What am I supposed to do when all three candidates for the presidency turn out to be credulous, anti-science ignoramuses? Obama thinks there’s a link between vaccines and autism, and now Hillary has jumped off the cliff with him. They’re both nuts, or at least suck-ups to the kooks.
Orac, of course, weighs in.
I thought you had already made up your mind.
Darwin 08
Dang…..well all things being equal you have to look at the rest of their platforms and vote for the lesser evil.
I have to say, I’m in the “baby industry” (I’m a doula) and it seems to me to be bad science to give a baby four different things that could cause major negative reactions at the same time.
I don’t think there’s a link to autism, but I don’t think babies should get more than one shot at a time — so parents can judge whether or not their baby has had a reaction, and also give baby’s immune system time to deal with each vaccine.
I wouldn’t take 4 different psychiatric medications at once, or 4 heart medications at once, but people don’t think twice about injecting a 4 week old baby with four different powerful medications at once (one in each arm).
I think it’s important to give babies vaccines to any diseases that they are in danger of contracting, and those that cause significant danger…but on the other hand, our vaccination protocols could use a lot of work.
“I never voted for anybody. I always voted against.”
-W. C. Fields
I wish either one had attended one of the science debates.
@#3 Zardeenah —
While I agree with your main point, the sad fact is that, probably due to the very scant understand we have of biopsychiatry, many patients do have to take 4 or more psychiatric medications at the same time simply in order to maintain a basic level of functioning. So this may not be the best analogy.
Argh. Much autism research needs to be done, but not about the bogus “link” between autism and vaccines! How many studies need to be done before the anti-vaccine people are satisfied? Oh yeah…they’re never going to be satisfied. And all three candidates are pandering to them. Why am I surprised?
And no, I’m not making light of autism; it’s tragic and I don’t blame parents wanting answers. But vaccines aren’t the answer. And trying to reduce or eliminate vaccines will set back public health by 50 years. IMHO.
Interesting, I remember when McCain stated his position on the subject the guys at the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast looked into the positions on each candidate and found Obama was by far the best.
could be worse it could be four more years od president Cheney oops meant Bush.
Only one of the three candidates has jumped into bed with the religious fundies, and that’s John McCain. They might all be religious, and all be too credulous, but make not mistake who the religious right will be rooting for come November. It’s not going to be Obama or Clinton.
BTW, I encourage American scientists and US citizens concerned with science to visit the website of Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) here.
They have information on local, state, and presidential candidates. It’s a non-partisan website, so they don’t endorse anything, but will give you a breakdown of each candidates views on important issues like climate change, energy, creation/ID, stem cell research, etc.
Candidates have to prattle on about their faith in order to have a chance at winning, and I guess that this kind of cluelessness about science is a similar type of pandering. If a politician talks sense about the autism/vaccine issue, he or she would be branded as Cruel! Heartless! Anti-Baby!!!!
I was happy that recently Obama made a point to explain to a reporter that he does believe in evolution. McCain has said he approves teaching ID. Has anyone heard from Hillary on the issue?
#3: Actually plenty of people take four heart medications at the same time. Its not unusual for an ace inhibitor, a diuretic, or a calcium channel blocker to be given at one time. As well as digoxin, or other inotropes for heart failure.
I think the best evidence for vaccines and autism can be seen in European countries. They took thiomersal out of their vaccines years before we did, and saw no difference in the autism rate. There is no link. There is a multitude of studies to support this; its just in America, if someone says it loudly and often enough people believe it. Thats why so many Americans say “well, evolution is only a theory”.
I think Obama will take this one.
The age difference between him and McCain is massive.
The younger generation will go for the younger canidate.
Here’s the thing. Science suffers from a credibility gap caused by an unholy alliance between science and quick-buck capitalism that has grown steadily more incestuous over the last few decades.
Today, many people are skeptical of science and scientists because of the numerous instances they’ve seen where science has been corrupted by the quest for corporate profits. Sure, we all benefit from sound science far more than we’re victimized by corrupted science, but the simple fact is that it’s human nature to focus on the negative.
The solution, as I see it, is for ethical scientists to clean up the profession and start outing some of their less ethical brethren who sell out to corporate sugar daddies. I personally know of at least one scientist who stood up to big business and saw his career destroyed, which might explain why many scientists are reluctant to rock the boat and lose funding. It also explains why many non-scientists no longer feel like they can trust the men and women in the white lab coats.
Argh. Why do they continue to give lip service to this, yes, I will swear: crap. Autism and vaccinations have no link; if anything, inflammation from a reaction to vaccination might help with socialization… It’s actually documented, a follow up to anecdotes that may actually have merit. None of the blind conjecture that some kind of inflammation causes autism has borne up under scrutiny: parents appear to be unwilling to see their children as having developed the way they have. Why? My son is a great kid, partly because I haven’t wheedled away my time pursuing bogus cures and causes, but instead have just taken care of him and given him what a parent can.
These injections are creating four armed babies!!
@#12
Actually, Hillary claims to be a Christian. I have my doubts…
Obama’s answer really isn’t that bad.
1. It is technically the truth that autism rates are skyrocketing, so he was able to be honest without hurting the person’s feelings.
2. Many people are concerned about the link- including that lady (he didn’t indicate that he was concerned).
3. He advocated scientific research to find out more. Surely, nobody here disagrees with that. The answer splits both ways so that this mother of an autistic child is not outraged, but so that those who respect science can feel confident in him.
How do we know there isn’t a connection? Have any of these studies accounted for differences in blood flow between two-armed and four-armed babies?
Clinton on evolution:
“I believe in evolution, and I am shocked at some of the things that people in public life have been saying. I believe that our founders had faith in reason and they also had faith in God, and one of our gifts from God is the ability to reason.”
Obama on evolution:
“[e]volution is more grounded in my experience than angels.”
and
“I’m a Christian, and I believe in parents being able to provide children with religious instruction without interference from the state. But I also believe our schools are there to teach worldly knowledge and science. I believe in evolution, and I believe there’s a difference between science and faith. That doesn’t make faith any less important than science. It just means they’re two different things. And I think it’s a mistake to try to cloud the teaching of science with theories that frankly don’t hold up to scientific inquiry.”
McCain on evolution:
“From a personal standpoint, I believe in evolution. When I stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and I see the sun going down, I believe the hand of God was there.”
These are all from the candidates’ profiles on Scientists and Engineers for America’s election site.
I find it somewhat bemusing that they all have to qualify their “belief” in evolution with a bunch of talk about theism, but there you have it.
Small correction: Obama thinks that a link is a good possibility and worth researching.
He’s still wrong, and with this much data in the possibility of him being honestly wrong is precluded, but it’s not quite the same thing.
#3
here in Australia we have a fairly good compliance rate with vaccines due partly to a financial inducement ( you get about $300 when the vaccine schedule has been adhered to at about age 18 months), free vaccines & free doctor appointment to have them administered and the fact its compulsory to have them recorded if your child attends school ( which of course is itself compulsory). I believe you can get out of it on certain religious or objector categories but they are quite rigorous in the requirements for these and its very uncommon. Add to the fact the anti-vacc loonies don’t have a big hold here and you get a quite good vaccine rate.
HOWEVER, people are intrinsically lazy and forgetful characters and I suspect part of the high complaiance is the ease and convenience of having multiple vaccs at once. I think if you seperated them out you’d probably start to find lessening compliance rates with each vaccine progressed merely because people forget appointments or lose track of when each is required. I’ve got three kids under three and I know I myself I lose track of who is up for what next. Fortunately we have a government register which you can access at any time ( and also personal vacc record books) so you can look it up but still I think the convenience of having it “over and done with” in short easy bursts certainly is easier for both parent and child.
Just my take on the situation.
“Who am I going to vote for now?”
I hope you were just being facetious. To make a decision, say for dessert, between chocolate ice cream, vanilla ice cream, and 71 year old moldy wedding cake based upon each server’s view on something they read once or twice about something they know nothing about?
Nah. I think you were just being funny.
PZ, don’t be so dense.
In a presidential election, it doesn’t matter if you are right. It matters how many people vote for you.
Honestly Obama’s answer is open to interpretation, as Orac points out. That said, it does appear that all the candidates are pandering on this issue, but they are politicians. While this doesn’t completely exonerate their answers, their are mitigating circumstances.
They have to stay on message each day in their campaign, and offering the 100% correct scientific answer would likely present a problem: the headline would be “Candidate X Denies Autism Crisis” (even though there probably isn’t) and that would knock him or her off message. Playing defense in a campaign for just one or two days not only keeps you from winning votes, but may lose you votes. Politically, it’s an easy decision to give vague, somewhat pandering answers, move on and avoid the bigger, more damaging headline.
For those of us who let the evidence act as our sole guide, this is disappointing. But I doubt there’s more to this issue than these vague answers, and I’m willing to bet neither Democratic candidate buys into the RFK, Jr. hype and misinformation on this issue.
I would hardly call a politician saying he has some suspicions, and he would like to see more scientific research in the area to be an anti-science ignoramus. The man is a United States Senator, and a lawyer by training. He is not part of the scientific community, and there is no reasonable expectation that he should be up on the latest research in every field of science. That is what advisers are for. On the other hand, he is the only candidate that has flat-out said that he believes in evolution, and that ID has no place in the classroom. For a politician in America these days, that is a refreshingly candid, and pro-science thing to say.
It could be worse, he could have said “God hates vaccines so I do too.”
His response, as someone else pointed out, actually was very diplomatic. Though we all know that the research has closed the book on the questions of a connection there seems to be a lack of public knowledge and those studies should be brought to the forefront. Hopefully federal funding will go to less explored items first, but more research can’t be bad. Hell, more research funding at all would be a blessing for so many labs! There is a definite disconnect between the public and science. I think in that lies our troubles.
Just got out one of the kids record books and I thought I’d list the compulsory shcedule so you in the US can compare. It’ll be interesting to see if we have more or less than you guys.
birth – Hep B
2 months – Polio/DTP
-Hib/Hep B
-Pneumoccocal
– Rotavirus ( oral)
4 months – Polio/DTP
-Hib/Hep B
-Pneumococcal
– Rotavirus (Oral)
6 months- – Polio/DTP
-Pneumococcal
– Rotavirus (Oral)
12 months- MMR
-Hib
– Meningococcal C
18 Months- Varicella
4 years – Polio/DTP
-MMR
Also pre-puberty they also have the one for genital warts/cervical cancer. They also give idigenous children vaccines on a slightly different schedule to reflect their needs better such as having the BCG because of higher rates of tuberculosis.
Interesting to hear any comments about how this compares to your schedule.
Well think about it, who will be more open to allowing the advancing of science? Hillary/Obama or McCain, really?
It’s not perfect, but we can’t all have a pony either :/
Seriously, the pandering is always annoying, and never far off with politicians. What are they going to say to unremitting believers, “don’t vote for me”?
If you want to judge these people, see if any have voted in favor of the vaccination/autism kooks. If they haven’t, especially if they have been a legislator for long, don’t worry too much. They’re probably just sucking up to morons, something that politicians do.
If they’ve voted for the nonsense, or have definite plans to introduce legislation in favor of pseudoscience, then be worried about them.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Meanwhile, Clinton just promised to exterminate the Iranian population if Iran attacks Israel. The Fellowship must have definitely rubbed off on her to get this close to Armageddonist thinking. A serious pledge to launch Holocaust 2.0 is rather more important than vaccine safety.
BTW there is an inherent conflict between personal health and public health. Personal health might say don’t vaccinate, public health says vaccinate. Public health says don’t use antibiotics, personal health says use them. (Maybe.)
Just throwing that out there.
I doubt that the same Barack Obama that said “Evolution is more grounded in my experience than angels” qualifies as a “credulous, anti-science ignoramus.”
