Actually, many herbel remedies are dangerous, so homeopathy
is probably safer.
True, of course. It's also true that many modern drugs are dangerous, so
homeopathy is probably safer than those too.
I don't recommend that people use either herbs or refined/synthetic
drugs willy-nilly. (Practitioners of Chinese Medicine refer to herbs as
"the poisons", and put their use far down the line of treatments to use.)
And [St. Johns Wort] doesn't have a company standing behind it, so buyer beware.
Any given suppliment has its supplier standing behind it. Modern drugs have companies like Merck standing behind them - buyer beware!
Because the point of medicines isn't to 'cure' people, it's to cause a known biological effect.
I am very very glad that you are not my physician. Indeed, you've pretty
much put into one sentence the reason why more and more people are turning
to various alternative and complementary modalities.
I want a doctor who's interest is in "curing" me, not just in causing a
known biological effect in my body.
If someone gets better from fake medicine, and not from
real, that is not the placebo effect, where you are treating real diseases
with placebos. If they were real, they would have been treated with the
correct medication.
Of course, there's no chance that what was identified as the "correct
medication", simply wasn't correct, since the medical system is infallible.
Uh-huh.
My mom gets no effect from standard injections of novocaine. (I can't
recall if it's that her nerve is in a weird place, or some chemical thing.)
When she was young, the dentist refused to believe this: if she didn't get
numb from "real" medicine, than the pain must not be "real". That put her
off going to the dentist for several decades. (Her current dentist uses a
different compound or a different technique that works.)
I have no problem with people drinking holy water, or
magical water left to sit under the full moon...I have problems with people
selling it as medicine to other people
Do you have problems with selling it? Or is it just the word "medicine"
that you want a monopoly on?
And why shouldn't we? We have to label it something. What should we call it, "happy happy fun fun"?
How about "problem"? A "problem" calls for a "solution" or for a way of dealing with it, and makes the person a problem-solver; a "disease" calls for a "cure", and makes the person a patient, someone under the care and authority of someone else. (I think "problems of living" is the term Szasz likes to use.)
Or if you want something fancier, how about "psychosocial dysfunction"?
I kind of like how that calls out the that the problem lies between the mind and society, that "sanity" is partially a social construct.
What about schizophrenia, or diabetes, or other conditions that people would maybe have more sympathy for.
The question is not sympathy! The question of whether the term "disease" is appropriate and helpful has nothing to do with how much sympathy we have.
Diabetes is a disease, it is a condition with definite observable physiochemical markers, that's how it is dignosed. Depression is not a condition with definite physiochemical markers, it is diagnosed based on behaviors, thoughts, and beliefs. (Schizophrenia, I believe, does have some definite diagnostic chemical markers, but I'm not sure about that.)
I can have just as much sympathy for someone with troublesome behaviors, thoughts, and beliefs as for someone with troublesome physiochemistry.
I think that your disdain and lack of sympathy for those people arises simply because you have your own problems, yet had to take care of someone else's, and no one helped you out of it and you didn't
have to take drugs.
I have no disdain or lack of sympathy for people with these problems. Geez. If calles a broken leg a "disease", and I say, "no, it's an injury, disease is not the right word and creates confusion", does that mean that I have no sympathy for people with broken legs?
Of course I have my own problems. And no, I chose not to take drugs. (Uh...I chose not to take those drugs.:-) ) That doesn't mean I haven't gotten help in dealing with my problems.
However small these problems may be, compared to a quadraplegic, or someone with a "real" illness, these conditions are problems, nonetheless.
Of course! That's never been in dispute in this thread! Let me repeat myself one more damn time: "The question is not whether it's real. The problems are very real."
We have little choice but to label these conditions something.
That's no argument for labeling them diseases...if we label them "Former Presidents of the United States", we've labeled them something. The question is, what is an accurate and useful label?
I agree with those who don't think "disease" isn't a good choice.
While some of them are not divided more than Avogadro, thus, by probability, producing a few molecules of the substance in the water, this is meaningless....It is, at best, literally equivilent to handing someone a grain of salt and saying 'Put this in a glass of water and you'll get better'.
No. I don't mean a few molecules, I mean that some contain active
ingredients in significant concentrations, of the order of 0.1% or more.
Sometimes a lot higher - this, for example,
is a 10% extract of arnica that I (quite anecdotally) find useful for
bruises. (An occupational
hazard.)
A "1X" solution is 10% concentration. If you Google for
homeopathic 1X, you'll see many products made with these
high-concentration extracts.
That's not to say that do or do not work. I don't consider myself a
defender of homeopathic theory in any way. But I'm really disappointed to
see self-described "skeptics" continually misrepresent it. Not all
homeopathic remedies are extremely dilute.
Nor is it considered, in homeopathic theory, enough to simply create a very dilute tincture, like putting a
grain of salt in a glass of water; first a fairly concentrated salt water
would be prepared, then that solution diluted, and so on. The solution must
be "prepared", shaken in some certain way, at every step. That theory may
be absolute bullshit, indeed that's where I'd put my money. But
intellectual honesty requires that we criticize it as it is, not set up
strawmen.
