raises
the question - what is the role of profit motive and wanting to be seen to
be doing something? It should be discussed with more seriousness than I see
currently.

Instead what I do see is a lot of hoarse rhetoric from those living in the
majority consensus reality.

Undoubtedly some good continues to come from drug companies and medical
research, it's not all bad, but there's an air of confidence that's
unearned. They are not doing anything about wellness, they don't even cure
diseases most of the time, only dealing with eradicating symptoms.

Putting down traditional medicine as alternative is also definitely kind of
majoritarianism that is aided by the rich pharma giants. Which is a tragedy
because they actually were developed in ages when profit motive was absent.

Science must also look seriously at the idea that there's no such thing as
objective reality, as I outlined in earlier messages. Limiting precision is
what enables objective reality.




On Sat, Feb 2, 2019, 7:27 PM Suresh Ramasubramanian 
>
>
>
>
> one study indicates that measles can "erase" a person's other
> immunities, leaving them vulnerable to infections for 2-3 years
> afterwardhttps://
> www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/07/404963436/scientists-crack-a-50-year-old-mystery-about-the-measles-vaccine
>
>
>
>
> --srs
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:22 PM +0530, "Suresh Ramasubramanian" <
> sur...@hserus.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Research says that even malnourished kids benefit by the  way
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4527386/
> And that's not the only nonsense hegde spouts besides quoting other
> charlatans in this space like Gary Null
> Here are a couple of rebuttals you can read
> http://nirmukta.com/2012/06/17/science-is-not-the-enemy-dr-hegde/
> And then this by Dr Balasubramanian of LV Prasad Eye Institute and former
> head of the CCMB in Hyderabad for decades - one of the most articulate
> writers on science in india
> https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/medicinebashing-is-too-much-with-us/article4728002.ece
> Hegde is a fraud - no question about it
>
>
> --srs
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:06 PM +0530, "Srini RamaKrishnan"  wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> https://www.moneylife.in/article/science-and-politics-of-vaccines/36886.html
>
> The more I read I find his stand on vaccination very reasonable, he merely
> says giving vaccines to malnourished children is dangerous. A full stomach
> is better than a vaccine at preventing infection.
>
> I thought you had done your research Suresh, so I didn't check earlier.
>
> On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 3:50 PM Srini RamaKrishnan  On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 1:32
> PM Suresh Ramasubramanian  wrote:
> >
> >> There is absolutely no open mind possible for vaccine deniers. And they
> >> cause far too much harm to be anything other than dismissed outright. I
> am
> >> sorry if we disagree on that matter.
> >>
> >
> > Before you completely close your mind I'd like to know what you know of
> > his talks?
> >
> > The only bit on vaccination I could find was this,
> > https://youtu.be/Pi4mpCmiTGg
> >
> > Which doesn't sound like vaccine denial at all.
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

  
  
  

one study indicates that measles can "erase" a person's other 
immunities, leaving them vulnerable to infections for 2-3 years 
afterwardhttps://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/07/404963436/scientists-crack-a-50-year-old-mystery-about-the-measles-vaccine




--srs

  




On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:22 PM +0530, "Suresh Ramasubramanian" 
 wrote:











  
  


Research says that even malnourished kids benefit by the  way
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4527386/
And that's not the only nonsense hegde spouts besides quoting other charlatans 
in this space like Gary Null
Here are a couple of rebuttals you can read 
http://nirmukta.com/2012/06/17/science-is-not-the-enemy-dr-hegde/
And then this by Dr Balasubramanian of LV Prasad Eye Institute and former head 
of the CCMB in Hyderabad for decades - one of the most articulate writers on 
science in india 
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/medicinebashing-is-too-much-with-us/article4728002.ece
Hegde is a fraud - no question about it 


--srs

  



On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:06 PM +0530, "Srini RamaKrishnan"  wrote:










https://www.moneylife.in/article/science-and-politics-of-vaccines/36886.html

The more I read I find his stand on vaccination very reasonable, he merely
says giving vaccines to malnourished children is dangerous. A full stomach
is better than a vaccine at preventing infection.