Don’t be a fucking moron. You can teach them the correct science. Vote for one who will get us out of Iraq.
It would have been nice to just be able to drop out when Edwards did, but I am just left with an “against” vote.
Against a continuation of Bush-life policies. Be nice every once in a while to vote “for” someone for president.
And yes, it would be nice to have a pony.
While I do despise the fact that I do not have the option of voting for a candidate who is line with my love and understanding of science and its tenets, I despise even more the fact that religious belief seems to be a requirement to be considered an “electable” candidate in America today. Monique Davis’s rant is far from atypical of the feelings of many of today’s politicians, but the prevalence of religous belief in our elected officials is not the fault of the candidates. This is, after all, a representative democracy, and as the creationists are all too ready to affirm, the majority of this country holds some sort of religious conviction. So it only stands to reason that we will be in a situation where we have viable candidates that do not have any religious beliefs ONLY when a greater number of our citizens cease to hold religious beliefs.
So, in the situation we are currently in, that is a battle we are not able to fight in the political arena. I truly hope that someday in the near future our nation can get to a point where our society of today catches up with the vision of our founders over two centuries ago – that the governance of our nation will not be held in sway by religion of any type.
The only place we can make any headway on this issue is in our education system. The battle being waged right now over our curriculum obviously has far-reaching consequences that touch every aspect of life, but the single most important one of those aspects is our future political environment. If our children are educated in a scientific, fact-based curriculum, they can be raised to think critically and think for themselves. If we allow religion to creep into the classroom disguised as ID (or whatever idiocy du jour becomes popular after its demise), then we will be continuing this religious political cycle by raising children intrenched in the idea that religion should be in every aspect of both private life, where it belongs, AND public governance, where it has absolutely NO business being.
Win the battle for science, and the battle in the political arena will begin to work itself out in time. If we lose science and let it be forced back under religion’s umbrella, we will be signing the death warrant of the separation of church and state in America. The cliche that “the children are our future” is uplifting only when we’re doing the right thing by those children. Allow our children to be educated by dogma, superstition, and divinely dictated knowledge, and that cliche becomes a doomsday prohecy.
@#37 brokenSoldier —
Well put.
In addition to the obvious need to combat the teaching of creationism in our schools, I think that we really desperately need to improve the general state of science education in America’s K-12 schools. Even in schools where creation nonsense isn’t present at all, “science” education often consists of haphazard collections of facts and “wow, isn’t this cool” so-called experiments rather than a solid grounding in the scientific method and some of the basics of the most important scientific theories (Newtonian mechanics, evolution, thermodynamics etc). Further, even this half-assed attempt at science education is often pushed aside mid-year, when the teacher realizes that science isn’t on the standardized tests because it’s not a “core” subject like math and reading are.
Not only does this miseducation do little to combat the church-taught beliefs of creationists with actual scientific fact, but it also leads to many otherwise reasonable people misguidedly accepting the argument that creationism should receive equal time and emphasis as evolutionary biology (or, for that matter, *any* time or emphasis). If our schools did a clearer job explaining the rudiments of what does and does not constitute a scientific theory, then perhaps people wouldn’t believe this kind of nonsense. A better presentation of the basic principles of evolutionary biology — and the strong evidence in support of it — wouldn’t hurt either.
If I didn’t hate children so much on a personal level, I might be compelled to try to become a science educator. Because the way things seem to be going now, the cliche “the children are our future” is anything but uplifting.
I’d suggest voting for your favorite third party candidate. Thumb your nose at the system… it deserves it. I wish we could get a good centrist party going and leave the damned “bases” of the R’s and D’s crying. Instead we get either far left or far right every time. This country desperately needs a viable third party. Instead we have a billion tiny third parties which attract a fringe of unrealistic activists. Divided we/they fall.
By the way, whatever they might say, I’m pretty sure Clinton is a closet atheist or agnostic. Obama… I wouldn’t put it past him to pretend to believe in God either (you pretty much have to if you want to get elected to any high office in this country). Too bad I can’t stand their economic policies.
McCain probably believes in God, but he doesn’t seem to be in thrall to the religious factions of the Republican party as Bush is. And if you agree with Christopher Hitchens about Iraq, then McCain is really your only candidate.
What to do?
@ #3 Do you know how vaccines work? It dosen’t matter how many they are exposed to. Babies are the best for accepting vaccines because their T-cell counts are many times higher than adults ever have even during times of illness.
As for the Autism epidemic. I think it is probably like the
“Seattle windshield epidemic” <-- google it
MIKE GRAVEL
@# 38 How can you hate children so much? They are just as susceptible to science as religion. Children are really great.
The autism rate for children now is 1 in 150.
http://www.kidshealth.org/research/autism_study.html
That is an epidemic.
Any other illness with that kind of rate would be getting national attention on a massive scale.
I’ve never experienced worry like I have with my 17 month old. I’ve been a laid back guy my whole life… but I’ve literally woken up at night worried my son was going to be snatched in a grocery store or something. Random things I tell myself are stupid… but I worry anyway.
Point being… people are rightfully scared for their children, and this doesn’t have an explanation yet. Parents are looking for the silver bullet to avoid so they can increase their odds. Who can blame them? 1 in 150 are very very bad odds when it is your own child’s life on the line.
Are vaccines the culprit? I don’t think so… but dang, something of this magnitude deserves a ton more attention and funding then it is getting right now.
um….. Ron Paul?
Of course my perfect candidate would never get elected in this present bizarro, faith-based atmosphere. He or she would need to have a strong grounding in the sciences, and know that prayer is not the solution to the very real possibility of Godzilla attacks on our major cities. That being said, I still think Obama is the best candidate to deal with domestic attacks by Venusian robots and ant-men.
Richard, #15:
I think the real problem is in how science is presented to laypeople. Corporate hired guns tend not to fool anyone in the scientific community, but the nontechnical press likes to present controversies (and both sides equally), so it’s too easy to elevate a crackpot and give the general public the appearance of a debate where none exists. See climate change.
@42 Amplexus —
I don’t hate children as a principle. There are a lot of great things about them. I was one once. I think I made a pretty good child, too.
I just can’t stand being around them on a personal level. I don’t like their need for attention, their constant shrieking, wailing cries (particularly at the younger ages), etc. And it seems when they get to their teen/pre-teen years, they just take the worst aspects of children and combine them with the worst aspects of adults, and you get sophomoric little brats. (I know this is an uncharitably inaccurate representation of children, but it’s how I feel when I’m around them, and why I don’t think I’d make a good parent or teacher. I have great respect for those who are [good] parents and teachers, though.)
I occasionally run across a kid I really like, but for the most part I try to avoid them. They avoid me. It works.
@DAG
It is obvious that obsessive-compulsive worry about children is causing the autism epidemic, as both have risen dramatically over the past decade.
What? You mean Obama is no longer the Messiah? I think you misread his sermon, oh ye of little faith! I heard him say, “Give unto science the things which are science, and unto the ignorant masses the things which are god.” He said it in code though, so as not to offend the ignorant masses, but he knew that his truly believing disciples would understand his message.
PZ, you’re concluding from one instance of political pandering that both the democratic front runners are “credulous, anti-science ignoramuses”? Isn’t there something, um, unscientific about that? Seriously, man. It’s called politics. Check it out.
Patriotism and piety are the two easiest things to fake. Just wear a flag lapel pin or name drop god shamelessly in speeches(even in non-sensical ways. Even if faith was somehow desirable, it’s just so easy to fake. Even further: you can’t seriously question someone’ faith without looking like a jerk. At the same time you can profess faith with no evidence, direct or indirect, anecdotal or cosmological.
Quoth Bob:
If we can get Bob to say his name backwards, will he return to the dimension from whence he came? Otherwise, we will be forced to call upon the Eats, Shoots & Leaves contingent; a fate worse than ravening Maenads.
UPDATE: He in fact was pointing to someone in the crowd when he said “this person.”
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/dr_obama_and_dr_mccain.html
Go down and check the update there.
Hell I feel like blaspheming tonight anyway so I’ll go further. You don’t have to explain whether you found God in Prison or from eating a pound of psychedelic mushrooms and a fifth of Jack Daniels, or from gazing into the eyes of your first born child. Either way people look at with like you posses some sagely wisdom. Just like professing blind patriotism. When saying the American is #1 you never hear people mention specifics, whether it’s our litany of inventions, great thinkers, or our impressively high teen pregnancy rate. It’s just assumed to be valid.
This “Bob” fellow (and also a “James”) is the pathetic PlanetKiller trying to get past his banning. His comments will be killed as I find them.
His comments will be killed as I find them.
It’s as if he were gone before he was ever here…
I’ll remember to wait and see if trolls can post for a while with impunity before immortalizing their bait in a quote.
It’s good to see you’re keeping the Maenads in your dungeon well fed, PZ.
PZ: Remember you have to remove the head after you stake his heart. Or you could just nuke him from orbit — it’s the only way to be sure.
Oh boy.
Imagine all the crazy things people would link to vaccines if they were given one at a time instead of in groups. Think of it… 40 different events for people to form questionable coincidental correlations with.
Talk about a statistician’s nightmare.
I definitely need to reef on whatever #39 is smoking and enter his magical world where the Democrats run “far left” candidates, and where Hillary goddamn Clinton doesn’t qualify as “centrist.”
Is there really that much room to squeeze in between Obama/Clinton and McCain? Like, maybe you’ll kill 9/10ths of the Iranian population instead of 3/4ths and every last living microbe, respectively?
Former candidate John Edwards got rich on junk science lawsuits. He also flat out rejected nuclear power based on tired and out of date reasons.
I’m just sayin’.
Nice hair, though.
#32 – Good point.
Hillary Clinton has threatened to “obliterate” Iran
were the words in a news article today, and you can’t decide who to vote for?
Global Warming may be a bit of a problem, but starting a nuclear winter isn’t the answer!
That Myers can blithely rub salt into the wounds of the Autism debate for socio-political gain, is beneath contempt. And to ignore the problem calls into question his humanity. For those who deal with the problem day-to-day, Autism represents something more than a simple religious dysfunction.
This sort of contempt, coming from the scientific elite of a country with an infant mortality rate lower than Mexico, is comically evil. Yeah, take the party line and shut up. No, I don’t think so.
But then we should never count on the vicious ideologues for our scientific paradigm shifts, should we?
@ wnelson can you explain ANY mechanism for how vaccines or additives might possibly, even on a conceptual level cause such a radical shift in brain organization? What is it ? An immune response? Histamine biochemical cascade? What is it man?
Let’s see – the last eight years prove that Republicans are bad for the country’s economy, prestige around the world, and produce incapable leaders. This has been verified independently by multiple citizens across the country, therefore voting for McCain would be just more of the same.
The last time a Clinton was in the Whitehouse we had lies, lies, and more damn lies. The President even had to question what we mean by “is” and “sex.” Therefore another Clinton in the Whitehouse will not be good for the libido of the nation.
That leaves Obama…an untried and untested hypothesis…which only leaves one conclusion…vote for Nader and then emigrate to Australia.
But then we should never count on the vicious ideologues for our scientific paradigm shifts, should we?
Vicious ideology is asshat wnelson’s stock in trade. I see he’s returned for more mockery and abuse.
The scientific elite of a country collects data among the country’s elite that can best afford medical care. Who counts the miscarriage or stillbirth of a teen in Mexico who doesn’t report it? Is there more breast cancer in Marin County California than in the rest of the nation, or does every woman in the richest county in America get her mammogram with more regularity than any other spot on the globe?
#43:
Is that 1 in 150 figure not ASDs in general? Because that is a very wide range of conditions, including some that would have dismissed as “an odd character trait” not too many years ago.
