Oh, at the moment, I don't encrypt email either. Neither do I encrypt my phone calls, which are quite a bit more sensitive. This is all a matter of convenience and that due to the low amount of encrypted traffic I'd just stand out if I encrypted. I just think we should up the convenience to get more encrypted traffic:)
The false positives problems seems quite close to me: I've been studying influence and I have some friends that are enrolled in a small cult. This has made me curious about the technicalities of mind control/cult formation, resulting in related searches etc. I'd be pretty annoyed if they started stopping me at every airport over that.
Anyway, the problem with disclosure of freaky fetishes is that they create a situation where one person get a strong hold over another person, which is a significant security breach (can be leveraged for more access.)
No, not everybody is. However, doing something you'd like to hide is far from the same as doing something that's illegal. For instance, if you were sending those love letters to your mistress rather than your wife, they would be reasonable to hide - and while this might immoral, it is not illegal, and it should not be.
The same would go if the love letters still went to your wife but included attached (intentionally socially incorrect example) scat porn. It's legal and consensual and between the two of you, yet giving this to Joe R Policeman allows him an undue hold over you socially.
Cool! I've also branched out a bit - I'm spending a lot of my time on studying influence, hypnosis, NLP, human attraction, and various aspects of self improvement and therapy. I still live in Oslo and work with programming. I took a brief stint doing sales to test out influence in practice, though.
There are often good reasons for using distributed VC systems (Darcs, monotone, Arch, BitKeeper, etc) instead of SVN.
There MAY be a good reason to use CVS in that CVS is slightly more trivial to set up; this Subversion tutoral makes the SVN setup fairly painless, too, though.
Subversion is likely to give you less pain in the long run than CVS, though.
<soapbox> I think SVN's lack of distribution support might end up being the worst thing to happen to open source ever. Distributed development can boost the open source model A LOT, and CVS suckiness made it much more likely that this would become the norm. Instead, Subversion creates a much higher bar that has to be jumped, delaying the full use of distributed systems a lot, possibly effectively killing it. Unfortunately, people need to think long and carefully about version control, development, hurdles, personal effort economics, and open source culture before the impact of this is obvious. </soapbox>
Note: The following may not apply to some totally exceptional programmers. However, unless you've got at least ten years of professional experience, assume it applies to you and you just don't have enough experience. I've never met nor heard of anybody it does NOT apply to.
This seems reasonable when one don't actually write real world code, instead just playing around with "what I want to do". Often, reinventing the wheel is cheaper than trying to use an old wheel, and trying to make something that can be perfectly reused is more expensive than writing it several times.
Writing things several times also leads to you knowing what things you did right and wrong, so the second or third time you do something similar can be much better. It's important to be careful on go #2, though - it's easy to try to solve all the things that were bad with the first system, and overengineering. That's known as "The Second Systems Effect".
This ignores a reality of the situation: As far as I've understood, MySQL AB has hired almost everybody from the community that hacks on MySQL-the-db. There are no serious outside hackers.
That means that MySQL-the-db would probably be set back a couple of years (at least), as you'd need a complete change of development practices, and new developers would have to learn the codebase and build that culture.
It might still work out - heck, mysql might finally become a quality product - yet it would take a ton of time.
No, it's slowly becoming the favourite hate object of more and more programmers. It's being *used* by many PHP and Perl monkeys, sure - unfortunately including me - but it still suck, and more and more of us know it. I hate that it's a two week job to migrate off it - otherwise, I'd be off it a long time ago.
While I'm all in favour of being environmentally careful, all evidence indicate that oil is much, much worse for us than nuclear. Anybody that drives a SUV is an asshole.
... and, of course, you could even use some or other decent programming language. Interfacing C from Perl sucks, at least compared to Ruby (and I'm told so about Python, too), and Ruby is much more pleasant to program in. Or at least that's my opinion, after a year of Ruby experience and about ten years of Perl experience.
