No, science is the willingness to relegate interpretations of evidence to be less significant than what some people want it to be. The evidence itself is pretty clear; what the scientists potentially got wrong is the interpretation. Suiting evidence to specific theories (as opposed to the other way around) is when you start practicing faith instead of science.
Have you tried to get technical assistance from Apple without visiting their Genius Bars? It's like they don't want you to speak directly with a human being. Though I have to admit, the thought of airport officials walking into the Genius Bar of an Apple Store is more than a little amusing.
While it's disheartening to hear about such abuse of the scientific method, from a purely scientific perspective (meta!) this actually isn't all that surprising. Abuse exists in every system; there's always a distribution around the mean of those who are honest and trying to do the right thing, and the minority who are either malevolently trying to game the system or who are truly just competent enough to not get fired. I'm also a grad student and while I would love to agree with your friend--in theory, science shouldn't allow it, but as we know, theory and practice rarely align in practice--I have to acknowledge that science is just another system run by imperfect human beings and, implicitly, will have some imperfections.
The problem arises when this distribution of participants skews and the "expected" minority (the quantity of which you still try to minimize!) grows. So the question becomes: is modern science suffering from a growing problem of bad scientists? It's hard to say. While I'm willing to accept the numbers, the title "is modern science dysfunctional" is, itself, a tad bit sensational, making the rest of the article difficult to take seriously.
You talk about cancer as if it were the flu, some common viral infection that most people get every now and then and is a minor annoying blip in one's everyday routine. It's a radically different disease by virtue of the fact that it's your own cells gone rogue. I'm not saying it's beyond the realm of science-based medicine, I'm saying it's not a trivial problem to solve, yet the fact that modern medicine hasn't solved it somehow anoints alternative medicine--which has never empirically shown any effectiveness beyond what you'd see from placebo--as the savior?
The whole point of this article is that it's fine to try something "different", provided you follow a couple baseline rules: first, you go the peer-review route. You do a double-blind clinical trial, you perform the analysis and see that your method works significantly better than placebo and has improvements over the current state-of-the-art, and then you market it publicly. If (and this is a big "if") Burzynski is going this route, he's doing this step entirely backwards, which is ethically suspect at best. Second, you let the data speak for itself, not the lawyers. You sue people who slander you, not your work. If your work is being called into question, you debate it scientifically, just like in the peer-review process.
It's the fact that Burzynski is failing hard on these two points that's getting him into trouble, not the supposed shortcomings of the modern medical industry.
Has this kind of crackdown on those who would reverse-engineer Skype's protocols always been around? Or has it only been elevated to prominence with the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft?
Being punished for doing the right thing tends to bias people towards hiding this sort of information, which would imply that your vulnerability isn't made public until someone slightly less kind happens upon it. Which is apparently the way these folks would prefer it be made public.
You sound like a politician: all broad platitudes, no concrete examples. You throw around flowery terms like "sweetness and honey", "expectation", and rhetoric about your girlfriend throwing you out, but I have yet to see a single example of how what Google is doing is evil.
Just about every commenter here who thinks Google is being evil is playing the Slippery Slope Fallacy card for absolutely everything it's worth. Yeah, I don't understand why Google is being so hard on the real names policy either, and yeah there's potential for abuse by tying your real name to all your Google accounts (though you're telling you didn't put your real name on your email? seriously?), but they've been King of Search and Advertising for quite some time now and, to my knowledge, haven't used their data for nefarious purposes just yet.
And given your lack of empirical evidence for why Google is being evil, I have to pose the same question regarding your take on Microsoft, Paypal, and Facebook: do you have data for why they're "out to get you", or just more anecdotal BS?
I'm really not trolling you; I just want to see if you have legitimate reasons for your very, very strong feelings or if it's all one big kneejerk, since the data, as it were, would tend to imply the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
pointer arithmetic, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors
Nanobots!
...over the sound of all its whining.
yes, it was intended to be out of context
my point was that comparing climate science to eugenics is a vast (and incorrect) oversimplification
Did you not read the part of TFS where it said "oversimplified"?
I didn't stop caring; I just stopped watching CNN.
Truthfully, I stopped watching CNN years ago.
literally ruins slinkys.
No, science is the willingness to relegate interpretations of evidence to be less significant than what some people want it to be. The evidence itself is pretty clear; what the scientists potentially got wrong is the interpretation. Suiting evidence to specific theories (as opposed to the other way around) is when you start practicing faith instead of science.
