A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929
moreisdifferent.blog
moreisdifferent.blog
Yet visit social media and it's absolutely overflowing with gloom and doom and histrionic political rage and fear bait. Saw a thread recently on Reddit about how many young people in the USA are contemplating suicide because the present or the future looks so bleak to them.
We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II.
It's convinced me that the human brain is just not wired for abundance. Our brain keeps searching and searching for the immediate existential threats that millions of years of evolution have programmed us to know absolutely must be there. If we don't see them it actually makes us panic more since it means the lion is hiding so well we can't spot it and it's about to jump out and get us.
I agree it's a thought-provoking comparison. It's a remarkably distorted lens, the one modern humans apply to interpret pre-industrial civilization. Should we glamorize a patrician of ancient Rome? Their lifestyle would be a mediocre, low-prestige one, if faithfully translated into the modern world. The vaunted villas of the aristocrats were farmhouses—go look up farm prices in rural Georgia or Kansas: that is ancient aristocracy. If you owned a herd of goats, that was a measure of wealth and success; we'd interpret the same thing as poverty. A chickenwire fence isn't a signifier of blight, but a delineation of land, and a sigil of an authentic land owner—an elite.
The wealth of a great empire, the trade routes of rare spices and fruits from thousands of leagues away? That's Wal-Mart.
It's a provocative idea! The life of the Roman upper aristocratic class is fully accessible to probably a full majority of contemporary Americans. You could replicate practically every part of it, if you liked*. And you're right that that's no longer a benchmark for self-actualization today; we want—need?—so much more than that.
*(The only large difference, and this is much more than a footnote, is the total abscence of slavery. Iron-age farms needed large numbers of slaves—something with the social impact that they'd label the farm owner, the aristocrat, as a high-status invidual. A human ranking above many others. The industrial revolutions replaced most of this with machines. You don't acquire social status by being superior to a tractor).
(The part where the humans alive today aren't 99% farmers has wildly rewritten the human experience, and we're still far from adjusted to that).
Convict labor is very much a thing in the US. That still counts as slavery.
Practicing gratitude is a pretty common strategy for combating depression. If young people today in developed nations don't even understand how bad humans used to have it (and still do, in some places), how can they possibly be grateful for what they have?
Maybe AI-generated, historical influencers should be a thing. "Walked two miles to the river to fill my clay jug. Set my baby down and a croc took her."
Anyway, I'm not sure this is gratitude so much as the gratification in having someone you can look down on.
I'm talking about deep existential despair and doomerism though, like people discussing suicide or refusing to have children because they're convinced the world is ending because of online discourse and/or paranoia.
Edit: speaking of perspective: one of my favorites is to go find a global salary comparison calculator and input my first world tech salary. If you are on this site chances are you are at least in the global 5% if not the global 1%.
I'm not even in the US and I have multiple friends who have expressed to me that they'd be afraid to holiday there due to reproductive rights stuff. For say, two, three weeks.
It's like some sort of extreme anxiety that has no basis in reality.
And by those standards our economic system is not working for the vast majority of people and getting worse every year.
If you pay attention to the whining losers on Reddit and other social media then you get a distorted view of the state of the country. The silent majority are doing fairly well.
The point is there is a massive class divide socially, also physically segregation. You can be completely unaware of what it's like to be on the wrong side of it.
The cracks in our society are growing, and the level of sophistication required to navigate our system is increasing.
My circle of friends and family is middle class and college educated. I don't know anyone under the age of 35 who owns more than a town house in a low cost area. What does your peer group look like?
> We'd have to fall pretty far for their standard of living to decline below that of Pharaoh Ramses II.
Not most people in America. Sure, Ramses didn't have a car, phone or modern medicine; but he could get whatever he wanted _that was available at the time_. That's the yardstick.
It also created lifestyles which aren't sustainable, destroyed our ecosystem, made gluttony and sloth our main cause of death.
If you look for the signs they're already visible, it's just that our system has a gigantic inertia. Look at things like ocean acidification and other climate feedback loops, massive wildlife extinction, loss of nutrients in veggies/fruit, PFAS in rain water, micro plastics polluting virtually every living organisms.
Humans work on hope, when things are continuously getting better we're thriving, when things start to fall apart ever so slightly it's much less fun, and we're slowly getting to that point. It doesn't matter how high you start, what matters is the general trend
Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.
I think there's a certain amount of cherry-picking going on with this textbook, however, as you'd find just as many pro-science books today, and likely a number of "science is the devil"-type publications in the early 1900s.