Spoken like someone who's never known anyone with a mental illness!
Don't tell me who or what I don't know. Among my friends and acquintances are "bipolars", "depressives", at least two "PTSDs", two who could be probably be diagnozed "multiple personality disorders", one sure and one probable "borderline personality disorders", and a few "panic disorders". Oh, and of course a few "addicts", anyone in the Baltimore area knows some former junkies. And a "co-dependant". (Some of these overlap, of course.)
A few of these people are former lovers. I've talked them through panic attacks, PTSD flashbacks, and the really really strong desire to fall off the wagon. Another was a housemate, who I visited several times after she checked herself into the local mental hospital.
And I've had clients and students with various "mental illnesses".
I myself could probably have found someone to diagnose me as "depressive", or perhaps the more trendy "bipolar", at least until a few years ago. My doctor dropped Prozac hints at me on more than one occasion.
I'm feeling much better now, thanks.
if you've ever known someone who is actually manic-depressive, or suffers from true clinical depression, you know it's as real as heart disease.
The question is not whether it's real. The problems are very real. The question is whether it's useful to label problematic states of consciousness, ideas, and behaviors as "diseases" or "illnesses", or whether other ways of thinking of them may be more useful.
My frustration with the idea that these problem are disease states comes not from ignorance, but from seeing how unhelpful - indeed, sometimes harmful - the "disease model" has been for most of these people.
And there's a word for something that can improve a subjective experience of health in subjects without any causal relationship. It's "Placebo".
Ah, but who says there's no causal relationship between my toothpaste rubbing and my headache relief? Maybe in my rubbing I'm hitting an acupuressure point that changes blood flow, and the studies used a slightly different rubbing technique. Maybe I've got some rare biochemical quirk where flouride deficiency gives me headaches, and I'm abosorbing trace amounts through my skin. The unknowns are many, the knowns few.
What they don't understand is that Placebos actually work too, and in many cases they work really well, as does prayer and even sheer bloody mindedness, both of which are cheaper than homeopathic remedies.
Well, many homeopathic remedies do indeed contain substantial amounts of active ingredients.
But for those that are (exclusive of the anomalous result discussed in TFA) nothing but inactive ingredients, think of them as the same category as an aid to prayer: prayer beads, Lourdes water, a Kwan Yin statue, whatever. Prayer often involves one of these, and/or going to (and quite probably financially supporting) a local church/synagogue/whatever. Not free.
"Sheer bloody mindedness" is fine too, but is naturally rare. I can help train it if you want to sign up for some classes, but they are not free. (And yeah, it can help. Ooops, I'm being anecdotal again.)
I don't recommend or use those extremely dillute homepathic remedies myself. (I do use some remedies that contain substantial amount of herbal extracts.) But if it's working for someone, hey, whatever gets you through.
(Provided there aren't dangers they're unaware of.)
But that's why the baseline for real medicines is "better than placebo", which is a lot higher a baseline than "better than nothing".
Thing is, sometimes, on an individual case-by-case basis, a placebo can be better than "real" medicine; the Demerol doesn't work but the sugar pill does. For that person, in that moment, what is "real" medicine?
My point is just this: if you're trying to answer the question "What will releive symptoms the best in this population?" systematic evidence is very helpful. If you want to answer the question "What will releive this person's symptoms the best", that one person is by defintion anecdotal.
Of course it does. My mom used to be a nurse, and they'd often
"placeboize" patients whose pain meds didn't seem to be working.
The problem is, the term can cover several different phenomena:
Researcher/therapist bias. We see what we expect to see; I think this
pill will make you stop complaining, so therefore after I give it to you I
don't notice your complaints as much.
Subject reporting bias. We say what we believe we're expected to say.
My head still hurts but I know the nurse wants me to say it doesn't, so I
say my headache's gone.
Subject perception bias. We see what we expect to see; I expect the
pill to help, so even though the same pain signals are entering my brain,
they are interpreted differently.
Non-specific physiological changes in the subject. Some physiological change happens, but it's not due to the therapy but due to incidental conditions. For example, I go in for some placebo surgery and what really makes be better is a few days of bedrest and nursing care, not the operation. (Or mybe it's due to the anesthesia, or the general stimuation of getting cut open, not because of the specific surgery.)
Specific physiological changes in the subject. This is the realm of neuropsychoimmunology,
where we see sort of a "feedback loop" between belief and physiological
functioning. It's this level that TFA refers to.
some people just don't get the humor when you combine "Muslim News", "Holy Jihad", and "Kill Bush", all while carrying a book on Bin Ladin. Perhaps your friend's newsletter was very funny or the satire very obvious.
I think the satire in a work whose headline says "Holy Jihad declared against Jordan's Steakhouse" (local restaurant) is pretty obivous. Especailly a hand-written newsletter with photocopied photos of Bin Laden (thus the book) with a thick graffitti-style magic marker beard.