There's an easy solution to this: Don't use company-based open source software. This means don't use MySQL, use PostgreSQL, don't use Red Hat or SuSE, use Debian or *BSD, etc.
I already do this, not particularly because I'm afraid of companies going away, just because I've found those solutions to be better for me. They've got user interfaces that are harder to learn - yet I find them better (more stable and more capable) when I've learned them.
Please define "truth". I'm sure you're aware that even though you feel very strongly about this, there's islamists that feel much stronger - so they'd be right and you'd be wrong. There's New Agers that feel really, really strongly too, and I'd expect you to say that they're wrong, too.
So, we agree that "I feel strongly" isn't truth - so what's truth? Why aren't you lying to yourself and to us, like you accuse the followers of Islam of doing, the Hinduists, the New Agers, etc?
Because your "rights" in this case would infringe more significantly on somebody else's rights.
To use an extreme example, it's like I'm not allowed to put a bullet through somebody else even if I own the bullet. Other rights trump the property right.
We, as in the western world, have chosen to have this apply to discrimination from businesses. If we want to avoid a close to totally segregated society, this is the only way we know to work - and my personal guess is that the basic tribal psychology of humans makes it the only way that CAN work.
I'm hoping he and people like him will block this. In Europe, I'm fairly sure it will - and, with a bit of luck, that will make it pointless in the US.
Oh, and for me, the conditions inside the US doesn't directly matter - unless it turn back into a free country, I've done my last visit:-( I hope for your sake that it gets fixed, of course.
This ain't going to happen more than once. I can just think about what happens when people like my father, who's got quite a temper, are told that his Blu-Ray player has turned into a brick because some guy in Taiwan used the key for that model to steal movies.
Besides being a guy with a temper who absolutely does not stand for that kind of thing (and will likely die as a result of the kind of anger he puts towards it), my father also is
Director of the National Institute for Work Environment Research
Directly appointed by the king (that's mostly a formality, though)
An active politican (local area)
An active writer of political essays for the national press
I am sure there's other people of a similar creed out there with similar amounts of temper.
I don't believe in magic or ghosts. So yes, that makes it a randomized path constrained by physics. On the other hand, I don't believe in "I" either.
Free will is an illusion, the strict boundary of an "I" is an illusion, yet both are illusions that our brain are (somewhat) made to maintain, and it makes us feel scared if anybody tries to remove those illusions.
This is simply false. Natural selection has not been able to explain hardly anything. It is simply invoked. Read some biological papers. Whenever something new is found, it is simply listed as "having evolved" without any discussion about how the evolution could even have taken place.
Sure, they do. When I see a house, I'll also tend to describe it as "being built by somebody", without any discussion about how this could have happened.
Both of these things are based on knowledge we accept as facts. Though I have less distinct evidence for it than I have for evolution, I believe that houses do not spring up by themselves. I infer this from physical laws and my experience around house-building.
As for Mendellian inheritance: When I refer to "evolution", I refer to the neo-Darwinian synthesis - our present understanding of evolution - and that includes Mendellian inheritance. Sorry to have confused you. In addition to Mendel, Darwin was also (originally) a creationist, BTW. And it *does not matter* - at those times, there wasn't heavy evidence either way. Now there is.
Natural selection means more than "Dead things don't reproduce, sick things don't reproduce well". There's a gradient of reproduction ability, and in some cases offspring will reproduce better than parents. You can see this easily in human society: Some people have more children than their parents did. And they definately have more offspring than those that don't reproduce at all.
If we're going to look at humans specifically, there's a very high selection going on first step (early natural abortions), something in the 40-60% range (I don't remember the number exactly.) Then there's a secondary selection happening for full individuals: A few percent die young, and this used to be much higher. Then there's the really significant selection: About 25% of men are chosen away, and do not get kids. This has increased heavily lately, that number is as of 2005 in Norway, at age 40. Other men get children by several women, keeping the *average* a trifle above one kid per person per generation.