It's an interesting read, either way, with some amusing editorializing by the article's author in the middle (no spoilers).
That's part of what Tom Nichols has been saying: https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/09/10/democracy-di...
This feels like a really uncharitable interpretation on what is going on.
To me it feels more like you have two sides, the two sides have viewpoints that feel very alien to the other side, so extreme that they feel like attacks but actually it's just a clash of worldview.
What you're looking at is the later stages of a disagreement. It didn't start out that way, it started as something like, hey can we put the ketchup in the fridge, nah I'd rather leave it out, I prefer it warm. (I'm obviously deliberately being silly here).
You move on in time and suddenly blows are being exchanged because everyone loses patience.
That's probably Special Circumstances in the Culture novels, but those novels are just a mashup of Iain Banks's imagination and biases, and I think they're poor approximation of anything resembling reality under any set of conditions.
Personally, I think your theory would be a fun conversation topic, but I doubt it reflects real life.
I don't think the lack of a challenge is the root cause of science denialism. It's a cultural thing, coming from a lack of confidence in the elites. Elites are distraught when inequality become larger and things get tougher for the poorest.
Like, who would you consider an 'Elite'? AFAICT, someone who's 'an Elite' thrives off of inequality, by definition. Without said inequality they wouldn't be 'Elite'.
Is it possible that your definition for Elite is similar to my definition for Specialist? Like 'Subject Matter Expert'?
I guess the way I used "elites" in my previous comment refers more to a certain perception of society some people hold, rather than to a definite group of people.
If we take the policies implemented during the COVID pandemic as an example, those came from the government, oftentimes backed by academia. Since a lot of people think the government is doing a bad job overall, they don't trust the legitimacy of those policies and oppose the scientific reasoning that led to them being adopted.
When the economy is doing well, people put more trust into their government, or the "elites".
Therefore, my thesis is that distrust into the institutions/science comes from a general discontent of the population, and is not a natural state of humanity.
> Humans are built to thrive in danger, chaos and instability. I think a good chunk of humans go insane in a safe and stable environment and resent the things that allow them to live mundane, safe lives -- technology, medicine and rational thinking.
No, I don't think that's true. Humans are built to learn from experience, and one thing that vaccines do is eliminate the experiences that justify their use. That also makes the experience/knowledge of smaller dangers more prominent. For instance, a kid getting his arm paralyzed from the (now discontinued) live oral polio vaccine, looks a lot different if people are commonly getting worse paralysis from wild polio than if no one is getting wild polio at all anymore.
The other thing you should probably take into account when regarding a book from 1929, is the experiences people had back then with (often dangerous) quack cures promising miracles. For instance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and_Drug_A...):
> By the 1930s, muckraking journalists, consumer protection organizations, and federal regulators began mounting a campaign for stronger regulatory authority by publicizing a list of injurious products which had been ruled permissible under the 1906 law, including radioactive beverages, the mascara Lash lure, which caused blindness, and worthless "cures" for diabetes and tuberculosis. The resulting proposed law was unable to get through Congress for five years, but was rapidly enacted into law following the public outcry over the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent.
Humans are adaptive learners, shaped by both individual experience and cultural memory. The rise of anti-vax sentiments might be better explained by psychological and sociological factors. Like mistrust of institutions, the amplification of fringe views via social media, or the cognitive biases that prioritize visible risks over abstract ones.
The entire problem is this: Fifty four percent of Americans read below the 6th grade level, which means that the simple majority of Americans don't understand the world they live in and never will.
why is this the case? From what I know, it's a lot tougher to tease out the cause of this malfunction in our society. Do we have an undereducated populace because of poverty? Lack of school funding? (if so, why do we underfund schools? is it because we don't have the money? greed? is there a concerted effort to suppress an educated populace for political reasons?) Is there a cultural reticence built into us that resists scientific thought?
My kneejerk analysis boils down to "it's the economy, stupid" and that a substantial portion of our population lives below the poverty line (which itself isn't defined particularly well and probably misses a bunch of folks who ought to qualify for 'living under distressed economic conditions'). It's tough to care about education when you struggle to keep a roof overhead.
Not only didn't it work, it made the world a far worse place. I think Occam's razor tells us why: Forty nine percent of people will always be of below average intelligence.
Average intelligence currently seems to mean understanding the world at the 6th grade level. Maybe we can raise that to the 7th grade level with a concentrated effort, but that will also raise the performance of the top fifty percent.
There will always be a bottom half and they will always struggle to understand the world the top half build.