On another note:
As a proud citizen of Soviet Canuckistan (I think that was Pat Buchanan…) I chuckle at the predicament of my backward neighbours (NOTE THE U!) to the south. Then I look at the politicians here and my laughter dies somewhat (not completely though, you guys are number #1 at a few things).
The general problem is that those people who should be running the nations of this world are the ones who would never get elected. Ever thought about running for office PZ?
Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Damn, I hate it when things like that are correct.
Um… hang on. Did you actually read the quote from Obama, PZ? He didn’t say vaccines cause autism, he said that some people are suspicious they do (which is obviously true), pointed out the person in his audience who’d brought the subject up with him, and expressed a willingness to continue research on the subject. Seems reasonable enough to me. What’s your problem with this?
Get a grip PZ. As another commenter said on another blog:
These people are trying to get elected. Not every U.S. citizen is smart enough to read Dr. Novella’s blog so that they can understand the nuance of autism rates jumping from 1:10,000 in 1994 to 1:150 in 2007. The average American would look at that and call Obama an IDIOT for denying the skyrocketing diagnoses of children with autism.
What more can he do? He was raised in his early years by an atheist scientist mother, and he respects the division of science and religion. To say that he lost your vote because he gave a vague scientifically-imperfect answer to a highly emotional and complex subject is just nuts.
His answer boiled down to “we will follow the science”. DUH! That is code for “Scientists, please understand that I’m with you on this, but I need to pander to these people so that I don’t look like the elitist dismissive asshole that the media wants me to be lately”.
I thought we were smart people around here… be smart enough to know that somebody who just comes out and says everything we would like them to say about science, religion, rationality, superstition, etc, etc.. would have no chance whatsoever. Like any species, this one is not going to evolve drastically overnight. From where we are now, Obama is a step in the right direction (as is Hillary too I suppose).
I wonder at the foolishness of expecting any of the three candidates to understand anything beyond Biology 092. I mean, these are all lawyers we’re talking about. The best we can hope for is for someone on their teams to be remotely schooled in science and scientific concerns. McCain’s camp surely never even bothered considering this, if his endorsements are any indication. Hillary’s are, if she has them, once firebrand young liberals who are now so concerned with keeping her chances alive that science be damned until they know she’s got the D ticket locked up. As for Obama, he probably has the best team of the three – again, if he even has them – and is willing to discuss issues deeper than the other two, even if he knows little about the topic at hand.
Who am I going to vote for now?
Do what the French did when Le Pen forced a second round of voting c.6 years ago?: Hold your nose and vote for the least worse of the remaining available fools. You could even do it French-style; that is, clip your nose shut with a clothespin when you vote to emphasize the point.
@#62 wnelson:
Huh? What exactly is the “socio-political gain” PZ is going to reap by saying these things? It’s not PZ that’s manipulating science for socio-political gain, it’s Obama and Clinton — by using their ignorance, feigned or genuine, to pretend that unscientific, correlational data should have any credence in scientific research.
PZ, and the posters who agree with him regarding vaccination and autism, are not “ignoring the problem.” This IS the problem: that people are chasing ghosts (the alleged autism-vaccination link) instead of doing actual autism research that might find something useful. In fact, continuing this persistent lie that vaccinations and autism have anything to do with each other is the really inhumane thing: it hinders autism research AND leads to people rejecting vaccination for their children, thus endangering the health of their child and public health in general.
…this just makes no sense. When did anyone call autism a “simple religious dysfunction”? The only person who might say this is a faith healer, and I haven’t seen any of them round PZ’s blog….
I’m a little confused what infant mortality in Mexico has to do with anything. Returning to the autism “debate,” if we look at the two major political parties, the “party line” seems to be to accept the autism/vaccination debate as worth studying, so I’m not sure what you’re complaining about. If you’re talking about PZ taking the scientific “party line”, well, the reason why this is pretty much established fact within the scientific community is that the correlation has been tested multiple times, in multiple ways, and no causal link has ever been demonstrated. It’s not ideology. It’s good science.
Give me one empirical piece of empirical evidence (note: NOT more rhetoric about “vicious ideologues” and their contemptuous inhumanity) why the scientific community should consider a paradigm shift in the way they think about autism and vaccinations (I’m assuming we’re still talking about that).
How many vaccines does a child get at one time? I’m not sure, but how many different bacteria and viruses does a child get exposed to from crawling on the floor and shoving its foot in its mouth, or licking the dog…
I suspect that this is one of those superficially plausible arguments that the anti-vaccers use to start persuading normal people that something is wrong. But there’s some importance in stimulating the child’s immune system – we seem to be getting more autoimmune problems, including asthma and allergies, as children are kept more and more sterile.
-brokenSoldier
I’d like to quote this; what would you prefer for attribution?
(And is it too early for another OM nomination?)
…the Democratic Party of the United States.
As “far left.”
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think the one thing the press and public overlooks is the broadening of the definition of Autism – it was expanded to include the “spectrum” of questionable disorders and, therefore, has increased to include several children and adults it did not previously.
If I had been born 15-20 years later than I was, I would have been diagnosed as autistic. And probably medicated and coddled rather than forced to grow and mature on my own time. :p
Speaking as a parent of an autistic child myself, wnelson, I have a few things to say. The first is “fuck you” for pretending to speak for me while you spew ignorance and venom.
Second, there IS no autism “debate.” There is the entire weight of the available scientific evidence, matched against an unholy alliance of money-grubbing, ambulance-chasing lawyers, sadistic monsters who find the mask of a righteous crusader a convenient camouflage, and angry parents so desperate for an enemy they can see that they’re willing to jettison sound science, sane public policy, and potentially millions of lives in order to chase one.
Which are you?
…what exactly do you know about modern diagnostic treatment approaches for autism?
To whom it may concern.
1. The absolute incidence rate of a disease has no relevance to whether it is an epidemic or not on. The current rate for heart disease is about 1 in 2-does that necessarily make it an epidemic? No. An epidemic is a sudden increase in frequency above the expected number for a disease (to quote my third year micro notes).
If the incidence of autism has remained stable, then it is not an epidemic.
2. I does not matter how terrible a disease is, this does not change the science and facts behind it. Autism is a debilitating illness? That doesn’t mean vaccines cause autism. Parents have to go through a lot to care for autistic children? That doesn’t mean vaccine cause autism.
Would you convict an innocent man of murder just because the crime was so horrific?
The only people who benefit from lying and willful ignorance of facts are politicians and the ambulance chasers who prey on the parents with autistic children.
Don’t you dare try to turn this around and say that someone is being insensitive, or doesn’t know what autistic children and their families go through, simply because they are unwilling to lie or remain ignorant.
PZ needs to get laid. -troll
At the risk of feeding the troll, I’d just like to point out that if the above were true, I’m sure there would be volunteers. Intelligence is sexy. And fluffy is kind of cute.
I’ll second that. Give me some nerd luvvin anyday. They’ve got nothing to prove and concentrate on the job at hand ( so to speak). Been the big muscly hunk route, prefer the tender gorgeous geek. Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Watch out though, I hear the trophy wife got her title from the suspicious blunt object wounds on the last girl that got too friendly with PZ ;)
When faced with two (or three, as the case may be) evils, choose the lesser.
Azkyroth @ #76
Quite simply, well said.
I swear, Wnelson is going for the fucktard hat-trick today.
notthedroids @33:
I think public health says: use the antibiotics JUST TAKE THE WHOLE COURSE YOU IDIOT
For vaccinations, if nobody else is immunised it’s definitely in your interests to get it so you are protected (assuming the vaccine is effective – a different argument). If most of the population is immunised already (herd immunity, ~80%) it is relatively less important, but I don’t know of any cases where it would be sensible to skip the immunisation on those grounds (I am not a biological scientist of any flavour though)
The last time a Clinton was in the Whitehouse we had lies, lies, and more damn lies. The President even had to question what we mean by “is” and “sex.” Therefore another Clinton in the Whitehouse will not be good for the libido of the nation.
…and yet we had the best economy we’ve had in the last 35 years.
I’m sorry, but if you took every lie that Clinton told during his entire presidency, they wouldn’t compare in either quantity or “quality” to a single year of the Bush administration’s tenure.
Clinton wasn’t the brightest guy in the world, but unlike Shrub, he at least knew to surround himself with intelligent policy wonks.
not that what Clinton (Bill) did will in any way end up relating to what Clinton (Hillary) might do, but I’m so fucking tired of people bringing up the “importance” of Clinton lying about getting a BJ in the Oval Office.
It’s just ridiculous.
I swear, Wnelson is going for the fucktard hat-trick today.
Don’t get riled up Ichthyic, for within wnelson’s surprisingly well written posts, there lies a pattern, which does undermine his integrity (more so if possible). May I present a hypothetical example?
PZ: I think I might buy a Mac as my new laptop.
wnelson: I used [emphasis added] to respect your opinion PZ, but this latest comment has crossed the line. Clearly your willful ignorance of this very serious issue and vile hatred shows your complete failure as a human being, and you should be ashamed of yourself, you evil ideologue.
Etha Williams @ 4 I know the quote by one of my favorite persons, W C! Here are two I also like:
“Wouldn’t it be terrible if I quoted some reliable statistics which prove that more people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol?”
“I am free of all prejudices. I hate every one equally.”
Of course the first quote I will freely interpret as the most truthful with the religious aspect, even giving WC’s
choice for alcohol. The first part is the more obvious even though W C acknowledges the latter. W C was definitely not religious, and many comments have been attributed to him regarding this state, but I am confident that he would feel the same as we do if he was alive today! What a romp he would have with the likes of all the retards we excoriate on this blog! Even though gone, he will always remain one of my favorite people. We will never have his like again. Good man, W C !
@ #11 Thanks for the SEA site. Useful.
@ #21 There are the reasons that I will not vote for any of these three religious dolts. This will be the first time that I will not vote in the presendtial election, as it will be a joke to vote for even the lesser of the bunch, and in spite of my friends offering that tired cliche of not voting will be a vote for the opposition.
@ # 38 and 47 I have to agree with you on not being overly fond of children for many reasons, but with one exception. I do not like male children as I consider them the worst of the two. More grief is caused by the little males than by the females, from downright nasty behavior to early premonition of all manner of criminal behavior. It is easy to develop this warranted opinion by simple observation wherever they may be. I will not go into a litany of the obvious reasons why I have developed this distaste of male children but it is based on watching and listening to their behavior over many years. I have expressed my opinions of the male sex in a previous blog and have been blasted with a plethora of all kinds of disjointed opinions too numerous to list here. My opinions remain intact as they stem from observable and honest evaluation of the facts. To state that the majority of misery in the world is caused by the male sex is to open a Pandora’s box of false injustice and personal affronts. This also remains an unchangeable fact and will remain so despite the defensive outrages of the offended. As my man W C has stated several times in his movies, “I hate you!”
Now let’s see what this generates!
I’m with AliciaP @ 75 on this one.
I was decidedly odd as a child, born 1942, but autism was not on the medics’ radar in those days. I endured a life of much surrounding worry and multiple investigations, meanwhile desperately trying to be normal – whatever that means. But no diagnosis.
At 25 and fortunately at work, with witnesses, an incident occurred which got me into to realms of slightly better doctors. Guess what? I have epilepsy. I had been having petits mals and absences all my life and, no, I wasn’t nuts.
If I’d been born 50 years later then I’d have been through that time’s sausage machine and come out marked with the scarlet A of autism. My first grand mal would have been marked down as a “rather rare” manifestation of Asperger’s and I might never have had either a full diagnosis or the medication which enabled a full and productive life.
For the prurient – yes, I am still a bit odd but whether that’s down to who I am or to a seriously stressed childhood ……. quite honestly, who cares at this stage?
