it's not a "statistical quirk". The placebo effect is reproducible and appears to be something that biology "does". how this works is an open area of research but not one that is really studied in detail.
AFAIK, the "real" placebo effect is a very small and specific thing that goes on when pain alleviation or inflammation are experimental variables, because of the body's μ-opioid system.
The rest of the placebo effect, outside of that domain, is being increasingly found to be the result of under-powered experiments.
We can choose the argue about the scope of the effect (I think it goes beyond just pain and inflammation, and don't think it's limited to mu-opioids), but generally, yes, pain and inflammation are the two areas where the placebo effect has been seen to occur in a well-powered, well-controlled study.
Ok, I'll be more specific: the reason why drug trials are placebo-controlled is that human body is already equipped with the most miraculous drug of all: our own immune system. So, to accurately measure effectiveness of the drug we have to benchmark it against effectiveness of immune system. Placebo effect is just our own body fighting disease, no mystical forces involved.
As far as I know, a placebo is all about symptoms and how a patient perceives them. When you take care of a patient and give him/her a pill, statistically the patient will report to have recovered quickly or suffered less. There might a body reaction where some hormone is released which blocks pain (http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/mood/art...), but no direct action as a cure.
In some contexts, you may be legitimately concerned only with the absolute level of "works" and not the level relative to a placebo baseline.
The (understandable, traditional) reason for measuring relative to placebo is that, "well, you don't need the drug if it's only as good as what a placebo gives -- just use the cheaper placebo! You should only bother with some special drug if it's better than what mere belief-in-effectiveness yields."
But that assumes that people are equally credulous of every placebo; if a person is more credulous of homeopathy, and credulity is hard to manufacture, then it's not quite wrong to say that it "works" under a relevant definition.
(I know this is kind of an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pen technicality, but eventually we'll want to actually understand why belief-in-effectiveness can matter at all, so we can exploit it, and reasoning like yours tends to give the idea that such an effort, by definition, can't work.)
Yeah, the former is a weak phrasing of the claim. The latter is too strong, though, to be scientifically precise. Better would be "overwhelming scientific evidence that this product does not work" or "the claims of this product have been tested false across hundreds of trials."
Which is to say, we're not 100% sure it's bullshit—we can't be, in science—but we're 99.999999% sure, or so.
Making a positive claim (the latter) only sets yourself up to be discredited when, after some amount of time, one of the products inevitably is proven to work for something.
It's better to make the negative claim (the former) rather than risk losing what little authority you have with people who are struggling to understand the evidence behind these products to begin with.
I have some issues with the statement "No scientific evidence this product works". To me it is toothless and not very convincing. What if the product never has been tested scientifically? In that case, it might work...
However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.
"No scientific evidence this product works" does not mean the same thing as "this product does not work!" People confusing the two is very harmful.
It could mean, for example, "there is plausible mechanism of action but there hasn't been much research on the topic [for whatever reason]" or it could mean "there's absolutely no known mechanism of action, it doesn't make physiological sense, and a century of research has proved it doesn't work." These two statements are obviously not the same!
> To me it is toothless and not very convincing. What if the product never has been tested scientifically? In that case, it might work...
> However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.
I don't think that this is how medical labelling should work. If you want to sell a product on the basis of its effect on your health, then the onus should be on you to prove that it works, not on others to prove that it doesn't. In this setting, I think that a presumption of guilt (ineffectiveness or harmfulness) until proven otherwise is appropriate.
I don't see how that's convincing at all. To you and me who actually know a little bit about how science is supposed to work, sure. But to some Jane Doe who never took any science classes in college and has no idea what "peer review" is, and is taken in by the fluffy New-Age BS marketing on the product's label, that phrase isn't going to mean squat.
The fundamental problem I think is that much of society simply doesn't understand what science is, and why it's important, or why they should care about scientific studies in regard to allegedly medicinal products they may use.
I tried to explain to him that homeopathic medicine is either 1) Nothing, if they diluted it 'correctly', or never bothered to put the poison in there to begin with or 2) Poison, if they failed to dilute it properly 3) Maybe some kind of actual medicine, in which case it's not actually homeopathic.
There are no other options.
He responded: "Well, it seemed to work for my kid, so I'm going to keep using it."
That teething gel really changed my opinion from "harmless, but dumb" to "potentially fatal or severely harmful, and also dumb, and also allowing children to suffer the teething pain".
There were an additional 400 children caused serious harm.
I'm baffled by the attitude of parents like the one you mention.
> Nothing, if they diluted it 'correctly', or never bothered to put the poison in there to begin with
There are both high-dilutionists and low-dilutionists within homeopathy.[1][2] I'm not saying you should run out and buy a bunch of homeopathic remedies or whatever, but also realize that the mainstream 'skeptic' account of homeopathy is not especially accurate.
Also realize that the latest scientific research on food allergies involves homeopathic-like mithridatism, so even though the idea of a like-cures-like high dilutionist treatment isn't anywhere near a universal panacea, it does at least appear to work in certain limited cases.
If they actually go through the proper channels and test their cures then I'll gladly accept them. Until that they are pretty much just a pseudoscience.
Woah, are you seriously comparing immunotherapy to homeopathy? One has no basis in reality and no known mechanism of action. The other has a solid scientific and biological foundation behind it. Nor is immunotherapy the "latest scientific research," its been around for decades.
James Randi famously starts out talks swallowing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills. He's not dead yet despite being almost 90.
I agree with him, but I don't believe he is comparing immunotherapy to homeopathy. Moreover, if you read the article it pretty much drops the use of Homeopathy for the very specific definition of like cures like and calls it like cures like pseudoscience and stated like cures like has never worked for any condition. I don't mind attacking homeopathy but once we begin using the very specific definition of like cure like and calling that basic principle pseudoscience...that is when I take issue with it because that is the exact principle immunnotherapy for allergies is based on.
> James Randi famously starts out talks swallowing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills.
And that's exactly why I posted my comment, because it's wildly irresponsible to post comments leading people to believe that they can do the same thing and come away unharmed. The fact is that if you chug a bottle of 3x diluted poison ivy oil then you're almost certainly going to die. And not because it wasn't diluted properly, because it had other ingredients, etc.
Most homeopathic treatments on the market today are highly diluted. But not all. And since historically there was more of an even split between high dilutionists and low dilutionists, it's not unlikely that in the future even more low dilution homeopathic products will come on the market. So when you post shit that's going to come up in Google for the next twenty years that's implicitly encouraging folks to try some stunt that could easily get them killed, don't expect to not get called out on it.
> if you chug a bottle of 3x diluted poison ivy oil then you're almost certainly going to die
Haha ok, yes, you have a point there. I guess it is really dangerous to assume that all homeopathic remedies are pure water, because some of them aren't actually diluted that much. Some of them still contain poison.
> swallowing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills
If you wanted to induce a placebo effect, playing up the potency of the sugar pill would be helpful - for example saying "Do not, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, take more than two, as this can result produce DANGEROUS effects" is a lot better than going "Ehh, take more if it'll make you feel better, this stuff's completely inert anyways.".
I believe we already do this in medical field: for example those big ibuprofens they give you after a trip to the ER. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it the exact. same. thing. as just taking multiple over-the-counter ibuprofen pills? The underlying idea being that the patient will be satisfied the doctor is "doing something" to alleviate his pain, while not having to write risky pain killer Rx.
Maybe, homeopathy works in a similar way - it gives a compelling sci-fi / witchcraft / whatever-you-fetish backstory to a sugar pill. And when your subconscious buys in, you may cure yourself. Certainly with the example of insomnia, it seems quite plausible.
I posted another comment but will follow up here because you are getting downvoted, unfairly I think.
As you say modern medicine embraces like cures like for multiple conditions I can think of off hand, including, as you mention immunotherapy for allergies. Others I believe include anti-venom and flu vaccination.
Also, the article itself is clear: many are diluted to be rendered useless and in general aren't based on science. Well there is a clear gap and what I consider an acknowledgement some of these therapies are based on science and do contain the active ingredient. In my mind that makes them not far off from vitamins, many of which if you buy off the shelf and break open will be filled with flour and other fillers. Still that is not to say the science behind vitamin supplements isn't real and there aren't some reputable companies making quality products.
Now I am not encouraging deception in the marketplace, or giving peanuts to kids with peanut allergies. Though that is part of real science and modern medicine using like cures like.
Eh I have no problem getting downvoted. I think it's unfortunate that HN is filled with folks who get their medical information from celebrity YouTube videos and then get super triggered by anyone who actually reads books, but at least I try to make the information available for anyone who wants it.
"Books" can be just as inaccurate as celebrity YouTube videos. Being printed on dead trees doesn't guarantee accuracy or even that it's coherent. Anyone can publish any nonsense they want.
> Also realize that the latest scientific research on food allergies involves homeopathic-like mithridatism, so even though the idea of a like-cures-like high dilutionist treatment isn't anywhere near a universal panacea, it does at least appear to work in certain limited cases.
After reading this comment it seems that the books you read are very suspicious.
I have read a number of comments here on like cures like with respect to vaccines. Vaccines are categorically NOT like cures like; vaccines work because a "sacrificial lamb" organism (bacteria, lab animal, or other) is infected, and then the macrophages (mostly white blood cells) then digest these bacteria or viruses that have infected the host and leave behind anti-gens. The immune system reacts to these anti-gens; and that's what the vaccine is, in layman's terms chopped up bacteria or virus that is chemically bonded to a protein (Major Histocompatability Complex (MHC) class II molecule) that activates a learning process in the immune system (adaptive immune response).
So it is not a like cures like process; it is a processed hybrid molecule that induces an immune response. Another organism has been through an infection to learn how to combat it so you don't have to. Vaccines prevent an infection from taking hold with biologically modified proteins, it doesn't cure an infection.
So perhaps it is less accurate to say vaccinations are like cures like and more significant processing of like cures like. So then maybe anti-venom also falls more in line with vaccinations in the sense of the processing of the original like involved.
Others have also presented arguments why immunotherapy for allergies isn't really like cures like. However, nothing as comprehensive as your post to suggest any significant processing on the vaccination level as much as a simple reduction to the chemical allergen to reduce and/or prevent allergies to said chemical.
Allergen immunotherapy (slowly increased exposure to allergens) is sometimes suggested for environmental allergies (such as insect bites or asthma) but not generally accepted for allergies such as food allergies. The reason for this is that there is scientific evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks. What's more is that it isn't just administered in blindly increasing amounts; the histamine reaction in the body is carefully measured and doses of the allergen in carefully calibrated to match. But this is just one small part of medicine.
Almost no other medical treatments have such evidence which is why homeopathy is labelled as having no evidence to support it and that is being generous as plenty of people have gone looking for evidence to support it but there is no credible evidence to be found after 100 years of trying.
"like cures like" is a dangerous oversimplification.
Vaccines and immunotherapy work by giving the body small amounts of the actual thing that is harmful (usually dead, in the case of vaccines). It's easy to see why this is a reasonable approach - it's giving the body "sparring practice" against the disease or substance.
Antivenom works similarly, except that the antibodies are grown in another animal, probably because by the time someone is bitten, there isn't time for their bodies to learn how to produce it themselves.
Homeopathy is based around finding substances which cause similar symptoms. They have no relation to the actual cause of the condition that they're supposed to treat. Is the "cure" for Ebola any random chemical that happens to cause humans to bleed out of every orifice? Is the "cure" for Alzheimer's any random chemical that causes people to lose their memory? How many conditions cause headaches, or nausea, or lack of energy? Are we supposed to believe that anything which can cause those symptoms is a universal cure for all of those conditions? If so, why bother with snake oil at all? Just make sure that one is exposed to a variety of cold/flu viruses, and they should (according to the "like symptoms" "theory") cancel each other out.
The whole concept didn't make sense in the 19th century, and it certainly doesn't today.
> The whole concept didn't make sense in the 19th century, and it certainly doesn't today.
The reason it doesn't make sense is because you're mischaracterizing it. Most homeopaths didn't believe that every substance that caused similar symptoms would be a cure, but rather they believed that these substances would be a fertile ground to look for treatments. It's basically like how today we consider drugs that cure diseases in rats as being promising to study further in humans.
