Singularity U, or Singularity Woo?
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Personally I think Kurzweil is the poster child for plausible sounding woo. Consider this. Kurzweil thinks he's going to be able to live forever and essentially reconstruct his dead father. He takes 150 (previously 250) supplements and 10 glasses of alkaline water per day. He wrote a nutrition book about avoiding fat, particularly butter, organ meats, and eggs. If you've read anything about nutrition in the last decade, you'll probably be aware these are some of the healthiest foods on the planet and the campaign against dietary fat was always lacking evidence. To be fair, he did backpedal on this point in a later book, but then again why would a computer scientist write two nutrition books in the first place?
His predictions have always seemed rather silly to me too (turing test passed in 17 years) but they are a bit more debatable at least.
Henriette, the late pet cat of Ben Goldacre, a UK anti-pseudoscience writer, is a licenced nutritionist. Poor old Hettie was able to get the certificate after she died.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/sep/30/badscience.res...
He hasn't really worked on OCR since the 70s. Apparently, that's his claim to technological progress. Oh, also he did some electronic noisemakers. Still, I wonder about the 40 years between then and now. 40 years is a long time to work towards transhumanist technologies. But instead he has squandered it into publicity on top of his OCR accomplishments?
There is a growing sentiment among transhumanists that his cheerleading and publicity campaigns aren't going to materialize advanced technology. We have to build it ourselves. But we already knew this, it's just that the "sit back and wait for it to happen" fairytale is very seductive. In fact, that's exactly what people want to hear.
For somewhat-unrelated criticism regarding Ray Kurzweil, there are these emails from Paul D. Fernhout: http://heybryan.org/fernhout/ But to be fair, you can still spot TSiN on random bookshelves when you go to hackerspaces. It's almost cute, really.
Bias: irc.freenode.net ##hplusroadmap ("sponsored by George Church" just like everything else)
Sometimes it's easy to disregard someone completely just because one think they take it too far.
Imagine how a Davinci might look today.
I do not buy Rays ideas on this matter either but there sure is a discussion worth having in there. Even despite some of the claims he makes.
<unnecessary sarcasm>Maybe Ray should jump in and fix tesseract for us.</unnecessary sarcasm>
Anyway. I see no point in defending Ray or any of his ideas. Just saying that the man isn't stupid and have done quite a few inventions.
To brush him of, as much as I disagree with some of his points, simply because he makes outragous claims seems a tad self-defeating.
More than you might guess. There's a lot of participation within the do-it-yourself biohacking scene. Also, RepRap and other open source hardware projects tend to attract transhumanist talent. I don't mean to sound too biased but you should check out that IRC channel I mentioned.
I am a fully licensed archmage. Anyone who wishes to get their journeyman warlocking certification should send 25 BTC to the address in my profile.
I won't touch it with a ten-foot pole myself, but homeopathy does get people the placebo effect and that's "A Good Thing" (tm).
That our analytical skills have correctly identified that homeopathy can't really do anything and we thus have to resort to beliefs in the mind-body relationship and e.g. meditation to achieve similar benefits is actually too bad for us.... just popping some pills would've been a lot easier.
Homeopaths (and other pseduo science peddlers) make money out of people who are at their most desparate state by selling them lies.
Homeopaths are careless and other people die.
I would make an analogy to veganism. Vegans as a whole are more intensely interested and passionate about their health and what they eat than your average healthy omnivore. For that reason, they're also more likely to proselytize and promote their ways to others. It's my belief that in doing so they potentially bring harm to themselves and to others. Do I think they should be engaged in vigorous debate and their arguments refuted to the best of scientific knowledge? Yes, absolutely. But I don't think treating them as idiots or malefactors is well-deserved or productive.
No. Much like teaching religious stories as if they were the truth doesn't do us any favors. "So what there is no evidence it works? It worked for me." and then you have to undo the damage to what could have been a rational person.
But at this point he is probably doing more harm than good, for the reasons you describe.
Or are you saying Kurzweil's contributions are very small in comparison?
As a person he should be judged holistically, and that includes his affinity for the occult. If he were to be a professor of Stanford today, his beliefs on the supernatural should be taken into consideration and viewed as a lack of intellectual integrity(although with all that we know now versus what humanity knew during his time, his stance would most likely be different today).
The Newton Project at University of Sussex and Cambridge University has collaborated with University of King's College in Halifax, Canada, and Indiana University to collect and transcribed his all of his writings. Their progress widget has them at 4,950,000 words so far.
Alchemical writings: http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=82&ca...
Religious writings: http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=44
Being from India, it is not unusual for all natural remedies (Neem leaves to soothe burns) to be classified as "Homeopathic".