I thought you had done your research Suresh, so I didn't check earlier.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 3:50 PM Srini RamaKrishnan  On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 1:32 PM 
Suresh Ramasubramanian  wrote:
>
>> There is absolutely no open mind possible for vaccine deniers. And they
>> cause far too much harm to be anything other than dismissed outright. I am
>> sorry if we disagree on that matter.
>>
>
> Before you completely close your mind I'd like to know what you know of
> his talks?
>
> The only bit on vaccination I could find was this,
> https://youtu.be/Pi4mpCmiTGg
>
> Which doesn't sound like vaccine denial at all.
>
>
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

  
  


Research says that even malnourished kids benefit by the  way
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4527386/
And that's not the only nonsense hegde spouts besides quoting other charlatans 
in this space like Gary Null
Here are a couple of rebuttals you can read 
http://nirmukta.com/2012/06/17/science-is-not-the-enemy-dr-hegde/
And then this by Dr Balasubramanian of LV Prasad Eye Institute and former head 
of the CCMB in Hyderabad for decades - one of the most articulate writers on 
science in india 
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/medicinebashing-is-too-much-with-us/article4728002.ece
Hegde is a fraud - no question about it 


--srs

  



On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:06 PM +0530, "Srini RamaKrishnan"  
wrote:










https://www.moneylife.in/article/science-and-politics-of-vaccines/36886.html

The more I read I find his stand on vaccination very reasonable, he merely
says giving vaccines to malnourished children is dangerous. A full stomach
is better than a vaccine at preventing infection.

I thought you had done your research Suresh, so I didn't check earlier.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 3:50 PM Srini RamaKrishnan  On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 1:32 PM 
Suresh Ramasubramanian  wrote:
>
>> There is absolutely no open mind possible for vaccine deniers. And they
>> cause far too much harm to be anything other than dismissed outright. I am
>> sorry if we disagree on that matter.
>>
>
> Before you completely close your mind I'd like to know what you know of
> his talks?
>
> The only bit on vaccination I could find was this,
> https://youtu.be/Pi4mpCmiTGg
>
> Which doesn't sound like vaccine denial at all.
>
>
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 4:05 PM Srini RamaKrishnan 
> https://www.moneylife.in/article/science-and-politics-of-vaccines/36886.html
>
>
>
> I thought you had done your research Suresh, so I didn't check earlier
>

I apologize, I'll retract that, I see comments by you in the article from a
while back which I'll now read.

>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

https://www.moneylife.in/article/science-and-politics-of-vaccines/36886.html

The more I read I find his stand on vaccination very reasonable, he merely
says giving vaccines to malnourished children is dangerous. A full stomach
is better than a vaccine at preventing infection.

I thought you had done your research Suresh, so I didn't check earlier.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 3:50 PM Srini RamaKrishnan  On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 1:32 PM Suresh Ramasubramanian  wrote:
>
>> There is absolutely no open mind possible for vaccine deniers. And they
>> cause far too much harm to be anything other than dismissed outright. I am
>> sorry if we disagree on that matter.
>>
>
> Before you completely close your mind I'd like to know what you know of
> his talks?
>
> The only bit on vaccination I could find was this,
> https://youtu.be/Pi4mpCmiTGg
>
> Which doesn't sound like vaccine denial at all.
>
>
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 1:32 PM Suresh Ramasubramanian  There is absolutely no open mind possible for vaccine deniers. And they
> cause far too much harm to be anything other than dismissed outright. I am
> sorry if we disagree on that matter.
>

Before you completely close your mind I'd like to know what you know of his
talks?

The only bit on vaccination I could find was this,
https://youtu.be/Pi4mpCmiTGg

Which doesn't sound like vaccine denial at all.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

There is absolutely no open mind possible for vaccine deniers. And they cause 
far too much harm to be anything other than dismissed outright. I am sorry if 
we disagree on that matter.

Doctor qualifications or not, he's now a full blown quack.

On 01/02/19, 1:04 PM, "silklist on behalf of Srini RamaKrishnan" 
 wrote:

On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 1:00 PM Srini  RamaKrishnan  You've got to keep an open mind about these things, listen to his talks,
he's astonishingly bright.

I have to add that he's ethical and noble in his quest to find the truth,
something I'd never accuse drug companies of.

>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 1:00 PM Srini  RamaKrishnan  You've got to keep an open mind about these things, listen to his talks,
he's astonishingly bright.

I have to add that he's ethical and noble in his quest to find the truth,
something I'd never accuse drug companies of.

>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 11:56 AM Suresh Ramasubramanian 
> BM Hegde is a full blown anti vaxxer Why is any credence at all
> being paid to his claims?


You've got to keep an open mind about these things, listen to his talks,
he's astonishingly bright.

I think the truth in these cases lies somewhere in the middle. No doubt
vaccines have been beneficial but the for-profit medical system has tried
to invent a vaccine for just about everything of late, and these latest
vaccinations are often optional and not very effective.

The Western medical profession has a great many sins to its credit,
especially when it comes to wellness - they pushed infant formula as safer
than mother's milk, fat as the cause of cholesterol, the infamous food
pyramid, the 2000 calorie a day diet, the 8 hours of sleep myth, and many
more.

The basic test of a science is repeatability, and not a single drug exists
out there that works the same on everyone. The control groups never control
for DNA, diet, lifestyle, height, weight and so many other factors, because
to do so would be too expensive.