You can, of course, fit this into the simple picture of "sick get less kids", yet there's the above-and-beyond part, too, and that's significant.
As for your search space: It's clear that random mutation *alone* does not work. However, random mutation work in combination with natural selection, and it is NOT exploring the full search space. Instead, it is exploring the search space of "small changes from the present point". Then these are "judged" by natural selection, and we get a set of new points.
WRT 21st century view, I know of most of those results, and consider them to be fairly orthogonal to the main argument. Yes, they show that after 4 billion years of evolution, there's some complex mutation mechanisms active. These fit well with neoDarwinism - the system is a feedback loop, and better ways of handling mutations has been selected. That is a natural consequence - these would be the best things that could happen to a reproducing machine, OF COURSE they will be selected for.
1 (a) Evidence for "shares a common ancestor" includes similar yet occasionally randomly varied information storage mechanisms, similar information stored, the information we have matching a pure branching tree backwards, etc. We do not know with certainity that there is a single ancestor on earth for all life on earth. For all we know, panspermia (life arriving from other planets) may be true. What we know is that all the evidence we have point at it all being connected *as far back as we get data*.
1 (b) Random mutation + natural selection being sufficient to create the diversity that exists today: Look at what evolution happens today, for instan
If there is evidence of a creator, the next step is finding evidence of who the creator may be. And you're even turning the process on it's head: It tend to be "be religious, look for evidence that can be constructed as being against evolution".
I don't get your comment about transposons as semantic toolkits. As far as I know, they are presently viewed as being mostly "active junk DNA". I happen to be sceptical about how much junk DNA actually IS junk DNA, based on too much DNA staying static over long periods of time - look e.g. at the correspondence between mouse and human DNA - yet I don't see any problem with there being SOME junk, and I see tranposons often being junk as perfectly reasonable based on what kind of results I get when I run simulations.
WRT the article: There's at least the following errors in it:
Representation of Darwin's idea as having been of gradual change. Large parts of the argument is based on this; it's wrong.
Representation of "Christians" while representing a fraction of Christianity that's got a tendency to be literal in their interpretation of a self-conflicting book. None of the christians I know have a problem with evolution.
Misrepresentation of "information creating itself" by disregarding the action of natural selection. Natural selection does the weeding. I have actually tested the use of this (again with simulations).
Misrepresentation of "information creating itself" by attacking a straw man. The argument of random monkeys isn't usually used to illustrate this, instead it is used to illustrate the opposite: Combinatorics increase complexity FAST, so pure random chance will not reach this.
Misrepresentation of "reactions are reversable". This is true, but it's the truth that does the service of a lie. Most reactions are either endoterm or exoterm, meaning they release or consume energy. This makes them asymmetrical - many results of reactions are effectively stable. For instance, you don't have the sea suddenly turning into a mass of hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, even though the water originally came from the reaction between them.
Misrepresentation of the set of computational systems, in that the system of a living being has a multitude of different pathways for most reactions. He's describing a linear code execution system, not one with built-in redundancy.
Misrepresentation of the "system" involved. The original system is quantum mechanics, our non-chaotic basic system for atoms. Saying if the program "works" or not is icky - does a stable compound "work"? In terms of evolution, what can be said to "work" is a compound that is stable enough, under some conditions, to function as a pattern for creation of more compounds of (very) similar patterns, with space for variation. The simplest such compound I know of is a clay crystal in a suitable environment.
Misrepresentation: Discussion of how a human-written program on a Von Neumann machine works. This is an analogy that does not hold. The system that nature runs on isn't a Von Neumann machine on any level we can see. Instead, it is a robust parallell system, which runs under quite different constraints. Also, we are able to effectively write programs using genetic algorithms (search for genetic programming), so the argument would seem to be irrelevant even if it wasn't fundamenally attacking a bad analogy.
Misrepresentation: The talk of chaos as connected to computer programs (as per above.) Quantum mechanics aren't chaotic, and as a such this falls down.