It was homeopaths who introduced the idea of clinical trials to mainstream medicine, and if they believed that like cured like in every instance this obviously wouldn't have happened.
> but rather they believed that these substances would be a fertile ground to look for treatments
That's still based on a pretty bad misunderstanding of how the body works. The action of a virus or bacteria is usually pretty undetectable. If you had no immune system, you wouldn't even get a cough or a runny nose.
A runny nose, a cough, vomiting, and diarrhea are the body's response mechanisms. They aren't caused by any one disease in particular, they are the body's way of trying to flush out the infection.
If you look for the cure in something that also makes your body angry and tries to flush it out, well you're not going to get very far. You're just going to make the problem much worse, and weaken your immune system further. So the whole idea of homeopathy is flawed from the very beginning.
This is completely different to testing cures in rats before human trials. I don't even really see the connection, to be honest.
They are not embracing like cures like. That's just folk wisdom, which has nothing to do with the actual mechanism of actions for immunotherapy, or vaccines, or anti-venom. The way vaccines cause immunity is by stimulating the production of antibodies. What is the proposed mechanism of action for homeopathic teething gel?
Homepathy may work as a channel to induce placebo effect. Sometimes this is enough to help. Claiming it has any other sorts of effects without scientific evidence is kooky.
Even if a hypothetical scenario would actualize where it is found that some specific homeopathic drug/treatment combination is effective as medicine it would not validate the rest of the tradition in any way.
Why take bullshit that you pay large amounts of money for and ascribe the 'effect' to homeopathy when you can get placebo effect from aspirin or sugar pills?
This is the weakest argument in defence of homeopathy... you don't need homeopathy to get placebo effect and so why give credence to a bunch of wackos
Historically, there may have been some people who used high concentrations and called it homeopathy. But not today, and that's not what these labelling regulations deal with.
I dunno, you can buy 3X diluted poison ivy oil here, which would be 1 part in 1000. I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure that if you chugged a bottle of this then you'd probably die:
Yes this is correct. The idea of homeopathy is that "like cures like" so poison cures poison, diluted disease kills disease. It's total BS and has no basis in science what so ever.
The idea does have some basis with vaccines. Though vaccines are a prevention and not a cure.
It looks like both homeopathy and the vaccine were even introduced in the same year(1796), which was a spooky coincidence when I looked it up just now.
Vaccinations don't employ "water memory". There is a discernable, detectable pathogen that the immune system responds to. There is no "dilute this and say there is a physically impossible ratio of this chemical to water" in vaccinations.
Sadly, we've all been subconsciously conditioned to believe something like this from The Princess Bride scene where Wesley built up an immunity to Iocane powder. :/
Drunks generally metabolize alcohol faster than teetotalers.
A cutting edge treatment for nut allergies is to consume small amounts of nuts (carefully prepared, etc.).
edit: I want to differentiate the nut thing from homeopathy. The idea there is to consume a very small and carefully measured portion of the nut, not some nonsense about training molecules.
What you are describing is poison resistance where consuming a toxic substance makes your body more tolerant to its adverse effects.
It makes total sense for nut allergy where the disease is the intolerance; if you become immune to the substance you are cured.
Toothache is not an intolerance to deadly nightshades and no level of resistance to the poison will cure what is a totally unrelated issue; pain caused by a something slowly digging a hole through my gum.
well, they sold a product that claimed to not have any active ingredient but instead be composed of magic water particles shaped by nightshade particles, I guess.
I guess that their downfall in this case was that the manufacturer was a True Believer who actually bothered with the whole add poison to water then water it down until poison is gone, rather than, y'know, just packaging tap water.
> Hyland’s recalled teething products in 2010, after a warning from the F.D.A. that they contained inconsistent amounts of belladonna. The company changed the formula and then began selling them again in 2011.
The foliage and berries are extremely toxic, containing tropane alkaloids. These toxins include atropine, scopolamine and hyoscyamine, which cause a bizarre delirium and hallucinations,[1] and are also used as pharmaceutical anticholinergics.
---
Yap, perfect for unregulated "natural" cure for babies.
Turns out, though, that one study found placebos are more effective than homeopathic solutions. (Too lazy to find the link, but "I read it somewhere"). At best, the links I could find claim homeopathic medicine is no better than a placebo.
More people believe hat homeopathy is BS? If you tell them one is the drug and one is homeopathic and they understand what that means, I could see the potential to skew the results.
This dad has a real problem and is looking in the (dangerously) wrong place for solutions.
Maybe you can suggest a few things that do work..
Rubber teethers with a gel in them that you can put in the freezer and get cold, but not so cold they burn or feel uncomfortable or could choke them (like ice cubes).
Cut, cool, washed celery stalks at least 4" long, so the baby (or you) can pull them back out of their mouth if the baby starts to stuff them down their throat (which happens). The baby will instinctively pull it back out if it hurts. (Note: carrots and most other vegetables are NOT safe, because the baby can break off little pieces and choke on them, but you can put them in a baby straining mesh thing to keep small pieces from choking them.)
To all parents (especially on sites that are not HN): please do not put anything in your baby's mouth that might hurt them. It's better to listen to them cry then to risk hurting them.
EDIT: removed anbesol/orajel suggestion as unsafe and probably ineffective anyway.
The FDA recommends against any medicines (including Anbesol and Orajel) for the "treatment" of teething but then they wallow a little bit and add "except under the advice and supervision of a health care professional."
They recommend putting pressure on the child's gums and/or providing a cold washcloth or teething ring to chew on. Make sure you supervise so the child doesn't choke.
The AAP are more direct "The American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend putting any prescription or over-the-counter pain relievers or medication that contain lidocaine [Anbesol] or benzocaine [Orajel] on babies' gums. These products are not useful for teething pain because they wash out of the baby's mouth in minutes."
There is valid reason to keep homeopathic treatments - sometimes psycho parent/patient comes to a doctor and demands a treatment. While doctor knows that there is none needed, such parent might be persistent and could otherwise give a child/himself something dangerous. In this case prescribing homeopathic placebo is a great way to calm down such person and stop him from self-medication.
Sadly, it has a side effect of people starting to think that it actually works.
Ok, when prescribed by a physician as you point out. My response was specifically about the GP's point regarding unsafe remedies for teething.
Teething is itself natural, safe, and perfectly normal, even if is a bit painful... so letting the process occur naturally is the most homeopathic approach. It's ironic and tragic that people are giving their precious little ones poison to stop what is really just pain from normal growth.
Real "homeopathic" treatments that actually work are things like a rubber teething toy to chew on, or a stalk of celery... that's about as natural as it gets! Poisons need not apply.
I think that's the point that the commenter you replied to was getting at. In other words, mocking people who claim it "works" because they believed it worked by the placebo effect.
Ask doctors and nurses and they'll tell you about people with and without the will to live, and how having a good outlook can mean the difference between life and death.
Doesn't say anything about death "The symptoms could include retarded physical development, and disruption of perceptual-motor skills and language."
Even if they did die is quite a stretch to assume they willed themselves dead. Infant lack a mental concept of death or dying to even be able to will themselves dead.
As for a cause, I would assume something similar to amblyopia.
You're not the only one that incorrectly thinks placebos can only relive symptoms.
But that is simply incorrect, placebos can cure, yes, actually cure. And not just mental conditions either (which is another common, yet incorrect, belief).
Having a young child will bring out the superstitious idiot in you.
Last night the baby went to sleep because I walked counter-clockwise while singing lullabies? That's it, that's the only direction I can walk in from here on out while putting her to bed. The kid ate her veggies with no complaint because I was humming The Simpsons theme? It's now the official meal-time song.
These seem profoundly irrational, but one thing I've noticed is that young kids are profoundly irrational beings. You will feel like a vulcan by comparison. My kid flips out if I put the blankets on her in the wrong layering order .... but "wrong" is different every night.
Mine's 9 months old; she doesn't care what I hum or how I turn. My examples are 100% me being irrational.
When she gets older and starts having well-developed preferences, then I will no longer be crazy - only my behavior will be, because I'll be in thrall to a tiny crazy person.
Yes, this. Babies communicate by crying and cooing. It's difficult to tell what's causing them to cry absent something obvious (like an injury). I could easily picture a parent trying anything and thinking it works purely out of coincidence.
Placebo has been shown to happen in babies and even animals I believe when proper blinding is not done. The behaviour of the carer will change when they know a real treatment hasn't been given which will impact the participant.
Parents rate their children as hyperactive after consuming sugar, no matter if the "sugar" is actually just red colored water. It's perception that's changed.
I could see it being a lot more than that. Its well known that stress worsens many conditions, so I see no reason that having "positive thoughts" wouldn't do the opposite.
A lot of the worsening/improvement is a perceived one. Also the point of doing double blind experiments with a placebo as the control is that if the new medication doesn't do better than a placebo then it effectively proves that it doesn't work.
ho·me·op·a·thy
ˌhōmēˈäpəTHē/noun
the treatment of disease by minute doses of natural substances that in a healthy person would produce symptoms of disease
We're actually very good at it, but we insist on doing it wrong a lot.
You're not going to rationally logically reason someone out of a position they got into via completely irrational illogical unreasoning belief.
Now you might replace their irrational illogical unreasoning belief with another like faith healing or anything an actor in a tv commercial wearing a doctors white coat says is true.
As an analogy, in the history of mankind I don't think any Christian Creationist has ever been converted to evolution by throwing scientific journal papers at him. You'd have better luck setting him on fire or being torn apart by lions in a Colosseum and even that mostly doesn't work. But Christian Creationists DO convert to other religions every day, all the time, plenty of currently Buddhists or Hindus or Pagans or Satanists or whatever.
Is it just me or is misinformation some sort of virus that slowly spreads?
I've noticed a sharp uptick in people utterly detached from reality lately where presumably the former checks to keep people grounded, like a critical news ecosystem, or a robust education system, has imploded.
You're not the only one - I've had this sense of a slow, but inescapably-accelerating epidemic for awhile now. Tuesday before last was not a shock.
It feels like we're slowly falling off the trajectory of the Renaissance and Enlightenment; avoiding fatalism about that is my main challenge right now.
Two driving factors, I think: dominance of the advertising industry, and a rise of "wicked problems" with no good comfortable answers. Global warming leads this: would you rather believe we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?
Take a step further: Human attention has become a currency more than ever before, and pandering to human biases is one way media companies have learned to earn that currency.
You used to need substantial capital to earn the reputation as a serious news organization, but now the barrier to entry is a vaguely-authoritative domain name and social media accounts.
Close. I'm not saying you're wrong but I am proposing a fork from your post in that the really important question isn't "would you rather believe we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?"\
But for the people in charge its more like:
"would you gain more authoritarian political power by promoting that we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?"
Now lets add another wrinkle... lets say by the magic of groupthink 99% of one population is already a devout member of one belief system. If 50% of climate scientists (small group though they are) were dyed in the wool Republicans then coming out against them would cost votes prestige and power. But if they already are indoctrinated to hate you and your race and your religion and your group, you don't lose very much in a practical sense by signalling against them. In fact as a member of the opposition you probably should oppose them on general principles and your own group expects you to live up to your ... devoutness.
I've seen it, watching people nearby me convert to denialism. I have to admit I agree with them on a lot of smaller details. A fascination with symbolic level commitments that are a rounding error WRT altering the Earth's long term problems but ruin innumerably human lives in the short term. "This symbolic proposal will help absolutely nothing in the long term, but in the short term it'll sure destroy a lot of jobs, jobs for people that our political group are trained to bitterly hate..."