Modern medicine then is at best an informed art, but not science.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

  
  
  

BM Hegde is a full blown anti vaxxer Why is any credence at all being 
paid to his claims?



--srs

  




On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 9:35 AM +0530, "Srini RamaKrishnan"  
wrote:










The respected medical journal Lancet is named after the knife used to lance
boils - and this was the specific metaphor the journal founder intended to
convey, to bring a modicum of scientific rigor to the work of medicine
which he felt was a messy boil on the face of humanity, full of half truths
and lies. This was 1823.

Cut to the present, and we see that for the last ten or twenty years well
respected Doctors, Professors and even editors of journals like Lancet have
repeatedly sounded the warning bell and warned that more than half the
studies they publish in their peer reviewed journals can't be trusted.

Then we see Pharma companies like Pfizer and GSK alone have paid more than
8 billion dollars each in the last two decades as malpractice settlements
in the US alone, but I don't see anyone calling them quacks. They literally
budget 1-2% of their revenue for future legal settlements annually. When
expecting to get caught pulling a con, and setting aside money for fines is
part of the business model, we have come a long way from science. It's just
business. Not service. Not science. They even continue to sell drugs that
have been banned or declared harmful in gullible parts of the world where
the law is yet to wake up. That is the very definition of a con artist, who
moves to new markets where the marks are still stupid.

The modern drug industry is clutching at straws - after billions of dollars
in research they have been forced to admit that the placebo effect is the
most effective drug in their arsenal, and they don't know how it works.

There is a point at which some people wake up to the fact that the practice
of institutional medicine is one of the biggest cons. For instance, Dr. B M
Hegde, is a world renowned cardiologist and a Padma Bhushan awardee who has
spoken out repeatedly against the modern medical business that pushes
invasive bypass surgeries, angioplasties and stents, which he says shorten
lives and reduce quality of life - he advocates instead calming the mind
using meditation and relaxation to accept death, and to allow the heart to
naturally route around blockages.

There's a tendency among Nobel laureates to think out of the box because
they finally have nothing to lose. Incidentally Dr. Rustum Roy is said to
have been nominated several times. Science cannot be science when it is
wedded to money and power - it doesn't matter how brilliant you are, if you
don't please the people with the purse you may as well rot. To speak truth
to power requires courage, which is impossible when you are a slave.

When you ignore this reality you find out the hard way what it costs - as
with Dr. C. V. Raman, the 1930 winner of the Nobel prize in Chemistry who
antagonized the ruling elite, especially Nehru and was expelled from IISC
for not being political enough. He reportedly smashed his Bharat Ratna
repeatedly with a hammer and gave up Chemistry, instead he taught his
neighbor's children Carnatic music in his last decades, and hung a board
outside his house - "No politicians allowed" - which mainly fingered the
politicians that filled the boards of research institutes, but also the
actual politicians who were their puppet masters.

Most scientists today spend more than half or 3/4ths of their time on
non-research activities, such as grant applications, networking,
administrative affairs, and teaching. What little time is left is spent on
the cargo cult ritual of publishing papers only on topics that were funded
for being normative, and that stand the best chance of not being rejected
for being too brave.

Medicine is about the whole human - not just the body, but also the mind
and the spirit. I think too many are still addicted to the opiate of
accepted wisdom.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

The respected medical journal Lancet is named after the knife used to lance
boils - and this was the specific metaphor the journal founder intended to
convey, to bring a modicum of scientific rigor to the work of medicine
which he felt was a messy boil on the face of humanity, full of half truths
and lies. This was 1823.

Cut to the present, and we see that for the last ten or twenty years well
respected Doctors, Professors and even editors of journals like Lancet have
repeatedly sounded the warning bell and warned that more than half the
studies they publish in their peer reviewed journals can't be trusted.

Then we see Pharma companies like Pfizer and GSK alone have paid more than
8 billion dollars each in the last two decades as malpractice settlements
in the US alone, but I don't see anyone calling them quacks. They literally
budget 1-2% of their revenue for future legal settlements annually. When
expecting to get caught pulling a con, and setting aside money for fines is
part of the business model, we have come a long way from science. It's just
business. Not service. Not science. They even continue to sell drugs that
have been banned or declared harmful in gullible parts of the world where
the law is yet to wake up. That is the very definition of a con artist, who
moves to new markets where the marks are still stupid.

The modern drug industry is clutching at straws - after billions of dollars
in research they have been forced to admit that the placebo effect is the
most effective drug in their arsenal, and they don't know how it works.

There is a point at which some people wake up to the fact that the practice
of institutional medicine is one of the biggest cons. For instance, Dr. B M
Hegde, is a world renowned cardiologist and a Padma Bhushan awardee who has
spoken out repeatedly against the modern medical business that pushes
invasive bypass surgeries, angioplasties and stents, which he says shorten
lives and reduce quality of life - he advocates instead calming the mind
using meditation and relaxation to accept death, and to allow the heart to
naturally route around blockages.