> There will always be a bottom half and they will always struggle to understand the world the top half build.
Before you spend too much time patting yourself on the back for being so superior, it's important to keep in mind that "intelligence" isn't all it's cracked up to be. "Intelligent" people do a lot of stupid shit, not listen, get deceived, and deceive themselves, etc. Hell, I've even heard "intelligence" describe as effectively a superior ability for post-hoc rationalization.
When you find yourself trying to understand the world by dividing it into dumbasses and "smart people like me," you should stop and remember to count yourself with the idiots.
I didn't say anything like that, or even adjacent to it. I didn't imply any judgement at all, other than to acknowledge that we're not all born the same.
That said, tall people will always be better at basketball on average than short people. Raising the average height doesn't really change that, and trying to pretend that if everyone were provided with the same opportunities they would achieve the same outcomes in basketball, or in intellectual pursuits, is dishonest and actively harmful to those born at a disadvantage.
Cultivating an us/them distinction is also actively harmful, more harmful I'd say. But if you can't help yourself, count yourself with them and do your best to avoid condescension.
It must be stopped, and that can't happen if we're pretending that all people being worthy of respect also implies that all opinions are.
Here's a thought. Animals often kill their own unhealthy babies but educated people much less so, and even demand that parents use technology to save them otherwise they're bad uneducated unintelligent people. Are those animals doing it wrong because they're too stupid to use medicine? Or are people doing it wrong? I'd say people have a non-scientific culture of minimizing of death even if it harms long-term evolutionary success of the species.
Firstly though, we need to agree on what "good" and "bad" mean, in a moral sense. To me "good" is anything that helps humanity thrive, and bad is when something does the opposite. If you have a different definition, this conversation will be a waste of both our time.
> He's right though.
He is not only wrong, he is dangerously wrong. Reason is mans only natural defense. We were born without tooth and claw or even fur thick enough to survive a winter. We must use our minds to survive in this world, or perish as a species. To reject that isn't just a rejection of our nature, it is a form of suicide for our species.
Are you aware that the vast majority of the humans on this planet would not exist today without science? For example, the Haber-Bosch process allows for something like 90% of the worlds food to be grown. Much of the remaining 10% couldn't exist without genetic manipulation, or at the very least selective breeding. To reject science would be to accept a world where at least 90% of us starved and the remaining 10% led short, violent lives filled mostly with unending misery and toil. I'm deeply opposed to that and consider it "bad."
> The scientific approach has blind spots
Yes, that's how science works. We form hypotheses and test them. If those theories turn out to match the evidence we keep them, if they don't we abandon them. That's the truly great thing about science, science can be wrong, but it can never STAY wrong when done properly.
> Religion, euthanasia, etc...
All of those questions depend on culturally defined norms and taboos that may change from person to person or region to region. As long as a persons cultural, spiritual, or philosophical thinking is still "good" (based on my earlier definition) it can coexist with reason, and it's irrelevant. Science does not demand that you put no other god before it, that's religion.
I object only when another system becomes "bad", and in this context that happens whenever someone decides that their ignorance should be valued more than the science that keeps us all alive. It should not, and there are very good reasons for that.
> bad uneducated unintelligent people
I never said, or implied this, or many of the other things you insinuate here. Stating it yourself, and then arguing against it is a form of logical fallacy called a "strawman argument", and it's not just irrational, it's more than a little rude.
I agree with that definition. However, it leads to a trade-off between short term thriving of individuals and long term thriving of humanity. We could pour all our resources into supporting every living person but would cripple our future development. Or we could go the other extreme and violate all the human rights to develop a more resilient long term society. Islam, for example, is very robust for thriving of humanity (no population collapse happening there) but very poor for thriving of all individuals within it (severe penalties for seemingly harmless "crimes", women's rights, etc.).
> He is not only wrong, he is dangerously wrong.
You don't actually know that, because you keep missing the point. How do you know I'm wrong if you can't seem to grasp what I'm talking about?
I don't think you're as clever as you seem to think you are. Maybe you should consider the possibility that the advice I gave up-thread is literally true in your case, and not just a reminder to take a position of humility.
It takes two people to communicate. If you have trouble communicating your point maybe try rephrasing it, instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks.
The background is a new faculty member actually teaching at university level. We know that proofs and reading are required. They do not.
In the context of you saying this after sharing a link to an article around difficulties at HBCUs, I'm trying to find some charitable way to interpret your statements as something other than horrendously racist. Can you please expound on this, or am I taking this correctly?