Misrepresentation/wrong: "Biological targets are necessarily small, because they require complex adaptive functions for survival". This is only true in the context of how we define "biological" or "life" and in connection with having other biology compete with it. The clay crystals mentioned above does NOT need this, and are a fairly large target. An old biological system that's built by natural selection from abiogenesis would naturally have
I have no idea what you mean by "Laws of life on earth", and the "could be different" is critical. The morphology doesn't aid your point, as it isn't anywhere near "right", and there's developmental stuff.
Seriously: When it comes to shared ancestry, the evidence is very, very, very strong. There are hundreds of thousands of datapoints. There are an extreme number of predictions that have been done based on this, there are extreme amounts of verification.
You are actually jumping to a conclusion. I'm assuming this isn't malicious - you seem to want to actually get at the real answer - yet when you take the time to actually inspect the evidence around evolution, you'll find that it is confirmed a million ways. As I said in another post: Evolution explains most variation in nature. There may be other sources of variation we do not know of - yet they cannot displace evolution and the data we have around it. Instead, they may be supplementary theories, used *together with* evolution.
This knowledge is sort of like our knowledge of the continents. 500 years ago, we didn't know about more than a couple of continents - the eurasian continent and africa. Now, we know all the continents *and know we know all the continents*. There is sufficient evidence, criss-crossing and linked together, that we can say this as an absolute fact.
There is sufficient evidence of shared ancestry and evolution that we can say this as an absolute fact, too, with similar interlinking.
Aren't those the same kind of statements everybody that hasn't actually *checked the freakin' evidence* comes with?
Aren't you supposed to follow that little commandment saying "Thou shalt not bear false witness"?
Aren't you actually grossly violating that by attempting to bring forth an untruth because you're too lazy to check the evidence?
There are three possible conclusions when you look at the evidence:
Evolution and natural selection is the cause of most, if not all, variation in the biological world.
Somebody design and orchestrate the biological world and intentionally makes it look like (1)
There is a giant conspiracy involving millions of people going on, orchastrating the creating of false information looking like (1), and the only reason that everything you check yourself (and I've done checking up to and including breeding experiments) match what you are told and are totally logical consistent is pure luck.
I personally choose to go with (1). From an observer's perspective, (1) and (2) are equal - it's the same information content. (3) is different - on the other hand, if you believe (3), I suggest that you go see a doctor. We have drugs for handling your condition.
No, it would be a worse hypothesis, as it discount observational evidence: Shared genetic material, shared aspects of biochemistry that could be different, shared morphology, etc.
(A) Behe's books has repeatedly been debunked.
(B) The claim of "many" is overblown. There are a very very few, compared to the overall number of people that study this. Almost all of them have the distinction of being a member of some religion that have their belief. And few of them seem to even be against evolution per se - they just try to insert other factors *too*, for instance saying "There is evolution BUT specication comes from God". And there is no significant rationale for doing so.
WRT "treated as fact": They are treated as facts because they are facts. There may be other things that influence, yet the *main thrust* of variance in those areas are explained by these cathedrals of knowledge. That's what a scientific theory is, BTW - a cathedral of knowledge that explains variance. It is NOT the same as a hypothesis, even though people tend to abuse the term informally.
Does your 1.8BN include marketing costs? It reminds me of the number including marketing.
My view is that the pharma companies should make a reasonable return on investment, assuming reasonable processes. At the moment, I'm very sceptical of whether the pharma companies are doing reasonable processes. There's three parts I'm sceptical of:
The patent laws in place seems to have raised the initial costs too far. Change of effective "ground rules" include the patentizing of research that was intially funded by the public, and (if I've understood correctly) patenting of some of the intermediate processes.
The companies seems to be run incompetently, due to lack of competition. Massive internal bueraucracy.
As far as I've understood, most of the funding goes to marketing. Significantly more than goes to research. There's traditionally been a LOT of semi-bribing of MDs to get them to use specific medications. This has been more restricted lately, yet I assume the same money is now used to market in some other way.