I’d like to know (and this isn’t a passive aggressive question, but an honest one) why everyone feels so sure there isn’t a link? I know there have been studies done previously that have proved inconclusive, but surely that doesn’t just mean they’re not at all linked? Or is there more information I just haven’t come across?
I decided not to have my son vaccinated because I felt the ingredients of vaccines were…well, poisonous. I just couldn’t feel comfortable putting derivatives of mercury in my tiny 3 month old and I don’t regret it. I read a lot about the history of vaccines and it appeared to me (maybe falsely so?) that all of the research done to prove they work was done by the company selling the vaccine. I felt that the eradication of diseases like polio were in no small part due to vast improvements in hygienic practices. Our bodies were designed to fight off disease and infection, so why did we think we needed a kick start? People have known for years that children need to get the chicken pox; its a childhood disease that you must have or potentially suffer greatly (or die) as an adult. What makes mumps or measles different? Also, why is the dosage for a 3 month old the same as it would be for a 5 year old?
I felt I did enough reading on the subject to make an informed decision and I would like to stress again, I’m not posing rhetorical questions here. If someone has any info or knows where I can find credible info on the subject, I’d greatly appreciate it. Any parents out there can understand I only want to do what’s best for my child, so the more I know about it all, the better!
Hmm. I had a comment written hypothesising that the nature of the political debate makes it impossible to answer such a question in a non-weaselly way, but on reading Orac’s post it does appear that Obama is, in fact, being an idiot.
Lighnin @78: Replace “murder” with “terrorism” and you’ll find a worrying number of people on both sides of the Atlantic who’d say that you should do just that.
On a somewhat happier, related note, Kathleen Seidel’s motion to quash has been granted.
I think the vaccine issue has been resolved, but I’d like to know more about the effects of plastics. It seems that more and more I read about some awful thing attributed to plastics, or high levels of plastics in people’s bodies. They appeared so inert, and yet we find that water bottles are contaminating us. Plastics are screwing with our precious bodily fluids, ruining that purity of essense. It has to be wrong.
maureen, I don’t know why you would think that doctors today are more inept at diagnosing epilepsy than they were in the 1940s, or that somehow your epilepsy would have been somehow misdiagnosed as autism. If anything, the criteria are getting more refined as more research is done.
Claudia, if you want a lot of information in a good place, Orac’s blog (which PZ linked to in his post) is an invaluable resource. Autism and vaccination research is one of the recurring main topics of his blog, and he has the chops to evaluate and summarize it in an easily understandable way. He also has his fair share of dissenting commenters, so you won’t feel like his place is dogmatic.
To address it very shortly, the links are not inconclusive, they are conclusively not there. Just to make a short point ot two, autism spectrum disorders are around 90% boys, 10% girls. Yet equal numbers of boys and girls receive vaccines – doesn’t that make you wonder how that could be explained if there were a link? Also, mercury hasn’t been in vaccines for several years, yet rates of autism have kept climbing.
Our bodies may have been “designed to fight off disease and infection”, as you say, but if so we still do a piss-poor job at it. It’s difficult for us to realize, given our recent history, but diseases have killed more humans than just about all other causes put together. Even the ones we think of as mild, childhood diseases have a decently high enough mortality rate in children that I don’t want to play dice with my own kids if I don’t have to.
Thanks for that, Carlie. I shall have to meander over to Orac’s Blog.
I did want to say, however, that I wasn’t just linking vaccines and autism. I know that was the topic of this particular post, but I do have a lot of concerns about them in general. I don’t currently see it as taking a chance on my son having not vaccinated him because I have yet to be convinced that vaccines work. The fact that mercury was removed in the last several years doesn’t fill me with a lot of hope…
You keep using that term “far left”. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
You folks have a far-right party and a wishy-washy centrist party. There is no left in America.
That would require a major reform of the Constitution: the separation of president and government. A presidential election always ends up as a battle between two candidates, either of whom accumulates a party behind himself. In other countries the government depends on the parliament, not the president, and this makes multi-party systems and coalition governments possible (…unless of course there’s a stupid way of translating votes into parliament seats, as in the UK).
Their economic policies are eminently unspectacular in European terms. You should learn more about those, I think.
Yes, but if you agree with Hitchens about Iraq, you are already ignorant beyond belief, so voting Reptilian is the logical choice anyway.
Let Diebold vote for McCain for you… </cynicism>
Yet another one whose ignorance knows no bounds! Paul is a cdesign proponentsist and generally doesn’t know shit, and his “I got mine, fuck you” social policy is not exactly PZ’s taste either.
LOL!
Votez escro, pas facho — vote crook, not fascist.
<yawn>
Very simple: there have been studies done that have proved conclusive.
Also, as mentioned above, thimerosal was taken out of vaccines in Europe much earlier than in the USA. What happened to the autism rates? Nothing.
If you want to know more, spend a few hours in scholar.google.com. There is more knowledge on teh intartoobz than your philosophy can dream, Horatio.
See, that’s simply not true. That’s something you should read a lot more about.
No.
Because the pathogens evolve, too. They, too, were “designed to” reproduce themselves, no matter if that causes disease and infection.
Easy: you can’t die from the chickenpox. Mumps and measles can turn horrible.
Also, you don’t really “need to” get the chickenpox — it just so happens that no vaccine exists and that none is really necessary.
Because it’s already tiny — just large enough that the immune system notices it at all. When a B or T cell recognizes an antigen, it reproduces! The size of the immune response hardly depends on the amount of the vaccine.
———————–
Sometimes I think everyone should have to spend a year or two learning molecular biology at a university level. This knowledge is simply needed all the time.
As I just wrote — for that you need to learn how the immune system works. And that’s hard work.
Sometimes I think everyone should have to spend a year or two learning molecular biology at a university level. This knowledge is simply needed all the time.
What is molecular biology? Is biochemistry and molecular genetics in one? Am I just looking at this from a different paradigm (the fields of science being defined by the names of my uni courses)?
*Is it biochemistry…
Must proof read comments…
David, that was a nice explanatory post, but SIWOTI in a minor way. There is a chicken pox vaccine available:
http://www.vaccineinformation.org/varicel/qandavax.asp
My understanding is that chicken pox is a nuisance in a child, but is a major P.I.T.A for adults, as it can cause more complications (shingles, pneumonia, kidney.heart problems, etc.)
Now if it will help, I will say my name backwards: boB!!1!
“Claudia #90”
I really am trying to understand your logic, but I just can’t seem to get it. Have you ever really read medieval history? Do you pay attention to what is going on in third world countries today involving the spread of diseases? Who are these people that have known for years that children need to get chicken pox? What is it about not having chicken pox that is going to make you potentially suffer or die as an adult? What form does that suffering take?
My mother would come undone (witch that she is) if she read that line. I had chicken pox when I was around 20 months old. This was in 1959. Before I recovered from the chicken pox, I developed a secondary infection known as erysipelas. My legs swelled so badly that Dr. Silman had to come to the house to treat me. He didn’t want me moved around. My mother said that he was coming to drain fluid from my legs so that the swelling didn’t rupture or burst the skin. I can’t remember what all was done but there are still tiny fragments of it that dangle in my mind from time to time. For a while they thought I was going to die. Obviously, I didn’t; but I had to learn how to walk all over again.
I’ve seen polio victims. I wouldn’t wish that on my child. I would do whatever was necessary to keep my children from getting it at all. I’m certainly no biologist, but if I remember correctly the organism that causes tetanus, or lockjaw if you prefer, is found all over the face of this earth, in abundance, and humans are not born with a reliable immunity to it. It seems to me to be much more worthwhile to give my children the advantage of never having had it at all, than to subject them to the disease and hope the antibiotics do their job. And what of them? Are they poisonous too? Would you deny your child penicillin or tetracycline?
I don’t know what you were reading, but for the sake of your children’s health I would suggest that you take another look at your conclusions. I would also suggest that you do an in depth study on the diseases you are subjecting your child(ren) to by not having them immunized, and the courses these diseases take when left untreated, and the kinds of damage that can be done to your child through delayed treatment, or sometimes even in treated cases. Where is the lesser damage done? Better yet, what do you intend to do when it is time you send your child off to school and they have to have an immunization record?
Peace be with you…
Claudia:
The evidence on polio is absolutely unequivocal. As soon as the Salk vaccine came into general use in the mid-1950’s, polio disappeared wherever it was used. Polio was previously a killer and a maimer of children, and it was quite common. I went to school with kids in calipers. Hygiene has nothing to do with polio, which is not to say it’s not important for other reasons.
Our bodies are not designed, they are evolved. The immune system is (usually) good, but it’s not perfect, and it can be overwhelmed. A century ago every parent expected, as a matter of course, to lose one or more children to “childhood diseases”. The reason it happens much less now is technology, and the science that drives it.
Humans have always used technology to improve our chances against our predators. We fought off the sabertooths with fire and knapped flint. We fight off the polio virus with the vaccines. There’s no real difference.
Massive epidemological studies have failed to produce any evidence that there is any causal link between any of the vaccines and any serious medical condition, certainly not autism. Proving a negative is intrinsically impossible; but on the other hand, there is convincing evidence that the lower the rate of vaccination in the population, the higher the rate of the relevant diseases. That inverse correlation is proven beyond all rational argument. And an unvaccinated child is not only endangered, he or she endangers others.
I urge you – for your sake, for your son’s, for the sake of other children around him – to have him vaccinated.
Not convinced vaccines work? How many people do you know who have contracted smallpox, or polio, or pertussis, or diphtheria? I contracted mumps, measles, and chicken pox as a child, just like all the other kids, and was hospitalized with the mumps – my wife got the chicken pox twice, just as her mother did, and was very ill with it. Our older children only got chicken pox, because they hadn’t gotten the vaccine, and our younger ones haven’t had any of those formerly ubiquitous diseases. Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but it’s all backed by the statistics.
I could think of a few other university level science based courses that should be obligatory, however since I realize that this is not a very realistic possibility with our current educational system, I might be satisfied with one that does a much better job inculcating critical thinking skills at a high school level in the public schools.
True Bob @ #99
Our kids in Aus have the varicella vaccine as part of the schedule at 18 months. Its not compulsory but is recommended. Chickenpox may not kill( except I guess in rare circumstances) but it can leave some nasty scarring ( my cousin ‘s face being a prime example, poor bugger) so we opted for it.
BTW, Angel Rose Young, I was saddened to read of your history. I hope that kind of horror is never revisited upon you (or anyone else, of course).
In an earlier thread, I mentioned that it seemed bad to have a mercury based preservative in a vaccine. After the usual NaCl highlighting, I recalled a problem I had. A virulent athlete’s foot fungus got into my blood. I saw it one morning in the shower (back when I could still see my feet, 30 yrs ago), the red streak up my foot and ankle. So how do you treat this septicemia? Antifungal medication and antibiotics.
“…we get either far left or far right every time…”
I somehow missed the far left ones. Someone refresh my memory.
“People have known for years that children need to get the chicken pox; its a childhood disease that you must have or potentially suffer greatly (or die) as an adult.”
WTF?!?!?!
Carlie,
I’m sorry if what I wrote was not clear. I certainly was not arguing that doctors are less able now to diagnose epilepsy.
Rather, I was thinking – I began life in sociology and psychology – of the fact that doctors like the rest of us are subject to pressures, hot topics and even whims. There is also the well-established, repeatedly confirmed, fact that when an individual has been given one label it is much more difficult get a new label than to start from scratch. I have long since ceased to keep up with the journals but the experimental proofs go back decades: some of them were old when I was a student.
Then again, even the best doctor may not find something if he’s not looking for it. Even the best equipment doesn’t provide absolute proof in every case. Remember, I was in my 30s before they began to explore the medical potential of MRI. When it got cheaper I eventually had a scan – it showed absolutely no injury or abnormality in any part of my brain. But I still have epilepsy. I still respond well to anti-epilepsy medication.