Math education in large tracts of the country is not good, more so in areas plagued by rural and urban poverty, but that's no excuse to continue in the same way at college. It's sadly common that incoming students have no clue what a proof is and that mathematics isn't plugging numbers into formulas, but there's no excuse continuing that at college level, especially when it's an elite college.
But the kid who wrote the article disagrees, she demands spoonfeeding. Give me my economics degree, but it mustn't have math in it!
* Climate Change (caused by the tech of "burning lots of fuels")
* PFAS, pesticides, endocrine disruptors, etc...
* Opiods crisis, nartotics, etc...
* Impact of GAFAM on privacy, social discourse, etc...
In a sense, the "white coats in their labs" and "nerds with glasses" have been repeatedly found (lately) to be on the "wrong side of the issue". (There are usually scientists on both side of the issue, which is the saving grace for science: self-correction is built in.)
Maybe it's relevant that the book is dated from 1929, that is, right before a time where "white coats" started being involved into very shady stuff (eugenics, mass-media propaganda, global-scale destruction weapons, and of, course, industrialized death.)
The COVID crises could have been a time for science in general to earn trust again - in some sense it did, but this time people were overexpecting, and got disappointed at least (and downright enraged at worst, if they were on the wrong side of the politico-scientifict decisions.)
And the pendulum will keep swinging, but hopefully still rise.
In other part, it's also that the bad consequence of what the "suits" ask the "nerds" to do are becoming increasingly more visible and obvious than before.
Of course science is still helping. But it's also hurting. And I would argue that for lots of folks, the hurting is more obvious and tangible than the help.
Not surprising. I look at vaccines the same way as I look at any new medication: has it been tested long enough to know what the long-term effects of it are, and do the benefits outweigh the risks. I don't have a problem with MMR, TB and other common vaccines, that have been around for decades. If I'm traveling to East Africa I'm going to get a yellow fever vaccine. I also don't have a problem with the COVID vaccine because it was clear that the risk of not getting vaccinated was significant. But I have never gotten a "flu shot" in my life because the benefit of it is rather low relative to the risk of influenza given my demographics and health. If that makes me an anti-vaxxer, so be it. Don't really care.
Speaking for myself, having lived and worked in SE Asia for a while, I've had almost every vaccine known to man (the only one I'm sure I haven't had is the HPV). I've had 5 COVID shots (got COVID once in 2021) and get an annual flu-shot. The only side-effect I've ever had (that I'm aware of), is a sore arm at the injection site. I have no idea what that says about me. My mum reacts badly to most (not all) vaccines - especially the flu shots. People vary and I suspect our immune system (which I believe is poorly understood) has complex effects on the response to some vaccines.
The effects of the vaccines linger, by design. (Granted, in a generally productive way.)
I had 3 COVID shots; no issues with the first two. But 2 years later, my arm is still quite sore to the touch where I got my shot (and I can feel mild discomfort there even without touching it). So obviously a long-term change there.
That seems like reasonable risk assessment to me. It’s a minor chore to get but the benefit to you is also pretty minor. Lots of people skip the flu vaccine for those reasons.
But some folks skip the flu vaccine because they are convinced that the vaccine itself will harm them. I hate the term “anti-vaxxer” but if I were to apply the concept, it’s mostly to that unbalanced risk assessment.
It’s an interesting question why some folks develop such an unbalanced assessment. And I dislike “anti-vaxxer” because I think is dismissive and derogatory, and leads away from trying to understand each other.
It's not just that. I generally avoid taking medications unless I need to (when prescribed), which so far in my life has been extremely rare. It may not be "harmful", but I don't want to put any chemicals in my body if I don't have to. Most medications come at some cost, in that besides doing what they are designed to do, they also interact with other cells or systems in ways that may not be desirable. Vaccines are no different in that respect.
I'm pretty sure setting a personal bar/risk tradeoff that lets you take a significant number of vaccines doesn't make you an anti-vaxxer.
But in any case, I'm not going to live my life by what labels others put on me.
And yet science says the opposite. The prevailing evidence suggests that humans are generally better suited to stable and safe environments, with danger and chaos typically leading to detrimental effects on mental health.
Generally, humans are better suited to stable and safe environments. But it would be irresponsible of genes not to include, occasionally, humans who did better in chaos because chaos frequently happens.
That, alone, could point to two very obvious but very different conclusions.
One is that people in those societies need medications more.
Alternatively, people in these societies get needed medications more.
I suspect the average American gets more therapy than the average Afghan, but I suspect the Afghans would still benefit from it.