There's a tendency among Nobel laureates to think out of the box because
they finally have nothing to lose. Incidentally Dr. Rustum Roy is said to
have been nominated several times. Science cannot be science when it is
wedded to money and power - it doesn't matter how brilliant you are, if you
don't please the people with the purse you may as well rot. To speak truth
to power requires courage, which is impossible when you are a slave.

When you ignore this reality you find out the hard way what it costs - as
with Dr. C. V. Raman, the 1930 winner of the Nobel prize in Chemistry who
antagonized the ruling elite, especially Nehru and was expelled from IISC
for not being political enough. He reportedly smashed his Bharat Ratna
repeatedly with a hammer and gave up Chemistry, instead he taught his
neighbor's children Carnatic music in his last decades, and hung a board
outside his house - "No politicians allowed" - which mainly fingered the
politicians that filled the boards of research institutes, but also the
actual politicians who were their puppet masters.

Most scientists today spend more than half or 3/4ths of their time on
non-research activities, such as grant applications, networking,
administrative affairs, and teaching. What little time is left is spent on
the cargo cult ritual of publishing papers only on topics that were funded
for being normative, and that stand the best chance of not being rejected
for being too brave.

Medicine is about the whole human - not just the body, but also the mind
and the spirit. I think too many are still addicted to the opiate of
accepted wisdom.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

  
  
  

cf https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/pauling.html
And yet Oregon State's Pauling institute still publishes nonsense like this 
https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/health-disease/common-cold





--srs

  




On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 9:11 PM +0530, "Charles Haynes" 
 wrote:










I was about to say that I'm very much reminded of Linus Pauling, when he
mentioned that he's a disciple of Linus Pauling.

It's quite sad when a respected intellect in one field thinks that makes
them an expert in unrelated fields and then promulgates nonsense like
Pauling did.

-- Charles

On Thu, 31 Jan 2019 at 10:55, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 9:52 AM Vani Murarka 
> wrote:
>
> >  Deeply appreciative of the discussion going on here at present, the muck
> > in science and in religion being called out.
> >
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es5lfOeobAs
>
> I came across this excellent talk by Dr. Rustum Roy today. He's a
> celebrated materials researcher who tried to do real ground breaking
> science, and not just please the funding agency.
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Charles Haynes]

I was about to say that I'm very much reminded of Linus Pauling, when he
mentioned that he's a disciple of Linus Pauling.

It's quite sad when a respected intellect in one field thinks that makes
them an expert in unrelated fields and then promulgates nonsense like
Pauling did.

-- Charles

On Thu, 31 Jan 2019 at 10:55, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 9:52 AM Vani Murarka 
> wrote:
>
> >  Deeply appreciative of the discussion going on here at present, the muck
> > in science and in religion being called out.
> >
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es5lfOeobAs
>
> I came across this excellent talk by Dr. Rustum Roy today. He's a
> celebrated materials researcher who tried to do real ground breaking
> science, and not just please the funding agency.
>

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 9:52 AM Vani Murarka  wrote:

>  Deeply appreciative of the discussion going on here at present, the muck
> in science and in religion being called out.
>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es5lfOeobAs

I came across this excellent talk by Dr. Rustum Roy today. He's a
celebrated materials researcher who tried to do real ground breaking
science, and not just please the funding agency.

Re: [silk] War on Science? / Philosophy

[silklist]

The original article for this thread 
(http://www.atimes.com/indias-war-science/) had a simple point -- science is a 
threat to the inherent wisdom of the ages.

Given that the discussion has broadened I'm including something I wrote a while 
back in response to a different Facebook thread about philosophical schools 
that have glommed onto the Trump agenda in the US.


https://www.facebook.com/vpostrel/posts/10154842507366348 (no need to look at 
this)

When I read about a rebellion against science it typically turns out to be a 
strawman view of science as certainty rather than simply a technique that works 
in concert with our co-evolving values. When I read complaints about government 
bureaucrats who are supposed to act in the public interest I ask what is the 
alternative – business bureaucrats who are supposed to act only in their 
shareholders’ interests? Shouldn’t we be thinking about how to make these 
approaches work in concert rather than simply rejecting all we’ve learned?

In mathematics axioms are not faith. They are simply arbitrary starting points 
and there are different systems based on different axioms. Non-Euclidean 
geometry takes axioms that might have seemed self-evident and chooses different 
ones. This is a very powerful idea.

It’s useful to read The Metaphysical Club which gives a sense of the late 18th 
century when the idea of a clockwork universe into which every part fits 
unambiguously was accepted by many. It was before Darwin’s godless evolution 
showed a universe that didn’t need a watchmaker.