Ideas or memes buzz around like molecules in the air. If their average thermalized velocity exceeds gravitational escape velocity they gradually buzz away and no longer have any interaction with the Earth. Thats why hydrogen and helium are extremely common in the universe as a whole but there's not that much in our atmosphere. At least thats the astronomical analogy. If you atomize a culture and isolate and encourage subgroups to isolate and "other" each other, sort of divide and conqueror strategy on steroids, then you can end up with unconstrained groups that split into completely different cultures. Just like you take a population of one species, isolate two groups, and in evolutionary time (100K years?) you get two species that no longer care much about each other, might even eat each other. The Amish no longer have much if any common ground with the most extreme college SJWs. I'm not sure the SJWs have anything in common with the vast majority of the country, frankly. They've achieved escape velocity and will only wander further and further from the main culture and cluster of other cultures, like every other group thats achieved escape velocity from the main culture. Eventually interactions between people who are both foreigners in their own land will get really weird. Think of muslims with guns at FL nightclubs or with pressure cookers at marathons, my point isn't to be anti-muslim but to point out theres not much common ground anymore when the primary mode of interaction has declined to the level that it involves bloodshed. Once a group achieves cultural escape velocity, woosh, they're no longer part of the conversation, its us vs them yelling time at the best and kaboom bang bang time at worst.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely and its not hard to absolute power in the form of political consensus in legacy mass media, academia, hollywood, SV. And with that absolute power comes corruption. Telling the truth becomes an act of disbelief or apostasy, or you can faithfully believe while knowingly lie. Its not just the left, in that any group thats 99% composed of one political group tends to fester and get smelly, there's plenty of this on the right. You can only gain power by a public display of ever more devout true believer statements, truth is gone out the window. Ask yourself if people gain power in academia or the legacy media by telling the truth or by loudly proclaiming their devotion to the political causes that 99% of them share... that's what post-truth world means. A healthy balanced competition would force the truth to make an occasional appearance, but in a polarized consensus of groupthink its just a legacy fable. Remember when that stuff was about the truth? Yeah not so much anymore.
Combine the two ideas above and its a real mess. Atomized individuals and groups are broken off into groupthink hubs that rapidly share no common ground or affection with any other group and their interactions are based on gaining internal strength by showing their devout belief by denigrating the opposition. Traditionally this leads to revolution and civil war. I'd be surprised if the 50 states are together much longer. Frankly I can't wait, as the younger I am the better I'll come out in the rebuilding, assuming I survive. I'd rather rebuild at age 50 than age 70, for example.
Rupert Murdoch, as but one example, is the driving force behind Fox News. Is that part of some grand left-wing conspiracy?
The number of left-leaning publications is pretty thin. The Huffington Post, parts of MSNBC, The Daily Show, and a case could be made for The Economist and The Guardian. For every one of those there's a dozen like The Daily Mail or USA Today.
> I'm not sure the SJWs have anything in common with the vast majority of the country...
"SJW" is a strawman pretty much by definition, but those who get slammed as being one are typically in the under 30 crowd which are generally more accepting and understanding of social justice issues. The so-called SJW group has more in common with their generation than "the majority of the country", but that's how things always are.
This "left vs right" stuff is all a distraction and wrong anyway. The major media outlets definitely are not right-wing biased: just look at Washington Post, NYTimes, etc. What they are is biased towards the establishment. This was especially obvious in the recent election, with things like WaPo posting dozens of editorials trashing Bernie and extolling Hillary, and the coverage of such outlets working to get Hillary elected at all costs. Of course, this is painted as "left wing" in the US because the Democrats are associated with "left", but Hillary was the Wall Street candidate, so unless you think that "left wing" equals "in bed with big corporate finance", the media outlets aren't really left-wing, they're pro-establishment.
Hillary is a center-right candidate which is why she's so difficult for progressives, the Bernie-backing crowd, to support.
She's also being painted as a communist by the extreme right which are so far to the one side of the political spectrum that everyone else is considered a "liberal" by comparison.
I agree that the left/right stuff is irrelevant when it's establishment and profit driven.
If you want actual left-leaning news you need to visit publications that don't give a fuck, like The Rolling Stone or Vice Magazine where they're not part of the establishment and have nothing to lose.
Instead of worrying about how young you are when it happens, wouldn't it make more sense to simply GTFO? I really wonder how many Americans now are thinking about this, esp. professionals who have the ability to fairly easily find work and live abroad.
The challenge now is to predict whether society in 50 years is going to look more like "Idiocracy" or "The Walking Dead".
Either way, I don't foresee a good future for the human race.
Hopefully, in some parallel universe, humans have avoided this fate, and are continuing the trajectory of the Enlightenment, and will proceed to exploring the stars, going where no one has gone before.
But that proposition, which is that the world will necessarily become a worse to a hyperbolic degree, is also misinformation. You can't, "predict" a future society 50 years from now with that level of precision.
Internet penetration and social media use. Most of the population using the internet has happened in the last 20 years and social media exploded in the last 10 (in 2005, Myspace had less than 100 million users worldwide).
This is a natural result of hyper-partisanship, which is a natural result of groups separating into their preferred echo chambers, which is a natural result of it being easy to move to said echo chambers, which is a natural result of the internet.
In these hyper-partisan environments, everyone is afraid to tell the whole truth because Team A might use pieces of Team B's statements against them (see the sibling comments about feminism and global warming, or anything around the current election, but any and every partisan topic applies). So what happens is people choose tidbits of truth that fully support their side's claims and ignore the rest of truth, and make sure everyone on their team follows suit. These tidbits of truth then get used in broader contexts and somehow become universal truths. These now universal truths are not questioned in one's own echo chamber because it would work against their shared goals.
Team B then admonishes Team A within the Team B echo chamber because of the obvious ignorance of reality of the truth tidbits that became universal truths. The (not so) funny thing is that Team B is completely unaware that they do exactly the same thing.
So, inside the Team A echo chamber all you hear is how the other side is completely ignorant of reality, suppresses the truth, ignores facts, outright lies and deceives, while our team is where the logic and reason exist. And the exact same thing is happening in the Team B echo chamber. Both teams are equally fervent about their superiority over the other team. And both sides have the same answer to the problem: get rid of the other team's echo chambers and everything will be fine.
The actual truth cannot exist in this kind of environment.
Brains never evolved to present reality to its owner. It's there to help you survive. You're totally free to build up an internal world view that only has the most tenuous attachment to reality, as long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to make a living and have kids (in an evolutionary sense).
When reality becomes inconvenient to people, they'll happily ignore it and do whatever it takes to get by. As long as they're not ignoring something that's going to imminently harm them, they can get away with it for a long, long time, especially when they can find a community that reinforces it.
You also never know what people actually believe, in their heart of hearts, and they may be professing nonsense so they can signal that their in some group, or because it's what they think you should believe, or what you they think that you want them to believe, etc.
In a world where special interests all vie for the ability to manipulate the "accepted truth," we have those same special interests to thank for people's lack of trust in the system.
Propaganda wouldn't work if people at large were able to think critically enough to counteract it. Most people implicitly trust whatever they've come to believe is authoritative.
It's much more likely that someone will reject a truth from an untrusted source than an untruth, even a clear untruth, from a trusted source. This is always true at some level. There is so much data on everything that all of it cannot be considered and independently evaluated by each person; at some point you have to believe that someone else who knows more about this than you do has verified the claims.
I'm sure you have a good reason for saying that but it's not one that fits well with this site. (Also: indeed we do want to reduce politics in the comments! That's coming soon.)
Let me put it this way: whatever the bonds are between homeopathy, Brexit, and Trump, they're far too weak to justify pulling an HN thread in that direction. That's because we want discussions to stay specific; when they go generic, bad things happen: the comments get less interesting, less civil, and more numerous.
Homeopathy does work. Its mechanism is not understood, but it works. It may not cure cancer, but it does work for less severe illnesses. Its working is not placebo effect. People say it works by placebo effect, but without proof, most probably just a guess. So the US gov order is wrong.
In modern medicine, the treatment is for disease; in homeopathy the treatment is for symptoms and conditions. That means one drug treats one disease cannot be basis of the trial. so they may not have been compared well in the previous studies. Double blinded study also will be difficult because the practitioner has to see the patient. So when considering studies, have to consider these. The mode of action explained by homeopaths may be wrong, so could say it is unscientific. This story is on the results and measuring it and results can be measured scientifically.
If it is placebo effect, it will not be effective for multiple times at multiple times in same person, could say there is personal bias. There are many conditions like cold, migraine which have no definite treatment in modern mainstream medicine, so there is no harm in experimenting homeopathy when having these conditions. I believe it is better to get a diagnosis from regular doctor first and then use homeopathy.
Do you have any reputable studies to support that claim? There's a significant body of pretty robust studies showing the exact opposite of your claim, so I'd be very interested to see compelling evidence otherwise.
Excellently executed, single reputable studies are also wrong for layman or broad journalistic discussion. What scientific outsiders need is a narrative about the current state of scientific discussion -- and that involves a <body> of reputable literature.
It works according to what proof? Do you know of a scientific article that compared homeopathy against a control placebo that showed homeopathy outperforming the placebo?
That is the core problem, ie in how far is personal health is measurable. For example my parents go to a MD who uses quite a lot homepathic approaches. They are going there every other week and he uses in my opinion a mixture between psycho theraphy, wonder waters and if it is serious some real medicine. I think it is a great comnination as it gives them stability and the feeling of having someone really supporting them with their health. If I were older I would do the same - if you go to the doctor only if you have some urgent issue it might be already to late. This ongoing process makes you very aware of changes in your health/body.
"In Germany, to become a homeopathic physician, one must attend a three-year training programme, while France, Austria and Denmark mandate licences to diagnose any illness or dispense of any product whose purpose is to treat any illness.[284]...
The Indian government recognizes homeopathy as one of its national systems of medicine;"
It is interesting in that if you search pubmed, you will find studies published all over the world which claim positive benefits to homeopathy with one exception, the U.S.
You could draw multiple conclusion from that. Nonetheless, it is interesting.
>doctrine of like cures like, a claim that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure similar symptoms in sick people. Homeopathy is a pseudoscience – a belief that is incorrectly presented as scientific. Homeopathic preparations are not effective for treating any condition...
Isn't like cures like the principle behind many modern medical therapies, such as: flu vaccination; anti-venom; and immunotherapy for allergies.
Not saying this is wrong decision, but its always interesting to watch the Government pick winners and losers. In this case their justification includes "many are diluted to the extent..." and "in general claims not based on science". So is that an acknowledgment products are based on science and not diluted to the extent rendering them useless? On the other hand its great watching members of congress explain why they refuse to pass laws require labeling of food containing GMO, because they generally acknowledge GMO could be harmful to consumers but the science is still out and so until then consumers shouldn't be making their purchasing decisions based on GMO labels.
The examples you gave aren't 'Like Cures Like' in the way homeopathy works. The things you described work by triggering your immune system to create T-cells with a memory of the disease.
Homeopathy works by taking a chemical and diluting it, generally to the point where it practically doesn't exist. Best case scenario, it's a sugar pill, worst case, they don't dilute enough with something dangerous and you are taking poison.
This isn't picking winners and losers, it's consumer protection that's required for a free market to be fair to consumers. If homeopathic producers follow clinical standards and proven that their products produce statistically better outcomes, then they can call it medicine and sell it on the market.
>Homeopathy works by taking a chemical and diluting it, generally to the point where it practically doesn't exist.
Certainly I could be wrong it's just that "process" sounds a lot like immunotherapy for allergies. I am not trying to lump homeopathy and immunotherapy in the same boat by any means, but looking beyond the differences in the two I think it is possible to be more open minded than labeling the like cures like doctrine pseudo science.
>This isn't picking winners and losers, it's consumer protection that's required for a free market to be fair to consumers.
Like I said I don't disagree with the labeling, but that doesn't mean there aren't winners and losers being picked. Sure its fair for consumers to know homeopathy treatments haven't been tested (not unlike supplements require FDA warnings), but they are still losers while others are winners and escape fair disclosures to consumers (e.g. my example of no GMO labeling).
> Certainly I could be wrong it's just that "process" sounds a lot like immunotherapy for allergies. I am not trying to lump homeopathy and immunotherapy in the same boat by any means, but looking beyond the differences in the two I think it is possible to be more open minded than labeling the like cures like doctrine pseudo science.
They do sound similar!
The items you cite work on the principle of training the immune system to react to known pathogens in ways that allow an effective immunoresponse later. Homeopathy works by diluting some compound to the point where you might have one molecule of it in a homeopathic dose and positing that this is a cure.
The former isn't "like cures like". It's more like an educational process, based on an understanding of how immune systems work. The latter isn't really "like cures like" either, because one molecule of anything in a teaspoon of water isn't enough to matter to anything or anyone.