We are constantly reminded on this blog – and rightly – that all scientific conclusions are provisional. That should apply to diagnoses, too. Absolute certainty about anything gets in the way of progress and that’s very true of medicine which has major social and emotional dimensions. Remind me to tell you sometime of my stand-up fight with a doctor from another specialism who told me, with almost religious conviction, that it was not possible to have both epilepsy and an IQ of 140-odd. He had an agenda – he was checking whether I should continue to be paid sickness benefit. But then, we all have agendas, don’t we?
We don’t yet know nearly enough about child development, especially for those children furthest from the over-simplified chart on the clinic wall or diagram in the text book that particular doctor used maybe 20 years ago. We don’t know nearly enough about the psychology of a child already labeled “ill” or “odd” or “deliberately difficult.”
My early symptoms would have made a diagnosis of Aperger’s in, say, 1999 perfectly reasonable. Want to bet how many of those currently on the autism spectrum will have a different diagnosis by the time they die? Want to bet how many will continue to bear that label because they never have the luck to run into a medic with the curiosity to want to work it all out again from first principles?
We don’t really know, do we?
No one running today is fit for leadership of a roll of toilet paper, much less a country on the brink of total failure.
Each and every candidate is either insane or a filthy liar of the most despicable kind, because each and every candidate has jumped on the moron wagon and proclaimed a belief in “Gawd.”
Not one, NOT ONE, can therefore be trusted. Not one is sane enough or has enough integrity to stand up to the filth of superstition.
Scum. Each. And. Every. One.
Its sad that bad-mouthing one of the greatest achievements in scientific history, one that has saved innumerable lives and led to the eradication of smallpox and polio, plagues that have claimed lives for centuries, can help you to get elected in our Union.
What the hell is wrong with us?
craig, there’s a phrase for it, and I can’t remember the first part: “xxxx window”. Basically, it means an argumentor repeats a statement until it is accepted within said window of consideration, regardless of the argument’s merits. This moves the window. So in the USA, it is accepted within this window that what actually is very right is “center”, and what is more central is “far left”. Compared to the rest of the world, the USA has no “far left”.
@ #111: The term you’re looking for is Overton Window.
That’s it, I’m movin’ to Sweden.
Thanks you so much, Physicalist. It was starting to get on my nerves. You saved me from great distraction.
I seem to have really offended the crap outta people! lol Well, I can assure you, that was not my intention.
To the person who spoke to me about polio…I’d never asserted polio wasn’t a horrible disease, nor did I wish it upon anyone. I was explaining something I’d read attributing the decline in diseases like polio to improved hygiene. Someone said, however, that polio has nothing to do with hygiene and I take that on board. That person also complained about my using the term “designed” and I can assure you, I have no faith in ID.
I’ve only recently become interested in scientific things and I hope that can explain my fully admitted ignorance on such subjects. There are a lot of people here with a lot of information and I intend to continue making decisions for me and my family based on having (and understanding) as much as I can.
‘Memory cells are what prompt the immune system to create antibodies that are dispatched to an infection associated with the pathogen it “remembers.” Memory cells don’t need reminders in the form of re-vaccination to keep producing antibodies (See Science, 1999; “Immune system’s memory does not need reminders”).’ This is one of the articles I read on the subject and I found it very convincing. Does that mean that I feel I completely understand how the immune system works? Not at all. But it was something that left me questioning what I’m told by my GP. That’s why I’m here engaging you all; I really want to understand. If I made the wrong decision, I need to know where I went wrong. I’m not a flippant, impulsive person; particularly not when it comes to the well-being of my son. I cannot stress that point enough.
To the person who asked me if I’d known anyone with …(then, they listed off a string of diseases) yes, I have. My husband had pertussis or “whooping cough” when he was 18 months old. He nearly died. He’d been vaccinated. I don’t know what that means for the vaccine…did it work because he didn’t die? Or did it fail because he got a disease he’d been immunised for?
Everyone keeps telling me the stats are there; but I find so much conflicting evidence.
*’If a person is healthy, first time natural exposure to a virus does not necessarily result in disease. In fact, the majority of first time exposures result in no symptoms but do result in ‘antibodies’ which ‘prove the exposure’ but also prove that immunity was present before the exposure.’
But also…
*’Our bodies were designed to fight off disease and infection,
No.’
Lastly, one of the things that concerns me most is the testing which everyone has said has been done and proven, but then I read that because authorities feel it unethical not to vaccinate, there are no control group studies. How can we be sure that vaccines are safe and effective, if this is true?
I will continue to do my best to imbibe and process all of this really good information, and many thanks to those who can point me in the right direction.
I agree with Richard @ #15 that the reality of corporate corruption of science is a major problem in the battle against woo. Prior to the demise of the corporation – which I, personally, will be happy to see – there are some measures that can be taken toward the recovery and modest preservation of the integrity of research, including an overhaul of Bayh-Dole, as suggested by Jennifer Washburn in Corporation Inc.:
http://www.utwatch.org/archives/jwashburn_interview.html
I would be interested to hear the candidates’ thoughts on this matter. (While we’re on the subject of children, I would be interested to know their position on US ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.) Well, less interested in their actual answers, and more in simply having the question raised publicly.
My own suggestion in the search for improved science education is an increase in gardens attached to schools and their further integration with the science curriculum. Children can learn about evolution through the study of plant defense mechanisms; apply the scientific method through, e.g., undertaking experiments in different pest control methods; and gain valuable skills in a practical area and in working collaboratively more generally. The gardens also supply fresh food to the school, which is never a bad thing. There are several such programs in my area, and they seem to be remarkably successful in all of these areas. Just one thought.
That sentence in my previous post should have read “as suggested by Jennifer Washburn in University Inc.”
Obama is one of my representatives, and I’m a faculty member at a major university who does biomedical research, including work on the molecular basis of autism disorders, so I wrote to him on the matter. I support Obama’s ‘call for more research’, but he needs to be more careful what he says lest he fan anti-vaccination flames. The email form at the government site returned some funky javascript error messages and of course him reading the message depends on whether some assistant actually gives it to him or files it under ‘concerned voter for biomedical research’, so I have no idea whether I was just pissing into the ocean.
But writing to educators and representatives about issues like these is certainly better than bitching about it on some blog message board. Agreed?
This is the link to the graph to which I was referring when I mentioned polio…
http://www.vaclib.org/sites/debate/web1.html
Claudia? Why exactly do you think that web site credible?
Dave @ #118: “But writing to educators and representatives about issues like these is certainly better than bitching about it on some blog message board. Agreed?”
No, not agreed; I take exception to your use of the term “bitching” to describe what people are doing here; and these actions are not mutually exclusive in any case, as shown by the fact that you’ve managed to do both.
Claudia:
Regarding the ethics of non-controlled vaccination trials (clinical studies I know a little about through my wife, who’s run local trials on a number of medications and treatments, and had to study the ethics and protocols to get licensed as a clinical research coordinator).
When a treatment is shown to be effective at a particular rate above placebo, and the condition is life-threatening or the benefit in reducing suffering is great enough, trials are often cut off or opened to allow all participants to receive treatment. You could not, for instance, get a “control” study of completely unmedicated diabetes type I subjects approved for ethical reasons: treatments exist, and the possible consequences for complete abandonment of current treatments are not something that falls under “do no harm.”
Vaccines fall under “do least harm” – some vaccines are potentially dangerous (namely, the reaction some folks have to anthrax vaccine) which is why the risk of vaccination is weighed against the virulence and consequence of not vaccinating for the general public. Childhood vaccines are not one hundred percent risk free, but in the view of medical ethicists the potential harm of not vaccinating has been weighed to be much worse than vaccinating for particular illnesses and risking side effects.
Not vaccinating means that your son could, if he comes in contact with persons from less-well-vaccinated countries, both contract a rare disease and potentially transmit the same illness. Airports, public spaces and attractions, even schools would be possible risk vectors to your son. The balance, in the mind of ethicists, is one of risks and consequences. The risk from vaccinating is small, and often not consequential; the risk from not vaccinating is potentially large, and potentially devastating. You might have a somewhat cloistered view of the utility of vaccination because of, well, the utility of vaccination.
I should think the comments of the last few days, if nothing else, would have convinced you all that this is a country of ignoramuses and kooks. Democracy means that even a pro-science politician (as I believe Obama to be) is forced to lie to fools to trick them into acting in their own best interests.
The important thing is not what they say at this point, but who they’ll listen to when it comes time to make actual decisions.
One of my favorite fellow commenters weighed in again, and renewed my admiration!
Posted by: Ichthyic | April 23, 2008 4:43 AM
And Clinton’s BIG military mistake was “pulling out” too soon from Somalia. Given that choice or Bush’s never-exit strategy, I’d go with erring on the side of caution and preventing more soldiers’ deaths in the process every single time.
And definitely did NOT surround himself with parrots who have the strange Congress Alzheimer’s affliction. Every time one of Bush’s bozos walks into a hearing of any sort, they lose the ability to recall anything pertinent. I don’t know how they get away with this, because as a combat arms officer in the Army (and I’m sure it was the same Army-wide, but combat arms have a bit more urgency forced on them, for obvious reasons), “I don’t know” was an answer that would get you either fired or kicked squarely in the ass until you did know the answer. If it falls within their scope of influence, a soldier is expected to know. Why we don’t hold our Executive Branch to the same standard I will never know. Supporting the troops, indeed…
I second the motion for ridiculous… Whenever Bill’s indiscretion kills 4,000 soldiers and wounds almost 18,000 more (I believe the number is somewhere around 17,950-something according to the Army Times and their count of Purple Hearts awarded), I’ll be willing to talk about it in the same vein of Presidential malfeasance as that of George W. Bush. Until then, I don’t want to hear it.
Nice post, Ichthyic. Though I’m tired of hearing about it political circles, I did hear a great joke somewhere recently about Bill and his preferences. (It might have been John Stewart, but I’m not sure.) The comment was made that if Hilary was elected, then we’d have Bill running around the White House again, this time with all the free time in the world on his hands! I thought it to be quite a clever little joke, but no doubt someone on Fox News will run with it and portray it as a serious concern – those guys really deserve to be on the list for Oscar nominations for most of their work.
SC@#121
I didn’t say the actions were mutually exclusive, and I agree with your summary of my actions. Let me clarify my opinion: If you are concerned about misinformation peddled by educators and/or politicians, then your first action should be to write to the politician and/or educator and/or school board etc and respectfully attempt to correct the misinformation. THEN you can come to this board and bitch about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket. No one likes the guy who stands in the sinking boat doing nothing except complaining about his wet socks. Grab a bucket and bail! Pull an oar! For the scientists and science-savvy people reading this: Prosetylize good science! DO SOMETHING USEFUL.
Azkyroth @ 76
Get back to me when you can keep the word “fuck” out of your posts.
I have an autistic son.
When people like Myers, who espouse the pill-fairy, party-line approach, mock people who are beating the bushes for an answer, he’s not interested in a cure, he’s interested in protecting turf.
I’m real sorry, medicalizing “sadness” and prescribing Ritalin for precocious boys — and Prozac for the adults, is no answer, despite being the “Science” of the day. This is were studied godlessness fails humanity. Dehumanization is as dehumanization does.
The business about infant Mortality, _is_ what allopathy has given us — the US has some of the worst outcomes given the level of medical care. We aren’t just behind Mexico — give the inconvenient facts a look.
All coming from a country that listened to the “Scientists” who told us that breast feeding was a useless evolutionary holdover. At least Europe knows better, we can’t even get secularism right.
Yes. Molecular biology is what it’s called at Vienna University: (molecular) genetics, microbiology, biochemistry, cell biology, immunology, and basic neurology all in one.