Privileged societies are more medicated because the most pressing issues to them are (somewhat) soluble using medication. Because they are not imminently worried about housing and sustenance or violence.
Would be odd to consider medicating for fibromyalgia or depression when you're starving and/or being bombed / shot at.
Lots of anti-vaxxers are fine with other kinds of drugs and use them liberally, even in many cases street drugs. They'll eat fast food, processed food, use household chemicals, do all kinds of other things that expose them to things they don't understand and may not be good for them, but vaccines are just the devil incarnate. The word vaccine seems to provoke a visceral gut reaction among a lot of them.
Like you said it goes way, way back. Something about vaccines creeps a lot of people out for reasons I don't understand.
If you're spreading lies about medicine because you distrust authority...
Well, first of all, you're dumb because you believe falsehoods.
But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my friends and my families' health, and to your own health as well.
Why would we have any patience for this?
Your rugged self-important individualism is not worth more than any of that.
You appear to be thinking that you're taking some heroic stand on principle. Your principle is leading you astray. It makes you antisocial, a danger to your neighbors.
Well, if you don't trust the government, then the likelihood that you'll be willing to follow their "orders" is pretty low.
> But more importantly, you're a danger to my health, my friends and my families' health, and to your own health as well.
And __this__ response is exactly why people can become anti-vaxx without having a problem with medicine or science in general (which is the question being put forward by the OP). You're coming at it from a "the gov said its safe, so it's safe, and you're an idiot for not trusting the gov" (even though governments have shown themselves to be un-trustworthy many many times -- not in the area of vaccines necessarily -- but in other domains.
So this type of urging to "do it because we're all doing it because Uncle Sam said so" is highly counter productive.
What makes you think so? I don't need a government to make up my mind on scientific topics, and neither should you.
Ironically, it's the person who believes the opposite of what some government says that is doing so.
of course, but you're missing the point being discussed here, which is "why are (some) people vaccine resistant but not resistant to medication in general?"; it becomes an issue when vaccines are _mandated_ (or quasi-mandated through heavy social pressure), because that's when the trust issue comes into play.
It's like when I was thirteen and suddenly thought my parent's interests were really uncool.
The reasons for why immunity to certain diseases is mandated is transparent and easy to understand.
Talk to someone with education in the field, like your doctor, rather than playing the edgelord.
In the abstract I can find the empathy in me to understand the childlike logic behind it, but like I said, zero patience for this bullshit.
I think it's the fact that vaccines are heavily pushed on everyone, which is very different than a medication that you choose to take, or your doctor specifically prescribes for you, to address a medical condition. Taking chemicals to cure some disease is different than taking chemicals when you're healthy simply to decrease a risk that you may or may not consider relevant to you. Also, often vaccines are administered not for your own sake but to protect the community, and so again it's a different calculation where you're injecting chemicals (or injecting your kids with chemicals) not because you think you need them but to potentially protect others should you become ill. Also there often isn't as much explanation around vaccines (besides COVID) as to their makeup, etc., compared to some medication that your doctor prescribes to you (i.e., if my Dr prescribes a blood thinner I'm going to get a pretty thorough explanation of it and can ask questions, whereas with vaccines it feels mandatory without much explanation other than "the surgeon general said to".
So it's not at all surprising to me that there is strong resistance to vaccines from some people who have no problem with medications in general.
A lot of things that we were forced to do during COVID still stick with me and have basically made me intensely distrustful of authority to a degree that wasn't present before.
It was just bullshit after bullshit enacted in law and forced on people. Walking in certain directions in the supermarket, going outside for only X minutes per day to exercise, only X people allowed at your table at the pub, etc. Just endless totally unscientific bollocks.
It's like getting into a heated debate with someone. You start out and actually listen to what people are saying, but then eventually it's just like, come on man, fuck off, I don't even care if you're right, I'm tuned out.
Fast food doesn't force me to eat it under penalty of imprisonment.
- Vaccines are usually injected, injection makes most people uncomfortable. Most of them get over it, but it can be panic inducing for a small number. Among street drug users, injection is usually considered extreme, as in, the thing only true addicts do.
- When you get vaccinated, you are fine, and then you get a few unpleasant side effects. That's the opposite of the usual drugs you take when you are sick and make you feel better.
- Sometimes, vaccination is made mandatory, many people don't like to be told what to do with their bodies, even if there are good reasons for it.