You're absolutely right. The processes do sound similar! They're just very different in very important ways well past how similar they may superficially sound.
Potentially off topic, but Im trying to navigate the alternative medicine world right now.
My mother in law just gave me a bottle of pills containing a Chinese herb meant to treat hair prematurely graying. I don't mind trying it and finding out it doesn't work in order to keep her happy but I've ran into some reports that it can cause liver damage, but I can't gauge how reliable those reports are. Any tips on how to find scientific research on things like this?
Pour some pills in the trash and tell her it didn't work. TCM is possibly worse than homeopathy in that at least homeopathic medicine is just water, while TCM is god knows what garbage.
Mother in laws and their daughters always are a difficult canyon to navigate. White lie may be best? Pretend to take it, and ask her occasionally if it's working..?
Who cares whether the plant works or not? The point here is that you have no idea what is actually in those pills. Odds are good that it doesn't include any of the plant that it indicates and no law is currently broken by that fact. Meanwhile, hair dye is tested on many people and has its ingredients listed.
The good news for your liver is that sounds exotic and expensive and lawn clippings are cheap so the odds are excellent its just some oregano or garlic or something from the landscape, not the real stuff that might rot out your liver.
Check Wikipedia as it usually links out to medical sites and offers a decent summary in most cases. In this case Wikipedia links to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3240794/ which appears to be an analysis of 25 cases. I'd say it's pretty damning and avoid it personally.
I have done a little googling and apparently the preparation and active ingredients are highly secret. The most substantial info I can come up with is that it is purportedly crazy high in zinc. This highly scientific (/Sarcasm) article is the source of this info: http://www.secrets-of-longevity-in-humans.com/fo-ti-root.htm...
A few thoughts as someone who has pursued a lot of alternative medicine (successfully, with a very critical eye):
Minerals, like zinc, can build up in the body. Thus they are a means to wind up poisoned. (Too much of anything is not good for you. Even water can kill you if consumed in excess. It gets called water poisoning.)
I was told by people who did their research that B vitamins (particularly PABA) and nutritional support for the adrenals can reverse grey hair. I was going prematurely grey due to a serious health crisis. I had some limited success with this approach in my thirties.
You could try taking zinc supplements to see if that is, in fact, the active ingredient in this super secret mumbo jumbo, minus the part where you expose yourself to god-knows-what.
If you don't actually care about your hair going grey, I strongly suggest you just tell her "No thanks." You shouldn't have to experiment with your own health to appease anyone at all.
Does anybody have any good links to impressively strong placebo effects of any treatment? Or is it always just a slight reduction in reported pain?
These debates always devolve into how placebo is a proven effect and doctors should prescribe placebos. Placebos seem to have limited effects though (they're not going to cure cancer or a cold) so this feels like a red herring.
This is excellent news. I am slightly ashamed to admit that an ex-g/f once convinced me to go to a homeopath to try and treat my Crohns, and back then I was completely ignorant of what that meant. Some hundreds of dollars later and a couple of weeks of taking some alcohol with water, carefully measured out in a teaspoon daily, I began to finally realise I'd been had. I wince now, but that was the first time I looked up information on homeopathy. Now, I'm not hugely intelligent, but I'm no dummy either, and have a reasonable education and understand of science, the scientific method etc; through pure ignorance I ended up handing over some cash and having a little bit of hope my health would improve. If there is something staring people in the face, people who are in my position might save their money and time.
FWIW, the only reliable 'treatment' I've found for my Crohns is pizza. And I guess even this is 99.5% psychological!
I never drank when I was first diagnosed, and didn't for some years afterwards. Now I sometimes do, but whether I do or don't there is no noticeable influence on my illness. Still, if you have found something that seems to work, you have nothing to lose by keeping at it (except if you love a beer!)
Thanks, yes, I have those things on my 'to monitor the progress of' list. Fortunately I've had a very good specialist doctor the the 15 years of my diagnosis, and he is happy to share 'research is going on in the area of...' information with me, those topics included.
Yeah the big problem is that it's sold in the drugstore right next to real medicine. It really baffles me. I used some Zicam because it was in my parents medicine cabinet and I didn't really think about it, just said "shortens duration of colds? Uh, OK, I guess I'll try it." Didn't even occur to me it wasn't real medicine! Well turns out Zicam contained zinc that destroyed some people's sense of smell! Uhhh... Whoops. I feel like a damn fool, I feel I should have known better and looked at the fine print. I went and assumed something packaged and sold as medicine was medicine.
It is also about time we force this for vitamins too. The disclaimer of "not been validated by the FDA to cure or treat a disease..." is a bunch of crap. It goes beyond false advertising, it is straight up untrue claims. They should be forced to do true double blind studies with several universities and show tangible benefit or don't advertise.
> is misinformation some sort of virus that slowly spreads
We're paying the lack of accuracy in "scientific truth". Journalists and political groups (on the Liberal side, especially) aren't innocent here.
I see that a lot with feminism.
For example: Scientific studies such as "Women in average are able to execute a parallel task in 169s, while men are able to execute in 177s" transforms into "Women 'better at multitasking' than men, study finds"[1]. Wait, what? 169s vs 177s!? Which serves the political group of feminists (hence, my stance about Liberals).
It is also widely accepted that women are paid less than men. When we dive into studies, we don't find a 30% difference; We find a heavy distortion and fact extraction, so that the worst possible interpretation of the scientific study becomes the headline of the article, and that helps liberal political groups to make us believe that women have a worse situation than men. Which, of course, conveniently forgets to mention that far more men are killed, homeless (2x in France), beaten up, harassed or commit suicide (3x in France) than women, and more are workaholics, which justifies a part of the pay difference.
I've talked about feminism but the same un-demonstration can be made about other groups targeted by the new wave of politics (=Trump).
Any normal person would be legitimate to disbelieve journalists, political groups and scientists who forget to mention some interesting fact that completely overturns the picture: 169s vs 177s means that a large part of men performs better than a large part of women on this test.
Maybe a lesson is, Liberals may have gone so far in misreporting science that they've discredited science altogether?
See? You keep at it. At what point I said the BBC article is to blame? That was you.
You are making strong claims without supporting evidence or data.
You mention things like "when you dive into the studies" yet you don't show us and we have to believe you.
What makes you different?
Also I might be slightly biased against someone who starts claiming everyone else is pushing an agenda against him. It is an irrational bias, I admit, because of how I despise the far right / white supremacism. Again, this is irrational from my side as you might not be even close to that group, but you sounded very close to it: the chosen example, the insistence on a world wide agenda against your kind, the lack of supporting proof / evidence and your follow up that didn't make a lot of sense to me (might be my poor grasp of English language).
Either way, I hope you're not offended and that you can see where I'm coming from and how your comment was perfect to illustrate op's claim.
The proof of misinformation is the BBC article itself: It starts with an inconclusive study and ends with a definitive title.
I could provide you with the hundreds of papers I've once stumbled upon[1], but it would be useless in convincing you because you don't acknowledge that articles like the BBC one discredits science.
[1] Actually they're all printed under my desk. They undemonstrate every argument of the feminists. And no-one wants to review them because they (like you) don't agree with the conclusion. That's science in reverse: "Women are oppressed, everyone knows it, so arguments against women can't be reasonably true". If you accept to start with "Are women oppressed?", comme to my place and we'll review my documents together. In the meantime the BBC article is a fine example of what is wrong with science.
It seems we're very far from each other and you have clearly made your mind up already.
That BBC article is fairly correct on what you claim false. A group solving problems in 169ms is better than another one doing it in 177ms. On average. But you seem to want to dismiss some things to support your agenda.
I don't know mate. I'm a male and I see almost daily situations where women can't feel comfortable. You might not want to consider them oppressed, but holy smokes they have to go through leaps of shit.
Again, I'm not trying to convince you. It's just my anecdotal experience, which seems supported by studies. Of course you might have the opposite experience and can dig up supporting studies.
I understand that you have no opinion about this particular topic, and I like that you are trying to understand how a supposedly educated person can reach the conclusion I reach. By the way, thank you.
> A group solving problems in 169s is clearly better than a group solving problems in 177s.
Sure, but the BBC article is titled "Women 'better at multitasking' than men", which is a deformation. I would have no problem if the BBC article were "Women were 4.6% than men on a given multitasking test", because it would communicate how small the difference is.
If I remember I discovered the article because of a BuzzFeed share titled something like "Yet another scientific study found that women are more clever than men, but they are still grossly underpaid", which is no less a stretch than the BBC article. Every word is factually correct, but they far from describe reality. Studies don't find that women are paid .77 per $1, if you take the time to read more than the title: That's an average all jobs confounded. When a study neutralizes by field, education, experience both in career and in the job, and time spent at work, they are fair to my eyes, but I havent found any yet. Averaging female factory workers with startup founders doesn't mean anything, but that becomes the headline of the newspapers and becomes an unquestionned truth, unfortunately.
The fact that you "can imagine how women can be harassed at work" is the result of hundreds of newspapers making the same mistake in article titles: Have we equally researched and communicated whether men are subject to male-specific difficulties? What if we found a relationship between x3 suicide rate, x2 homelessness rate and x17 prison rate and being a male? Would you start doing something if there was a link? What if we gave funding for those studies a much as we give funding for woman-specific studies?
If we could apply pure scientific rigor to analyzing males as much as women, I would bet my whole life's savings and 60% of all my future salaries that we'd find men are subject to more violence, physical and emotional, and more unfairness than women. If any day you start opening this can of worm, you'll notice that people don't accept your results, saying "because you have a grudge against women".
If everyone could react to the title of such BBC articles by protesting for misrepresentating the study, then the science itself would get more credit.
You seem to be abusing of whataboutism and straw manning in your comment. It's difficult to discuss when the goal posts are moved :)
In any case, I especially wanted to follow up on two things: your assumption that I think women are harassed at work based on articles is wrong on so many levels. I do have family, friends, colleagues and I see them suffering struggles that I or other male friends or colleagues don't have to go through. I see this with my own eyes.
The second is that you say males suffer more violence than women do. Yes, that's true. Who are however the ones causing such violence? But that doesn't change things. Men have been abusing their superior physical power to abuse women during history and even today in almost every part of the world.
None of that undermines you as a person for being a white male. I am fully aware of the rampant numbers on male depression and suicide rates. I am also aware that males feel often less inclined to look for help when in trouble, including extreme situations like being raped.
It is however the very same ideology that ostracise women the ones that will put pressure on you to "man up" and call you a pussy, a loser and a failure if you can't get a promotion, a submissive girlfriend or sustain a big stereotypical family with your salary.
The very same people that cause your biggest worries are the same people that tell you the rest are to blame for those. Please take a moment to think about why there's so much psychological pressure on men to be career successful... It's the same root cause that ostracises women.
We're in this together, please don't give hate a chance.
PS: I'm not surprised an educated person can share your opinion. It has nothing to do with studies and knowledge.
I don't live in a ivory tower :-)
In my case, the worst psychological trauma (because we have to call it what it is) were given by women. Specifically, one at high school and one who was my girlfriend. Society hasn't punished those women, and when I seeked for help, society (my mother, colleagues, friends, psychologists) didn't believe the trauma was that big, they just encouraged me to get over it.
So yes, I agree the bro attitude is what caused society to tell me that. I agree we need to ditch it. But as it stands, society ditches the bro attitude only when a woman is the victim. A man who doesn't want the car that goes with the job isn't a real man, while it's ok for women. Society specifically helps women because they're shy and too unconfident to be promoted as managers, but not men with the same traits.
That's why we need to fix prejudices like "All women are victims", "Women are paid .77 per dollar" or "Women are more clever than men". We need to remove the gender from those sentences. "Weak people are psychologically harmed at home", "Unconfident people aren't promoted despite better skills", "Shy people are paid less than their peers", etc. It's ok if those happen to be 95% women: Let's help people based on their weakness, not based on their gender.
About hate: Well the damage is done, so what you want from me is that I pardon women. It's not time to do it, when most party still propose even more advantages for women without acknowledging male-specific difficulties. As soon as equality for men is a right, I'll forgive what I've been through.
It's fine to post about your personal experiences when they're relevant to a good conversation, but not as part of off-topic ideological rants. The latter are not ok here; please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13011538.
