914 karma · joined July 31, 2011
I'm not sure dismissing all research that disagrees with me as witch-burning would be a good habit as a scientist.
It's not a rejection of all research to say that some questions remain unanswered. In fact, I'd say it is the foundation of good science to understand which claims are supported by evidence, and which claims are not.
I did mean TiO2. There is a reason the EU considers it a carcinogen and is banning it from several classes of products.
And I'm not sure I would really consider a "Go Ask Alice" column as peer-reviewed research.
TiO2 also has a signficant body of evidence demonstrating that it is a carcinogen when inhaled in particulate form. Just because some compound is safe in one context does NOT mean it is safe in all contexts.
> Do you understand that when you eat PTFE it comes out exactly the same way it went in?
I bet if I asked you to eat shards of glass, they would leave your body pretty close to how they went in :) Whether your body would remain unchanged is another question. While this is an extreme example, there are more subtle ways a compound could interact with the body. For instance, glyphosate has long been considered a safe compound because it "leaves the body the way it comes in." However, recent research has revealed substantial evidence that glyphosate may adversely interact with the human microbiome, which is linked to many various health conditions. This is an active thrust of a lot of new medical research that wasn't strongly considered 20 years ago. It is simply not enough to say the compound remains unchanged, the real question is whether the body is unchanged, and the body is pretty complex and our understanding is very incomplete.
It's not clear which version of the scientific method you subscribe to from your posts, but in general proving a negative is ~really, really~ hard. This list of all possible interactions in the human body with arbitrary chemicals is quite long. The list of things that have been 'proven safe' only to be considered unsafe when studied more carefully is quite long. To suggest that our knowlegde of the safety of ~any~ compound is complete is impossible.
There is no One True Standard.
This picture I stole from some blog shows this projection: https://grahamshawcross.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/spots.jp...
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A 2D square lattice is defined by two perpendicular basis vectors denoting nearest-neighbor distances. Lets put a grid point at the origin at define position as (a,b), where a and b are in units of the basis vectors. That is every integer (a,b) is a grid point that is a hops to the right and b hops up from the origin. Lets also define directions [a,b], where this is the vector from the origin (0,0) to point (a,b).
Consider the following operation: we draw an arbitrary line on the lattice then take all the points within some distance of that line and project them onto the line.
If you draw the line parallel to either basis vector, i.e. [1,0] or [0,1], you will get a 1D sequence where every point is identical: a 1D grid. This is actually independent of the size of the neighborhood around the line we consider as long as it is large enough to include any points; the projections of more distant points align with closer points due to the symmetry of the lattice. A line at 45 degrees (i.e. [1,1]) produces a similar result.
What about some other integer vector? If we draw a line along [5,7], the projected points will no longer be as tidy, but after some distance along the line, we will reach a point equivalent to where we stared: the grid point (5,7). And then (10,14) and (15,21) so on. Every time we hit a new grid point, the pattern of the projection will repeat. The specific pattern between grid points may vary as we change the size of the neighborhood around the line we consider for the projection, but it will always retain the same periodicity. Like the previous cases, as we increase neighborhood size, the projection will stop changing after some critical value as all new points in the neighborhood will line up with previous points. You can see this properties by playing with a piece of graph paper. All rational vectors have parallel integer vectors, and so will have some underlying periodicity.
What about an irrational vector, say [e,pi]? After leaving the origin travelling on this path your will ~never~ hit another grid point. Therefore the projections of grid points will be aperiodic. Not only that, as we increase the neighborhood size, the pattern constantly changes: each new point always has a new spot on the projection. However despite being aperiodic, the system is still ordered: you can know where the next point will show up every time.
It turns out, if you draw a line along the vector [phi,1], where phi is the golden ratio, and use a neighborhood size of sqrt(2), the projection of the points has another interesting property: there are only two possible distances between projected points on the line, lets call them long (L) and short (S), themselves related by the golden ratio. The pattern of Ls and Ss is itself ordered and aperiodic. Not only that, but a simple substituion relation L->LS and S->L produces a longer sequence that includes the original. This just happens to be the substitution relation for finding subsequent terms in the binary fibbonaci sequence.
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I am sorry for this long-winded explanaton, but I am hoping it helps with visualization without pictures. Perhaps I should write a short blog post with some pictures. The key points are: starting from the origin a rational vector on a grid will always hit another grid point (and then infinite additonal points), which will define periodic relationships will all other grid points to the line. An irrational vector will never hit another grid point, so the relationships are always aperiodic. For a specific choice of projection and vector, you can recover the binary fibbonacci sequence.