A statement like "all men are created equal" is meaningless outside context and 
interpretation. Words do not have intrinsic meaning. What does equal mean? Do 
they all get the same opportunity?

The concept of science as an operational and ambiguous process without 
arbitrary “truth” has been very powerful and very successful. Why would one 
want to go back to a time before we had the tools to test various approaches 
and understandings?

How does one address issues like public health, climate change and other 
challenges if we don’t accept the need to evolve our understanding and 
challenge our givens? Science is not about certainty but rather an acceptance 
of the limits of our understanding and our inability to know the future.

This is why it is so important to invest in research and infrastructure to 
create opportunity. It is to complain in hindsight that the “wrong” decisions 
were made. But what is the alternative?

It is also important to recognize there isn’t “the market” but rather complex 
interactive systems that don’t necessarily produce the results we want. Science 
and values are deeply coupled as we try to achieve results we want while 
accepting that our needs and understanding are constantly changing. It’s a 
co-evolutionary process. For that matter public/private is a spurious 
distinction – it’s really about the structure of particular markets. For some 
parts are important and for others value is in the whole.

I learned a lot when I provided tools to the finance industry. I’ve come to 
understand how few understand those tools. Many assume that numbers have 
intrinsic meaning and have a naïve faith in their ability to predict the 
singular future.

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Vani Murarka]

 Deeply appreciative of the discussion going on here at present, the muck
in science and in religion being called out. Haven't read Srini
RamaKrishnan's post "Building a better world" yet.

Maybe it isn't a very great time for me to open my mouth, because I am
feeling so deeply immersed in beauty and grace right now (not due to these
posts, but independent of it), that anything I read seems beautiful to me
-- and such kind of effusive expression does not have place in logical
deliberation, I am aware. But I just want to say I have been in love with
science since I was child, but pretty soon became aware of how it has
trapped itself in its very definition and demand of being objective.
However, however much an entity (a school of thought or any kind of entity
-- be it science, or any religion, or any individual, race, country
whatever) may bind itself in any kind of limitation, truth and beauty does
find a way to emerge. That limitation that the entity imposes on itself,
itself becomes its strength.

This, the present moment, on a global scale, is a very fertile time. All
that is erupting is only taking us towards that -- truth and beauty.



--

Vani Murarka

* vani expressions - blog writings 
* काव्यालय (Kaavyaalaya: House of Hindi Poetry) 
* गीत गतिरूप - कवि का अनोखा साथी 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

I am not saying science done well isn't worthwhile, just as politics
done well is beautiful, but the real world practice of both leaves
much to be desired - unless one accepts that that's just how things
are.

There is a virtue signalling with regards to science in some kinds of
political debate that I think is unmerited. All human endeavours can
be done well or badly depending on the humans doing it. Any large set
of humans will assume a normal curve of capability, morality, honesty,
which the scientific community is no exception to.

If we can question the methods and motives of politicians, then we
ought to also question the methods and motives of scientists.


On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 9:08 PM, Keith Adam  wrote:
[...]

> I think you misunderstand the scientific process.  Scientists may do research 
> and publish a paper detailing their hypothesis, method, results, study 
> numbers etc. and draw their conclusions.  But it is not 'established 
> scientific consensus' until it is reproduced by many different groups, many 
> times with outliers in the data accounted for.  One scientific paper does not 
> science make.  And moreover, the person you quote above makes it clear that 
> most scientists understand that that is how science works. It is the 
> mainstream media and press that latch on to a single research paper and claim 
> it is 'science' that do not understand how science works.

It occurred to me as I read that interviewee's argument that I'd never
climb into a taxi if there was no guarantee the driver knew the way,
on the mere chance that I might end up nearer to the destination than
I am currently. Yet I appreciate that scientific endeavours are more
complex, and therefore some error margin is inevitable. Politicians
then have it even harder, since humans are even more unpredictable
than scientific experiments. Their error margins should then be
enormous.

So, that was my point about politics - this is just how politics works
- there are a lot of compromises to be made and mad things get said
and done to obtain votes. No politician can guarantee that their
approach is going to be honest or even beneficial, and that they
aren't going to fall prey to their human weaknesses, just like
scientists.

Let's not take everything literally, because if we do, then my point
is, even science won't fare any better, which you confirm.

The scientific method alone does not guarantee good science, just as
an election alone does not make a democracy. We can't work around
human flaws with better systems - sometimes yes, not always.

Scientific consensus can be inexact, and bad policy outcomes are
certainly possible, which is what I think some politicians inexpertly
articulate when they criticise science.