As for "Kill Bush": the whole content of the thing was supposed to be a comment from a fictional Iraqi insurgent. Fictional characters say and do all sorts of things that their creators have no intention of doing; Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, and no one ever thought of hauling him in for questioning about any unsolved shootings because he wrote "Fulsom Prison Blues".
So, yeah, writing something goofy like "Muslim Extremist News: Glorious leader Bin Laden says `Kill Bush!' and declares a Holy Jihad against Jordan's Steakhouse!" shouldn't be something that gets you detained by the cops for several hours and followed around town by intimidating police surveillance for several days. There are actual crooks my local cops could be chasing instead.
Mental illnesses are real illnesses and have hard, acute neurological expression in the brain.
Certainly some people have strong difficulties in their lives. And certainly some people have deformities or injuries to their nervous system. But the idea that "mental illnesses" such as depression have direct neurological expression is not as supported as SSRI makers would like you to believe. (Another link: here.)
Labeling psychological difficulties (other than neulogical illness or injury) is questionable. It has strong legal and social consequences that we ought to consider.
The DSM, the official defintion of mental health and illness, has its roots in a military effort to decide who was too crazy (or not crazy enough?) to be a soldier. It's critera for listed condtions are famously vauge. And who decides which condtions are "illnesses"? Just a few decades ago, homosexuality was a "mental illness" according to the DSM.
These illnesses are not merely coming from a person who is playing a casual game of make-believe who needs to get a grip.
I agree, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should use the word "illness" to describe these states.
Your justifaction is the suggestion that anecdotal evidence is better than systematic evidence, which is what quacks have always said when the systematic evidence reveals them to be quacks.
Depends on the context. If I find that rubbing toothpaste on my toes relieves my headaches, my anecdotal evidence trumps any controlled studies showing that rubbing toothpaste on the toes of randomly selected subjects does nothing. It even trumps controlled studies showing that rubbing toothpaste on the toes caues headaches in randomly selected subjects. I'm not a randomly selected subject, I'm me, and my treatment goal is to improve my own subjective experience of health.
On the other hand, if someone comes to me about their headaches, in the absense of controlled studies showing that the treatment works, rubbing toothpaste on the toes would not be at the top of the list of things I'd suggest. (But not absent from that list - it's safe and cheap, it worked for me so maybe those controlled studies are flawed, and at the very least will help clean out toe jam, so why not give it a whirl?)
Of course, we also have to ask how much bearing that systematic evidence has on the actual application in question, how much these objective measurement correspond to the goal of improving subjective experiences of health. I always recommend this article by, and this interview with, Ted Kaptchuk.
Also, if you write something that could sound a little strange out of context (paintball, for example), you could end up with some big hassles because you seemed a bit "suspect".
Yep. A friend of mine was detained for several hours, and under increased police surveillance for at least a few days, after someone at Kinkos' didn't get the joke of a "newsletter" he was photocopying. (Story here, and more details here.)
I was talking with someone just yesterday about knowledge. It seems to me that what is far more important than storing a bunch of facts in the brain, is storing the methods and means by which one can find those facts
"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best." -- Frank Zappa
It's smart to store only that information which you need immediately locally (and by locally I mean in your brain). Everything else belongs in an external but accessible database.
Richard Feynman tells a story along that line in one of his books. He was taking a graduate seminar about the nervous system, and about giving a presentation to the rest of the class on some aspect. He started by putting an anatomical diagram (a "map of the cat", as he put it) on the board, but the other students said don't bother, they already knew that stuff. His thought was that it was no wonder that he, an outsider in the field, was able to keep up with the class if they were wasting time memorizing stuff you could look up easily. (Of course, there's also the fact that he was a frickin' genius, that probably helped him keep up too.)
No, genius that is what evolution does, or do you think the wheat that was grown in 1920 is identical to the grasses found in 10000 BC?
"Evolution" is a vague term. Natural selection does not add new genes into a species, it selects from those that exist. Mutation adds new genes into a species. Evolutionary change can occur without any new genes being introduced merely by selection, or it can occur through mutation where new genes are introduced.
"This hurricane season shattered records that have stood for decades -- most named storms, most hurricanes and most category five storms. Arguably, it was the most devastating hurricane season the country has experienced in modern times." -- Navy Vice Adm. Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr., Ph.D., undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator.
The frequency of storms seems to be cyclical and unrelated to global warming trends. Their strength, however, is related to the temperature increase.
they get all up in arms about there being more storms in a hurricane season when we never used to record storms. we only used to record hurricanes.
The NOAA link I give above notes that in 1933 there were 21 named storms. So apparently they were recording and naming them seventy years ago. When exactly is it that you're claiming "we only used to record hurricanes"?
Free market solution provided for: pollution is trespass, trespass violates your property rights.