Exactly. This constant badgering about "liberals" and "cucks" and other crap is a sterling example of being detached from reality.
This isn't about teams, this isn't about cheering for your "side" to win. Things like climate change shouldn't be a contest to see which worldview shouts the loudest.
Maybe it's attention deficit, drowning in information, that causes people to subconsciously demand over-simplified explanations.
This is the sort of generic flamewar tangent that I pray every day will not happen on HN today. Whimsical, specific tangents are fine, but opening a portal to a black hole is not ok. Please don't do this again.
Slightly off-topic, but I can't help but recall a rather hilarious 9 minute beat poem by Tim Minchin
"By definition", I begin
"Alternative Medicine", I continue
"Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
Do you know what they call "alternative medicine"
That's been proved to work?
Medicine."
>Again, this is irrational from my side as you might not be even close to that group
This poster said he votes "extreme right" because he pretty much blames the feminist movement on him not having a girlfriend despite admitting he lacks confidence. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12908279
By the way, I'm not stalking him or anything, I just read that post and thought "oh man that's gotta be the same guy that posted in the Trump thread" and checked to see if I was right.
The comment you're replying to doesn't say any lies. It doesn't show all your reasons to vote FN (nor that you want to vote for them), but it clearly states one of the things you shared with HN.
It seemed clear from the start that you had some kind of grudge against women and I'm trying not to judge you, because I don't know you and I'd make a wrong judgement.
However, please let me tell you that women do indeed have to go through great lengths to get the same recognition we do. If you could, would you rather be a woman? If the answer is "no", think about the reasons.
Things are definitely not black or white, but whatever your feelings are towards discrimination in favour of women, please please please take some time to walk in their shoes an understand how what might seem unimportant or a joke to us could put them in discomfort or just plainly scare them. Think about the bullies at school (you've mentioned identifying as a nerd) and how you would smile at their jokes and try to be best buds just because you felt scared by their physical superiority.
> blames the feminist movement on him not having a girlfriend
That was too short to be accurate, the relationships between those events are parallel, not consequences.
Look, I'm the result of positive action: We've done lots of things in favour of women. I'm actually grateful that society did that, because it's just plain better when a bro group becomes a mixed group. And the result is much more in line with my ethics of equality of chances for everyone.
Unfortunately there are 2 drawbacks:
1. The mixed environment we have in programming is not a mixed environment. It's a separate environment with brogrammers in the mixed team, and girlsgrammers (I'm coining the term right now with you). Those girls are members of Girlz In Web movements. They get support from the company to get training. They get support from the team lead to develop their skills. They didn't have to have been programmers for 10 years before applying, because managers look for their human skills. They are targetted by specific job ads which filter by genre (ex: Twitter ads, Google Ads, Facebook ads). They get help from networks that are filtered for women. They complain that brogrammers harass them. So you may have a team with up to half of women (only 30% in my experience), but as males we don't have mixity and new acquaintances: We have a bunch of people who only talk to us if they want to, who are specifically protected by the management and who will be promoted anyway.
2. It is a known risk of positive discrimination, that we don't promote people who deserve it because we promote people to fit criteria. I'm a kid of that generation, I'm the one who repeatedly couldn't be promoted because there's a woman in the group. Now that you look at me in the eyes, what do you tell me? "Sorry for you mate, you couldn't develop your skills as a Team Lead, because we had this girl to promote, who's 4 years younger than you, doesn't know what an HTTP header is, but she's a girl"? That's not even what you tell me. You/society tells me "Those women, who got promoted early, aren't paid as much as males of the same management level, and it's unfair. By the way, men aren't oppressed.".
About empathy... I get that women sometimes feel impressed. That's why I really take care of being respectful with women and not talk to them when they don't show signs that they agree to, because I'm afraid they will complain of harassment. Guess what, that made me so respectful with women that I'm still single. Story of my life.
Anyway, back to the point: There isn't a correct depiction of the supposed wage gap in news articles, because they misreport scientific studies with blanket statements like "Women are better at multitasking than men". According to newspapers and if we believe the scientific studies they report, women only have qualities and males only have defects, except strength, which is the reason why men are rapists. I'm not even caricaturing much, it's pretty much equivalent to what they say. So we can't be surprised that men (in my situation, or other groups when newspapers misreport another truth about other topic) look for "more accurate sources". Because conflating "177s vs 169s" with "Women are better at..." isn't genuinely accurate, and repeating misreporting all across newspapers when it serves specific minorities isn't accurate either.
my guess is you got passed on for team lead because none of your peers wanted you there.
If the girl was promoted but an idiot than chances are it's the Dilbert principle. It's a fake promotion to get her out of the way where she can do least harm...
None of the above have anything to do with you being single
FACT: There's more men than women in senior leadership positions. Ergo your hypothesis that women get promoted more than men is false.
I wouldn't want someone as bitter as you as a team leader either. Team leader is a diplomatic position as much as it is a technical position. Team leader is certainly not a position for everyone and I wouldn't personally want to do it.
>According to newspapers and if we believe the scientific studies they report, women only have qualities and males only have defects, except strength, which is the reason why men are rapists. I'm not even caricaturing much, it's pretty much equivalent to what they say.
This is also factually incorrect.
I don't mean to be rude but your energy is best directed inwards into examining what is causing you so much emotional distress and work on fixing that. It's not a problem with the outside world and posting off topic flamebait rants on Hacker News is not a good way to improve your physiological health.
If it's not a vendetta, it's certainly a personal attack of the kind that's not OK here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13008211 and marked it off-topic.
In addition to everything said, please don't take homeopathic drugs on the theory that "at least it's harmless." This usually happens when people try to please someone (parents, friends) by "just trying" homeopathy. I made the mistake of doing that, and it was definitely not harmless - the "medicine" contained strong allergens which not only caused hives, but resulted in the acquisition, for a few years, of allergies I never had before - apparently this can happen with sensitization caused by strong allergens.
The homeopathic "doctor" was delighted. You see, the other thing in homeopathy, apart from the belief in water memory, is the concept of most disease as a type of itch ("psora"), which can erupt through the skin ("psora miasm"). No, really, I didn't make that up, you can (with some difficulty) find this stuff with Google. Since like cures like, allergens such as poison ivy, which cause skin rashes, are thought to be curing internal disease, and some homeopathic medicines are full of them, and are used as a complement to the super-diluted ones. Stay away from that whole swamp.
I feel alone in thinking I don't want the government regulating any of this. What's next? A prayer disclaimer as you walk into a church?
The people who buy this are probably the ones who can't afford real medicine, and now regulation is going to make this even more expensive. If you think this is the government trying to protect us against ourselves: it's not, and that's not the role of government anyway. This is just an alternative medicine attack to remove competition and keep the price of real drugs high.
Putting on a label doesn't cost anything. I don't see why you think this would make (non-) medicine more expensive?
Also, the FDA has the responsibility to make sure that fake medicine cannot be advertised as being medicine. It doesn't remove competition, it removes fraudulent competition from competing with real medicine.
I'm not always for regulation but in this instance I absolutely think it is necessary.
"The people who buy this are probably the ones who can't afford real medicine"
This is the reason. If they can't afford real medicine I am doubly-supportive of labeling that prevents them from wasting that money entirely. I'm also not sure how often real medicine is more expensive... I've seen some expensive homeopathic treatments.
Homeopathic treatments are simply not fit for purpose, even by the standards of ordinary products. If an engine oil failed to provide any lubrication, or if an electric cord could not power devices attached to it, it would promptly be withdrawn from the market. Standards should only be higher for products that are intended for human consumption.
So over here every pack of cigarettes has a big label saying 'smoking kills' and might show graphic images that 'prove' that smoking can cause lung cancer, blindness etc.
Given that I don't smoke and hate the smell I'm sure that I'm heavily biased, but I still think that this is a good thing. The government isn't restricting access to your drug of choice, it just tries to make it less appealing.
Labeling water with 'Actually, this is useless' feels like a good idea to me. People that jumped the fence, 'true believers', won't be affected. They shake their head, mumble that The System is broken and doesn't support alternative treatments and .. will continue to buy that shit.
But people that are in need of help might actually read that disclaimer and save time & money.
If you cannot buy real medicine for some reason (how barbaric is that, btw?) I don't think that you should buy overpriced water instead.
This sounds cute and it's probably true that water has some subtle hard-to-reproduce property of retaining certain configurations, but even if this were true, what's so great about it?
I'm not entirely convinced that a hard-to-reproduce configuration of water will affect my physiology, and if it does, then this would have to be put through scientific rigeur, which it is not, it's performed on blind faith that it works.
Here are the must take next steps for US government:
1. All churches, mosques, temples etc. to have a board outside their "Prayer Does Not Work."
2. All astrologers, tarot card readers, psychic readers etc. to have a large bold faced notice "This does not work".
3. All laws passed by congress must begin with "This might have severe unintended consequences that are bigger than the problem this bill claims to solve".
It's scary how much power simply give to the government, and how thankful they are that government officials who they've never met can make decisions for people neither of them have ever met.
253 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadThe rest of the placebo effect, outside of that domain, is being increasingly found to be the result of under-powered experiments.
To show something only has a placebo effect is the equivalent of showing it does not work.
The (understandable, traditional) reason for measuring relative to placebo is that, "well, you don't need the drug if it's only as good as what a placebo gives -- just use the cheaper placebo! You should only bother with some special drug if it's better than what mere belief-in-effectiveness yields."
But that assumes that people are equally credulous of every placebo; if a person is more credulous of homeopathy, and credulity is hard to manufacture, then it's not quite wrong to say that it "works" under a relevant definition.
(I know this is kind of an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pen technicality, but eventually we'll want to actually understand why belief-in-effectiveness can matter at all, so we can exploit it, and reasoning like yours tends to give the idea that such an effort, by definition, can't work.)
Which is to say, we're not 100% sure it's bullshit—we can't be, in science—but we're 99.999999% sure, or so.
It's better to make the negative claim (the former) rather than risk losing what little authority you have with people who are struggling to understand the evidence behind these products to begin with.
However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.
"No scientific evidence this product works" does not mean the same thing as "this product does not work!" People confusing the two is very harmful.
It could mean, for example, "there is plausible mechanism of action but there hasn't been much research on the topic [for whatever reason]" or it could mean "there's absolutely no known mechanism of action, it doesn't make physiological sense, and a century of research has proved it doesn't work." These two statements are obviously not the same!
> However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.
I don't think that this is how medical labelling should work. If you want to sell a product on the basis of its effect on your health, then the onus should be on you to prove that it works, not on others to prove that it doesn't. In this setting, I think that a presumption of guilt (ineffectiveness or harmfulness) until proven otherwise is appropriate.
The fundamental problem I think is that much of society simply doesn't understand what science is, and why it's important, or why they should care about scientific studies in regard to allegedly medicinal products they may use.
I'm on a facebook list for dads, and after it came out that a homeopathic teething gel killed 10 kids (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/health/teething-remedies-i...) someone asked if it was worth the risk to keep giving to his kids, since it worked.
I tried to explain to him that homeopathic medicine is either 1) Nothing, if they diluted it 'correctly', or never bothered to put the poison in there to begin with or 2) Poison, if they failed to dilute it properly 3) Maybe some kind of actual medicine, in which case it's not actually homeopathic.
There are no other options.
He responded: "Well, it seemed to work for my kid, so I'm going to keep using it."
There were an additional 400 children caused serious harm.
I'm baffled by the attitude of parents like the one you mention.
http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html
There are both high-dilutionists and low-dilutionists within homeopathy.[1][2] I'm not saying you should run out and buy a bunch of homeopathic remedies or whatever, but also realize that the mainstream 'skeptic' account of homeopathy is not especially accurate.
Also realize that the latest scientific research on food allergies involves homeopathic-like mithridatism, so even though the idea of a like-cures-like high dilutionist treatment isn't anywhere near a universal panacea, it does at least appear to work in certain limited cases.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/History-American-Homeopathy-Academic-...
[2] http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/202602
James Randi famously starts out talks swallowing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills. He's not dead yet despite being almost 90.
