I wouldn't grade Dr. Bakker very highly if this were an exam. He was asked questions and didn't answer any of them directly. Instead he chose to tell a story of his own preference. Sorry, but if we wanted that, why not just go read his blog or something? Telling inconclusive but interesting anecdotes is a great use for blogs.
I wish the editors would push back on guests who try to do this. I would be happier to read, "Dr. Bakker decided he didn't actually want to answer your questions and submitted a free-form essay instead; you can read it on his web site at..." than be presented with an illusion that he actually paid attention to what we asked. If he did pay attention, he should credit those who motivated his answers.
Since "science" is "the formalization of the way we know anything at all about anything", it's not really a matter of "not fitting a system". You could try eating only rocks to "not fit the nutritional system", but you'd rather quickly end up dead. Not all systems work. Rejecting a broken system in favor of a less broken one is not symmetric with rejecting a working system in favor of a fatally flawed one.
Although some subset of Christians seem to be very disturbed by the implications of the fossil record (and phylogenetics from DNA sequencing, if they pay attention), there is a good case to be made that these details of the history of life on earth are not wholly incompatible with the Christian world view.
However, recent findings in cognitive science and neuroscience are perhaps more directly challenging. Whether it is religious experiences induced by magnetic fields (or certain types of supposedly spiritual experiences seeming identical to certain types of epilepsy caused by defects in neuronal biochemistry), or the inseperable nature of mind and brain (as shown by reams of brain injury data, effects of psychoactive substances, fMRI imaging, sensory deprivation experiments, and so on), or the degree to which our morality and actions are instinctive and not necessarily fully within our control, scientific research seems to be painting a very different picture of man-the-sometimes-thinking-animal than has Christianity or other traditional religions. In particular, notions of will and soul that appear central to an understanding of Christianity seem increasingly at odds with neuroscience.
What is your opinion on the compatibility of Christinaity with cognitive science? Must one or the other adapt in order for the two to exist harmoniously, and if so, what form might that take?
Well, I was sort of expecting the OP to say that he pointed out that the machine was not in fact millimeter wave and was actually x-ray backscatter (based on inspection). That he did not makes me wonder about the exact identity of the scanner.
He told you first that the machine was X-ray backscatter, and then that it was millimeter wave? Or you read the signs that it was backscatter and he said it was millimeter?
Agreed, except why single out vaccines? It should be every prescription or procedure. Just record everything and do data mining. You wouldn't even need a dedicated VAERS then, as all the data relevant to safety would be embedded in the standard medical records.
Indeed. But that doesn't make the statement in that health magazine (which I believe is just reprinted from a CDC fact sheet, or pretty close) any more relevant. It shows that infants have an immune system, but that's hardly in dispute. More relevant information would include things like strength of immune response to a vaccination vs. response to a cold. Otherwise it's just a reassuring-sounding trick to fool the scientifically illiterate into doing the right thing. Personally I take a pretty dim view of people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons; although it seems efficient at the time, it produces a brittle system in that if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, you don't know how to react when something changes or you receive new information.
I wouldn't exactly call VAERS reporting "a scientific process". The disclaimers on the database read like the ones on Slashdot polls.
If it were scientific, the doctor would call you a week after the injection and ask how her health was and if she suffered any major or minor maladies, and the answer whatever it was would go in a database.
Or, heck, all adjacent pairs of medical interventions could go into a database, whether it had anything to do with vaccinations or not. There is much you can do with lots of data; the health care system is designed to squirrel that data away into various different filing cabinets, not look for patterns. Medicine has a long way to go yet to be a data-driven science in the way that, say, advertising is. (Kinda makes you think about our priorities as a culture, eh?)
Even with the lack-of-reporting bias, VAERS still can be used to detect particularly problematic vaccines, simply because some reports do get through, and there's no reason to expect the legitimate ones are suppressed more than the illegitimate ones. The assumption is that _none_ of it is virus-related. So, okay, sample size is smaller and statistics are noisier, but you can still detect obvious trends with careful statistics.
Don't forget to multiply by the risk of catching the disease when you say "high risk of death".