We have all kinds of anti-trespass laws and the most private-property (and private-power) favorable government seen in this country since the days of the robber barrons, and yet your "pollution is trespass" solution isn't working. When power is concentrated into the hands of large corporations, it's impossible for the "little guy" to successfully prosecute them for "trespass".
(Now, if you're saying that the ultimate solution is to make sure that economic power isn't concentrated into the hands of a few, great. I agree. Welcome to libertarian socialism. But at the moment it is the case that economic power is immensely concentrated thanks to the state actions that enable capitalism.)
Even there, though, someone has to figure out where "trespass" starts. Somewhere on the continuum between the negligable pollution I add to the air we all share when I burn a candle, and a smokestack pumping pure poison into the air, there has to be the line where behavior becomes actionable. That line is regulation.
(And I love how libertarian capitalists pretend that enforcing anti-trespass laws is somehow not the use of force. The verbal gymnastics involved in asserting that someone who is sitting quietly on your front lawn is using force against you, is entertaining.)
Free market solution provided for: tell your grocer you want more labels on foods. Get friends and family to do the same. Grocer will either buy labeled foods or lose your business.
Falsely label something is fraud. Calling a GM organism a "tomato" when it is so different from a tomato that a patent is warranted is false labeling. I'm sure as a libertarian capitalist you're opposed to fraud, no?
Lateral gene transfer. It is also possible that some genetic material from a GM plant somehow ended up in a relatively distant relative. This sort of thing is somewhere between extremely rare and astonishingly rare (one in a million or one a quadrillion?), we don't know. This is what the article implies happened.
My understanding - as perhaps you as a biologist can speak to this point - is that the techniques of GM can make horizontal gene transfer more probable. After all, the gene in question was transfered into the "target" organism by some vector, some sort of "artifical virus" (this is my lay understanding and I welcome informed corrections from knowledgable biologists).
You do realize that man, through selective breeding, grafting, and other means has been doing GM for centuries before anyone knew what DNA was?
Please, not this tired apology. Selective breeding is completely unrelated to genetic modification, it introduces no new genes into a species. Grafting is even more unrelated.
Now, we are using more precise means to achieve the same goals of: better yields, less loss due to pests, etc.
Along with introducing allergens into foods that didn't previously have them, and introducing "better yield" characteristics into weeds.
If you want non-GM foods, there are thousands of grocery stores for you. Go shop there. Problem solved!
Part of the problem is that pollen from the genetically altered foods you want, pollutes the fields growing the foods that most people want.
Another part of the problem is that genetically altered foods are not labeled, since agribusiness giants bought enough legislators to make the law say that while GM crops are different enough from ordinary crops to deserve patents, they are at the same time so similar to ordinary crops that they need not be labeled.
If you want your GM crops, grow them under bio-hazard controls so they don't contaminate real food, and label them so people know what they're getting. Failure to do the first is pollution; failure to do the second is fraud.
You didn't answer his question: "But what if I don't recite it, rather I print it and sell the printed copy for a profit or recite it to a paying audience?"
As I originally stated: "My ethical rights as a creator are to have that relationship recognized, and to get my cut of any money that someone makes with that work." Royalty-right, not copy-right.
The time you spent trying to design, code, and bug-check that app is unworthy of recoupment under your beliefs. So why would anyone bother to code or make music? For love? Communism tried that already.
I get paid to write code that suits my employer's needs. This is true of most programmers, most code is written in-house. Yes, much COTS code would go away without copyright - and almost certainly be replaced by collaboratively funded open source / free software.
I also get paid (a very very small amount, not even minimum wage, but that's the music biz) by a local bar to make music, because that brings people in to sit and drink. If I get off my butt and finally go into the studio to record a CD of my original songs, if I shop it around I could get gigs that pay more significant money. People sharing copies of my songs could only help that process.
There are ways for creators to get paid besides an artifical state monopoly on making copies.
Communism tried that already.
It's funny how just a few hours ago I was discussing with some friends how some people seem to think the failure of state communism means that there are no other possible economic arragements besides contemporary Western capitalism.
Under the state communism of Lenin or Mao, you wrote code or songs, or grew wheat, or made tractors, for the state, not for love.
But yes, I would create some code, poems, and music even if there were no money in it. Certainly very few musicians or poets ever make significant money from their art. (Especilly poets.) Artists do it for love. They can of course do more of it if they get paid, but that in no way implies that our copyright scheme is the best, or even a good, way to see that artists get paid.
(and somebody should tell those creeps that decide to enforce copyright on scout troops that want to sing "Row Row Row Your Boat" around campfires)
IIRC, the issue was about for-profit camps that feature sing-alongs as an attraction. The Girl Scouts were accidently caught up in the dragnet, and ASCAP let them off the hook.
plus your means of enforcement breaks other laws (manslaughter, murder, etc.)
There's little ethical difference between me pointing a gun at you to make you stop, and me getting my proxy the state to do it instead. Either it is ethical to use force to make you stop reciting my poem, or writing it down for a friend, or whatever; or it's not.