And that's exactly why I posted my comment, because it's wildly irresponsible to post comments leading people to believe that they can do the same thing and come away unharmed. The fact is that if you chug a bottle of 3x diluted poison ivy oil then you're almost certainly going to die. And not because it wasn't diluted properly, because it had other ingredients, etc.
Most homeopathic treatments on the market today are highly diluted. But not all. And since historically there was more of an even split between high dilutionists and low dilutionists, it's not unlikely that in the future even more low dilution homeopathic products will come on the market. So when you post shit that's going to come up in Google for the next twenty years that's implicitly encouraging folks to try some stunt that could easily get them killed, don't expect to not get called out on it.
Haha ok, yes, you have a point there. I guess it is really dangerous to assume that all homeopathic remedies are pure water, because some of them aren't actually diluted that much. Some of them still contain poison.
If you wanted to induce a placebo effect, playing up the potency of the sugar pill would be helpful - for example saying "Do not, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, take more than two, as this can result produce DANGEROUS effects" is a lot better than going "Ehh, take more if it'll make you feel better, this stuff's completely inert anyways.".
I believe we already do this in medical field: for example those big ibuprofens they give you after a trip to the ER. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it the exact. same. thing. as just taking multiple over-the-counter ibuprofen pills? The underlying idea being that the patient will be satisfied the doctor is "doing something" to alleviate his pain, while not having to write risky pain killer Rx.
Maybe, homeopathy works in a similar way - it gives a compelling sci-fi / witchcraft / whatever-you-fetish backstory to a sugar pill. And when your subconscious buys in, you may cure yourself. Certainly with the example of insomnia, it seems quite plausible.
As you say modern medicine embraces like cures like for multiple conditions I can think of off hand, including, as you mention immunotherapy for allergies. Others I believe include anti-venom and flu vaccination.
Also, the article itself is clear: many are diluted to be rendered useless and in general aren't based on science. Well there is a clear gap and what I consider an acknowledgement some of these therapies are based on science and do contain the active ingredient. In my mind that makes them not far off from vitamins, many of which if you buy off the shelf and break open will be filled with flour and other fillers. Still that is not to say the science behind vitamin supplements isn't real and there aren't some reputable companies making quality products.
Now I am not encouraging deception in the marketplace, or giving peanuts to kids with peanut allergies. Though that is part of real science and modern medicine using like cures like.
After reading this comment it seems that the books you read are very suspicious.
And the only thing that can be read had nothing to do with homeopathy.
So it is not a like cures like process; it is a processed hybrid molecule that induces an immune response. Another organism has been through an infection to learn how to combat it so you don't have to. Vaccines prevent an infection from taking hold with biologically modified proteins, it doesn't cure an infection.
[EDIT] fixed typo and thinko
Others have also presented arguments why immunotherapy for allergies isn't really like cures like. However, nothing as comprehensive as your post to suggest any significant processing on the vaccination level as much as a simple reduction to the chemical allergen to reduce and/or prevent allergies to said chemical.
Almost no other medical treatments have such evidence which is why homeopathy is labelled as having no evidence to support it and that is being generous as plenty of people have gone looking for evidence to support it but there is no credible evidence to be found after 100 years of trying.
Vaccines and immunotherapy work by giving the body small amounts of the actual thing that is harmful (usually dead, in the case of vaccines). It's easy to see why this is a reasonable approach - it's giving the body "sparring practice" against the disease or substance.
Antivenom works similarly, except that the antibodies are grown in another animal, probably because by the time someone is bitten, there isn't time for their bodies to learn how to produce it themselves.
Homeopathy is based around finding substances which cause similar symptoms. They have no relation to the actual cause of the condition that they're supposed to treat. Is the "cure" for Ebola any random chemical that happens to cause humans to bleed out of every orifice? Is the "cure" for Alzheimer's any random chemical that causes people to lose their memory? How many conditions cause headaches, or nausea, or lack of energy? Are we supposed to believe that anything which can cause those symptoms is a universal cure for all of those conditions? If so, why bother with snake oil at all? Just make sure that one is exposed to a variety of cold/flu viruses, and they should (according to the "like symptoms" "theory") cancel each other out.
The whole concept didn't make sense in the 19th century, and it certainly doesn't today.
The reason it doesn't make sense is because you're mischaracterizing it. Most homeopaths didn't believe that every substance that caused similar symptoms would be a cure, but rather they believed that these substances would be a fertile ground to look for treatments. It's basically like how today we consider drugs that cure diseases in rats as being promising to study further in humans.
It was homeopaths who introduced the idea of clinical trials to mainstream medicine, and if they believed that like cured like in every instance this obviously wouldn't have happened.
That's still based on a pretty bad misunderstanding of how the body works. The action of a virus or bacteria is usually pretty undetectable. If you had no immune system, you wouldn't even get a cough or a runny nose.
A runny nose, a cough, vomiting, and diarrhea are the body's response mechanisms. They aren't caused by any one disease in particular, they are the body's way of trying to flush out the infection.
If you look for the cure in something that also makes your body angry and tries to flush it out, well you're not going to get very far. You're just going to make the problem much worse, and weaken your immune system further. So the whole idea of homeopathy is flawed from the very beginning.
This is completely different to testing cures in rats before human trials. I don't even really see the connection, to be honest.
Even if a hypothetical scenario would actualize where it is found that some specific homeopathic drug/treatment combination is effective as medicine it would not validate the rest of the tradition in any way.
http://abchomeopathy.com/avpot.php/Rhus-t?defaultpotency=3X
It looks like both homeopathy and the vaccine were even introduced in the same year(1796), which was a spooky coincidence when I looked it up just now.
Not even close to the same thing.
A cutting edge treatment for nut allergies is to consume small amounts of nuts (carefully prepared, etc.).
edit: I want to differentiate the nut thing from homeopathy. The idea there is to consume a very small and carefully measured portion of the nut, not some nonsense about training molecules.
It makes total sense for nut allergy where the disease is the intolerance; if you become immune to the substance you are cured.
Toothache is not an intolerance to deadly nightshades and no level of resistance to the poison will cure what is a totally unrelated issue; pain caused by a something slowly digging a hole through my gum.
Huh. Well, we do inject people with weakened diseases (vaccines). So in that example, "like" really does cure "like", by training our immune system.
So, uhh, that part is kind of true. Only when it's not diluted so many times that it ends up being pure water.
I guess that their downfall in this case was that the manufacturer was a True Believer who actually bothered with the whole add poison to water then water it down until poison is gone, rather than, y'know, just packaging tap water.
The snake oil might be completely ineffective, but it better at least be oil from an actual snake.
Is it good to make pancakes?
Wait, where do you think the vast majority of bottled waters come from? Actual springs?
Wow. That is messed up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna is not something to be playing with when it comes to "inconsistent amounts".
---
The foliage and berries are extremely toxic, containing tropane alkaloids. These toxins include atropine, scopolamine and hyoscyamine, which cause a bizarre delirium and hallucinations,[1] and are also used as pharmaceutical anticholinergics.
---
Yap, perfect for unregulated "natural" cure for babies.
To be fair, there is: 4) Placebo.
Placebos do work. So it might well be working for his kid.
> or never bothered to put the poison in there to begin with
In that case, it would be pure water, and therefore it would be completely effective for treating the condition of dehydration.
Maybe you can suggest a few things that do work..
Rubber teethers with a gel in them that you can put in the freezer and get cold, but not so cold they burn or feel uncomfortable or could choke them (like ice cubes).
Cut, cool, washed celery stalks at least 4" long, so the baby (or you) can pull them back out of their mouth if the baby starts to stuff them down their throat (which happens). The baby will instinctively pull it back out if it hurts. (Note: carrots and most other vegetables are NOT safe, because the baby can break off little pieces and choke on them, but you can put them in a baby straining mesh thing to keep small pieces from choking them.)
To all parents (especially on sites that are not HN): please do not put anything in your baby's mouth that might hurt them. It's better to listen to them cry then to risk hurting them.
EDIT: removed anbesol/orajel suggestion as unsafe and probably ineffective anyway.
They recommend putting pressure on the child's gums and/or providing a cold washcloth or teething ring to chew on. Make sure you supervise so the child doesn't choke.
http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm385817.ht...
The AAP are more direct "The American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend putting any prescription or over-the-counter pain relievers or medication that contain lidocaine [Anbesol] or benzocaine [Orajel] on babies' gums. These products are not useful for teething pain because they wash out of the baby's mouth in minutes."
https://www.aappublications.org/content/35/8/32.1
In short, the actual medicine is just as bad. It also doesn't work and causes death.
Neither organization recommend the use of vegetables.
Teething is itself natural, safe, and perfectly normal, even if is a bit painful... so letting the process occur naturally is the most homeopathic approach. It's ironic and tragic that people are giving their precious little ones poison to stop what is really just pain from normal growth.
Real "homeopathic" treatments that actually work are things like a rubber teething toy to chew on, or a stalk of celery... that's about as natural as it gets! Poisons need not apply.
For example look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitalism - infants will themself to death because they are not loved.
Ask doctors and nurses and they'll tell you about people with and without the will to live, and how having a good outlook can mean the difference between life and death.
These are infants who are well cared for, fed, clean, warm. But they die simply because they are not held.
Even if they did die is quite a stretch to assume they willed themselves dead. Infant lack a mental concept of death or dying to even be able to will themselves dead.
As for a cause, I would assume something similar to amblyopia.
So it cured someone, yet didn't work?
I don't think you realize how powerful the placebo effect actually is.
But that is simply incorrect, placebos can cure, yes, actually cure. And not just mental conditions either (which is another common, yet incorrect, belief).
Last night the baby went to sleep because I walked counter-clockwise while singing lullabies? That's it, that's the only direction I can walk in from here on out while putting her to bed. The kid ate her veggies with no complaint because I was humming The Simpsons theme? It's now the official meal-time song.
When she gets older and starts having well-developed preferences, then I will no longer be crazy - only my behavior will be, because I'll be in thrall to a tiny crazy person.
Talking to nurses working with babies apparently this is a thing and they get to understand babies quite well when they cry.
Parents rate their children as hyperactive after consuming sugar, no matter if the "sugar" is actually just red colored water. It's perception that's changed.
Since there's almost no regulation the buyer has no way of knowing if it was correctly diluted or not.
http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/uc...
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/fda-homeopathic-teeth...
It seems we're just generally very bad at this stuff as a species.
You're not going to rationally logically reason someone out of a position they got into via completely irrational illogical unreasoning belief.
Now you might replace their irrational illogical unreasoning belief with another like faith healing or anything an actor in a tv commercial wearing a doctors white coat says is true.
As an analogy, in the history of mankind I don't think any Christian Creationist has ever been converted to evolution by throwing scientific journal papers at him. You'd have better luck setting him on fire or being torn apart by lions in a Colosseum and even that mostly doesn't work. But Christian Creationists DO convert to other religions every day, all the time, plenty of currently Buddhists or Hindus or Pagans or Satanists or whatever.
I've noticed a sharp uptick in people utterly detached from reality lately where presumably the former checks to keep people grounded, like a critical news ecosystem, or a robust education system, has imploded.
It feels like we're slowly falling off the trajectory of the Renaissance and Enlightenment; avoiding fatalism about that is my main challenge right now.
You used to need substantial capital to earn the reputation as a serious news organization, but now the barrier to entry is a vaguely-authoritative domain name and social media accounts.
But for the people in charge its more like:
"would you gain more authoritarian political power by promoting that we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?"
Now lets add another wrinkle... lets say by the magic of groupthink 99% of one population is already a devout member of one belief system. If 50% of climate scientists (small group though they are) were dyed in the wool Republicans then coming out against them would cost votes prestige and power. But if they already are indoctrinated to hate you and your race and your religion and your group, you don't lose very much in a practical sense by signalling against them. In fact as a member of the opposition you probably should oppose them on general principles and your own group expects you to live up to your ... devoutness.
I've seen it, watching people nearby me convert to denialism. I have to admit I agree with them on a lot of smaller details. A fascination with symbolic level commitments that are a rounding error WRT altering the Earth's long term problems but ruin innumerably human lives in the short term. "This symbolic proposal will help absolutely nothing in the long term, but in the short term it'll sure destroy a lot of jobs, jobs for people that our political group are trained to bitterly hate..."