>
> A single paper may draw an incomplete or incorrect conclusion due to; study 
> groups being too small, errors in statistical methods, errors in equipment or 
> apparatus, human bias or indeed by outright deceit.  But to claim that half 
> of science is false due to human failings is somewhat of a stretch.

What number would you put it at? Anyway, I never made the claim
anywhere that half of science is false.

I decided against a PhD when I was a grad student, some 17-18 years
ago because in a rather short period of time I had run into most of
the problems and perverse motivations that these gentlemen in high
places write about. I knew I wanted to pursue knowledge, and it was
clear I'd be better off doing it outside of academia. In academia I'd
spend much of my life in the pursuit of funding and peer approval, and
ultimately very likely producing derivative research in order to
secure funding and approval.

That the guardians of science are so slow to fix an existential crisis
is what should be ringing the alarm bells.

Science has a rather large and stinky problem that contaminates its
reputation, made worse by the social charade of superiority and
infallibility. Politicians often talk about cleaning up politics, a
sentiment I rarely hear scientists express.

I think it's irrelevant to the purposes of the thread exactly how much
it stinks, that it stinks to unacceptable levels has been established,
yes?


>
> Of the problem of the mainstream media reporting a single study as 'science' 
> reminds me of what Professor Spiegelhalter [1] said on More or Less this 
> week, that if something is being reported as it is usually contrary to the 
> established view and is therefore extraordinary.  And that extraordinary 
> claims require extraordinary proof. Which is never usually the case of a 
> single research paper.

This is so with anything. Though politicians say stupid things, and
engage in corruption and populism, the world by and large manages.
Consensus is how humans error correct for well, being human.


> 


> The utility of the result in the framework to which it applies matters.  An 
> accuracy of an atomic clock that is greater than the age of the universe is 
> probably fine for 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Keith Adam]

>
> On Feb 21, 2018 6:24 PM, "Biju Chacko"  wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 2:31 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan 
> wrote:
> > >
> > > Paying respect to science is good form, but doesn't always mean it's an
> > > indication of quality. Neither is questioning science inherently a bad
> > > idea.
> >
> > Erm, there's a hell of a difference between questioning specific
> > studies or hypotheses and dismissing established scientific consensus.
>
>
> Science is largely determined by the people doing the science and
> their human failings. There's no protection against human nature.
>
> A good rabbit hole is the Google search term, "half of all science is
> wrong", which is a paraphrase of the words of Richard Horton
> (www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext),
> editor of The Lancet, who admitted rather timidly or bravely
> (debateable) in his editorial that "much of the scientific literature,
> perhaps half, may simply be untrue." Also in his words, "science has
> taken a turn toward darkness."

 

> Most are silent, and the few defenders seem to come out with silly
> excuses that would make politicians blush.
>
> Here's one -
>
> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-papers-are-probably-
> wrong/
>
> << But Solomon Snyder, senior editor at the Proceedings of the
> National Academy of Sciences, and a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins
> Medical School in Baltimore, US, says most working scientists
> understand the limitations of published research.

I think you misunderstand the scientific process.  Scientists may do research 
and publish a paper detailing their hypothesis, method, results, study numbers 
etc. and draw their conclusions.  But it is not 'established scientific 
consensus' until it is reproduced by many different groups, many times with 
outliers in the data accounted for.  One scientific paper does not science 
make.  And moreover, the person you quote above makes it clear that most 
scientists understand that that is how science works. It is the mainstream 
media and press that latch on to a single research paper and claim it is 
'science' that do not understand how science works.

A single paper may draw an incomplete or incorrect conclusion due to; study 
groups being too small, errors in statistical methods, errors in equipment or 
apparatus, human bias or indeed by outright deceit.  But to claim that half of 
science is false due to human failings is somewhat of a stretch.

Of the problem of the mainstream media reporting a single study as 'science' 
reminds me of what Professor Spiegelhalter [1] said on More or Less this week, 
that if something is being reported as it is usually contrary to the 
established view and is therefore extraordinary.  And that extraordinary claims 
require extraordinary proof. Which is never usually the case of a single 
research paper.

So yes, half of all scientific papers in the last twenty years may not be 
repeatable but what we can then draw from that is that their conclusions and 
hypotheses are incorrect.  That is the scientific method is it not?  And it has 
worked remarkably well.