The calculation for at-risk populations can be very different for low-risk populations. That's why, for example, countries in temperate climates don't bother vaccinating for yellow fever unless people are going to be traveling.
Er, wait, so female protanomaly colorblindness isn't a result of genetics because the rate is only 0.01%?! Sadly, blanket statements are no substitute for statistics.
Actually, a lot of early vaccines don't really contribute to lifelong immunity, even if the immune system is mature enough to generate some protective temporary immunity. Vaccine catch-up schedules for older children often skip one or more injections.
Also, a lot of young children don't get sick any more because of herd immunity. If you don't vaccinate them, though, you have to be extra-confident the herd that they are interacting with is adequately immune. (If you herd your babies, which we generally do, then you do need to have the baby-herd immunized to get protection.)
Welllll, those thousands of other bacteria and viruses aren't usually injected into us in quantities high enough to often cause a low-grade fever. Let's not use bad evidence, even if the concerns are unwarranted or part of mass hysteria or whatever.
It's because compliance rates are higher for younger children, all else being equal. So if you _can_ vaccinate at 6 months, the argument goes, why wait until, say, 12 years, when the chance you'll actually get it done is lower?
It implies that even if they make decent machines, you don't want to buy from them because they will use their legal rights to make your life more difficult.
Thanks, but if there's a less hostile option, I'll take it.
Rounded corners have practical utility: you don't hurt yourself on them, and they slide into pockets and covers more easily. It is obvious and there is prior art, but it is not merely aesthetic.
You think Gore would have gone into Iraq? We've spent in the neighborhood of $3 trillion there. Thats about $10,000 per capita in the U.S.. That's rather a lot of money. Maybe you think it's money well spent, or maybe you think it's a waste, but it almost certainly would have been spent dramatically different under Gore.
You think McCain would have passed Obamacare (which might be a pretty big deal to the ~5% of the people who will be covered who weren't before, and to the people who have to pay for it)? Despite presidents failing to pass health care reform for decades (and mostly it being a Democratic initiative)?
Or, to play cynicism against cynicism--you don't think that each party wants to do something to fire up its base and stick it to the other guys so they'll win the *next* election?
There are a lot of ways that it doesn't matter. But to say it doesn't matter at all sounds like a rationalization for not paying attention or getting involved--or it deserves a really robust argument.
Yeah, it can matter, because even if 90% of what two candidates will do is identical (and you believe it's all a bad idea), the remaining 10% can have an impact. People were saying "Bush vs. Gore, does it really matter?" back in 2000. In retrospect, don't you think that certain things would have turned out rather differently--enough so to matter?
You can't really win the "it is substantial!" argument because the information is mostly fluff--general statements of approach on how to tackle difficult problems, without actually specifying how to resolve any difficult bits.
It's much more supportable to compare Romney 2012 with Obama 2008--how much detail did Obama have?--and then play the "details are for Congress, vision is for the President" card.
*blink*...awful for international relations? Compared to what?
I mean, I can understand if one is less than thrilled by the economic record, if one thinks that Obamacare was really not the top priority given the state of the economy, etc. etc., but our international relations have--by the accounts of other nations--improved tremendously since Bush, and Romney's overseas trip didn't exactly go smoothly. And in the third debate, Romney seemed to agree with Obama far more than he agreed with himself (his previous statements on foreign policy). Awful? How?
You do know that you can not want to vote for someone, and yet not hate _everything_ about them, right?
The placebo effect works, and homeopathy should be a tremendously inexpensive way to induce it. The placebo effect does not mean that people do not get better--it is that people get better even when you give them something inert! How better to generate something inert that feels like it should help than to take something that should help and dilute it? Granted, the effects of placebo are limited, but if you only need something limited anyway, why not give them a microcent's worth of water in a 20-cent vial, sold for $2, to make the patient feel as much relief as they can generate from their own beliefs? (How different is this from bottled water, anyway? The tap water in most places affluent enough to afford bottled water is perfectly safe.)
I'm only partly joking.
(Blasted democracies, requiring informed citizenry and spoiling all our plans to dupe them into thinking they're fine!)