There seems to be wasteful "faking" of research. It seems the pharma industry is doing a lot of "semi-faked" research, controlling what factors they can to get as good results for their drug as they can. This include changing pre-filtering of the human subjects used in studies, manipulating the timeframe of the studies to get the data that's optimal for their drug compared to the competitors, cancelling the funding for or not publishing studies that give "bad" results, etc.
Note that these are my impressions. For the research part, they're based on discussion with several people that have carefully studied the research done. For the rest, they're based on popular publication in the area, including previous Slashdot discussions and links posted in them. I have not checked this carefully against primary sources - so take with a grain of salt.
There is a fast track process through the FDA, and I believe this drug would be on it. As far as I've understood, any drug that does not yet have a "equivalent" on the market is automatically on it. Ie, Viagra was on the fast track, Cialis was not. Actually, that may be wrong - the requirements for the was relaxed sometime in the 90s. Before that, there was a requirement for something like "increased survival".
Slashdot Mirror
The false positives problems seems quite close to me: I've been studying influence and I have some friends that are enrolled in a small cult. This has made me curious about the technicalities of mind control/cult formation, resulting in related searches etc. I'd be pretty annoyed if they started stopping me at every airport over that.
Anyway, the problem with disclosure of freaky fetishes is that they create a situation where one person get a strong hold over another person, which is a significant security breach (can be leveraged for more access.)
Eivind.
The same would go if the love letters still went to your wife but included attached (intentionally socially incorrect example) scat porn. It's legal and consensual and between the two of you, yet giving this to Joe R Policeman allows him an undue hold over you socially.
Eivind.
Good to hear from you!
Eivind.
There MAY be a good reason to use CVS in that CVS is slightly more trivial to set up; this Subversion tutoral makes the SVN setup fairly painless, too, though.
Subversion is likely to give you less pain in the long run than CVS, though.
<soapbox>
I think SVN's lack of distribution support might end up being the worst thing to happen to open source ever. Distributed development can boost the open source model A LOT, and CVS suckiness made it much more likely that this would become the norm. Instead, Subversion creates a much higher bar that has to be jumped, delaying the full use of distributed systems a lot, possibly effectively killing it. Unfortunately, people need to think long and carefully about version control, development, hurdles, personal effort economics, and open source culture before the impact of this is obvious.
</soapbox>
Eivind.
This seems reasonable when one don't actually write real world code, instead just playing around with "what I want to do". Often, reinventing the wheel is cheaper than trying to use an old wheel, and trying to make something that can be perfectly reused is more expensive than writing it several times.
Writing things several times also leads to you knowing what things you did right and wrong, so the second or third time you do something similar can be much better. It's important to be careful on go #2, though - it's easy to try to solve all the things that were bad with the first system, and overengineering. That's known as "The Second Systems Effect".
Eivind.
That means that MySQL-the-db would probably be set back a couple of years (at least), as you'd need a complete change of development practices, and new developers would have to learn the codebase and build that culture.
It might still work out - heck, mysql might finally become a quality product - yet it would take a ton of time.
Eivind.
Eivind.
While I'm all in favour of being environmentally careful, all evidence indicate that oil is much, much worse for us than nuclear. Anybody that drives a SUV is an asshole.
Eivind.
And no, I'm not talking about video game.
Eivind.
Eivind (Perl Must Die!)
I already do this, not particularly because I'm afraid of companies going away, just because I've found those solutions to be better for me. They've got user interfaces that are harder to learn - yet I find them better (more stable and more capable) when I've learned them.
Eivind.
So, we agree that "I feel strongly" isn't truth - so what's truth? Why aren't you lying to yourself and to us, like you accuse the followers of Islam of doing, the Hinduists, the New Agers, etc?
Eivind.
To use an extreme example, it's like I'm not allowed to put a bullet through somebody else even if I own the bullet. Other rights trump the property right.
