Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt

None of that aspect to "science the religion" has anything to do with the scientific process.

By the way, Science, which I hope people recall, has no ability to fully describe the truth - only our best possible guess. That's also written in the scientific process.

Also many people say "because science" and note things like computers and gravity to justify anything related to science that can't possibly be wrong.

Here's a simple thought experiment to help you understand how little we actually are with science and the human body:

Dig up every article and research paper you can on coffee.

Tell me now, for sure, is Coffee Good for you or Bad for you?

That's probably a lot harder to answer than:

Is plastic in Salt Good for you or Bad for you?

And then ask yourself if you drink coffee or drink melted plastic and try to reveal your biases and realize every scientist is doing the same.

You don't need a conspiracy to do bad science. Just as you don't need a conspiracy to do bad code - and we all on HN know how much of bad code is around. All you need is to write code - with the best of intentions - and to neglect to follow best practices or cut corners from time to time, or just lack experience or foresight to predict potential problems. Sometimes you don't even know it's bad code until you come back to it a couple of years later and stare at it in horror - how could anybody do this?

With code, though, there's an evolutionary pressure acting on it - it is actually meant to be run. If the code does not perform, if it is buggy, if it's insecure or unmaintainable - it creates incentive to be replaced, so some of it dies off and hopefully is replaced with better one (or one bad in different way :). With scientific papers, bad paper can linger around for years until either it obviously contradicts reality in a way making its claims unsustainable, or is refuted by other paper. But for many papers just finding out it is wrong requires doing the same work as the original author did, sometimes more - and the incentives to do that are usually much less prominent.

> The scientific process underpins every aspect of our modern era.

True. But the fact that this process allowed us to achieve much does not mean every part of it is perfect - just as the fact that Facebook has billions does not mean every piece of code running Facebook is great. Some of them is surely terrible.

Like I said I'm mostly ignorant of that domain, and curious what more informed people would say on that topic.

Carlin’s point was that “shell shock” is more visceral and evocative than “PTSD”, in a way that would be helpful as a rhetorical shield in the hands of its sufferers.

Saying that a rape or accident survivor has “shell shock” communicates by analogy the problem they’re facing, even to laymen who have never experienced such trauma—everyone has seen a war movie where artillery shells are landing all around someone, and most can (if prompted) easily picture what chronic exposure to such a traumatic stressor would do to them. This creates empathy in the minds of laymen who may not understand what was so traumatic about the particular trauma the PTSD suffered encountered.

Whereas saying “they have PTSD” does the opposite—it communicates the symptom without painting a picture of the cause, inviting a layman to minimize the imagined cause.

It’s like saying that someone is a “battered spouse”, vs. “a victim of domestic violence.” The former could have been taken to just mean the latter—non-physical forms of violence and all—but instead, in pursuit of accuracy and precision, an umbrella term that does not evoke a central example is used, and has settled into, more often than not, being mentally interpreted by the listener as implying the least-bad thing that still merits the name.

To put this another way: this is the reason that security vulnerabilities have started getting names like “Heartbleed.” That is an evocative name. CVE-2014-0160? Not so much. More useful to researchers! But less useful as a rhetorical device to communicate the impact of the problem. It’s a PR campaign in support of solving the problem!

Going from “shell shock” to “PTSD” is like going from the named vulnerability to the numerical designation. You’re doing anti-PR, making a buzzword on the tongues of the public into something that’s too much effort to buzz about at all.

Sure, the term might have more diagnostic “clarity.” When in medicine has that ever mattered? Do we name bones or tendons for what they do? No, we just give them ridiculous “legacy” names inherited from some conversation someone had once in 400BCE. Because those names are catchy, in a way that systematic names wouldn’t be.

Most of Carlin's routines involve ironic hyperbole. He had a bit about how everybody on the road driving faster than you is a maniac and everybody driving slower than you is an idiot.

It's an extremely important bit for understanding his work. Carlin believed that everybody should express their opinion loudly from their own point of view, be aware that a lot of the time those opinions will be wrong, but know that when we do not express those opinions the fuckers always win.

When he shouts that the transition from "shellshock" to "PTSD" has been a tool used for government control he's absolutely right. It was. By making a disease name for it and creating PTSD treatment programs the military could look like it was addressing the problem, where the actual problem was the military using human suffering as a tool to reinforce American political power for economic reasons.

If you told George Carlin "yeah, but rape victims have the same experience, don't we need to include them" he'd probably have told you to call that cock-shock. You'd say "that's gross" and he'd say "rape is gross, the name for what happens after it should be horrible, not clinical".

By saying things like this, Carlin highlights hypocrisies and illusions in our lives and thought processes. Carlin wants to make sure you see what you've forgotten by moving to the new words.

I'm reminded of when Vonnegut pointed out how dangerous it was to move from Armistice Day to Veteran's Day.

"It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not."

Vonnegut doesn't mean that later veterans didn't suffer, that their service is worthless or that their pain shouldn't be noted. He's saying that by including new individuals, the message of the day - that it is horrific to murder millions of people for any reason - has been erased for the good of the military system.

People like Vonnegut and Carlin aren't trying to say things that are correct. They're trying to say things that expose truth. It's very different.