I'm not advocating vigilanteeism, due process rights are also important; but its hypocritical to forget that criminal penalties mean the threat of force - i.e., the pointing of guns. If I can't picture myelf standing behind that gun, I shouldn't ask the state to do it for me.
You do in fact own that poem, which is why you can enforce those conditions of use.
Holding a copyright is not the same as ownership, ethically or legally, and should not be confused with it.
Whether I choose to freely release my photos to the general public or sell copies for a profit is my choice. I respect your terms and ask that you respect mine.
It's not a question of "respecting" your choice. What you are calling your "choice" is actually the use of government force to prevent someone from taking an action you don't like.
You can choose to ask people to do certain things with respect to "your" work, sure. The idea that you should be entitled to have the state use force to enforce your wishes is not at all so clear.
The Constitutional authority for Congress to issue copyrights is not some notion of "respecting" the choice of artists, but rather to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". More and more people are coming to believe that preventing people from sharing information doesn't serve that end, that there are better ways to promote that progress in an age where sharing copies of a work is as easy and natural as speaking.
However, the basic premise behind copyright is sound. If you write a book or compose a symphony, you SHOULD have the exclusive copyright on that work...It is completely up to the copyright holder to decide what happens to the work.
Hmm. So if you memorize one of my poems and want to recite it to a friend, I should have the right to use force to stop you? "Shut up or I'll shoot!"
No.
Ideas are not property. If you recite my poem, you take nothing away from me. My poem is not "mine" in the same sense that my guitar is "mine"; it more "mine" in the sense of "that's my girlfriend" or "that's my father". To say "the poem is mine" expresses relationship, not ownership.
Any artist knows that the work "comes from, but mostly through".
My ethical rights as a creator are to have that relationship recognized, and to get my cut of any money that someone makes with that work. I think the way songwriter royalties currently work is the closest thing to a a workable "rights" system: you can play my songs all you want, but if you cover them on a CD, or play them and get paid, you owe me a royalty.
Why should I as a content provider respect your Fair Use rights if you don't respect my copyrights?
A copyright is an artificial legal creation. A "fair use right" is not a right unto itself, but a limitation on those artificial legal creation - these "fair use rights" (and many more) would exist if all copyright laws were repealed.
I believe the existance of a working quantum theory means that the universe can be considered as a simulation insofar as there might exist a universe without quantum physics and just particle physics.
Our model of the universe - that is, the sum total of our theories and observation about it - is a simulation. It exists in our brains and in our books. TFA talks about the idea that "reality and information are, in a deep sense, indistinguishable". But of course our model of reality is made out of information!
A century or two ago we though that the information-universe was "compressable": determine the initial conditions and the deterministic rules, and (in principle) you had a complete description of the past, present, and future of reality. But it seems that the universe is not compressable: there's no complete model of it that's smaller.
Slashdot Mirror
True, of course. It's also true that many modern drugs are dangerous, so homeopathy is probably safer than those too.
I don't recommend that people use either herbs or refined/synthetic drugs willy-nilly. (Practitioners of Chinese Medicine refer to herbs as "the poisons", and put their use far down the line of treatments to use.)
Any given suppliment has its supplier standing behind it. Modern drugs have companies like Merck standing behind them - buyer beware!
I am very very glad that you are not my physician. Indeed, you've pretty much put into one sentence the reason why more and more people are turning to various alternative and complementary modalities.
I want a doctor who's interest is in "curing" me, not just in causing a known biological effect in my body.
Of course, there's no chance that what was identified as the "correct medication", simply wasn't correct, since the medical system is infallible.
Uh-huh.
My mom gets no effect from standard injections of novocaine. (I can't recall if it's that her nerve is in a weird place, or some chemical thing.) When she was young, the dentist refused to believe this: if she didn't get numb from "real" medicine, than the pain must not be "real". That put her off going to the dentist for several decades. (Her current dentist uses a different compound or a different technique that works.)
Do you have problems with selling it? Or is it just the word "medicine" that you want a monopoly on?
How about "problem"? A "problem" calls for a "solution" or for a way of dealing with it, and makes the person a problem-solver; a "disease" calls for a "cure", and makes the person a patient, someone under the care and authority of someone else. (I think "problems of living" is the term Szasz likes to use.)
Or if you want something fancier, how about "psychosocial dysfunction"? I kind of like how that calls out the that the problem lies between the mind and society, that "sanity" is partially a social construct.
The question is not sympathy! The question of whether the term "disease" is appropriate and helpful has nothing to do with how much sympathy we have.
Diabetes is a disease, it is a condition with definite observable physiochemical markers, that's how it is dignosed. Depression is not a condition with definite physiochemical markers, it is diagnosed based on behaviors, thoughts, and beliefs. (Schizophrenia, I believe, does have some definite diagnostic chemical markers, but I'm not sure about that.)
I can have just as much sympathy for someone with troublesome behaviors, thoughts, and beliefs as for someone with troublesome physiochemistry.