>
> > And in either case, any serious disputation demands support of
> > objective evidence. Unless, of course, you're saying the scientific
> > method itself is questionable -- in which case I'd humbly ask for your
> > alternative way of understanding reality.
>
>
> Heh, why do you go opening that can of worms? That wasn't something I
> said, still if one goes there it soon begs a metaphysical question on
> the nature of reality itself. I don't think Silk is a medium built for
> that kind of debate. However there are some jumping off points for
> those interested,
>
> 1. Quantum events are not deterministic, but probabilistic, which
> requires reworking Francis Bacon's assumptions that experiments are
> always repeatable. Such debates are currently only being held in
> philosophy departments, and not in physics departments.
>
> Yet makers of still more accurate atomic clocks, random number
> generators all run into this sooner or later.
>

What problems regarding atomic clock accuracy are you referring to?  An article 
in this week's New Scientist mentions an atomic clock that is accurate to one 
second in a billion billion, it  would be out by one second in 32 billion 
years.  [2]

The utility of the result in the framework to which it applies matters.  An 
accuracy of an atomic clock that is greater than the age of the universe is 
probably fine for the uses to which it would be put.

Also, consider the radioactive decay of phosphorous-32.  It has a half-life of 
14.29 days.  This is well established and repeatable.  We know what will happen 
to 10kg of the stuff in a period of time.  However, the decay of individual 
atoms is indeed a matter of statistical probability.  We are unable to 
determine which atoms will decay and which ones won't.  But in the objective 
framework 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Feb 21, 2018 6:24 PM, "Biju Chacko"  wrote:
>
> On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 2:31 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:
> >
> > Paying respect to science is good form, but doesn't always mean it's an
> > indication of quality. Neither is questioning science inherently a bad
> > idea.
>
> Erm, there's a hell of a difference between questioning specific
> studies or hypotheses and dismissing established scientific consensus.


Science is largely determined by the people doing the science and
their human failings. There's no protection against human nature.

A good rabbit hole is the Google search term, "half of all science is
wrong", which is a paraphrase of the words of Richard Horton
(www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext),
editor of The Lancet, who admitted rather timidly or bravely
(debateable) in his editorial that “much of the scientific literature,
perhaps half, may simply be untrue.” Also in his words, “science has
taken a turn toward darkness.”

I thought he was being too polite and too late. He's in as prestigious
a scientific position as they come. It'd be like the Pope questioning
catholicism.

And he was largely only talking about the lack of reproducibility in
scientific results. If you hazard a guess about likely bad motives and
bias, then it becomes silly in scale ( One very brave 2005 study
briefly caused waves and then vanished,
"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
).

There isn't more said about this because there's no easy solution to
the problem, and of course  no one wants to bite the hand that feeds -
academics have little job security if they fall out with their peers
or lose public trust.

Most are silent, and the few defenders seem to come out with silly
excuses that would make politicians blush.

Here's one -

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-papers-are-probably-wrong/

<< But Solomon Snyder, senior editor at the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, and a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins
Medical School in Baltimore, US, says most working scientists
understand the limitations of published research.
“When I read the literature, I’m not reading it to find proof like a
textbook. I’m reading to get ideas. So even if something is wrong with
the paper, if they have the kernel of a novel idea, that’s something
to think about,” he says.>>


Still there have been other brave souls, occasionally, even in senior
positions at world leading research institutions who have spoken out -
either encouraged by the example of Dr. Horton, or because it's not
just a pimple on the face of science, it's a giant tumor that's eating
most of the face.

The implications on public policy are obviously dire,
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/how-many-scientific-papers-just-arent-true/

<< "If half of the scientific literature “may simply be untrue,” then
half of the climate research cited by the IPCC may also be untrue.
This appalling unreliability extends to work on dietary cholesterol,
domestic violence, air pollution – in short, to all research currently
being generated by the academy.
The US National Science Foundation recently reminded us that a
scientific finding “cannot be regarded as an empirical fact” unless it
has been “independently verified.” Peer review does not perform that
function. Until governments begin authenticating research prior to
using it as the foundation for new laws and huge expenditures, don’t
fall for the claim that policy X is evidence-based." >>.

You failed to quote the next bit in my post about tribal identity. The
debate on the validity of science (as we practice it for some decades
now) should not automatically become a religious war.

I think for a lot of people who aren't religious about science -
science has been smelling like rotting fish for some time - but they
often express this doubt in less than eloquent ways. Mainly because
they don't know a lot about science, and were thus insulated from
acquiring a tribal identity, and having to defend science at every
turn.


> And in either case, any serious disputation demands support of
> objective evidence. Unless, of course, you're saying the scientific
> method itself is questionable -- in which case I'd humbly ask for your
> alternative way of understanding reality.


Heh, why do you go opening that can of worms? That wasn't something I
said, still if one goes there it soon begs a metaphysical question on
the nature of reality itself. I don't think Silk is a medium built for
that kind of debate. However there are some jumping off points for
those interested,

1. Quantum events are not deterministic, but probabilistic, which
requires reworking Francis Bacon's assumptions that experiments are
always repeatable. Such debates are currently only being held in
philosophy departments, and not in physics departments.