More Examples Here:
http://hpathy.com/materia-medica/indian-homeopathic-drugs/
Note: I am not saying everything in the URL is gospel, just that there are some natural remedies that work.
Hanhemann's description of Homeopathy is:
"based on the hypothesis that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people will cure that disease in sick people." (Wikipedia)
This theory is nonsense and proven to be quackery.
In summary: I suspect that Professor Wadhwa's interpretation of Homeopathy was culturally biased. There is nothing wrong or revolutionary with giving natural cures a closer look, just not under the Woo of Homeopathy. If Wadhwa was advocating Hanhemann's Homeopathy then that is indeed disappointing given prevalent evidence.
That's unfortunate that in this day and age, there are people who can't distinguish between scientifically proven natural remedies and homeopathy. Natural remedies work because they contain chemicals that have an effect on the body. For example, willow bark contains salicylic acid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aspirin
Science, people!
Can it be slotted in the same league as naturopathy?
After all naturopathic formulations don't always have the same efficacy in controlled trials. Do they?
If I remember correctly, Vivek Wadhwa also authored quite a few articles (on Techcrunch and elsewhere) that demonstrated a poor understanding of stats/science.
For example:
If I were in charge of Singularity U I would view this as immediate grounds for firing Mr. Wadhwa.
The studies consistently show visa issues are almost never the primary reason they are returning to their home countries. Many are going back to India and China because their economies are or at least were booming offering more opportunities, they are more comfortable in their homeland, nearer family and friends, less culture shock, etc.
He will then immediately whipsaw around and insist its urgent the U.S. pass Startup Visa and increase H1-B quotas to somehow solve the pressing visa problem… which isn't actually the problem per his own studies.
So if the guy is willing to ignore the results from his own study because its inconvenient to the agenda he is pushing, this latest episode surprises me not at all. Once he latches on to something he seems to stick to it, regardless of what the data says. His long running primary agenda seems to be he wants the U.S. to throw the doors open to all Indian engineers and entrepeneurs who want to come. This also happens to be a popular agenda with a lot of big tech companies and VC's which contributes to his popularity among certain circles.
Personally in my case, Visa issues were the no.1 reason that I moved back to India.
It seemed unfair that while all other developers in the US could happily do indie and freelance work in their free time and even start their own company, while I had to be an H1-B slave and work for pretty much the same company for 6-8 years before I could even get permanent residency.
Also even working for startups and getting equity is mostly out of question as most startups typically dont do H1-Bs until they are large enough. Your only choice is to work for a shitty megacorp and get confined to your cubicle and a mediocre pay for 6-8 years. Also make sure you are nice H1-B slave coz if you get fired you have to leave in 30 days.
Seriously fuck that!
If that were the case, then quacks would find themselves without an audience.
I do worry that by casting quacks out of polite society, we will also cast out iconoclasts and free thinkers.
Philosophy 101
--Morris Raphael Cohen, quoted by Cohen in "The Earth Is Round (p < 0.05)"
This of course doesn't apply to homeopathy.
This is a strange sentence. So this hypothetical alternative treatment has been shown to work better and with less side effects and also that it's risk is low, but is only "non-fully proven".
If you showed low risk and better efficacy and less side effects then that's pretty much fully proven. What's left?
Maybe you're right. Care to point to some specific cases?
We err far too much on the side of not approving new treatments (it's like we think harming someone by giving them bad medicine is thousands of times worse than doing the same harm by not giving them good medicine), particularly when there are no patents so no drug company profit motive to push them through trials.
>"but it's not yet something your doctor would prescribe you."
Because it doesn't require a prescription. There is nearly unlimited information on the product (including efficacy), and I can go into any pharmacy in North America and buy it off the shelf, no questions asked.
>"particularly when there are no patents"
The idea that you can't make money without owning the patent on something flies in the face of everything done in the hacker world, doesn't it? I don't buy into that theory, but can't really back up my opinion. The world is filled with companies who sell commodity products at a mark up, though.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20424008
Basically what is says that omega-3 combination might help some kids, we need more research.
omega-3 is safe to use(except maybe for people who use blood thinners). The best strategy seems just to try.
Well, yes. Less effects of all sorts naturally means less side effects as well.
Some of the greatest scientists in the world have been corrupted by their personal biases and if people like Einstein can waste decades in a hunt for something that doesn't exist (i.e., his denial of Bell's theorem and search for a deterministic hidden variable) then surely Whadwha too can fall prey to his biases (which he seems to have shown today). The difference is that Einstein did research that could be corroborated, while Whadwha teaches, which can impact the intellectual integrity of his students.