- You never know when a vaccine have saved someone. Someone didn't get sick, but is it because of the vaccine, natural immunity, luck, or simply a lack of exposure, maybe he will get sick eventually, you can't really tell, and you don't really notice when something doesn't happen. However, when a vaccine hurt someone, or failed to prevent the disease it should protect against, that's very noticeable.
- The most successful vaccines are now often considered useless, because the disease they protect against is so rare, why go through the discomfort of the vaccination when it is so unlikely for you to get sick either way? It is a tragedy of the commons, as the reason the diseases is so rare is because of widespread vaccination.
I agree the needles don't help though.
So I don't think its vaccination perse, at least not on its own, but vaccines have various things going against them. Like someone else in this thread said, government mandate + preventative medicine has the right ingredients to form a conspiracy theory with, religious doctrine has historically amplified that as well. Additionally, there's also a distrust of 'big pharma' in general, and especially with minority groups a history of dubious or even malevolent medical experimentation by the government.
A big part of the antivaxxers are now also anti 5G, advocate against the use of sunscreen, are against wind energy and EV, sometimes pro-russia, anti-deepstate, etc. Some of this is fossil lobby, some of it is the result of Russian propaganda and other parts are just organic whackyness, like the flat earthers.
This sort of language makes problems worse and even further decreases trust.
Casting a wide net and calling ivermectin a "risy drug" when a quick search engine query will show it is used safely in humans as an antiparasite drug. When someone who is skeptical about vaccines reads these sorts of blatant falsehoods why in the world would they believe anything else you say?
If you wanted to warn people against using forms formulated for animal consumption then you could've just said that, instead you painted with a wide brush which justifies someone to not trust you.
That just means it's safer than being infested with untreated parasites.
It doesn't mean someone without worms should take it for funsies.
Your same Google search will reveal ivermectin carries (as with almost any intervention) potential serious side effects. Doctors prescribing medication balance those risks with the potential benefits; it's why you don't get fentanyl (safe! effective! widely used!) for a papercut, even if it would be very helpful for the pain.
Tylenol overdoses are relatively common and can even be deadly, but it would be a gross over-generalization to classify Tylenol as a "risky" drug. If you want people to take a drug in a proper setting, in proper amounts, to treat the relevant disease you should /just say that/ instead of trying to get people to think a generally safe drug isn't generally safe.
If someone has a serious bacterial infection and thinks they just need Tylenol, I wouldn't tell them that "You shouldn't take Tylenol! It's risky!" instead I'd tell them that Tylenol won't help treat their disease.
https://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-use-on...
> But the FDA says acetaminophen carries a special risk. About a quarter of Americans routinely take more over-the-counter pain relief pills of all kinds than they are supposed to, surveys show. That behavior is "particularly troublesome" for acetaminophen, an FDA report said, because the drug's narrow safety margin places "a large fraction of users close to a toxic dose in the ordinary course of use.”
> Taken over several days, as little as 25 percent above the maximum daily dose – or just two additional extra strength pills a day – has been reported to cause liver damage, according to the agency. Taken all at once, a little less than four times the maximum daily dose can cause death. A comparable figure doesn't exist for ibuprofen, because so few people have died from overdosing on that drug.
> From 2001 to 2010, annual acetaminophen-related deaths amounted to about twice the number attributed to all other over-the-counter pain relievers combined, according to the poison control data.
> Acetaminophen overdose sends as many as 78,000 Americans to the emergency room annually and results in 33,000 hospitalizations a year, federal data shows. Acetaminophen is also the nation’s leading cause of acute liver failure, according to data from an ongoing study funded by the National Institutes for Health.
> In fact, the FDA has still not completed the review of the drug that began back in the 1970s, as part of the agency’s larger mandate to assess the safety and efficacy of older medicines.
> As the panel’s work was going on, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals weighed in on acetaminophen. The London-based Lancet declared in a 1975 editorial that if the drug “were discovered today it would not be approved” by British regulators. “It would certainly never be freely available without prescription.”
except for the thousands of doctors who overprescribed opioids due to either ineptitude or their own benefit, or perhaps lack of alternatives
yeah, the Sacklers are primarily at fault, but I think people forget that they weren't handing out these pills themselves on street corners, but that __doctors__ were handing them out, triggering the biggest health crisis in America
Sure, some of these might be the same people, but I disagree that there's a big overlap between anti-vaxxers, which are not uncommon (I know quite a few who "vaccine resistant" which in many people's minds == anti-vaxxers), and anti-5G which is very niche (I've never met or interacted with a single person who thinks that), or anti-EV which is again a different demographic ("I want to drive my gas guzzling F-150 because Amerika is #1")
I wouldn't be surprised if he mixed in a few other "vitamins"
If you want to claim "autism comes from vaccines" you really have to put up some sort of evidence that supports the claim, and the reality is that there is no reliable evidence for the claim. Also, which vaccine? They use a wide range of technologies? Is it thimerosol... which isn't in any of the major vaccines used in the US today (and was unlikely to be a cause of autism in the first place, and is also still used in many contexts).