Oh. Thanks. I had chickenpox in 1988, when there was no vaccine yet, and missed the first few weeks of school. :-) I didn’t know life-threatening cases of chickenpox do exist.
Never mind — tetanus is caused by a virus, so antibiotics don’t apply.
Yes, except that memory cells don’t necessarily live as long as your brain does, and, more importantly, that the specificity of the immune response rises each time the infection (or vaccination) is repeated.
BTW, Science is a weekly, so just giving the year doesn’t help much if you actually want us to dig that reference out.
I had pertussis when I was 10. I was vaccinated. I suppose that’s why it was pretty harmless — every time I ran I wasn’t able to breathe for a few seconds afterwards, that’s all.
In other words, the plural of “anecdote” isn’t “data”…
Read more about those studies.
It’s great that you read Science!
From that site:
If he really said that, it was the most short-sighted thing he ever said. It presupposes that there are precisely two sides — not one, not three, not five, not fifteen, but two. This is hardly ever the case. Moreover, it assumes that people never believe something because they just want to believe it; he should have known better from ample personal experience.
-brokenSoldier
I’d like to quote this; what would you prefer for attribution?
(And is it too early for another OM nomination?)
Posted by: Azkyroth` | April 23, 2008 2:57 AM
I’d be fine with you just saying it came from a concerned citizen, but you can use ‘brokenSoldier’ from Pharyngula if you want to be a bit more specific. (I don’t have too many attribution desires atl all! :P )
Sabrina #13: ” Actually plenty of people take four heart medications at the same time. Its not unusual for an ace inhibitor, a diuretic, or a calcium channel blocker to be given at one time. As well as digoxin, or other inotropes for heart failure.”
Yes, and it’s impossible to know the interaction. It’s witch-doctery – mix some herbs and keep on trying until the patient dies or gets better. Very few of these combinatorial therapies actually have the statistical support of the combination to believe them efficacious; you may have sufficient data on each individual component, but that does not imply efficacy for joint application.
That’s the problem with the vaccine debate in the wide-view. I’m sure there is some combination of vaccines, in some temporal order that increases the probability of autism; there’s also probably some combination of vaccines in some sequence that allows you to leap tall buildings in a single bound. And both cases are probably so dependent on initial conditions that it’ll be impossible to disentangle them, making research into them absurd – like trying to find how we can knock the earth out of orbit by having everyone jump simultaneously in a particular pattern when Jupiter is properly aligned with the galactic black hole.
Way too much of medicine is this kind of magical thinking, where you keep on “adjusting” medications until the patient responds, then believe that the “adjustments” caused the response. And of course dead patients are simply eliminated from the data set. We’ve seen this come out of the pharmacological industry too many times, with disastrous effects.
I meant no offense. I did think it strange that you would be positing private letter-writing as a superior of more effective form of action to, well, public discussion. As you suggest in your own comment, you don’t know if your letter will ever be read by anyone at all. And it seems pretty clear that political pressures will mean that even if it is it will not reduce the pandering to the antivax people as long as they are seen as a significant lobby.
Comments here, in contrast, will be read by potentially thousands of people, and can raise public awareness to the extent that candidates have to take it into account, and also perhaps that they sense enough public support for science that they won’t feel they have to pander to the woomeisters to such an extent. In other words, I see this discussion as fully complementary to efforts directed at politicians in a more targeted way.
I think that what is being done here IS education and proselytizing good science, in a way that letter-writing can never do. Claudia and others like her are real people with real concerns, and scientists here can share with them their knowledge, helping them to arrive at a better understanding of the issues involved. I see it as very useful. I guess we just disagree on this.
David @127:
Tetanus toxin is produced by bacteria, not virii. Antibiotics will kill tetanus-producing bacteria, and indeed are part of treatment for tetanus-producing bacterial infections. Antibiotics cannot get rid of the toxin (which is a protein). For this, targeted immunotherapies (antibody treatments) are often used. The best means of avoiding complications of tetanus poisoning is tetanus vaccination. Which brings us back (sort of) to the original subject…
Forgot to put this is in sooner: One more from the sneering at the freaks, your-kid-has-autism-too-bad-so-sad, cause I’m a scientist, file — or maybe not:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/government-concedes-vacci_b_88323.html
One thing is for certain: we do it this way, cause we’ve always done it this way doesn’t cut it.
Scientific breakthroughs come from the margins, from the freaks, from the accidents. Not from ideologues like Myers.
“Which is worse, screwing an intern or screwing a country?”
— Bumper sticker from before the Iraq war.
Did you notice what you just wrote?
And then you complain when people say “fuck” when they talk to you?
Then compare Europe.
And then compare health insurance.
Where’s the connection to autism here?
SC@130:
Well said. I see your point. I think science advocacy in venues such as this would be much more effective, however, if the tone of the discussion was generally more respectful and informative. The uninformative (though often lively!) content of these message boards sometimes taints the quality of PZ’s original blog entries. While entertaining, I don’t think it reflects well on the science establishment. Individuals here may be anonymous, but nevertheless may be held (mis)representative of the group in any polarized discussion.
ARGH! Clostridium tetani! What was I thinking!
“Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough to be persecuted by an orthodoxy. You also have to be right.”
I’ll look up the exact wording and the attribution later today.
Or I could just use a shorter quote:
“Logic — you’re doing it wrong.”
They may all be ignorant about the issue but there are a lot of issues out there. Do we really expect them to be scouring the literature for the connection between vaccines and autism?
Personally, I like Obama’s reply. He is ignorant about the issue, but his response was “The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.
lets find out the truth.” He is also a friend to science when he says: “An Obama administration will go where the science and the facts lead us, whether it is about climate change or toxic heavy metals in our environment.”
Clinton, on the other hand, should know better. She has sponsored the Autism Act and introduced the Expanding the Promise for Individuals with Autism Act. She must be knowledgeable about the issue. Yet, her method for dealing with it is that “we need independent, thorough, and comprehensive testing of all drugs, including vaccines, to make sure that they are safe and effective.” An objective that can surely never be met or measured. We all know about the complete and utter failing of the FDA and it’s close relationship to special interest groups.
Obama seems more friendly to science. Clinton just tossed the problem into the basement.
wnelson: “I’m real sorry, medicalizing “sadness” and prescribing Ritalin for precocious boys — and Prozac for the adults, is no answer, despite being the “Science” of the day. This is were studied godlessness fails humanity. Dehumanization is as dehumanization does.”
You’re confusing business with science. It’s what I call “Scientifism”. Business often wraps itself up in the accouterments of science to run cons; it’s done as well by bureaucrats in charge of science funding. But using scientific jargon doesn’t make it science, any more than scientology. Note how you quote “Science”; you already have an intuition that it’s being done to you, but instead of learning actual science (which is hard), you prefer to dismiss the substance with the form.
So go on with your “dehumanization” irrationality. Since fake rationality has failed you, check out how much better poetry and mythology does (since we haveno historical record on that!) Of course, you’ll just be conning yourself, just like those who turn scientific discourse into poetic thievery.
frog:
Sorry, Charlie — you can’t separate the Enfamil paycheck, from the free samples, from the Barbie-doll drug reps, from the groupthink. Use any logic you want. Or rather, just go read Kuhn.
Myers simply represents a corrupt establishment, that is protecting turf.
It doesn’t matter what the outcomes are, just keep doing things the same. What a joke.
I think this is one of those occasions where the PZ condemnation should be a little muted.
Barack is a magnitude better than the incumbent – he’s intelligent, articulate and considered. Also, he’s explicitly stated his belief in ‘evidence and the scientific method’ which appears in one of these:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2992109862891026370
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2163963600197208037
Sure, he’s managed to compartmentalise the evidence thing when it comes to sky fairies, but he’s undeniably movement in the right direction.
“Influencing the public” is as loaded an elitist concept as can be found.
Like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” with absolutely no physical counterpart, influencing the public is taken as gospel.
All one had to do is get the right framing and the right overton windows – and do the “science.”
Here is a smattering of the gigantic business of influencing the public.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Public_relations_firms
Johnnie Cochran knew his framing, his “Simpson windows,” and his gloves framing, and his jury windows.
You might call Johnnie’s lawyering; window science, Spirit science, glove science, or the science of teaching the controversy.
Lawyer hating wags and negative types call it – adversarial masquerade.
Of course, it is all designed for the public’s own good and getting to justice, as in influencing innocent little children who do not know the way …
My favorite is Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”
It’s all about the “spirits” in economics and history.
Weber’s science of spirits is the idealist Rosetta Stone and the most powerful tool for the analysis of human history and all the horrendous pestilences emanating from the “spirits” that cause everything.
Samuel Huntington calls his “Clash of Civilizations” – political science.
It is filled with all powerful and causative spirits.
Casting out the causative spirits, then, is the task before us.
Some immediate examples;
The terrible spirit of Islamofascism.
The glorious spirit of Zionism.
The glorious spirit of Jesus-of-Nazareth.
Our addiction to the oil spirits.
Failure to communicate about the genocidal concentration camp spirits in Gaza.
QED; Spirits cause everything and getting yourself more spiritual can cure all the problems that the bad spirits cause.
As someone who has Asperger’s Syndrome, I must express my anger towards this whole “autism is a bad thing” trope on which that the anti-vaccine claims. Austistic kids are not the one-dimensional retards of popular imagination. We may have below-average social skills, but we also tend to do much better than most on systematic thinking. If neurotypicals insist on stereotyping us, then it would be more accurate to cast us as aloof geniuses than tragic idiots.
Interestingly, there is an hypothesis that Darwin may have had Asperger’s Syndrome.
Oops, typo. Let me correct it:
As someone who has Asperger’s Syndrome, I must express my anger towards this whole “autism is a bad thing” trope on which that the anti-vaccine claims depend. Austistic kids are not the one-dimensional retards of popular imagination. We may have below-average social skills, but we also tend to do much better than most on systematic thinking. If neurotypicals insist on stereotyping us, then it would be more accurate to cast us as aloof geniuses than tragic, drooling idiots.
Interestingly, there is an hypothesis that Darwin may have had Asperger’s Syndrome.
wnelson: “Sorry, Charlie — you can’t separate the Enfamil paycheck, from the free samples, from the Barbie-doll drug reps, from the groupthink. Use any logic you want. Or rather, just go read Kuhn.”
Oh, that’s just silly. Just lump in Bohr, Mayer and your local pharma rep! Let’s put a Bush “science” hack in the same boat with Crickson! It’s just a “corrupt establishment”, anyhow.
That there’s some critical thinking. You may want to re-read Kuhn – I don’t think he means what you think he means.
And where are my free samples? The Ken and Barbie pharma reps always seem to go just past my lab… Dammit, I’m getting ripped off! PZ, you getting enfamil and handjobs? What’s a brother got to do?
Sorry — that’s Crick — I guess Watson and Crick have become fused in my mind. Two heads give you extra eyes for “borrowing” other folks crystallography I guess.
Dave, I understand your concern, but I think we need to use an appropriate comparative reference. The level of debate here may not be up to the standards of a discussion of these questions at the NIH or CDC, but I think we should be considering it rather in the context of the broader public discussion. This would persist at a frighteningly low level whether or not the ScienceBlogs touched the issue, and I believe Sb and its commenters contribute to raising that level and to broadening understanding. I should admit that, entrenched in my own work and research, I wasn’t even really aware of this vaccination issue until I read about it on Orac’s blog. I’m now much more likely to be vocal about it politically, and to have places to send people for credible information should they want it. And I’m certainly glad that you have bothered to contribute to the discussion here, spreading knowledge and correcting errors!
frog:
It’s good to see that the Lilly White, supra-supra research community is immune to the same pressures that have corrupted allopathy in the US.