When I was younger, two consecutive governors from opposite parties both ended up in prison for their activity as elected officials. The STOCK act was passed 10 years ago, but insider trading in congress remains rampant.
We have different expecations.
Even if you accept this is true, I have a hard time believing that 'following the news' actually achieves this in any substantial way. If anything, it may have the opposite effect, as ad-driven sensationalism selects for disjointed, short-term stories with large emotional impacts over those which enable readers to form far-seeing, rational, coherent world-views.
Is the vast majority of computer use for the explicit and sole purpose of cybercrime? If so, this is news to me. It's more like demonizing the dark web since its main function is to facilitate crime.
The primary purpose of GMOs is to increase herbicide usage. This isn't some philosophical argument; this is how GMOs are actually used. How can you separate a tool from it's primary usage? To me, an honest discussion of GMOs requires one to leave abstract notions behind and consider the context of GMOs in modern agriculture. This context is overwhelmingly centered around herbicides. If you remove herbicide-resistant GMOs for the discussion, there's barely a point in having it all because what remains is so insignificant.
Definitely, I begrudge every single moment I am forced to use my phone and intentionally don't bring it with me as often as possible.
> ... other than as a chip in our arm ...
Oh. Count me out.
You're right that there's nothing comparable to the modern era: the modern era hasn't existed long enough to have collapses that total. I think you are not applying the same level of scrutiny to ancient societies as you are to modern ones.
This is a controversial question. To pick a popular example, estimates of lives saved by the Green Revolution range from the billions to the hundred thousands, and you don't have to look hard to find arguments that this shift in agricultural technology increased the number of people living in poverty. The advent of agriculture precipated explosions in food production and population growth along side a major decrease in living standards that persisted for millennia. One well-documented side effect of this transition is a vastly increased susceptibility to epidemics.
When presented with a surplus of a resource, humans have an interesting tendency to simply use up more of it until a shortage reappears. Maybe this is why I have to use so many electron apps.
For instance, she criticizes James Scott's "Against the Grain" for using a different definition of 'state' than the first one she found on wikipedia, but it is unclear why this is a bad thing. In fact, Scott himself notes that there are many competing definitions of state that are all imperfect in his context; and that ultimately the choice of one or another is rather arbitrary. It is so that he can develop this context that Scott delays his formal definition. In searching for a legible, bold-face, definition of 'state' on page 1, the author has ignored the context surrounding the concept of state as well as its place in the arguments of the book as a whole.
The author suggests she borrowed Scott's sense of legibilty in her own term to suggest that legibilty has some benefits; that she can easily determine the effects of the failure of a single leg of an argument on the whole and she can easily 'spot check' to determine is some fact is true or false. But in her application of this concept, especially the section on "Against the Grain," she demonstrates primarily that her approach is causing her to miss nuance, trip over ambiguity, and ignore context. Ironically, this is the exact critique Scott presents of legibility in his other work.
Since all objects are composed of quantum particles, all objects are quantum objects. So a complete theory of QM needs to be able to explain, not assume, why some objects behave classically.
It's a shame there isn't more IR discussion here. I'm actually pretty surprised by the low quality of the discourse.
This is how I would describe the vast majority of applications of antibiotics. I'd like to be more charitable and say the people encouraging the use of antibiotics didn't realize the scale of the damage they were causing.
> Yes, there is bright biological line between viruses that can infect humans and bacteria. And sure, the human virome could be thing, and certainly natural bacteriophages are important and so are many benign, transient infections important for the human system.
The human virome ~is confirmed~ to be a thing, and includes bacteriophages. This bright biological line conclusively does not exist. Why would humans evolve to coexist with (or include) a large number of benign viral populations?
> Tobacco causing cancer was the default because it is a foreign contaminant in the human body.
If this is your argument, then what is the default for removing something that is benignly present in the vast majority of people? Surely it should be that it is potentially unsafe, like it is with the appendix and gut microbiome and frontal lobe etc. Anyway this is a historical argument. We've applied huge amounts of pesticides because there was 'no evidence they were harmful.' It turns out this was a bad idea. This framework is clearly very dangerous. Perhaps we should look harder for evidence of harm before we do things.
> That's akin to saying that despite we know that global warming has many negative effects, we have to show it has no positive effects.