I have no disdain or lack of sympathy for people with these problems. Geez. If calles a broken leg a "disease", and I say, "no, it's an injury, disease is not the right word and creates confusion", does that mean that I have no sympathy for people with broken legs?
Of course I have my own problems. And no, I chose not to take drugs. (Uh...I chose not to take those drugs. :-) ) That doesn't mean I haven't gotten help in dealing with my problems.
Of course! That's never been in dispute in this thread! Let me repeat myself one more damn time: "The question is not whether it's real. The problems are very real."
That's no argument for labeling them diseases...if we label them "Former Presidents of the United States", we've labeled them something. The question is, what is an accurate and useful label?
I agree with those who don't think "disease" isn't a good choice.
No. I don't mean a few molecules, I mean that some contain active ingredients in significant concentrations, of the order of 0.1% or more. Sometimes a lot higher - this, for example, is a 10% extract of arnica that I (quite anecdotally) find useful for bruises. (An occupational hazard.)
A "1X" solution is 10% concentration. If you Google for homeopathic 1X, you'll see many products made with these high-concentration extracts.
That's not to say that do or do not work. I don't consider myself a defender of homeopathic theory in any way. But I'm really disappointed to see self-described "skeptics" continually misrepresent it. Not all homeopathic remedies are extremely dilute.
Nor is it considered, in homeopathic theory, enough to simply create a very dilute tincture, like putting a grain of salt in a glass of water; first a fairly concentrated salt water would be prepared, then that solution diluted, and so on. The solution must be "prepared", shaken in some certain way, at every step. That theory may be absolute bullshit, indeed that's where I'd put my money. But intellectual honesty requires that we criticize it as it is, not set up strawmen.
Don't tell me who or what I don't know. Among my friends and acquintances are "bipolars", "depressives", at least two "PTSDs", two who could be probably be diagnozed "multiple personality disorders", one sure and one probable "borderline personality disorders", and a few "panic disorders". Oh, and of course a few "addicts", anyone in the Baltimore area knows some former junkies. And a "co-dependant". (Some of these overlap, of course.)
A few of these people are former lovers. I've talked them through panic attacks, PTSD flashbacks, and the really really strong desire to fall off the wagon. Another was a housemate, who I visited several times after she checked herself into the local mental hospital.
And I've had clients and students with various "mental illnesses".
I myself could probably have found someone to diagnose me as "depressive", or perhaps the more trendy "bipolar", at least until a few years ago. My doctor dropped Prozac hints at me on more than one occasion. I'm feeling much better now, thanks.
The question is not whether it's real. The problems are very real. The question is whether it's useful to label problematic states of consciousness, ideas, and behaviors as "diseases" or "illnesses", or whether other ways of thinking of them may be more useful.
My frustration with the idea that these problem are disease states comes not from ignorance, but from seeing how unhelpful - indeed, sometimes harmful - the "disease model" has been for most of these people.
Just a data point: many homopathic remedies do contain significant amount of active substances. Not are dilluted past Avogadro's number.
Thanks to homopathy's being the designated whipping boy of skeptics for decades, many people seem unaware of that.
Ah, but who says there's no causal relationship between my toothpaste rubbing and my headache relief? Maybe in my rubbing I'm hitting an acupuressure point that changes blood flow, and the studies used a slightly different rubbing technique. Maybe I've got some rare biochemical quirk where flouride deficiency gives me headaches, and I'm abosorbing trace amounts through my skin. The unknowns are many, the knowns few.
Well, many homeopathic remedies do indeed contain substantial amounts of active ingredients.
But for those that are (exclusive of the anomalous result discussed in TFA) nothing but inactive ingredients, think of them as the same category as an aid to prayer: prayer beads, Lourdes water, a Kwan Yin statue, whatever. Prayer often involves one of these, and/or going to (and quite probably financially supporting) a local church/synagogue/whatever. Not free.
"Sheer bloody mindedness" is fine too, but is naturally rare. I can help train it if you want to sign up for some classes, but they are not free. (And yeah, it can help. Ooops, I'm being anecdotal again.)
I don't recommend or use those extremely dillute homepathic remedies myself. (I do use some remedies that contain substantial amount of herbal extracts.) But if it's working for someone, hey, whatever gets you through. (Provided there aren't dangers they're unaware of.)
Thing is, sometimes, on an individual case-by-case basis, a placebo can be better than "real" medicine; the Demerol doesn't work but the sugar pill does. For that person, in that moment, what is "real" medicine?
My point is just this: if you're trying to answer the question "What will releive symptoms the best in this population?" systematic evidence is very helpful. If you want to answer the question "What will releive this person's symptoms the best", that one person is by defintion anecdotal.
Of course it does. My mom used to be a nurse, and they'd often "placeboize" patients whose pain meds didn't seem to be working.
The problem is, the term can cover several different phenomena:
I think the satire in a work whose headline says "Holy Jihad declared against Jordan's Steakhouse" (local restaurant) is pretty obivous. Especailly a hand-written newsletter with photocopied photos of Bin Laden (thus the book) with a thick graffitti-style magic marker beard.