Yet makers of 

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Biju Chacko]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 2:31 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan  wrote:
>
> Paying respect to science is good form, but doesn't always mean it's an
> indication of quality. Neither is questioning science inherently a bad
> idea.

Erm, there's a hell of a difference between questioning specific
studies or hypotheses and dismissing established scientific consensus.
And in either case, any serious disputation demands support of
objective evidence. Unless, of course, you're saying the scientific
method itself is questionable -- in which case I'd humbly ask for your
alternative way of understanding reality.

You also seem to be saying that we have no right to expect better from
politicians. I'd question that. In my opinion, science is as close as
we are getting to objective truth. Am I being idealistic If I expect
truth from our politicians.

Is it wrong to expect people to be honest about their views? Why can't
the BJP say that it wants to protect cows because it's religion asks
it to and that it thinks most Indians would agree. Don't invent
pseudoscientific drivel!


-- b

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Srini RamaKrishnan]

On Feb 21, 2018 9:17 AM,  wrote:

https://www.facebook.com/lynn.wheeler/posts/10214578899241825

(which points to http://www.atimes.com/indias-war-science/)

Please join the discussion and add comments if you know more about this?



I don't use Facebook, I'm even hesitant to click on links that point to it,
so my comments here.

--

Left or Right wing politics, or any idea for that matter, can be sold
scientifically, if one so desires and possesses the necessary intelligence
and eloquence to selectively examine facts. For object lessons please watch
Yes minister.

If people want to feel good about their evening drink sooner or later there
will be two studies published everyday in leading journals arguing the
benefits of alcohol. Times of India never fails to tell me about both of
them.

Paying respect to science is good form, but doesn't always mean it's an
indication of quality. Neither is questioning science inherently a bad
idea. Unfortunately, most see it as some kind of tribal identity - the
world is more complex than a binary state.

Like tobacco, beef can be taxed heavily with a very "secular" argument for
it - Scandinavian countries are already proposing such a beef tax (links
below).

It's a pity that the Bjp's preference is for lynch mobs and mad rhetoric,
but again there's a lot of internal logic to it. Mob violence sends a
louder message in politics than a hundred press releases.

I see stupidity/intelligence and violence/calm as being equally present
across the entire political spectrum - in the long run.

It's clear the BJP, being relatively new to power, lacks savvy political
and PR advisors like the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby who can teach them
to have their cake and eat it too. It's also true that they relish
authoritarian displays that boldly announce that a new sheriff is in town.

Congress is a party that has ruled India for decades, and in its last days
had developed a gentle, even lazy "benevolent dictator" quality about it.
The BJP, is not an old hand at power, and so it is eager to cement the
status quo and make its mark - hence the bloody politics. Lest we forget,
during the insecure days of Indira's India there was a lot of bloodshed and
nonsense too.

There's a Goldilocks period where the political leadership is neither
insecure nor complacent, neither too young, nor senile, but golden ages are
fated to be stuck in between the two extremes of being too hot and too
cold.

The article by Shashi Tharoor, as far as I can tell, is just a rhetorical
club he's chosen to beat his political opponent with. He's not impartially
examined all the facts available to him, instead, like a good debater, or
politician, he has sketched a convenient narrative.

The electric car policy, the phenomenal growth in renewable energy all
point to a real fear of global warming. It's hard to feel otherwise sitting
in smog cooked Delhi.

When the Mughals invaded India they were nothing more than savages on
horseback, unlettered and unrefined. A mere hundred years later they were
building the Taj Mahal during their Goldilocks period.

Insecurity and stupidity often look alike. It's a season of madness, but
that's just politics.

India and the world is only as mad or sane as it ever was.

---
Secular case for taxing or banning beef:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/21/eat-
less-meat-vegetarianism-dangerous-global-warming

"Adhering to health guidelines on meat consumption could cut global
food-related emissions by nearly a third by 2050, the study found, while
widespread adoption of a vegetarian diet would bring down emissions by 63%."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/meat-
tax-inevitable-to-beat-climate-and-health-crises-says-report

--

Re: [silk] War on Science?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Says "content not available now".  Either that post is private or it has been 
removed.

With the BJP in power there's enough of our local version of creationists and 
other assorted idiots who have suddenly found themselves in charge of education 
boards, ministries and such.  So, entirely unsurprised.

On 21/02/18, 9:17 AM, "silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus@lists.hserus.net on 
behalf of silkl...@bobf.frankston.com" 
 wrote:

https://www.facebook.com/lynn.wheeler/posts/10214578899241825

(which points to http://www.atimes.com/indias-war-science/)

Please join the discussion and add comments if you know more about this?

[silk] War on Science?

[silklist]

https://www.facebook.com/lynn.wheeler/posts/10214578899241825

(which points to http://www.atimes.com/indias-war-science/)

Please join the discussion and add comments if you know more about this?