I meant "that is, whether it is of sufficient value that we can convince people to trade that stuff for tokens that can be used in arbitrary exchanges, thus indicating that it is of general worth". If you have stuff and you cannot get people to give you money for it, it's a pretty clear indication that it's worthless or nearly so. I didn't make clear that I was using this to tackle the measurement problem of whether something is wealth, not equating all wealth with money.
But he's talking about algebra, not about category theory or partial differential equations. Algebra, taught well, is no more than firstly, the ability to solve problems in general using abstract thinking, instead of muddling through the specifics every time; and secondly, to map numerical concepts onto the world and use them to solve problems. These reasoning skills are incredibly basic and incredibly important in today's society to function as a competent and responsible individual. If some people manage to learn the same skills through another circuitous route, that's okay, but if a HS diploma is supposed to mean that an individual has reached some minimal level of education, and they cannot manage to read and decipher texts of the level of complexity necessary to understand the world, cannot manage to think abstractly about problems quantitative and otherwise so as to act wisely on the basis of experience, and so on, then what is it that the diploma signifies aside from reaching a certain age? What is it that a B.A. from Harvard is supposed to signify--that the person is intellectually accomplished, or merely that they do one thing that they like well?
Democratic societies ultimately depend upon the intellectual sophistication of their members. Measures that increase the pressure to be intellectually sophisticated are therefore advisable.
Now, if we're doing a lousy job teaching algebra--and I think we are--then we should be alarmed and try to find ways to improve dramatically. Then most everyone will be able to learn that basic skill, and devote the rest of their time (after covering the other basics) to whatever it is that they're particularly good at and/or passionate about. (I think that the thought-patterns required for applying calculus to physical problems are also so fundamental that they should be required in high school, but let's try to get algebra under control first.)
Stuff is created by the poor and middle class. Whether or not that turns into wealth (i.e. tokens that we can exchange for different stuff) depends on whether the created stuff is useful. A properly functioning boardroom will make sure that it is.
(There are plenty of improperly functioning boardrooms, boardrooms which are redundant because everyone already knows what the useful stuff is, and boardrooms which make the right call on what is useful but demand far too much compensation for the task.)
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't grade Dr. Bakker very highly if this were an exam. He was asked questions and didn't answer any of them directly. Instead he chose to tell a story of his own preference. Sorry, but if we wanted that, why not just go read his blog or something? Telling inconclusive but interesting anecdotes is a great use for blogs.
I wish the editors would push back on guests who try to do this. I would be happier to read, "Dr. Bakker decided he didn't actually want to answer your questions and submitted a free-form essay instead; you can read it on his web site at ..." than be presented with an illusion that he actually paid attention to what we asked. If he did pay attention, he should credit those who motivated his answers.
Since "science" is "the formalization of the way we know anything at all about anything", it's not really a matter of "not fitting a system". You could try eating only rocks to "not fit the nutritional system", but you'd rather quickly end up dead. Not all systems work. Rejecting a broken system in favor of a less broken one is not symmetric with rejecting a working system in favor of a fatally flawed one.
Although some subset of Christians seem to be very disturbed by the implications of the fossil record (and phylogenetics from DNA sequencing, if they pay attention), there is a good case to be made that these details of the history of life on earth are not wholly incompatible with the Christian world view.
However, recent findings in cognitive science and neuroscience are perhaps more directly challenging. Whether it is religious experiences induced by magnetic fields (or certain types of supposedly spiritual experiences seeming identical to certain types of epilepsy caused by defects in neuronal biochemistry), or the inseperable nature of mind and brain (as shown by reams of brain injury data, effects of psychoactive substances, fMRI imaging, sensory deprivation experiments, and so on), or the degree to which our morality and actions are instinctive and not necessarily fully within our control, scientific research seems to be painting a very different picture of man-the-sometimes-thinking-animal than has Christianity or other traditional religions. In particular, notions of will and soul that appear central to an understanding of Christianity seem increasingly at odds with neuroscience.
What is your opinion on the compatibility of Christinaity with cognitive science? Must one or the other adapt in order for the two to exist harmoniously, and if so, what form might that take?
Well, I was sort of expecting the OP to say that he pointed out that the machine was not in fact millimeter wave and was actually x-ray backscatter (based on inspection). That he did not makes me wonder about the exact identity of the scanner.