As for "Kill Bush": the whole content of the thing was supposed to be a comment from a fictional Iraqi insurgent. Fictional characters say and do all sorts of things that their creators have no intention of doing; Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, and no one ever thought of hauling him in for questioning about any unsolved shootings because he wrote "Fulsom Prison Blues".
So, yeah, writing something goofy like "Muslim Extremist News: Glorious leader Bin Laden says `Kill Bush!' and declares a Holy Jihad against Jordan's Steakhouse!" shouldn't be something that gets you detained by the cops for several hours and followed around town by intimidating police surveillance for several days. There are actual crooks my local cops could be chasing instead.
Certainly some people have strong difficulties in their lives. And certainly some people have deformities or injuries to their nervous system. But the idea that "mental illnesses" such as depression have direct neurological expression is not as supported as SSRI makers would like you to believe. (Another link: here.)
Labeling psychological difficulties (other than neulogical illness or injury) is questionable. It has strong legal and social consequences that we ought to consider.
The DSM, the official defintion of mental health and illness, has its roots in a military effort to decide who was too crazy (or not crazy enough?) to be a soldier. It's critera for listed condtions are famously vauge. And who decides which condtions are "illnesses"? Just a few decades ago, homosexuality was a "mental illness" according to the DSM.
I agree, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should use the word "illness" to describe these states.
Depends on the context. If I find that rubbing toothpaste on my toes relieves my headaches, my anecdotal evidence trumps any controlled studies showing that rubbing toothpaste on the toes of randomly selected subjects does nothing. It even trumps controlled studies showing that rubbing toothpaste on the toes caues headaches in randomly selected subjects. I'm not a randomly selected subject, I'm me, and my treatment goal is to improve my own subjective experience of health.
On the other hand, if someone comes to me about their headaches, in the absense of controlled studies showing that the treatment works, rubbing toothpaste on the toes would not be at the top of the list of things I'd suggest. (But not absent from that list - it's safe and cheap, it worked for me so maybe those controlled studies are flawed, and at the very least will help clean out toe jam, so why not give it a whirl?)
Of course, we also have to ask how much bearing that systematic evidence has on the actual application in question, how much these objective measurement correspond to the goal of improving subjective experiences of health. I always recommend this article by, and this interview with, Ted Kaptchuk.
Yep. A friend of mine was detained for several hours, and under increased police surveillance for at least a few days, after someone at Kinkos' didn't get the joke of a "newsletter" he was photocopying. (Story here, and more details here.)
Richard Feynman tells a story along that line in one of his books. He was taking a graduate seminar about the nervous system, and about giving a presentation to the rest of the class on some aspect. He started by putting an anatomical diagram (a "map of the cat", as he put it) on the board, but the other students said don't bother, they already knew that stuff. His thought was that it was no wonder that he, an outsider in the field, was able to keep up with the class if they were wasting time memorizing stuff you could look up easily. (Of course, there's also the fact that he was a frickin' genius, that probably helped him keep up too.)
"Evolution" is a vague term. Natural selection does not add new genes into a species, it selects from those that exist. Mutation adds new genes into a species. Evolutionary change can occur without any new genes being introduced merely by selection, or it can occur through mutation where new genes are introduced.
Yeah, like those "greenies" at NOAA:
The frequency of storms seems to be cyclical and unrelated to global warming trends. Their strength, however, is related to the temperature increase.
The NOAA link I give above notes that in 1933 there were 21 named storms. So apparently they were recording and naming them seventy years ago. When exactly is it that you're claiming "we only used to record hurricanes"?
We have all kinds of anti-trespass laws and the most private-property (and private-power) favorable government seen in this country since the days of the robber barrons, and yet your "pollution is trespass" solution isn't working. When power is concentrated into the hands of large corporations, it's impossible for the "little guy" to successfully prosecute them for "trespass".
(Now, if you're saying that the ultimate solution is to make sure that economic power isn't concentrated into the hands of a few, great. I agree. Welcome to libertarian socialism. But at the moment it is the case that economic power is immensely concentrated thanks to the state actions that enable capitalism.)
Even there, though, someone has to figure out where "trespass" starts. Somewhere on the continuum between the negligable pollution I add to the air we all share when I burn a candle, and a smokestack pumping pure poison into the air, there has to be the line where behavior becomes actionable. That line is regulation.
(And I love how libertarian capitalists pretend that enforcing anti-trespass laws is somehow not the use of force. The verbal gymnastics involved in asserting that someone who is sitting quietly on your front lawn is using force against you, is entertaining.)
Falsely label something is fraud. Calling a GM organism a "tomato" when it is so different from a tomato that a patent is warranted is false labeling. I'm sure as a libertarian capitalist you're opposed to fraud, no?
My understanding - as perhaps you as a biologist can speak to this point - is that the techniques of GM can make horizontal gene transfer more probable. After all, the gene in question was transfered into the "target" organism by some vector, some sort of "artifical virus" (this is my lay understanding and I welcome informed corrections from knowledgable biologists).