Facts, evidence, and reason. On Slashdot. Oh, you funny person, you.
Hence the "mutation" aspect of disease spread, otherwise the infection would be one-and-done. Just like the flu.
Or perhaps someone independent of his/her political affiliations believes this will truly improve things for America and its citizens?
Yeah, I couldn't keep a straight face either.
Have you tried to get technical assistance from Apple without visiting their Genius Bars? It's like they don't want you to speak directly with a human being. Though I have to admit, the thought of airport officials walking into the Genius Bar of an Apple Store is more than a little amusing.
...it's too much.
pwnd
So are terrorists. How convenient.
It's two movies in the same way the last Harry Potter book was two movies. Quite literally, more bang for buck.
While it's disheartening to hear about such abuse of the scientific method, from a purely scientific perspective (meta!) this actually isn't all that surprising. Abuse exists in every system; there's always a distribution around the mean of those who are honest and trying to do the right thing, and the minority who are either malevolently trying to game the system or who are truly just competent enough to not get fired. I'm also a grad student and while I would love to agree with your friend--in theory, science shouldn't allow it, but as we know, theory and practice rarely align in practice--I have to acknowledge that science is just another system run by imperfect human beings and, implicitly, will have some imperfections.
The problem arises when this distribution of participants skews and the "expected" minority (the quantity of which you still try to minimize!) grows. So the question becomes: is modern science suffering from a growing problem of bad scientists? It's hard to say. While I'm willing to accept the numbers, the title "is modern science dysfunctional" is, itself, a tad bit sensational, making the rest of the article difficult to take seriously.
You talk about cancer as if it were the flu, some common viral infection that most people get every now and then and is a minor annoying blip in one's everyday routine. It's a radically different disease by virtue of the fact that it's your own cells gone rogue. I'm not saying it's beyond the realm of science-based medicine, I'm saying it's not a trivial problem to solve, yet the fact that modern medicine hasn't solved it somehow anoints alternative medicine--which has never empirically shown any effectiveness beyond what you'd see from placebo--as the savior?
The whole point of this article is that it's fine to try something "different", provided you follow a couple baseline rules: first, you go the peer-review route. You do a double-blind clinical trial, you perform the analysis and see that your method works significantly better than placebo and has improvements over the current state-of-the-art, and then you market it publicly. If (and this is a big "if") Burzynski is going this route, he's doing this step entirely backwards, which is ethically suspect at best. Second, you let the data speak for itself, not the lawyers. You sue people who slander you, not your work. If your work is being called into question, you debate it scientifically, just like in the peer-review process.
It's the fact that Burzynski is failing hard on these two points that's getting him into trouble, not the supposed shortcomings of the modern medical industry.
Where you go sure can help, though.
Has this kind of crackdown on those who would reverse-engineer Skype's protocols always been around? Or has it only been elevated to prominence with the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft?
tl;dr can we hate on Microsoft?
We must go deeper!
No good deed goes unpunished.
Being punished for doing the right thing tends to bias people towards hiding this sort of information, which would imply that your vulnerability isn't made public until someone slightly less kind happens upon it. Which is apparently the way these folks would prefer it be made public.
I do it for the mod points :)
Good luck with abstinence being "used widely".
You sound like a politician: all broad platitudes, no concrete examples. You throw around flowery terms like "sweetness and honey", "expectation", and rhetoric about your girlfriend throwing you out, but I have yet to see a single example of how what Google is doing is evil.
Just about every commenter here who thinks Google is being evil is playing the Slippery Slope Fallacy card for absolutely everything it's worth. Yeah, I don't understand why Google is being so hard on the real names policy either, and yeah there's potential for abuse by tying your real name to all your Google accounts (though you're telling you didn't put your real name on your email? seriously?), but they've been King of Search and Advertising for quite some time now and, to my knowledge, haven't used their data for nefarious purposes just yet.
And given your lack of empirical evidence for why Google is being evil, I have to pose the same question regarding your take on Microsoft, Paypal, and Facebook: do you have data for why they're "out to get you", or just more anecdotal BS?
I'm really not trolling you; I just want to see if you have legitimate reasons for your very, very strong feelings or if it's all one big kneejerk, since the data, as it were, would tend to imply the latter.