He told you first that the machine was X-ray backscatter, and then that it was millimeter wave? Or you read the signs that it was backscatter and he said it was millimeter?
Agreed, except why single out vaccines? It should be every prescription or procedure. Just record everything and do data mining. You wouldn't even need a dedicated VAERS then, as all the data relevant to safety would be embedded in the standard medical records.
Indeed. But that doesn't make the statement in that health magazine (which I believe is just reprinted from a CDC fact sheet, or pretty close) any more relevant. It shows that infants have an immune system, but that's hardly in dispute. More relevant information would include things like strength of immune response to a vaccination vs. response to a cold. Otherwise it's just a reassuring-sounding trick to fool the scientifically illiterate into doing the right thing. Personally I take a pretty dim view of people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons; although it seems efficient at the time, it produces a brittle system in that if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, you don't know how to react when something changes or you receive new information.
I wouldn't exactly call VAERS reporting "a scientific process". The disclaimers on the database read like the ones on Slashdot polls.
If it were scientific, the doctor would call you a week after the injection and ask how her health was and if she suffered any major or minor maladies, and the answer whatever it was would go in a database.
Or, heck, all adjacent pairs of medical interventions could go into a database, whether it had anything to do with vaccinations or not. There is much you can do with lots of data; the health care system is designed to squirrel that data away into various different filing cabinets, not look for patterns. Medicine has a long way to go yet to be a data-driven science in the way that, say, advertising is. (Kinda makes you think about our priorities as a culture, eh?)
Even with the lack-of-reporting bias, VAERS still can be used to detect particularly problematic vaccines, simply because some reports do get through, and there's no reason to expect the legitimate ones are suppressed more than the illegitimate ones. The assumption is that _none_ of it is virus-related. So, okay, sample size is smaller and statistics are noisier, but you can still detect obvious trends with careful statistics.
Don't forget to multiply by the risk of catching the disease when you say "high risk of death".
The calculation for at-risk populations can be very different for low-risk populations. That's why, for example, countries in temperate climates don't bother vaccinating for yellow fever unless people are going to be traveling.
Er, wait, so female protanomaly colorblindness isn't a result of genetics because the rate is only 0.01%?! Sadly, blanket statements are no substitute for statistics.
Actually, a lot of early vaccines don't really contribute to lifelong immunity, even if the immune system is mature enough to generate some protective temporary immunity. Vaccine catch-up schedules for older children often skip one or more injections.
Also, a lot of young children don't get sick any more because of herd immunity. If you don't vaccinate them, though, you have to be extra-confident the herd that they are interacting with is adequately immune. (If you herd your babies, which we generally do, then you do need to have the baby-herd immunized to get protection.)
Welllll, those thousands of other bacteria and viruses aren't usually injected into us in quantities high enough to often cause a low-grade fever. Let's not use bad evidence, even if the concerns are unwarranted or part of mass hysteria or whatever.
The VAERS database is open. You can check yourself to see if your entry is there (assuming you know enough to find it in anoymized form).
https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/index
It's because compliance rates are higher for younger children, all else being equal. So if you _can_ vaccinate at 6 months, the argument goes, why wait until, say, 12 years, when the chance you'll actually get it done is lower?
It implies that even if they make decent machines, you don't want to buy from them because they will use their legal rights to make your life more difficult.
Thanks, but if there's a less hostile option, I'll take it.
Rounded corners have practical utility: you don't hurt yourself on them, and they slide into pockets and covers more easily. It is obvious and there is prior art, but it is not merely aesthetic.
You think Gore would have gone into Iraq? We've spent in the neighborhood of $3 trillion there. Thats about $10,000 per capita in the U.S.. That's rather a lot of money. Maybe you think it's money well spent, or maybe you think it's a waste, but it almost certainly would have been spent dramatically different under Gore.
You think McCain would have passed Obamacare (which might be a pretty big deal to the ~5% of the people who will be covered who weren't before, and to the people who have to pay for it)? Despite presidents failing to pass health care reform for decades (and mostly it being a Democratic initiative)?
Or, to play cynicism against cynicism--you don't think that each party wants to do something to fire up its base and stick it to the other guys so they'll win the *next* election?