Absolute power corrupts absolutely and its not hard to absolute power in the form of political consensus in legacy mass media, academia, hollywood, SV. And with that absolute power comes corruption. Telling the truth becomes an act of disbelief or apostasy, or you can faithfully believe while knowingly lie. Its not just the left, in that any group thats 99% composed of one political group tends to fester and get smelly, there's plenty of this on the right. You can only gain power by a public display of ever more devout true believer statements, truth is gone out the window. Ask yourself if people gain power in academia or the legacy media by telling the truth or by loudly proclaiming their devotion to the political causes that 99% of them share... that's what post-truth world means. A healthy balanced competition would force the truth to make an occasional appearance, but in a polarized consensus of groupthink its just a legacy fable. Remember when that stuff was about the truth? Yeah not so much anymore.
Combine the two ideas above and its a real mess. Atomized individuals and groups are broken off into groupthink hubs that rapidly share no common ground or affection with any other group and their interactions are based on gaining internal strength by showing their devout belief by denigrating the opposition. Traditionally this leads to revolution and civil war. I'd be surprised if the 50 states are together much longer. Frankly I can't wait, as the younger I am the better I'll come out in the rebuilding, assuming I survive. I'd rather rebuild at age 50 than age 70, for example.
Most newspapers, television and radio stations, along with the big new sites are controlled by a handful of companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...) that are far from left-leaning.
Rupert Murdoch, as but one example, is the driving force behind Fox News. Is that part of some grand left-wing conspiracy?
The number of left-leaning publications is pretty thin. The Huffington Post, parts of MSNBC, The Daily Show, and a case could be made for The Economist and The Guardian. For every one of those there's a dozen like The Daily Mail or USA Today.
> I'm not sure the SJWs have anything in common with the vast majority of the country...
"SJW" is a strawman pretty much by definition, but those who get slammed as being one are typically in the under 30 crowd which are generally more accepting and understanding of social justice issues. The so-called SJW group has more in common with their generation than "the majority of the country", but that's how things always are.
She's also being painted as a communist by the extreme right which are so far to the one side of the political spectrum that everyone else is considered a "liberal" by comparison.
I agree that the left/right stuff is irrelevant when it's establishment and profit driven.
If you want actual left-leaning news you need to visit publications that don't give a fuck, like The Rolling Stone or Vice Magazine where they're not part of the establishment and have nothing to lose.
The challenge now is to predict whether society in 50 years is going to look more like "Idiocracy" or "The Walking Dead".
Either way, I don't foresee a good future for the human race.
Hopefully, in some parallel universe, humans have avoided this fate, and are continuing the trajectory of the Enlightenment, and will proceed to exploring the stars, going where no one has gone before.
I'm not sure which is worse.
I can't wait to see all the conspiracy theories that pop up around self-driving cars.
ELON MUSK DIDN'T GO TO MARS, WAS ALL TO DODGE TAXES.
In these hyper-partisan environments, everyone is afraid to tell the whole truth because Team A might use pieces of Team B's statements against them (see the sibling comments about feminism and global warming, or anything around the current election, but any and every partisan topic applies). So what happens is people choose tidbits of truth that fully support their side's claims and ignore the rest of truth, and make sure everyone on their team follows suit. These tidbits of truth then get used in broader contexts and somehow become universal truths. These now universal truths are not questioned in one's own echo chamber because it would work against their shared goals.
Team B then admonishes Team A within the Team B echo chamber because of the obvious ignorance of reality of the truth tidbits that became universal truths. The (not so) funny thing is that Team B is completely unaware that they do exactly the same thing.
So, inside the Team A echo chamber all you hear is how the other side is completely ignorant of reality, suppresses the truth, ignores facts, outright lies and deceives, while our team is where the logic and reason exist. And the exact same thing is happening in the Team B echo chamber. Both teams are equally fervent about their superiority over the other team. And both sides have the same answer to the problem: get rid of the other team's echo chambers and everything will be fine.
The actual truth cannot exist in this kind of environment.
When reality becomes inconvenient to people, they'll happily ignore it and do whatever it takes to get by. As long as they're not ignoring something that's going to imminently harm them, they can get away with it for a long, long time, especially when they can find a community that reinforces it.
You also never know what people actually believe, in their heart of hearts, and they may be professing nonsense so they can signal that their in some group, or because it's what they think you should believe, or what you they think that you want them to believe, etc.
The problem is a worrying lack of critical thinking.
It's much more likely that someone will reject a truth from an untrusted source than an untruth, even a clear untruth, from a trusted source. This is always true at some level. There is so much data on everything that all of it cannot be considered and independently evaluated by each person; at some point you have to believe that someone else who knows more about this than you do has verified the claims.
[1] http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/teach-philosophy-to...
They'll simply put the name on the label without an claim about what it does, and leave that to books.
The regulation will do nothing.
It seems that almost every article I read on HN these days has someone trying to somehow inject a Trump or Brexit reference.
Where exactly in my post did I blame anything on trump?
Let me put it this way: whatever the bonds are between homeopathy, Brexit, and Trump, they're far too weak to justify pulling an HN thread in that direction. That's because we want discussions to stay specific; when they go generic, bad things happen: the comments get less interesting, less civil, and more numerous.
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6860/has-most-pe...
If it is placebo effect, it will not be effective for multiple times at multiple times in same person, could say there is personal bias. There are many conditions like cold, migraine which have no definite treatment in modern mainstream medicine, so there is no harm in experimenting homeopathy when having these conditions. I believe it is better to get a diagnosis from regular doctor first and then use homeopathy.
But reality is that it doesn't work, it is just a big fraud
When you have any actual proof and no the same "Belieeeve!!!" call us
Like you just claimed it "does work" without any goddamn proof. Bulllllllshiiitttttt.
From the wikipedia page:
"In Germany, to become a homeopathic physician, one must attend a three-year training programme, while France, Austria and Denmark mandate licences to diagnose any illness or dispense of any product whose purpose is to treat any illness.[284]...
The Indian government recognizes homeopathy as one of its national systems of medicine;"
You could draw multiple conclusion from that. Nonetheless, it is interesting.
Isn't like cures like the principle behind many modern medical therapies, such as: flu vaccination; anti-venom; and immunotherapy for allergies.
Not saying this is wrong decision, but its always interesting to watch the Government pick winners and losers. In this case their justification includes "many are diluted to the extent..." and "in general claims not based on science". So is that an acknowledgment products are based on science and not diluted to the extent rendering them useless? On the other hand its great watching members of congress explain why they refuse to pass laws require labeling of food containing GMO, because they generally acknowledge GMO could be harmful to consumers but the science is still out and so until then consumers shouldn't be making their purchasing decisions based on GMO labels.
Homeopathy works by taking a chemical and diluting it, generally to the point where it practically doesn't exist. Best case scenario, it's a sugar pill, worst case, they don't dilute enough with something dangerous and you are taking poison.
This isn't picking winners and losers, it's consumer protection that's required for a free market to be fair to consumers. If homeopathic producers follow clinical standards and proven that their products produce statistically better outcomes, then they can call it medicine and sell it on the market.
Certainly I could be wrong it's just that "process" sounds a lot like immunotherapy for allergies. I am not trying to lump homeopathy and immunotherapy in the same boat by any means, but looking beyond the differences in the two I think it is possible to be more open minded than labeling the like cures like doctrine pseudo science.
>This isn't picking winners and losers, it's consumer protection that's required for a free market to be fair to consumers.
Like I said I don't disagree with the labeling, but that doesn't mean there aren't winners and losers being picked. Sure its fair for consumers to know homeopathy treatments haven't been tested (not unlike supplements require FDA warnings), but they are still losers while others are winners and escape fair disclosures to consumers (e.g. my example of no GMO labeling).
They do sound similar!
The items you cite work on the principle of training the immune system to react to known pathogens in ways that allow an effective immunoresponse later. Homeopathy works by diluting some compound to the point where you might have one molecule of it in a homeopathic dose and positing that this is a cure.
The former isn't "like cures like". It's more like an educational process, based on an understanding of how immune systems work. The latter isn't really "like cures like" either, because one molecule of anything in a teaspoon of water isn't enough to matter to anything or anyone.
You're absolutely right. The processes do sound similar! They're just very different in very important ways well past how similar they may superficially sound.
My mother in law just gave me a bottle of pills containing a Chinese herb meant to treat hair prematurely graying. I don't mind trying it and finding out it doesn't work in order to keep her happy but I've ran into some reports that it can cause liver damage, but I can't gauge how reliable those reports are. Any tips on how to find scientific research on things like this?
The product is called "Fu-Ti"
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/sidebar-whats-in-th...
In before the stereotypical MiL jokes along the lines of "of course the pills are pure cyanide" etc.
Search PubMed there seem to be a few papers around indicating it's toxicity and discussing it like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22210538
A few thoughts as someone who has pursued a lot of alternative medicine (successfully, with a very critical eye):
Minerals, like zinc, can build up in the body. Thus they are a means to wind up poisoned. (Too much of anything is not good for you. Even water can kill you if consumed in excess. It gets called water poisoning.)
I was told by people who did their research that B vitamins (particularly PABA) and nutritional support for the adrenals can reverse grey hair. I was going prematurely grey due to a serious health crisis. I had some limited success with this approach in my thirties.
You could try taking zinc supplements to see if that is, in fact, the active ingredient in this super secret mumbo jumbo, minus the part where you expose yourself to god-knows-what.
If you don't actually care about your hair going grey, I strongly suggest you just tell her "No thanks." You shouldn't have to experiment with your own health to appease anyone at all.
Best.
It's not perfect but they have assembled information on quite a variety of substances and scientific trials therof.
These debates always devolve into how placebo is a proven effect and doctors should prescribe placebos. Placebos seem to have limited effects though (they're not going to cure cancer or a cold) so this feels like a red herring.
FWIW, the only reliable 'treatment' I've found for my Crohns is pizza. And I guess even this is 99.5% psychological!
But I love not spending days in hospital more.
:)
We're paying the lack of accuracy in "scientific truth". Journalists and political groups (on the Liberal side, especially) aren't innocent here.
I see that a lot with feminism.
For example: Scientific studies such as "Women in average are able to execute a parallel task in 169s, while men are able to execute in 177s" transforms into "Women 'better at multitasking' than men, study finds"[1]. Wait, what? 169s vs 177s!? Which serves the political group of feminists (hence, my stance about Liberals).
It is also widely accepted that women are paid less than men. When we dive into studies, we don't find a 30% difference; We find a heavy distortion and fact extraction, so that the worst possible interpretation of the scientific study becomes the headline of the article, and that helps liberal political groups to make us believe that women have a worse situation than men. Which, of course, conveniently forgets to mention that far more men are killed, homeless (2x in France), beaten up, harassed or commit suicide (3x in France) than women, and more are workaholics, which justifies a part of the pay difference.
I've talked about feminism but the same un-demonstration can be made about other groups targeted by the new wave of politics (=Trump).
Any normal person would be legitimate to disbelieve journalists, political groups and scientists who forget to mention some interesting fact that completely overturns the picture: 169s vs 177s means that a large part of men performs better than a large part of women on this test.
Maybe a lesson is, Liberals may have gone so far in misreporting science that they've discredited science altogether?
[1] "Women 'better at multitasking' than men, study finds" – http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24645100
You are making strong claims without supporting evidence or data.
You mention things like "when you dive into the studies" yet you don't show us and we have to believe you.
What makes you different?
Also I might be slightly biased against someone who starts claiming everyone else is pushing an agenda against him. It is an irrational bias, I admit, because of how I despise the far right / white supremacism. Again, this is irrational from my side as you might not be even close to that group, but you sounded very close to it: the chosen example, the insistence on a world wide agenda against your kind, the lack of supporting proof / evidence and your follow up that didn't make a lot of sense to me (might be my poor grasp of English language).
Either way, I hope you're not offended and that you can see where I'm coming from and how your comment was perfect to illustrate op's claim.
I could provide you with the hundreds of papers I've once stumbled upon[1], but it would be useless in convincing you because you don't acknowledge that articles like the BBC one discredits science.