For example, take dual n-back. Just with the materials in http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ I could construct a case that dual n-back is a fantastic intervention which will boost children's grades, help cure ADHD, help addicts kick drugs, increase your IQ, etc - or I could construct a case that it's a statistical artifact contributed to by financially compromised researchers which has failed replication and ought to be kicked to the trashheap of history.
Both would be true if you 'evaluate of my points on their own merit'.
When someone says that him believing in pseudoscience X reduces their confidence in any of the articles on topics Y or Z, they are quite correct. They have learned reasons to think that he left evidence out, or twisted it, or didn't look for counter-evidence, or engaged in any of the myriads of sins of omission or commission that lead a reader to falsehood.
Some authors have more credibility than others. If someone positions themselves in the realm of the incredible (which is what homeopathy is), they lose credibility, as they should.
Well - no, science produces falsifiable hypothesis. Here is my hypothesis, you (or me) could falsify it by showing x. x could be shown, but I can't show it - can you?
That's science.
In this debate the homeopaths are asked time and again to show x, they never do, so the hypothesis that we have is that it's utter bunk. If some homeopath can show that their shit really works (with a double blind randomized trial with controls) then booooo yahhhh! it works!
It's not about debates, it's not about who is right. It's about what can be shown to be true, or not.
Homeopathy deserves to be removed from the table.
Crank science is different. I guess that The Media and capitalism are the problem. Homeopaths are probably never going to go away because there is money to be made, and The Media are probably going to keep reporting on it because it sells.
Perhaps there will come a point (like with UFO's) where interest will simply dissipate and it'll stop being a story.
Until then we have a problem - the process is the story, just like for AGW. Why aren't there grants for this? Why do wise professors simply dismiss it? What on earth are we doing supporting these massive drug companies with their expensive and somewhat poor therapies? We need to be aware that the processes of science (everyone I know thinks this is just uninteresting, therefore there is every reason to believe that anyone working on it is wasting there time - unless I have reason to think otherwise - so mehh) doesn't have the effect that we anticipate it to; so lots of careful, calm, open minded rebuttal based on cast iron facts and offers of changes of opinion if things can be proved other wise would be good.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dawkins%20homeop...
It was homeopathy that pioneered evidence-based medicine, which is why mainstream medicine eventually merged with low dilution homeopathy and began to use its methods. But Randi doesn't mention that either.
Can you point me to an article about this history?
"19th-century homeopaths pioneered systematic drug-testing research, challenged the dangerously depleting procedures of mainstream physicians at that time, established rigorous professional standards, and valued advanced education at least as highly as their mainstream counterparts did. It was not without reason that homeopaths considered the bases of their approach to medical problems to be more logical and more promising than the inherited tradition of the ancients, upon which mainstream physicians still based their practices. [...]
This book will be useful primarily to scholars looking for specific information about particular people, events, and developments within the homeopathic movement during the period covered. Among other things, readers will find the names—and often the opinions—of hundreds of previously invisible homeopathic practitioners, publicists, and professors; they will follow fierce debates between the so-called high-dilutionists (whose therapeutic commitment to infinitesimally small doses of supposedly energized substances verged on spiritualism) and the low-dilutionists (who ultimately merged with mainstream physicians in the early decades of the 20th century); they will explore the founding and fate of homeopathic medical schools; they will listen to well-intentioned homeopaths defend themselves against attacks from the American Medical Association; and they will learn about regional variations in the character, reception, and legal standing of homeopathy around the country."
Anyway not to defend homeopathy, but I just find it sad that so many people view James Randi as a credible source despite the fact that he can rarely go five minutes without lying about something.
It seems a stretch to say that James Randi is lying when he doesn't include a disclaimer that the same word happened to also be used for something more scientific around 80 years ago.
Everything Randi talks about is perfectly true if you use the contemporary understanding of the word "homeopathy"
Which he wasn't. He was specifically talking about homeopathy in the period when it was invented and when it came to the US in the mid 19th century. In fact he even talks about 'the proving', which as a far as I know isn't even actively done anymore in modern homeopathy. (I'm pretty sure the modern manufacturers are just reusing old formulas and not actually doing new 'research'.)
"John S. Haller, Jr, reminds us that homeopathy in the 19th century rested upon highly specific principles—all of which flowed from Samuel Hahnemann's fundamental axiom that “like cures like”"
Taking a magical axiom as a given and then using scientific principles is not science.
You can make the exact same arguments about alchemists and some schools of occult study. They used careful and meticulous methods, and even made some discoveries in the areas of lab work or procedure that were useful to many areas.
These things don't mean the beliefs are any more true.