There are a lot of ways that it doesn't matter. But to say it doesn't matter at all sounds like a rationalization for not paying attention or getting involved--or it deserves a really robust argument.
Yeah, it can matter, because even if 90% of what two candidates will do is identical (and you believe it's all a bad idea), the remaining 10% can have an impact. People were saying "Bush vs. Gore, does it really matter?" back in 2000. In retrospect, don't you think that certain things would have turned out rather differently--enough so to matter?
You can't really win the "it is substantial!" argument because the information is mostly fluff--general statements of approach on how to tackle difficult problems, without actually specifying how to resolve any difficult bits.
It's much more supportable to compare Romney 2012 with Obama 2008--how much detail did Obama have?--and then play the "details are for Congress, vision is for the President" card.
*blink*...awful for international relations? Compared to what?
I mean, I can understand if one is less than thrilled by the economic record, if one thinks that Obamacare was really not the top priority given the state of the economy, etc. etc., but our international relations have--by the accounts of other nations--improved tremendously since Bush, and Romney's overseas trip didn't exactly go smoothly. And in the third debate, Romney seemed to agree with Obama far more than he agreed with himself (his previous statements on foreign policy). Awful? How?
You do know that you can not want to vote for someone, and yet not hate _everything_ about them, right?
The placebo effect works, and homeopathy should be a tremendously inexpensive way to induce it. The placebo effect does not mean that people do not get better--it is that people get better even when you give them something inert! How better to generate something inert that feels like it should help than to take something that should help and dilute it? Granted, the effects of placebo are limited, but if you only need something limited anyway, why not give them a microcent's worth of water in a 20-cent vial, sold for $2, to make the patient feel as much relief as they can generate from their own beliefs? (How different is this from bottled water, anyway? The tap water in most places affluent enough to afford bottled water is perfectly safe.)
I'm only partly joking.
(Blasted democracies, requiring informed citizenry and spoiling all our plans to dupe them into thinking they're fine!)
Caffeine?
I meant "that is, whether it is of sufficient value that we can convince people to trade that stuff for tokens that can be used in arbitrary exchanges, thus indicating that it is of general worth". If you have stuff and you cannot get people to give you money for it, it's a pretty clear indication that it's worthless or nearly so. I didn't make clear that I was using this to tackle the measurement problem of whether something is wealth, not equating all wealth with money.
But he's talking about algebra, not about category theory or partial differential equations. Algebra, taught well, is no more than firstly, the ability to solve problems in general using abstract thinking, instead of muddling through the specifics every time; and secondly, to map numerical concepts onto the world and use them to solve problems. These reasoning skills are incredibly basic and incredibly important in today's society to function as a competent and responsible individual. If some people manage to learn the same skills through another circuitous route, that's okay, but if a HS diploma is supposed to mean that an individual has reached some minimal level of education, and they cannot manage to read and decipher texts of the level of complexity necessary to understand the world, cannot manage to think abstractly about problems quantitative and otherwise so as to act wisely on the basis of experience, and so on, then what is it that the diploma signifies aside from reaching a certain age? What is it that a B.A. from Harvard is supposed to signify--that the person is intellectually accomplished, or merely that they do one thing that they like well?
Democratic societies ultimately depend upon the intellectual sophistication of their members. Measures that increase the pressure to be intellectually sophisticated are therefore advisable.
Now, if we're doing a lousy job teaching algebra--and I think we are--then we should be alarmed and try to find ways to improve dramatically. Then most everyone will be able to learn that basic skill, and devote the rest of their time (after covering the other basics) to whatever it is that they're particularly good at and/or passionate about. (I think that the thought-patterns required for applying calculus to physical problems are also so fundamental that they should be required in high school, but let's try to get algebra under control first.)
Stuff is created by the poor and middle class. Whether or not that turns into wealth (i.e. tokens that we can exchange for different stuff) depends on whether the created stuff is useful. A properly functioning boardroom will make sure that it is.
(There are plenty of improperly functioning boardrooms, boardrooms which are redundant because everyone already knows what the useful stuff is, and boardrooms which make the right call on what is useful but demand far too much compensation for the task.)