Tag Archives: Rants

Mar20

Wednesday Links

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Wednesday Links

Chiropractors playing to a parent’s deepest fear – SIDS. We don’t know what causes it, we know little about how to prevent it, but Chiropractors lay claim to secret knowledge and take advantage of new parents’ willingness to do anything for their children by lying to them.

Ed Yong tells an inspiring story of a triumph in genomic medicine. Lilly Grossman carries a gene mutation that fills her nights with shaking and seizures instead of sleep, but finding it delivers the treatment she needs to live an almost normal life. Grab your hankies.

This won’t make a lot of sense to many people, but an abstract that shows a possible neurobiological connection for skin picking and hair pulling (dermatillomania and trichitillomania) makes me think how nice it would be to eventually find a way to fix it.

Take this, people who think diet can prevent all disease. So there.

This may seem like a wonderful advancement in prosthetics, but can you say. . .mind control?!?!?

Recognize a pattern? Republican sticks to party platform, opposes gay marriage. Republican offspring comes out as gay. Republican weasels out of original stance.

I can’t say this where it’s appropriate, but you can tell when someone thinks he knows more than he actually does when he’s not even wrong. Unfortunately, the Dunning-Kruger effect means it will be impossible to educate him as to why this is so. He does not experience the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and learns only what strengthens his confirmation bias. Worse, this is willful ignorance and intellectual dishonesty. Rationalwiki is an appropriate source of information to reflect my repressed snarkiness. Enjoy.

Bookmark this site for when you need a good laugh or a healthy dose of schadenfreude. There is simply too much here for me to give it to you a bit at a time. Bask in its guanophrenic glory as it slowly loads the page bit by bit up to the top. If you really want to get in the spirit, go to the pantry and get some tinfoil to make yourself a party hat first.

AWWW!! ELEPHANT BAYBEEE!

Mar8

The Problem With Science. . .

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The Problem With Science. . .

Just venting here in response to seeing these horrible arguments concentrated in a heap somewhere else. There may be others, but these are the ones that make me particularly irritated.

1. “Science doesn’t consider the bigger picture!” This implies that there is a “bigger picture,” and that science should concern itself with researching only what fits into it. This isn’t science. Science is not designed to confirm what we want to know, but to find out what we don’t know, whether it comes out the way we want it to or not. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle that comes in a giant plastic garbage bag. We don’t have the big picture. Even if we start working on putting together just the edge pieces, we might find some edges are straight, some are curved, some of the angles are acute and some are obtuse. We can gather together all the pieces that have the same shade of blue, but that doesn’t mean those pieces will fit together. You can’t consider a “bigger picture” unless you already know what the picture is, so science works on putting the pieces together and building from there.

2. “Science doesn’t answer questions about the soul/mind/spirit/etc.” Science is the study of the physical world. It is a method by which we can observe and study objects and phenomena that exist in, affect, and are affected by the physical world. Complaining that science is flawed because it doesn’t study the supernatural is like complaining that a bicycle is flawed because it doesn’t fly. It does what it is designed to do. Just because it doesn’t do what you want it to do doesn’t mean it’s broken. In fact, it means it’s working.

3. “Science is inaccurate because it’s being done by humans.” First of all, science has methods of self-correcting. Evidence has to be predictable, repeatable, and falsifiable. Human error might result in flawed evidence, but the scientific method provides a way for other humans to verify or overturn that evidence. Second of all, this complaint comes most frequently from people who tout ideas that are built on anecdotes and wishful thinking, promulgated by charismatic leaders of cults of personality. Magical thinking is fraught with human error, yet its proponents are the quickest to complain about human error in science. The mind boggles.

4. “Science is being financed by big business, so scientists don’t really care about discovering the truth!” There are certain problems that arise from what research is financed and what research flounders. But this doesn’t mean that science is corrupt. Scientist is not a glitzy, high-paying position, even if you’re doing pharmaceutical research. Again, though, this view is expressed by people who believe in things that are being sold by companies that make broad, sweeping statements about the efficacy of their products without having to worry about regulatory oversight, and individuals profiting from the sales of these products, or non-evidence-based practices, whose faces you see on book jackets and TV talk shows. The hypocrisy seems evident only to people who haven’t been taken in by the purveyors of anecdotal proof.

