41–50 of 421 posts
I feel like posting your personal science based work on social media walks the thin line between education and self interested-marketing. What if after a year of posting, you find an error in your study? You have just misinformed everyone for a year. How do you backtrack on that?
Once upon a time, not long ago, MS sufferers were deemed "hysteric", "crazy" etc, until there was technology that could show physical evidence of the damage caused by MS.
This is sad. Unfortunately we have some people who put their beliefs and politics above science and will actively act against investigation only because a line of inquiry could result in evidence against their view. It comes from both the left and right depending on the topic. It’s not simply dissent it also is about pressuring institutions to not fund certain areas of investigation which is a very detrimental conseq…
You say that's people putting beliefs and politics above science, but while that's a rational thing to suggest there are two problems with it.
Firstly, a lot of issues don't and can't have any scientific rationale behind them. They're moral judgements. For example, if you want to go looking for scientific evidence for why the death penalty is a terrible idea you won't find any. You'll only find ethical and moral rhetoric about why killing innocent people by mistake is bad, or why the economics of keeping people in prison for decades when you could just kill them is irrational. Science has nothing to say. Science doesn't judge.
Secondly, people don't always believe evidence even if it's there. For example, if you take a random sample of teams and find the ones that make the best decisions are more diverse[1], some people will demand "positive discrimination" is a terrible idea and a meritocratic system must be better even in the face of the evidence or they'll just argue that the evidence is plain wrong. How do you persuade those people to change their minds?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriklarson/2017/09/21/new-resea...
Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes/conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as "biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.". I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno's thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those withou…
> the pain is real, it's just caused by processes in your brain, I don't find this particular statement very revolutionary. We have known for a long time that physical pain is manufactured by the brain as an evolutionary tactic to help us prevent further harm to ourselves. If we didn't "feel pain" when we were on fire, we would burn to death.
It depends on how you read it, since the short 12-word summary could be read dozens of different ways. There's ways in which trivially, of course, duh, pain is in the brain, where else would it be? But there's also ways in which it stands in stark contrast to what most people implicitly believe.
Take your (you, the reader, not kimmy1 specifically) beliefs about the nature of pain, and explicitly hold it up to the concept of phantom limb syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb And make extra sure to read the section about mirror box treatment. (That it works at all, for anyone, is the important point, not whether it's a miracle cure for all sufferers.)
You may already have heard about these things, but have you explicitly examined your beliefs about pain to ensure they incorporpate these ideas?
I don't know about fibromyalgia, but it wouldn't shock me that much if there is something a lot like phantom limb syndrome out there that confuses us by causing phantom pain in body parts that exist. For eminently rational reasons it would be a long time before we worked out way down to that hypothesis.
Another field where science is on a collision course with online (and offline) activists is genetics. As we decode and understand more of the genome, it is possible that our genes affect more of our behavior than what the partisans of tabula rasa hold for truth. And unless the political climate evolves, in a power struggle between activists and science, I wouldn't bet on the scientists.
> As we decode and understand more of the genome, it is possible that our genes affect more of our behavior than what the partisans of the tabula rasa hold for truth What “partisans of the tabula rasa”? Activists of both the left and right seem more likely to be partisans of genetic determinism, though of which aspects of intellect, identity, and behavior varies between them.
I agree, but that's enough. In any one area, scientific fact will run into serious opposition. In a different area, the opposition may come from other people, but be just as strong.
If anything, this will make it harder to defeat, than it would be if "partisans of the tabula rasa" were a neatly circumscribed group.
Another field where science is on a collision course with online (and offline) activists is genetics. As we decode and understand more of the genome, it is possible that our genes affect more of our behavior than what the partisans of tabula rasa hold for truth. And unless the political climate evolves, in a power struggle between activists and science, I wouldn't bet on the scientists.
> As we decode and understand more of the genome, it is possible that our genes affect more of our behavior than what the partisans of the tabula rasa hold for truth What “partisans of the tabula rasa”? Activists of both the left and right seem more likely to be partisans of genetic determinism, though of which aspects of intellect, identity, and behavior varies between them.
Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes/conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as "biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.". I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno's thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those withou…
Over the next 20 or so years, expect a lot of syndromes/conditions to be reclassified, as Michael Sharpe puts in the article, as "biological condition[s] that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors.". I struggled with RSI for a couple of years until I read John Sarno's "The Mind-Body Connection" on the recommendation of someone from HN. Sarno's thesis is that many chronic pain conditions (those withou…
Fortunately, I found the underlying physical cause and am responding quickly to treatment.
Glad to hear Sarno helped you though :)
I'd like to comment here that this is primarily about chronic fatigue syndrome. There are other handwaving statements towards vaccines, global warming, and GMO, but none of those statements have a clear factual outlay. It's particularly interesting to me that it was implied that the activism against physical exercise/CBT to treat (not cure) chronic fatigue had done damage to the motivations of scientists to perform f…
It's not entirely clear from the layout, but that bit of content is a kind of "info box", a bit of extra information that in a printed magazine you'd find in a box alongside the main article, meant more as context than as a substantial article on its own. That explains why it merely points out these other cases where activism might clash with science and doesn't go into detail.
> This was distinctly not about common controversies around identities such as the existence or non existence of biological/cognitive differences of race, sexuality, and gender, even though those would be IMO the most pertinent subjects to cover about how(and if) science is affected by activism
It would be a different article then wouldn't it :-)