Global warming is human-induced change. Removing EBV from the entire human population is human-induced change. The bar for causing change should be higher than leaving things as they are. A better analogy would be removing the appendix. There was no evidence this was harmful for 100 years! That doesn't mean it wasn't harmful!
> You can calculate a distribution of impact of every confounding factor onto the measured variance
In my experience, no one does this. And certainly never with the most important confouding varibables like diet and lifestyle.
We had some minor inklings of the microbiome, but we were not aware of serious consequences. Unless you are accusing the all the governments and medical bodies of the world of gross malpractice.
> It has a way of doing so over evolutionary timescales, which is not true for EBV.
Do you have evidence for this claim?
> That is a bacteriophage.
Do you really think nature has drawn a bright line between viruses than can affect humans and viruses that can affect bacteria? I'm not sure this lines up with reality. People are even seriously starting to talk about the "Human Virome" [1]
> I don't need to prove a negative, you have the burden of proof.
This is what they said about tobacco causing cancer and pesticides killing bees and carbon emissions causing global warming. How did that work out? I'd prefer a more proactive scientific framework than a reactive one. Maybe we could stop the next crisis before it happens.
> There aren't 1 million confounding variables as far as sampling for EBV.
There are 1M confounding factors in sampling outcomes. Not controlling for confounding variables is a great way to get weak conclusions.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/viruses-can-help-...
This is a difference in semantics, not reality. The body also doesn't have a way of spontaneously ejecting the appendix. I would describe this as the body being happy to let it stay there. Of course, sometimes the body becomes unhappy with the existence of the appendix. I think the interesting question is why this happens and the proper treatment is to remove or mitigate these triggers. This is harder than removing the appendix.
We thought there were no serious consequences of antibiotics for a century. We were wrong. As someone living with autoimmune disease, I can assure you that we continue to misunderstand these diseases. I wish I could be so confident that we would never be wrong about anything else ever again. A few days ago there was an article where a virus was used to fight a bacterial infection [1]. How can you earnestly say it's impossible that any virus that makes its home in the immune system could play a role in the immune response? Proving negatives is really hard. Maybe if I saw a 10000 studies that showed no correlation for a wide range of different infections I could be convinced, but our system doesn't encourage publication of negative results so I'm not holding my breath. How many have you seen?
The problem with statistical medical studies is that in general samples are non-random (as you note in another comment) and cannot easily control for any of the 1M (lower bound) confounding variables. Our current methods here are mainly good for p-hacking publications, not uncovering causal relationships or complex effects. This is a discussion for somewhere else though probably.
[1] https://english.elpais.com/usa/2022-01-27/how-a-virus-helped...
If the immue system does "whatever it can" to get rid of EBV, why is it happy to let EBV lie dormant in most people who have it?
Most of what you said can be said about bacteria too. It turns out bacteria can be helpful and blindly applying antibiotics is linked to the rise of numerous autoimmune diseases. It took quite a long time for us to figure it out.
I think the burden of proof is on the people who want to modify other people's bodies (i.e. prophylactic EBV vaccination). You can do what you want to yourself. But unless we want to repeat the mistakes of the recent past we should be ~really~ sure there is no reason the body keeps it around lying dormant. One could even say this is a larger "control group" than the one you are talking about.
Besides, correlational medical studies can't even determine if eggs and coffee are good or bad for you. If we really want to answer these questions adequately, we need better tools.
It did hold for a long time, until it didn't because we found scientific evidence that said the opposite. Are you really so confident that no such evidence could ever be found for anything else? There is so much we don't know about the human body.
Until these question are answered I don't think it's possible to call it uniquely bad.
We are only just now catching up to the idea that bacteria are not always dangerous. There are probably other things we don't know. The tonsils and appendix recently were recategorized from vestigial organs to immune privileged bacteria resevoirs which play significant roles in the immune system.
I think it would be a better idea to try to identify the reasons that some people have adverse reactions and some don't before going into the body and removing things.
Toughness in a material science sense is the ability to absorb energy before failure. This has two major components, yield strength (energy to initiate deformation) and ductility (ability to deform without fracture).
The ductility of steel (and of many other metals) is what drive their use in structural applications, whereas many materials, i.e. ceramics, have higher yield strength but almost no ductility. Even though many glasses are "stronger than steel", if you drop a glass bowl and a steel bowl only one will shatter. If your I-beam shatters you are in trouble.
Steel is interesting in comparison to other metals because iron and carbon are abundant and the iron-carbon system has a lot of interesting features that can increase both strength and ductility.