We, as in the western world, have chosen to have this apply to discrimination from businesses. If we want to avoid a close to totally segregated society, this is the only way we know to work - and my personal guess is that the basic tribal psychology of humans makes it the only way that CAN work.
Eivind.
Oh, and for me, the conditions inside the US doesn't directly matter - unless it turn back into a free country, I've done my last visit :-( I hope for your sake that it gets fixed, of course.
Eivind.
Besides being a guy with a temper who absolutely does not stand for that kind of thing (and will likely die as a result of the kind of anger he puts towards it), my father also is
I am sure there's other people of a similar creed out there with similar amounts of temper.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Free will is an illusion, the strict boundary of an "I" is an illusion, yet both are illusions that our brain are (somewhat) made to maintain, and it makes us feel scared if anybody tries to remove those illusions.
Eivind.
Sure, they do. When I see a house, I'll also tend to describe it as "being built by somebody", without any discussion about how this could have happened.
Both of these things are based on knowledge we accept as facts. Though I have less distinct evidence for it than I have for evolution, I believe that houses do not spring up by themselves. I infer this from physical laws and my experience around house-building.
As for Mendellian inheritance: When I refer to "evolution", I refer to the neo-Darwinian synthesis - our present understanding of evolution - and that includes Mendellian inheritance. Sorry to have confused you. In addition to Mendel, Darwin was also (originally) a creationist, BTW. And it *does not matter* - at those times, there wasn't heavy evidence either way. Now there is.
Natural selection means more than "Dead things don't reproduce, sick things don't reproduce well". There's a gradient of reproduction ability, and in some cases offspring will reproduce better than parents. You can see this easily in human society: Some people have more children than their parents did. And they definately have more offspring than those that don't reproduce at all.
If we're going to look at humans specifically, there's a very high selection going on first step (early natural abortions), something in the 40-60% range (I don't remember the number exactly.) Then there's a secondary selection happening for full individuals: A few percent die young, and this used to be much higher. Then there's the really significant selection: About 25% of men are chosen away, and do not get kids. This has increased heavily lately, that number is as of 2005 in Norway, at age 40. Other men get children by several women, keeping the *average* a trifle above one kid per person per generation.
You can, of course, fit this into the simple picture of "sick get less kids", yet there's the above-and-beyond part, too, and that's significant.
As for your search space: It's clear that random mutation *alone* does not work. However, random mutation work in combination with natural selection, and it is NOT exploring the full search space. Instead, it is exploring the search space of "small changes from the present point". Then these are "judged" by natural selection, and we get a set of new points.
WRT 21st century view, I know of most of those results, and consider them to be fairly orthogonal to the main argument. Yes, they show that after 4 billion years of evolution, there's some complex mutation mechanisms active. These fit well with neoDarwinism - the system is a feedback loop, and better ways of handling mutations has been selected. That is a natural consequence - these would be the best things that could happen to a reproducing machine, OF COURSE they will be selected for.
You mention Scott Gilbert and genetic assimilation. Gilbert considers this to fit under Darwinism: http://www.devbio.com/article.php?ch=22&id=213 (near the bottom). As do I.
1 (a) Evidence for "shares a common ancestor" includes similar yet occasionally randomly varied information storage mechanisms, similar information stored, the information we have matching a pure branching tree backwards, etc. We do not know with certainity that there is a single ancestor on earth for all life on earth. For all we know, panspermia (life arriving from other planets) may be true. What we know is that all the evidence we have point at it all being connected *as far back as we get data*.
1 (b) Random mutation + natural selection being sufficient to create the diversity that exists today: Look at what evolution happens today, for instan
I don't get your comment about transposons as semantic toolkits. As far as I know, they are presently viewed as being mostly "active junk DNA". I happen to be sceptical about how much junk DNA actually IS junk DNA, based on too much DNA staying static over long periods of time - look e.g. at the correspondence between mouse and human DNA - yet I don't see any problem with there being SOME junk, and I see tranposons often being junk as perfectly reasonable based on what kind of results I get when I run simulations.