I know exactly what Kuhn means, those who got their hands dirty down here in RealityLand see it first hand. Everything from Chemical restraints for the elderly, to Ritalin in the classsroom. The legal horsepower put into attacking Midwifery is a prime example.
Outcomes be damned — where’s my paycheck?
Hey Brandon, I may have Asperger’s, my son definitely does. He is fortunate to have a few teachers (HS) who appreciate his differences (along with some past who thought they’d “fix” him *facepalm*). His English teacher thinks he’s wonderful and says the other (neurotypical)kids are the ones with problems.
Anyway, I for one welcome our Asperger’s Overlords. The social interaction thing is pretty big, but that takes work (hard work, I hear) and isn’t insurmountable. And we have a great and very intelligent, if quirky, kid. I wouldn’t trade any aspect of him. It isn’t a matter of “fixing” him, it’s a matter of him learning to cope with all of us doofii (he’s a super-misanthrope – I have no idea where that comes from).
The old guard is not dead and I STILL do not believe for a second that either a black man or a woman will be president. Even though this is the perfect set up–everything is so bad that nothing can make it any worse–it’s not going to happen.
he’s a super-misanthrope – I have no idea where that comes from.
I’m not too misanthropic myself all the time, but there have been moments when other humans’ actions have made me wonder if the world would not have been a better place had the K/T asteroid missed and prevented human evolution. We almost certainly wouldn’t have fossil fuels, wars, pollution, or fundies. Still, most people I have met in person are decent enough to prevent me from hating humans too much.
Thanks again to those of you who responded to my post(s). Now to take up the arduous task of lots more reading followed by, hopefully, comprehension. Wish me luck…
Thanks Brandon. I don’t know if there is some tendency with AS or not. Generally, he has no close friends, several acquaintances, and that’s about it. He doesn’t get anti-human at particular individuals (mostly), but does in general disapprove of the species and caretaking of the planet. He probably wishes he were a bonobo.
The Bush admin is committed to finding the spirits that caused all the murder and destruction in Iraq.
When they find the elusive spirits, they will “bring them to the Bar of Justice” where trained lawyers will give them the legal treatment.
Bush has his best Yale lawyers and most committed Zionist Israel Firsters working on “the spirit thing.”
These same brilliant lawyers are framing American values/spirits in order to insure a kinder and more gentle Middle East shorn of Islamofascism.
We can’t leave Iraq without giving the Iraqis a proper legal system, can we?
Leaving Iraq and the Middle East altogether is impossible until the Israelis eliminate the evil spirits causing Islamofascism and thereby thwarting the Divine designs of a Zionist State from the Nile to the Euphrtaes either.
Hillarious and Bama are trained lawyers. Altough McCain is only a trained militarist, he is devoted to the law also.
All three are funded by the Israel Lobby and totally committed to an expansionist Israeli State free from the terrible evil spirits of Islamofascism.
Is there some kind of corollary to Godwin for those who blame Israel and AIPAC for every ill and perceived conspiracy?
wnelson: “It’s good to see that the Lilly White, supra-supra research community is immune to the same pressures that have corrupted allopathy in the US.
I know exactly what Kuhn means, those who got their hands dirty down here in RealityLand see it first hand.”
Nice bit of Manichaeanism there – that’s the worse disease we’ve inherited from the Late Imperial Roman state religion. I wouldn’t mind the fairies so much, if they weren’t such angry, blind fairies.
You didn’t understand Kuhn at all, not even the slightest clue. He’s not a moralizing, neo-Platonic prick trying to divide the world into “Good” science and “Bad” science, but an actual scientific philosopher (or visa-versa) trying to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the historical scientific process. “Normal” science is not a satanic plot, it’s a necessary (and honest) part of the scientific process when new technological or mathematical tools have not yet become available.
That is completely separate from the problem of corrupt science, or more accurately non-science parading as science. What a curse was late Greek philosophy, with it’s separation of “RealityLand” from “The Real” – two thousand years of hell because fools are convinced that it must be hell.
Grow up. Pissing and moaning over the use of profanity in an argument is one step below “[I can’t refute any of your argument based on the evidence and logic you’ve provided but] YOU USED WIKIPEDIA AS A SOURCE [SO YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT IS AUTOMATICALLY INVALIDATED]!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111!!!!!!!!!!”
I also notice that you have failed to engage my actual point.
Assuming you’re telling the truth, you can tell your son he has my sympathy. No one deserves a willfully ignorant troll for a father.
he’s a super-misanthrope – I have no idea where that comes from.
But Asperger’s isn’t even always tied to that kind of mindset, which makes the stereotyping even worse. My son was diagnosed with Asperger’s, and he loves people more than you could imagine. He just has no idea how to interact with them, has no concept of personal boundaries, sometimes has no real need for them, and gets really frustrated when they don’t do what he thinks they ought to do. (He’s the supreme martinet of the playground.)
Claudia, I’m glad you’re looking into it more. I think part of why the vaccine debate is so charged is that it’s easy to alienate people, and I hope we here haven’t done that to you. Yes, vaccines have a non-negligible level of risk. There are risks. You are right to have concerns. However, I think one problem we have is that we don’t intuitively grasp the potential risk on the other side of not having vaccines, because most of us of childbearing age haven’t lived in a place and time when there weren’t any. We don’t realize how swift and deadly a diptheria epidemic can be. We don’t have the memory of gut-wrenching fear that our child could contract polio just by going to the park to play. The scariest thing for me is that we’re fast approaching a time when the drugs we do have won’t work any more. Antibiotics are fast becoming obsolete, and apart from phages, which have a lot of catching up to do, we don’t really have anything else. I dread a time when unvaccinated children contract a strain of measles that is resistant to all antibiotic classes, and we’re reduced to keeping them comfortable and hoping for the best because there is nothing else we can do.
maureen, I see what your point was. I agree there is definitely a bandwagon effect with fad diseases, and unfortunately it’s up to individuals to become “personal experts” and keep pushing when a diagnosis doesn’t feel right.
Look up “null hypothesis.” It might clear a few things up.
(If it doesn’t, I’m assuming that the reason for your confusion is a common misconception among laypeople, the idea that questions default to “maybe” rather than “no” when there’s no evidence for “yes”).
Oh, and I’d just like to add a second on Azkyroth’s “fuck you” to wnelson, because the rash of bombastic ignorance wnelson’s displaying in this thread is more extensive than I have time to get into (not that it’s more than he displays any other time he posts).
I hate to criticize you, Claudia, given your obvious good intentions for your child and your willingness to put some effort into learning more. So please take this as a sincere question which is not meant to offend you (I have Asperger’s myself and often fail in conveying my meaning tactfully) – and by the way – this isn’t addressex to you, Claudia – I also take issue with the notion that having a child with autism or an autism spectrum disorder is automatically “tragic”).
Here’s my question, Claudia: why would you think that your opinion on a medical issue, even backed up by a modest amount of personal research, is better than that of your G.P.? I’m guessing that you have no more than a high school science education. Your doctor has had five years or more of medical training. Don’t you think that your doctor, or any doctor, probably knows more about how the body works than you do? Isn’t some humility on your in order here?
Of course we are all entitled to ask questions and study issues for ourselves, and nobody should automatically take everything a doctor (or any other expert) says as gospel truth. Doctors have been known to be wrong, both individual doctors and the medical profession collectively. I’ll admit I don’t have a good rubric at hand to differentiate an appropriate level of skepticism (of all authority) from foolish and arrogant rejection of well-founded scientific knowledge. On what basis is a non-doctor justified in deciding that a doctor is wrong? Any ideas, Pharygulites?
Claudia, I am sincerely interested in understanding your thought process in making your decision against vaccination.
Carlie, I did not mean to imply that AS = misanthrope. I know several AS kids, and mine is the only one I know to be anti-human. About the only thing they have in common is difficulty with social interactions and they’ll gab your ear off about their favorite subject (whether or not you listen to them), in excruciating detail.
I don’t remember where I heard this, but it’s good:
“When you’ve met one kid with ASD, you’ve met one kid with ASD”.
Thanks, Askyroth, I was trying to figure out how to word a similar sentiment, and the most polite thing I could come up with was that with a father like wnelson, autism is the least of his son’s problems. To take a swipe at conventional Western medicine as “allopathy,” beating the bushes for anything so long as it isn’t recommended by “the pill fairy” means that wnelson is just another mark, a suitable target for the grifters that prey on delusional ignorance like his. Maybe Betty Boop will sell wnelson some Jippo. It’s homeopathic.
Pr(I) = t_I*i_I/(t_I*i_I+t_D*i_D), where t is the amount of time spent studying the question, i is innate talent (a proportionality factor for time), I is me, D is doctor, Pr(I) is the probability that I am right.
The tricky part is that proportionality factor – we all think we’re g’damn geniuses and everybody else is a moron (or am I just projecting?) But it’s hard to beat a specialist in t, even if your proportionality factor is large.
Then of course you have to multiply those probabilities by the risk factors if either one or both of you are wrong, and deciding those risk factors themselves require the recursive application of the formula.
As I said, it’s hard to beat a specialist – except when they’re wrong in the principle they’re applying.
Only if there are exactly two possibilities: 1) the relationships between treatment and outcome are one-to-one and onto, meaning a perfect correspondence every time, and 2) the relationships between treatment and outcome are totally random, meaning there is no predictable correspondence at all between treatment and outcome.
That kind of binary thinking maps very poorly to things as complex as living beings. Even though relationships between treatment and outcome are almost never one-to-one and onto, there are observed trends, which mean they are not totally random. There is nothing unreasonable about drawing on what is known about various trends, extrapolating an expected result on that basis, and adjusting that expectation as necessary in the face of empirical results.
Further, you seem to assume that everyone operates in an information vacuum. There are also case reports in the literature of patients where the interactions between combination treatments, side effects, and outcomes have been observed. When adjusting medication combinations, people also draw on that body of literature, to the degree it exists–some more, some less–so again, even though everything is not known in a simple one-to-one and onto way, neither is it totally random shots in the dark, either.
. I’m sure there is some combination of vaccines, in some temporal order that increases the probability of autism
Oh, you’re sure, huh? Got a mechanism in mind by which this might work? I mean one that hasn’t already been taken into account by the literature, of course. A few hypotheses? A preliminary study design?
Watch out for people who say “I’m sure…” like that; it generally means “I’m talking out my ass here and I want to sound like I’m authoritative.”
plum, I’m on your side in this, but I think there is every reason to believe that a non-doctor might know more about a particular topic than a doctor does, even if they don’t understand all of the underlying reasons. Your family doctor may have gotten his or her degree twenty or more years ago. They might not have kept up on every aspect of their field since then. No one can be up-to-date on every disease, but doctors have to be familiar with at least the basics on all of them. A dedicated parent spending hours and hours researching one particular problem might very well come across some recent research or new treatments that the doctor is not aware of.
That said, the danger is that the parent might not have the requisite background to be able to filter and critically evaluate all of the information they encounter, which is where the doctor would have a leg up. Best situation would be for the parent to bring the doctor the information they’ve found and the source, and discuss it together.
True Bob, I didn’t mean to say you were claiming that, just that it’s a common stereotype that because a lot of AS kids are that way, all of them are. That was what kept me from believing that it was a possible diagnosis for mine, in fact, until the clinician laid his whole history out highlighting all the signs (and pointing out that a child kissing his evaluator during their first meeting is not exactly normal practice :) ). I like your quote.
@ thalarctos, #163:
I can attest to your statement about intraction and side effect manifestation being an intensely individual, and definitely not of a one-to-one nature. Without getting into my specifics, I take – on average – about 20 pills per day (5 different medications), and this is a fraction of what I used to take. At the height, I was taking anywhere from 30 to 40 pills each day until I finally got tired of it.