Ultimately, what RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science. I think he's doing it because he thinks the established science is corrupt, but I fail to see how he could possibly correct that while also casting doubt. If he ends up in a public health leadership position, he's going to find very quickly just how poorly his approach to public health works.
I was predisposed to be favorable towards vaccines when I first became a parent. But experience has taught me that those who push vaccines are simply uninterested in a convincing me, they are only interested in coercing me.
At this point if the CDC has a LOT of work to do to rebuild trust. I don't see it happening anytime soon.
Of course, you should additionally read the various counter arguments that have been published, for instance: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5789217/, and likely more beyond.
I've heard this said in the NYT and elsewhere, but have yet to read any actual quotes of his __in context__.
> RFK Jr is doing is sowing doubt in established science.
the first rule of science is that it is never "established". This is especially true in health sciences, where thing that we were pretty sure were one way turn out not to be that way, or are much more nuanced than we thought. So challenging established thought is what scientists should be doing.
Now if RFK is a public health official then that is probably counter-productive and not really the place to be doing that. But he hasn't been a public health official to my knowledge so far.
I don't know that much about RFK but one thing I do like about him is that he's speaking out against the unhealthy processed food industry, which I don't hear hardly anyone else doing. (Lots of people say "eat healthy" but there's not that many people saying "these large multinationals are feeding you garbage for profit".
When you say that science is never "Established", that's horse pockey. Established means we have a high level of confidence (not absolute). Yes, things get updated, for example we now don't go around saying that "stress causes ulcers". And when it comes to vaccines, multiple high quality studies have failed to find a relationship between vaccines and autism, while the original work has been discredited (shown to be false) and retracted. Yet the news cycle about that caused large numbers of people in the US to not get their kids vaccinated for many different things (and also blame the vaccines for their children's autism). (to be realistic, vaccines do have side effects and there is an entire program detected to detecting those problems).
As for whether he's been a public health official: no, but he has worked on environmental and public health problems before (I don't recall if this is before or after he ate so much fish he got mercury poisoning).
I don't think many people are complaining about him speaking against processed food, but again, the policy he promotes should be thoughtful, not knee-jerk.
I do recommend you read his book, https://lfpl.overdrive.com/media/6093658, it seems you are of the misconception that a paper being retracted is a statement that it is false. In reality, it’s a statement that state officials (sponsored by big pharma) have threatened the livelihood of the author and/or publisher. It’s extortion, not science.
Further, I'm not going to read RFK's book. I place it in the same category as 9/11 Truthers- not even worthy of inspection.
(If you’re about to go on some statistically illiterate sidebar about how the COVID vaccines weren’t actually that effective, you can save your breath)
RFK, who is vaccinated along with his children: "I’ve been fighting 40 years to get mercury out of fish. Nobody calls me anti-fish."
===In July, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.===
===“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.===
===That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”===
[0] https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-preside...
"appeared onscreen next to"
It's unserious. To get his actual opinion, which is nuanced, you have to go long form.
It was something produced by his own non-profit. Do you not think it is fair to associate him with the non-profit he founded and ran? He has had no trouble associating himself with the organization. I feel like we can make the same association without misleading anyone.
This is still just a deflection from the question of what "people who aren't against vaccine technology" even means. Can you please define it? I am having trouble seeing the difference between being anti-vaccine and being anti-vaccine technology.
NOTE: The comment I originally responded to has since been edited.
So I guess you can take your pick.
If you know anything about marketing you know that for such messaging to be culturally pervasive is a result of years of effort and organizing.
Weird that people still get raped and murdered in your "safe and stable" environment. Sometimes the perpetrators don't even see justice and get away with their crimes. How do you account for that?
> a certain amount of cherry-picking
Without a doubt. I don't trust authority because I've been abused by it before. I'm sure you didn't mean to punch down but that's how many of us would rationally perceive it.
I read a better analogy; they compared the life table of humans with the life table of Chimpanzee or Bonobo. The change between before and after the introduction of modern medicine is obvious.