5. “Science says one thing one day, and then something entirely different later.” Part of that is the nature of science. Remember that mention of falsifiability? The idea is that you don’t close off your options by setting something in stone. The knowledge we have and the tools to gather that knowledge are constantly improving. If we learn something new, and it disproves the old idea, we let go of the old idea. The other part is the dumbing down of science for the layperson that happens in the media. New evidence is presented by journalists as proof of one thing or another – when proof is only for math and whiskey, and when the studies they’re pointing to actually say nothing at all like what they say in the news. Remember that big picture reference? The scientists finish a corner, and the journalists declare the puzzle complete. That’s not a problem with science.

Mar10

A Modest Proposal of My Own

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A Modest Proposal of My Own

Thanks to the sheer number of bills proposed by Republican elected officials across the country, their convoluted justifications for those bills, their “misstatements” about those bills, and their ignorance about existing laws and medical reality, I think we can all agree that the primary focus of all of this is that they don’t want women to have intercourse. They especially don’t want poor, non-white, non-Christian women to have intercourse. And while they’re OK with well-off, white, Christian women having intercourse, they want them to have it only with their husbands and only for making babies – even these women are not allowed to (ooh, fetch me my smelling salts!) enjoy it.

The whole problem with this is that they’re focusing on the girls and women. Last time I checked, humans don’t reproduce by parthenogenesis, so there has to be a male participant in there somewhere. And if you think about it, this is where the problem lies. The female of the species does not have to be an active or willing participant in this process in order for it to occur, so these legislators are simply taking the wrong approach.

In fact, no matter where you look, from ancient history to today, not a single attempt to eliminate non-procreative sex by restrictions on women has had more than a marginal effect. This is due to the flawed perception that somehow women, by their sheer presence, render men slaves to uncontrollable desire. No matter how much boys are taught that girls are wretched and unclean, they still want to see them and touch them. No matter how much modest, concealing clothing you put on girls, boys still think about what’s underneath. No matter how much you keep girls’ and women’s mobility restricted, they sometimes have to leave the house – and a boy or man can find them there. Or, having no restrictions themselves, get in to wherever the women are confined. If the boys want to have sex with girls, they have the ability to do so with a willing or unwilling partner, and always seem to find a way.

Clearly, hiding the womenfolk and making them fully responsible for and ashamed of causing male arousal is just not cutting it. Giving women yet another burden, that of forced childbearing, as a “consequence for their actions,” won’t be any more successful. Women have an incredible number of deterrents against sexual intercourse as it is. We’re really doing our best, guys, but we need some cooperation here.

So my feeling is that a completely different approach is needed. It is boys and men who need to be the focus of curtailing the immoral practice of recreational sex. If they do not experience arousal in the first place, then intercourse simply will not take place! No more sex ed classes, no more birth control controversy, no more unplanned pregnancies, no more need for moral outrage directed at women! Problem solved!

Perhaps some of the money being taken away from organizations that are involved in women’s health and family planning could be diverted to researching a treatment that would eliminate male sexual arousal. Certainly, some of the money being spent on all those unneeded ultrasound machines in abortion clinics would help, since they would no longer be used. No religious organizations would be forced to cover contraception in their employees’ insurance policies, so I’m sure they’d gladly lend financial as well as moral support towards this research.

Imagine it – a world in which men would be capable of sexual arousal only when they and their legally married spouse decided it was an appropriate time for procreation! Not only would it solve all the problems our lawmakers are trying to legislate away, but some of the problems they themselves cause by engaging in non-procreative intercourse outside of marriage! No more adultery, because it wouldn’t be possible, and absolutely, positively, none of that yucky boy-on-boy buttsecks. EWWW!

I can’t think of a single reason why the folks who want women to stop having sex, stop using birth control, and stop having babies, would object to a plan like this. It’s incredibly sensible, and bound to work. Don’t you agree?