WRT the article: There's at least the following errors in it:
Seriously: When it comes to shared ancestry, the evidence is very, very, very strong. There are hundreds of thousands of datapoints. There are an extreme number of predictions that have been done based on this, there are extreme amounts of verification.
You are actually jumping to a conclusion. I'm assuming this isn't malicious - you seem to want to actually get at the real answer - yet when you take the time to actually inspect the evidence around evolution, you'll find that it is confirmed a million ways. As I said in another post: Evolution explains most variation in nature. There may be other sources of variation we do not know of - yet they cannot displace evolution and the data we have around it. Instead, they may be supplementary theories, used *together with* evolution.
This knowledge is sort of like our knowledge of the continents. 500 years ago, we didn't know about more than a couple of continents - the eurasian continent and africa. Now, we know all the continents *and know we know all the continents*. There is sufficient evidence, criss-crossing and linked together, that we can say this as an absolute fact.
There is sufficient evidence of shared ancestry and evolution that we can say this as an absolute fact, too, with similar interlinking.
Eivind.
Aren't you supposed to follow that little commandment saying "Thou shalt not bear false witness"?
Aren't you actually grossly violating that by attempting to bring forth an untruth because you're too lazy to check the evidence?
There are three possible conclusions when you look at the evidence:
- Evolution and natural selection is the cause of most, if not all, variation in the biological world.
- Somebody design and orchestrate the biological world and intentionally makes it look like (1)
- There is a giant conspiracy involving millions of people going on, orchastrating the creating of false information looking like (1), and the only reason that everything you check yourself (and I've done checking up to and including breeding experiments) match what you are told and are totally logical consistent is pure luck.
I personally choose to go with (1). From an observer's perspective, (1) and (2) are equal - it's the same information content. (3) is different - on the other hand, if you believe (3), I suggest that you go see a doctor. We have drugs for handling your condition.Eivind.
Eivind.
(B) The claim of "many" is overblown. There are a very very few, compared to the overall number of people that study this. Almost all of them have the distinction of being a member of some religion that have their belief. And few of them seem to even be against evolution per se - they just try to insert other factors *too*, for instance saying "There is evolution BUT specication comes from God". And there is no significant rationale for doing so.
WRT "treated as fact": They are treated as facts because they are facts. There may be other things that influence, yet the *main thrust* of variance in those areas are explained by these cathedrals of knowledge. That's what a scientific theory is, BTW - a cathedral of knowledge that explains variance. It is NOT the same as a hypothesis, even though people tend to abuse the term informally.
Eivind.
My view is that the pharma companies should make a reasonable return on investment, assuming reasonable processes. At the moment, I'm very sceptical of whether the pharma companies are doing reasonable processes. There's three parts I'm sceptical of:
- The patent laws in place seems to have raised the initial costs too far. Change of effective "ground rules" include the patentizing of research that was intially funded by the public, and (if I've understood correctly) patenting of some of the intermediate processes.
- The companies seems to be run incompetently, due to lack of competition. Massive internal bueraucracy.
- As far as I've understood, most of the funding goes to marketing. Significantly more than goes to research. There's traditionally been a LOT of semi-bribing of MDs to get them to use specific medications. This has been more restricted lately, yet I assume the same money is now used to market in some other way.
- There seems to be wasteful "faking" of research. It seems the pharma industry is doing a lot of "semi-faked" research, controlling what factors they can to get as good results for their drug as they can. This include changing pre-filtering of the human subjects used in studies, manipulating the timeframe of the studies to get the data that's optimal for their drug compared to the competitors, cancelling the funding for or not publishing studies that give "bad" results, etc.
Note that these are my impressions. For the research part, they're based on discussion with several people that have carefully studied the research done. For the rest, they're based on popular publication in the area, including previous Slashdot discussions and links posted in them. I have not checked this carefully against primary sources - so take with a grain of salt.Eivind.
Eivind.