So you're mad at Randi for not providing a small piece of historical context in a presentation about protecting people from modern con artists? That just seems like you are looking for something to object to.
If that's true, then modern medicine isn't science because it works exactly the same way. It starts with all sorts of spiritual axioms, like the idea that the most effective drugs are made by isolating one single molecule out of the entire plant. And that's what modern medicine believes is a universal and inviolable law, no matter how much empirical evidence there is that this isn't always the case. (E.g. look at the efficacy trials of marijuana vs. pure THC.)
"So you're mad at Randi for not providing a small piece of historical context in a presentation about protecting people from modern con artists?"
It's not really a small piece of trivia, especially considering the idea that all homeopathy is high dilution was the sine qua non of his argument. And furthermore, low dilution homeopathic treatments still exist today, e.g. those zinc lozenges you see at the checkout counter of every pharmacy. More people probably have exposure to those than every other homeopathic remedy combined.
I guess Randi could have said "only the people who believe this crazy stuff believe this crazy stuff", but he did make it clear that his history wasn't complete and comprehensive.
The damning evidence remains the same: I can go into an otherwise reputable store and pay for "medicine" that is just water with pseudoscientific incantations performed over it. And you have the chutzpah to call Randi dishonest?
My criticism of western medicine isn't that it focuses on new molecular entities (NMEs), but rather that it focuses only on NMEs despite loads of empirical evidence pointing out that much of the best medicine is potentially neither new nor a molecular entity. My point is that it's not fair to criticize alchemy for having guiding spiritual assumptions if you're not willing to admit that western medicine has its own spiritual assumptions.
Can you link to this empirical evidence? I'm honestly not aware of it.
This is a non-profit pharma company working on getting MDMA through phase III trials. They've been getting tons of publicity lately, in part because of their very solid methodology and in part because of their results and the interestingness/importance of the project. No traditional pharma companies will do any research on the drug though because it can't be patented, not to mention it's schedule I meaning that each study can take literally several years to get approved.
For a comparison of marijuana with marinol, this is a good link:
http://norml.org/component/zoo/category/marinol-vs-natural-c...
There are lots of plants that compare well with pharma drugs safety and efficacy wise in preclinical studies, but there are basically zero actual clinical studies done on them because they can't be patented or prescribed.
Andrew Weil has a great writeup on why plants are usually better than drugs here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/why-plants-are-...
Obviously there are many famous counterexamples where the isolated molecule really is much better, like with aspirin. But often with just the whole plant or some extract you can get at least 80% of the benefits but with only 10% of the side effects. (Plants kill only a couple hundred people in the US per year, whereas pharma drugs kill 200k+ per year.)
Well in all fairness, the volume of people being treated with plants and the volume of people being treated with pharmaceuticals probably isn't near enough to proportional to make that a fair comparison.
There are many plants that work very well indeed, much of modern medicine is based on them. I'm just not sure why you would not take the next step and isolate the active ingredients and synthesize them so that people can benefit from something with predicable dosages and a price affected by economies of scale.
In terms of drug research being hampered by prohibitionist drug laws we are in agreement. What I still don't understand is why you think that some beneficial compound that's adulterated and present in unpredictable amounts in plant form is better than the alternative? I'm definitely going to challenge you on this 80%/10% statement.
Something either has a biological effect or it doesn't. The cases like aspirin (where the natural form also had a second active ingredient that acted as a buffering agent) are rare, it's more common that the plant form has other active ingredients that are harmful.
I sympathize with your bias towards the naturalistic fallacy, since I'm prone to it as well the facts aren't on your side here.
Yeah but it's not patentable. There are many drugs that have the potential to cure all sorts of diseases that never make it to market for this reason.
"I'm just not sure why you would not take the next step and isolate the active ingredients and synthesize them so that people can benefit from something with predicable dosages and a price affected by economies of scale."
Because often they work less well and have more dangerous side effects. There literally is no isolated molecule that on average will produce better results than the whole plant, even though what you're getting from the plant is a little different each time.
The first rule of recreational drug use is rotate your receptors. E.g. if you keep hammering the exact same receptor with the exact same molecule each time, bad things are going to happen. The same thing often applies to medicinal drugs, in which case standardization tends to be worse on average than taking a random cocktail of chemicals, even if you don't know what it is your taking. Again, c.f. the research on marijuana vs pure THC for a good example of this.
"What I still don't understand is why you think that some beneficial compound that's adulterated and present in unpredictable amounts in plant form is better than the alternative?"