Please, not this tired apology. Selective breeding is completely unrelated to genetic modification, it introduces no new genes into a species. Grafting is even more unrelated.
Along with introducing allergens into foods that didn't previously have them, and introducing "better yield" characteristics into weeds.
Part of the problem is that pollen from the genetically altered foods you want, pollutes the fields growing the foods that most people want.
Another part of the problem is that genetically altered foods are not labeled, since agribusiness giants bought enough legislators to make the law say that while GM crops are different enough from ordinary crops to deserve patents, they are at the same time so similar to ordinary crops that they need not be labeled.
If you want your GM crops, grow them under bio-hazard controls so they don't contaminate real food, and label them so people know what they're getting. Failure to do the first is pollution; failure to do the second is fraud.
Corporate monsters are a creation of governments that issue charters. Allowing governments to create these monsters is not a "side effect of liberty".
As I originally stated: "My ethical rights as a creator are to have that relationship recognized, and to get my cut of any money that someone makes with that work." Royalty-right, not copy-right.
I get paid to write code that suits my employer's needs. This is true of most programmers, most code is written in-house. Yes, much COTS code would go away without copyright - and almost certainly be replaced by collaboratively funded open source / free software.
I also get paid (a very very small amount, not even minimum wage, but that's the music biz) by a local bar to make music, because that brings people in to sit and drink. If I get off my butt and finally go into the studio to record a CD of my original songs, if I shop it around I could get gigs that pay more significant money. People sharing copies of my songs could only help that process.
There are ways for creators to get paid besides an artifical state monopoly on making copies.
It's funny how just a few hours ago I was discussing with some friends how some people seem to think the failure of state communism means that there are no other possible economic arragements besides contemporary Western capitalism.
Under the state communism of Lenin or Mao, you wrote code or songs, or grew wheat, or made tractors, for the state, not for love.
But yes, I would create some code, poems, and music even if there were no money in it. Certainly very few musicians or poets ever make significant money from their art. (Especilly poets.) Artists do it for love. They can of course do more of it if they get paid, but that in no way implies that our copyright scheme is the best, or even a good, way to see that artists get paid.
IIRC, the issue was about for-profit camps that feature sing-alongs as an attraction. The Girl Scouts were accidently caught up in the dragnet, and ASCAP let them off the hook.
There's little ethical difference between me pointing a gun at you to make you stop, and me getting my proxy the state to do it instead. Either it is ethical to use force to make you stop reciting my poem, or writing it down for a friend, or whatever; or it's not.
I'm not advocating vigilanteeism, due process rights are also important; but its hypocritical to forget that criminal penalties mean the threat of force - i.e., the pointing of guns. If I can't picture myelf standing behind that gun, I shouldn't ask the state to do it for me.
Holding a copyright is not the same as ownership, ethically or legally, and should not be confused with it.
It's not a question of "respecting" your choice. What you are calling your "choice" is actually the use of government force to prevent someone from taking an action you don't like.
You can choose to ask people to do certain things with respect to "your" work, sure. The idea that you should be entitled to have the state use force to enforce your wishes is not at all so clear.
The Constitutional authority for Congress to issue copyrights is not some notion of "respecting" the choice of artists, but rather to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". More and more people are coming to believe that preventing people from sharing information doesn't serve that end, that there are better ways to promote that progress in an age where sharing copies of a work is as easy and natural as speaking.
Hmm. So if you memorize one of my poems and want to recite it to a friend, I should have the right to use force to stop you? "Shut up or I'll shoot!"
No.
Ideas are not property. If you recite my poem, you take nothing away from me. My poem is not "mine" in the same sense that my guitar is "mine"; it more "mine" in the sense of "that's my girlfriend" or "that's my father". To say "the poem is mine" expresses relationship, not ownership. Any artist knows that the work "comes from, but mostly through".
My ethical rights as a creator are to have that relationship recognized, and to get my cut of any money that someone makes with that work. I think the way songwriter royalties currently work is the closest thing to a a workable "rights" system: you can play my songs all you want, but if you cover them on a CD, or play them and get paid, you owe me a royalty.
A copyright is an artificial legal creation. A "fair use right" is not a right unto itself, but a limitation on those artificial legal creation - these "fair use rights" (and many more) would exist if all copyright laws were repealed.
Our model of the universe - that is, the sum total of our theories and observation about it - is a simulation. It exists in our brains and in our books. TFA talks about the idea that "reality and information are, in a deep sense, indistinguishable". But of course our model of reality is made out of information!
A century or two ago we though that the information-universe was "compressable": determine the initial conditions and the deterministic rules, and (in principle) you had a complete description of the past, present, and future of reality. But it seems that the universe is not compressable: there's no complete model of it that's smaller.
I've only seen this idea mentioned before in one place (Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe ). It sounds interesting, can you provide a further reference? Thanks.