This textbook is from 1929 and was probably being written at the exact same time as the Snopes monkey trial (1925). You're reading science hype because science was under attack; and not from "social justice warriors" but from conservative Americans. Notice that the single most transformative discovery in all of biology, evolution, isn't mentioned.
That attack on evolution is still taking place. In Texas there was an attempt to strike all references to evolution and climate change from the curriculum, along with other attempts to introduce biblical references. When did that take place? That was this year; oh, and in 2023: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/texas-education-board-...
Getting mad at "social justice warriors" for an imagined reaction while ignoring the actual attacks on science is... well, it's what I've come to expect.
The post and your comment emphasize how the impact of science depends more on the public than the handful of scientists who create it. Roughly ~0% of people understand any given scientific topic. It will always be completely asymmetric. It will always involve stuff like belief in an ideology, struggles for political power, (relatively blind) trust in a movement or leader, etc. As a result, there is no world in which scientists don't regularly harm whoever follows them, the same as any leader in an uncertain/asymmetric environment (by getting stuff wrong accidentally, or actively abusing their power for personal gain).
The part about social justice warriors is actually interesting because that view will come across as "we hate science!" to some people but the real idea is somewhere between "successful science requires exerting some political power over other people" (obviously true) and "western science was built on a foundation of coercion and oppression, making lots of technological progress and causing some unavoidable tragic effects." Whatever the "truth" is, it's really complicated ethically.
It's the Scopes trial.
Interesting point RE the Snopes trial. You are right, evolution is not mentioned in the book as far as I can tell. Even though it is foundational to understanding the human body (in particular some weird features it have which any half-good creator would never design that way.)
The SJWs / woke cult are a bit of a personal hobby horse for me. I think it is important to mention, since woke ideology comes from academics at top universities, as well as journalists at top media outlets -- people who have a lot of power to shape the public discourse and influence public policy. The power of Christian fundamentalists over society and culture, on the other hand, has been waning, if one looks over the past few decades. Yes, they are in the ascendancy at the moment with the 2024 election and whatnot, but overall their influence is waning. Of course, both anti-science from the left and from the right are issues we should worry about -- I'm just giving an argument why we might want to be a bit more worried about anti-science from the left. How much either issue is discussed probably greatly depends on what circles you run in.
Note I did mention how there is no discussion of sexual health or women's health in the book. That is an issue with health textbooks that has been improved a lot but still exists to some extent today due to Christian conservatives.
I just miss when yall were simply libertarian and talked about taxes! We can go back to that one day right?
I was involved in a previous iteration of the culture war (religion vs atheism) pretty heavily. If this is anything like that, it'll start fading once people feel like the cultural dominance of the group is broken.
If you want a rule of thumb, hollywood being considered non-woke and universities not requiring diversity statements (cultural conservatives consider these to be roughly isomorphic to the old loyalty oaths) would be generally what to look for.
Edit: These institutions losing their influence would probably also be sufficient. There's nothing inherently important about hollywood, so if another locus of entertainment gains prominence, and it has different cultural views, that would also qualify.
But for the universities ok, this is at least a thing we can hold onto. It's a little rough to implicitly associate the "diversity" considered in hiring/enrolling at a school with the evil professors, because the entire argument then quite easily contracts down to: "there are too many non-white academics, and that is the real problem." But I guess the whole point is to free ourselves from such silly concerns like racism, institutional or otherwise.
Either way, I just hope they/you get what you want. I used to be worried that this whole thing would spiral too much into violence, but its easy to see now that all the people who care about the "wokeness" are, yeah, exactly like creationists: they just want to feel represented, they just want the blurb in the textbook; its not so much about the world outside, but just how they feel about it; that its ok for them to be angry about the kids sports team or whatever. People want to be principled!
I am truly hopeful at this point they will eventually find some peace while still allowing everyone to live with some self-determination and everything else. Its a little long in the tooth now, but hopefully the recent political ascendency will temper it a bit.
It definitely is. But so was my iteration. A good chunk of the previous iterations of the culture war have been as well. A lot of my generation really didn't like how conservative the small towns we grew up in "felt", it felt oppressive and dumb.
> Either way, I just hope they/you get what you want.
Yeah, I'm not participating in this one. I missed a few years of the culture war during a raging alcoholic phase and both sides feel really foreign nowadays and kinda confusing. But I do occasionally like to pop a bag of popcorn and watch people fight.
> I used to be worried that this whole thing would spiral too much into violence
My guess is probably not much more than the 70s (and we're still a long way from that, there were ~2500 bombings in an 18 month period in 71 and 72), but it seems really unlikely to advance to civil war levels.