Because that's what the evidence says is often the case. It doesn't really make any logical sense, it's just what happens to be true. A good example of this is the TED video Eating To Starve Cancer, where they talk about how mixing a bunch of different types of tea together is more anti-angiogenic than any individual tea:
http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/17/can_we_eat_to_s/
Even if you were to standardize some mixture, there is no reason to believe that taking the same mixture day after day would be more effective than taking a different mixture each time.
Also, you can actually standardize plant medicine now. Plants are cloneable, and you can grow them in highly controlled conditions and then blend them together the same way they blend tea or champagne. (Which is why champagne from a good house tastes almost exactly the same despite the wildly different growing conditions each year. Same for things like Lipton english breakfast tea or whatever.)
"I sympathize with your bias towards the naturalistic fallacy"
The naturalistic fallacy is assuming that if something comes from nature it must be better. That's not at all what I'm saying here.
So those other things that don't work? Zinc as a common cold treament has never had a convincing effect size and when controlling with equally bad tasting placebos has no effect.
> like the idea that the most effective drugs are made by isolating one single molecule out of the entire plant. And that's what modern medicine believes is a universal and inviolable law, no matter how much empirical evidence there is that this isn't always the case. (E.g. look at the efficacy trials of marijuana vs. pure THC.)
I'm not aware of any universal and inviolable laws in modern medicine other than the need to prove a treatment actually works. There are certainly scientists and doctors looking at non-THC cannabinoids. To suggest that anyone is using non-scientific principles to do anything useful in this area is absurd.
The reason that active ingredients are isolated is to provide a predictable and safe result for all patients. When you skip that step you get other results: Like the people who lost their sense of smell by taking Zicam because low dilution homeopaths told them it would cure the common cold.
Vivek Wadhwa has the better perspective on the matter. The author is assuming that "because people who believe in homeopathy are believing in something that does not follow from our scientific models, homeopathy must not work." But this is fallacious.
We all know about the placebo effect. Do we know the efficacy of homeopathy in the realm of the placebo effect? Perhaps a pill with a bogus (but plausible to the naive) reason has more power than a sugarpill with no explanation at all as to why it works. If so, by some definitions of efficacy (say, "works better than a sugarpill"), you would have to conclude that homeopathy works (albiet in the context of our world, where many are scientifically illiterate).
The universe does not follow our scientific model. Rather, it is always(1) the model that follows the universe. There will always(2) be inexplicable (and apparently scientifically impossible) phenomena, and the purpose of science is to find them.
(and also to simplify the axioms. Wolfram might be disappointed with the LHC outcome, but I'm hopeful that somebody will find a new model -- equivalent to the standard model, or at least one that leads to the standard model in other scales of physics -- that I can actually understand ;) )
(1) Well, never say neither always nor never, and mileage may vary based on unexpected factors.
(2) This I've concluded from Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, but then again I don't actually buy that 100% either. I don't buy that (X implies X) implies (X is true), which I think is assumed in GIT. Input appreciated.
Now, this doesn't mean its real (or fake), it just means we need more research. Its also worth noting that the trials of homeopathy in the Shang 2006 article were rated as higher quality than those of conventional treatment (but there were less of them).
(or I read the wrong paper...)
Should they just use Hacker News itself? Build their own? Or can Hacker News sprout channels? I'd be fascinated by the topics they cover.
My hypothesis here is that Vivek was trying to open a debate, to challenge the students to accept the possibility of alternative views, rather than pushing those alternative views. This is strongly aligned with his role as VP of Academics where he is trying to encourage the students to consider alternative possibilities and that there are different perspectives, this is within his role remit. Not to defend homoeopathy but it's when you examine and challenge existing hearsay that you can make great strides of innovation.
http://www.skepdic.com/woowoo.html
It's the non-denominational version of making stuff up while untroubled by complete lack of evidence. Also the sound effect that goes along with handwaving.
I had to pause a second to search my mental vocabulary database to make sure it was what I thought it was, but yeah. I wouldn't say it's the most common word used to describe the concept, but I would think that it would be well known.
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Homoepathy doesn't work. They've done studies on it. They haven't tested vague "things related to homeopathy" like "does water have a memory?", they have actually tested the 'drugs' themselves. They don't work.
Before you trot out the tired "flat world" defense, read Isaac Asimov's essay on degrees of wrongness. Our ideas have been getting better over time -- it's preposterous to propose that we could be as wrong about molecular biology, germ theory and medicine as we were about the earth's shape. We are wrong, but we know we are not that wrong.
That paper you mentioned is complete bollocks: http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2009/10/why-i-am-nominating-...
And finally hiding nonsense behind "everyone believed the world was flat" is quite aggravating. Scholars have known the earth was spherical and even its approximate circumference for over 2000 years.