[1] Actually they're all printed under my desk. They undemonstrate every argument of the feminists. And no-one wants to review them because they (like you) don't agree with the conclusion. That's science in reverse: "Women are oppressed, everyone knows it, so arguments against women can't be reasonably true". If you accept to start with "Are women oppressed?", comme to my place and we'll review my documents together. In the meantime the BBC article is a fine example of what is wrong with science.
That BBC article is fairly correct on what you claim false. A group solving problems in 169ms is better than another one doing it in 177ms. On average. But you seem to want to dismiss some things to support your agenda.
I don't know mate. I'm a male and I see almost daily situations where women can't feel comfortable. You might not want to consider them oppressed, but holy smokes they have to go through leaps of shit.
Again, I'm not trying to convince you. It's just my anecdotal experience, which seems supported by studies. Of course you might have the opposite experience and can dig up supporting studies.
> A group solving problems in 169s is clearly better than a group solving problems in 177s.
Sure, but the BBC article is titled "Women 'better at multitasking' than men", which is a deformation. I would have no problem if the BBC article were "Women were 4.6% than men on a given multitasking test", because it would communicate how small the difference is.
If I remember I discovered the article because of a BuzzFeed share titled something like "Yet another scientific study found that women are more clever than men, but they are still grossly underpaid", which is no less a stretch than the BBC article. Every word is factually correct, but they far from describe reality. Studies don't find that women are paid .77 per $1, if you take the time to read more than the title: That's an average all jobs confounded. When a study neutralizes by field, education, experience both in career and in the job, and time spent at work, they are fair to my eyes, but I havent found any yet. Averaging female factory workers with startup founders doesn't mean anything, but that becomes the headline of the newspapers and becomes an unquestionned truth, unfortunately.
The fact that you "can imagine how women can be harassed at work" is the result of hundreds of newspapers making the same mistake in article titles: Have we equally researched and communicated whether men are subject to male-specific difficulties? What if we found a relationship between x3 suicide rate, x2 homelessness rate and x17 prison rate and being a male? Would you start doing something if there was a link? What if we gave funding for those studies a much as we give funding for woman-specific studies?
If we could apply pure scientific rigor to analyzing males as much as women, I would bet my whole life's savings and 60% of all my future salaries that we'd find men are subject to more violence, physical and emotional, and more unfairness than women. If any day you start opening this can of worm, you'll notice that people don't accept your results, saying "because you have a grudge against women".
If everyone could react to the title of such BBC articles by protesting for misrepresentating the study, then the science itself would get more credit.
You seem to be abusing of whataboutism and straw manning in your comment. It's difficult to discuss when the goal posts are moved :)
In any case, I especially wanted to follow up on two things: your assumption that I think women are harassed at work based on articles is wrong on so many levels. I do have family, friends, colleagues and I see them suffering struggles that I or other male friends or colleagues don't have to go through. I see this with my own eyes.
The second is that you say males suffer more violence than women do. Yes, that's true. Who are however the ones causing such violence? But that doesn't change things. Men have been abusing their superior physical power to abuse women during history and even today in almost every part of the world.
None of that undermines you as a person for being a white male. I am fully aware of the rampant numbers on male depression and suicide rates. I am also aware that males feel often less inclined to look for help when in trouble, including extreme situations like being raped.
It is however the very same ideology that ostracise women the ones that will put pressure on you to "man up" and call you a pussy, a loser and a failure if you can't get a promotion, a submissive girlfriend or sustain a big stereotypical family with your salary.
The very same people that cause your biggest worries are the same people that tell you the rest are to blame for those. Please take a moment to think about why there's so much psychological pressure on men to be career successful... It's the same root cause that ostracises women.
We're in this together, please don't give hate a chance.
PS: I'm not surprised an educated person can share your opinion. It has nothing to do with studies and knowledge. I don't live in a ivory tower :-)
So yes, I agree the bro attitude is what caused society to tell me that. I agree we need to ditch it. But as it stands, society ditches the bro attitude only when a woman is the victim. A man who doesn't want the car that goes with the job isn't a real man, while it's ok for women. Society specifically helps women because they're shy and too unconfident to be promoted as managers, but not men with the same traits.
That's why we need to fix prejudices like "All women are victims", "Women are paid .77 per dollar" or "Women are more clever than men". We need to remove the gender from those sentences. "Weak people are psychologically harmed at home", "Unconfident people aren't promoted despite better skills", "Shy people are paid less than their peers", etc. It's ok if those happen to be 95% women: Let's help people based on their weakness, not based on their gender.
About hate: Well the damage is done, so what you want from me is that I pardon women. It's not time to do it, when most party still propose even more advantages for women without acknowledging male-specific difficulties. As soon as equality for men is a right, I'll forgive what I've been through.
This isn't about teams, this isn't about cheering for your "side" to win. Things like climate change shouldn't be a contest to see which worldview shouts the loudest.
Maybe it's attention deficit, drowning in information, that causes people to subconsciously demand over-simplified explanations.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13007570 and marked it off-topic.
"By definition", I begin "Alternative Medicine", I continue "Has either not been proved to work, Or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call "alternative medicine" That's been proved to work? Medicine."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk
This poster said he votes "extreme right" because he pretty much blames the feminist movement on him not having a girlfriend despite admitting he lacks confidence. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12908279
By the way, I'm not stalking him or anything, I just read that post and thought "oh man that's gotta be the same guy that posted in the Trump thread" and checked to see if I was right.
The comment you're replying to doesn't say any lies. It doesn't show all your reasons to vote FN (nor that you want to vote for them), but it clearly states one of the things you shared with HN.
It seemed clear from the start that you had some kind of grudge against women and I'm trying not to judge you, because I don't know you and I'd make a wrong judgement.
However, please let me tell you that women do indeed have to go through great lengths to get the same recognition we do. If you could, would you rather be a woman? If the answer is "no", think about the reasons.
Things are definitely not black or white, but whatever your feelings are towards discrimination in favour of women, please please please take some time to walk in their shoes an understand how what might seem unimportant or a joke to us could put them in discomfort or just plainly scare them. Think about the bullies at school (you've mentioned identifying as a nerd) and how you would smile at their jokes and try to be best buds just because you felt scared by their physical superiority.
From guy to guy, it's about empathy really.
> blames the feminist movement on him not having a girlfriend
That was too short to be accurate, the relationships between those events are parallel, not consequences.
Look, I'm the result of positive action: We've done lots of things in favour of women. I'm actually grateful that society did that, because it's just plain better when a bro group becomes a mixed group. And the result is much more in line with my ethics of equality of chances for everyone.
Unfortunately there are 2 drawbacks:
1. The mixed environment we have in programming is not a mixed environment. It's a separate environment with brogrammers in the mixed team, and girlsgrammers (I'm coining the term right now with you). Those girls are members of Girlz In Web movements. They get support from the company to get training. They get support from the team lead to develop their skills. They didn't have to have been programmers for 10 years before applying, because managers look for their human skills. They are targetted by specific job ads which filter by genre (ex: Twitter ads, Google Ads, Facebook ads). They get help from networks that are filtered for women. They complain that brogrammers harass them. So you may have a team with up to half of women (only 30% in my experience), but as males we don't have mixity and new acquaintances: We have a bunch of people who only talk to us if they want to, who are specifically protected by the management and who will be promoted anyway.
2. It is a known risk of positive discrimination, that we don't promote people who deserve it because we promote people to fit criteria. I'm a kid of that generation, I'm the one who repeatedly couldn't be promoted because there's a woman in the group. Now that you look at me in the eyes, what do you tell me? "Sorry for you mate, you couldn't develop your skills as a Team Lead, because we had this girl to promote, who's 4 years younger than you, doesn't know what an HTTP header is, but she's a girl"? That's not even what you tell me. You/society tells me "Those women, who got promoted early, aren't paid as much as males of the same management level, and it's unfair. By the way, men aren't oppressed.".
About empathy... I get that women sometimes feel impressed. That's why I really take care of being respectful with women and not talk to them when they don't show signs that they agree to, because I'm afraid they will complain of harassment. Guess what, that made me so respectful with women that I'm still single. Story of my life.
Anyway, back to the point: There isn't a correct depiction of the supposed wage gap in news articles, because they misreport scientific studies with blanket statements like "Women are better at multitasking than men". According to newspapers and if we believe the scientific studies they report, women only have qualities and males only have defects, except strength, which is the reason why men are rapists. I'm not even caricaturing much, it's pretty much equivalent to what they say. So we can't be surprised that men (in my situation, or other groups when newspapers misreport another truth about other topic) look for "more accurate sources". Because conflating "177s vs 169s" with "Women are better at..." isn't genuinely accurate, and repeating misreporting all across newspapers when it serves specific minorities isn't accurate either.
If the girl was promoted but an idiot than chances are it's the Dilbert principle. It's a fake promotion to get her out of the way where she can do least harm...
None of the above have anything to do with you being single
I wouldn't want someone as bitter as you as a team leader either. Team leader is a diplomatic position as much as it is a technical position. Team leader is certainly not a position for everyone and I wouldn't personally want to do it.
>According to newspapers and if we believe the scientific studies they report, women only have qualities and males only have defects, except strength, which is the reason why men are rapists. I'm not even caricaturing much, it's pretty much equivalent to what they say.
This is also factually incorrect.
I don't mean to be rude but your energy is best directed inwards into examining what is causing you so much emotional distress and work on fixing that. It's not a problem with the outside world and posting off topic flamebait rants on Hacker News is not a good way to improve your physiological health.
The homeopathic "doctor" was delighted. You see, the other thing in homeopathy, apart from the belief in water memory, is the concept of most disease as a type of itch ("psora"), which can erupt through the skin ("psora miasm"). No, really, I didn't make that up, you can (with some difficulty) find this stuff with Google. Since like cures like, allergens such as poison ivy, which cause skin rashes, are thought to be curing internal disease, and some homeopathic medicines are full of them, and are used as a complement to the super-diluted ones. Stay away from that whole swamp.
The people who buy this are probably the ones who can't afford real medicine, and now regulation is going to make this even more expensive. If you think this is the government trying to protect us against ourselves: it's not, and that's not the role of government anyway. This is just an alternative medicine attack to remove competition and keep the price of real drugs high.
Also, the FDA has the responsibility to make sure that fake medicine cannot be advertised as being medicine. It doesn't remove competition, it removes fraudulent competition from competing with real medicine.
"The people who buy this are probably the ones who can't afford real medicine"
This is the reason. If they can't afford real medicine I am doubly-supportive of labeling that prevents them from wasting that money entirely. I'm also not sure how often real medicine is more expensive... I've seen some expensive homeopathic treatments.
Homeopathy is popular in the UK where medication is usually free and has a low cost if it's not free.
However, goods sold with the expectation of efficacy should _be controlled_ based on that promise.
Homeopathic treatments are simply not fit for purpose, even by the standards of ordinary products. If an engine oil failed to provide any lubrication, or if an electric cord could not power devices attached to it, it would promptly be withdrawn from the market. Standards should only be higher for products that are intended for human consumption.
Given that I don't smoke and hate the smell I'm sure that I'm heavily biased, but I still think that this is a good thing. The government isn't restricting access to your drug of choice, it just tries to make it less appealing.
Labeling water with 'Actually, this is useless' feels like a good idea to me. People that jumped the fence, 'true believers', won't be affected. They shake their head, mumble that The System is broken and doesn't support alternative treatments and .. will continue to buy that shit.
But people that are in need of help might actually read that disclaimer and save time & money.
If you cannot buy real medicine for some reason (how barbaric is that, btw?) I don't think that you should buy overpriced water instead.
One of the oft-cited claims by practitioners is that water has memory[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory
This sounds cute and it's probably true that water has some subtle hard-to-reproduce property of retaining certain configurations, but even if this were true, what's so great about it?
I'm not entirely convinced that a hard-to-reproduce configuration of water will affect my physiology, and if it does, then this would have to be put through scientific rigeur, which it is not, it's performed on blind faith that it works.
1. All churches, mosques, temples etc. to have a board outside their "Prayer Does Not Work." 2. All astrologers, tarot card readers, psychic readers etc. to have a large bold faced notice "This does not work". 3. All laws passed by congress must begin with "This might have severe unintended consequences that are bigger than the problem this bill claims to solve".
Safety is a good thing, but so is liberty.