I now recognize that there are some pharmaceutical medications that I cannot live without, but there are also many out there that are not necessary, but continue to be prescribed and used anyway. I talked to my doctor and told him my concerns, and we sat down to pare my meds list down to something that I could (literally) stomach. That conversation was not even remotely close to a one-time sit-down, consisting instead of a period of 2 or 3 months of tinkering with my meds to make sure I could live with what resulted.
Medicine and its application are neither purely random nor black-and-white, which is exactly why the medical and pharmaceutical industries are so prone to both snake-oil salesmen AND malicious prescribers of high profit-margin drugs.
The only cure is individual critical thinking and the application of common sense.
Not unless the doctor in question has actual training and experience in doing research. Many practicing physicians, due to the drink-from-a-firehose approach to teaching pre-clincal “science” (i.e. a giant factoid dump from textbooks) in med school, sadly have not much more understanding of how science actually works, and hence not much more effective bullshit filters, than the typical educated layperson.
I would like to add a third “fuck you, wnelson!” to Azkyroth and Carlie.
I have no idea why autism trolls like wnelson pick on science except that it might provide a distraction from the frightening thought that “maybe it was something I did?” Relax – nobody knows what causes autism, and even when we do find out we still won’t be able to blame ourselves for something that happened before we knew any better.
But we can certainly blame autism trolls like wnelson – who would like parents to skip their children’s vaccinations – for the risk that children will die of preventable diseases. On that count I pronounce wnelson Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!
I wrote in a complaint on Obama’s website. I have every confidence that enough complaints will make Obama’s campaign rethink this spectacular brain fart. I guess I have hope.
.
Carlie, you’ve summed it up perfectly–there is simply too much information out there for every primary-care provider to be an expert in every condition. Many patients, through hard work and study, have become experts on a particular condition, and definitely have more deep knowledge in that particular area than physicians do.
The problem, of course, is when one decides to assume the “patient expert” mantle without doing the hard work and study. But that’s not a new problem, even if the info glut is unprecedented–Plato pointed out, I forget how many years ago, that “there is no royal road to learning”. We all have to go through more or less the same process in our own way, if we truly want to get there.
Carlie, I had not heard that stereotype for AS. Thanks for sharing. My son is actually really sweet (he’d deny that), but primarily to younger children. He loves to help them, particularly younger AS kids, and he really has a knack for it (another one of those “where’d that come from?”).
Your kid sounds really sweet. Mine takes a while (weeks) before he tolerates new people touching him.
Cheers
As always with your posts, brokenSoldier, well said.
I am gratified to hear that your doctor was responsive to your concerns and took the time to sit down with you–that is, of course, how it should work, but for lots of reasons, it doesn’t always.
In a perfect world, no one would need to have to do that, of course, because people wouldn’t have complex and multifactorial conditions that need to be approached by trial and error in an attempt to find an optimal combination of meds.
Then again, no one consulted me on the specifications, so that and $3 will get you a latte….
I don’t think it’s an actual policy position anyway. For a smart lawyer Obama is sometimes distressingly weak at speaking off the cuff. He needs to exert more vigilance on the brain-to-mouth pathway.
Thank FSM, though, I don’t think at his worst he’ll ever come out with anything one one-thousandth as bad as Hillary’s “nuke Iran” crap.
frog: “Very few of these combinatorial therapies actually have the statistical support of the combination to believe them efficacious; you may have sufficient data on each individual component, but that does not imply efficacy for joint application.”
thalarctos: “Only if there are exactly two possibilities: 1) the relationships between treatment and outcome are one-to-one and onto, meaning a perfect correspondence every time, and 2) the relationships between treatment and outcome are totally random, meaning there is no predictable correspondence at all between treatment and outcome.”
Where did you pull that out of? (I know but I’m too polite to say!)
The problem is not one of shades of grays, but a lack of knowledge of the mechanisms of interactions. It’s exactly because you’re working with complex systems that you can’t take the knowledge of A, the knowledge of B, and then simply combine them (unless you have explicit and fairly complete knowledge of mechanism).
What you describe is exactly witch-doctery. I have anecdotes (not statical data, but anecdotes) about what happens. I have some vague correlations, but in different systems without even statistical controls, then I fine tune based on response. You may be right, you may be wrong, but you have no scientific basis to to know – what you have is intuition. That makes you a hi-tech witch doctor (which sometimes is the best that can be done).
You can not go from one-offs and then pretend that you have scientific or causal or even correlative information. You can’t know in which way and what in specific caused the change in outcome. So the humble individual minimizes any interactions in their treatments, so that the treatment resembles as much as possible the scientific data we do have. You make the best possible “natural” control you can have by simplifying the system as much as possible, and altering the least number of variables. You never assume linear or even monotonic interactions.
I understand that MD don’t have the freedom of a mechanic to pull apart the system and actually find out what’s wrong. But when I see folks on nine different medications I know that the MD is just giving them random pills with no possible way of actually correlating outcome with treatment. Remember, the system you’re working on is adaptive and dynamic. They’ll get better or worse 100% of the time, even if left alone.
From your use of the word “impossible”.
Ah, we agree then that any further discussion is a waste of both our time.
frog: I’m sure there is some combination of vaccines, in some temporal order that increases the probability of autism
Interrobang: Oh, you’re sure, huh? Got a mechanism in mind by which this might work? I mean one that hasn’t already been taken into account by the literature, of course. A few hypotheses? A preliminary study design?
Watch out for people who say “I’m sure…” like that; it generally means “I’m talking out my ass here and I want to sound like I’m authoritative.”
I’m also sure that Interrobang lacks even a semblance of humor sensitivity.
Yes, I’m also “sure” that the proper combination of dance moves by the entire human race at some point in the history of the earth would be sufficient to dislodge the earth from its orbit. I’m also “sure” that if I wait long enough my car will slide out through the vent in my garage door, and that a doppelganger of me exists somewhere among all possible universes. Finally, I’m sure that if I dropped Interrobang from the Empire State Building there is some sequence of small turbulences in the atmosphere that will lead him to gently land on his feet.
That’s the nature of a probabilistic universe. Anything can happen once, and it does have a causal sequence, even if incredibly improbable. We normally don’t bother to investigate them.
But then, quoting out of context (without understanding? Or intentionally?) is so much more fun! Particularly when it inverses the meaning of the statement so you can flame someone.
I plan to vote for Nader again. I don’t care what people say about stealing votes from the Democrats, the way they’ve been playing things perhaps they deserve a loss instead of my vote.
You’d think they would have figured it out by now. Instead they seem to be saying “Hey, the Repubs keep winning, maybe we should try to be more like them!”
I’ve always felt that “let them eat cake!” was the most eloquent and telling formulation of right-wing social policies, personally.
Claudia:
Vaccines are not infallible, nor are they reasonably expected to be. Vaccines do, however, dramatically reduce the chance of a person developing an infection, and give the immune system a head start in preparing to fight that particular pathogen. Incidentally, people who wear seatbelts in cars sometimes die in accidents anyway. Does that mean we shouldn’t wear seat belts? (This is actually a very apt comparison, considering that some people refuse to wear seatbelts because of scare stories they’ve heard about being trapped in burning or sinking cars, etc. – much like the scare stories about mercury and nebulous, unspecified “toxins”).
Vaccines do have an additional benefit that seat belts don’t: even if they don’t stop everyone from catching a given disease, they do help to prevent it becoming an epidemic, by reducing the number of people who develop enough of an infection to be contagious and to subsequently spread it to other groups and areas (this phenomenon is referred to as “herd immunity”). Thus, it is important not just for your child’s sake but for my child’s sake, my parents’ grown children’s sake, and for the sake of overgrown children like wnelson, to do your part in vaccinating your child.
The takehome here is: not vaccinating because you’re afraid of the chemicals in vaccines is like not putting a seatbelt on your child because you’re afraid he’ll wind up trapped in a burning car.
@#77: I know enough that for someone growing up in a low-income family, the only treatment they get from Medicaid and HMOs is medication. Schools force (ok, “highly recommend”) parents to get their children screened, and then medicated so the school doesn’t have to deal with them. A child labeled as autistic, disabled, slow, or even ADD/ADHD is often coddled rather then being made to live up to the same standards as “normal” children. Unfortunately this is all too often the case.
Yes, and look how well that turned out for Marie Antoinette :) (<history-pedant>although that probably didnt go quite the way the story has it.</history-pedant>.
Isaac Asimov used to take kind of the mirror-image of that argument in explaining why he was happy to pay taxes as the price to live in a civilized society—basically, he said that he was happy to pay for things like traffic lights to keep transportation running smoothly, and social programs to help people who otherwise might get so desperate as to start taking from and destroying the society whose smooth functioning he was both dependent upon and part of.
…however, studies of effectiveness are required by law before a vaccine is approved, as I understand it. No one’s going to go back and take kids off a given vaccine 20 years after it’s been approved just to see what happens, which I think is what Pat was trying to say here, but this research has been and must be done – at the outset.
Everybody should send the Obama campaign an e-mail or letter to get him to renounce this position. Here is the e-mail I wrote:
————-
I recently read an article on The Huffington Post (see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/obama-climbs-on-the-vacci_b_97969.html) which suggests that Senator Obama has embraced the position of the Vaccine-Autism Link proponents.
Being an Obama supporter and donor, I was fairly shocked that Mr. Obama would take a position held by a scientifically illiterate and/or intellectually dishonest interest group.
Let me be perfectly clear. There is absolutely no link between autism and vaccinations. This has been shown over and over again. Suggesting otherwise does great harm by decreasing the adoption of vaccinations in general.
Put simply, an ill informed mother deciding not to vaccinate their child could kill my grandmother, and I’m none to happy about it.
I have included a series of links that discuss the “controversy” in hopes that it will convince Barack to take the scientific position on this issue.
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=87
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=85
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=59
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=68
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=17
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=37
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=57
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=83
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=159
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=184
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=185
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=203
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=95
there’s your autism epidemic. Anyone blathering on about statistics of it should probably take the things in that article into consideration.
You didn’t answer the question. As far as I can tell, you’re projecting your own prejudices onto the mental health system, schools, and parents in general, prejudices that seem to be ultimately founded, even if only subconsciously, in the popular but exploded idea that mental disorders are, at root, a character flaw. Your characterization of the situation with regard to treating mental disorders in children is at best an uncharitable oversimplification, and at worst outright slander (this depends somewhat on the school, and the parents; it’s very nearly true of the Folsom Cordova Unified School District, for instance, but much less true of the Sacramento Citiy Unified School District). As a parent with an autistic child who’s receiving proper treatment, and a person who grew up on the spectrum myself but wasn’t diagnosed with an ASD until this year (maureen’s point about “labels sticking” is, at least, all too accurate), I think I would know.
So, Ms. P, would you like me to describe for you the treatment (ABA therapy alongside speech and occupational therapy, for the curious) our daughter is receiving, the symptoms she displayed that led to the treatment, and the improvements she’s shown? Perhaps you’d also care to hear about my symptoms, the difficulties I still have, and why and how I feel my life might have been improved if I and the adults around me understood what the differences between myself and my peers actually represented and taken the steps necessary for me to learn to cope with and work around these difficulties from the beginning, instead of them defaulting to the assumption that I was just a brat and having to be dragged kicking and screaming away from it, and me just plain being confused and gradually habituating, essentially as a defense mechanism, to thinking of my neurotypical peers as stupid and shallow as – a habit I’m still struggling to break?
Or would you prefer to just keep assuming that what “seems logical” to you trumps the entire weight of both the available evidence and the experience of people who, you know, actually deal with this stuff directly?
(By the way, exactly what peculiarities do you display that you think would be taken for Asperger’s symptoms? Your attitude almost suggests that you learned about it from SomethingAwful.com or a similar source, so I’m wondering exactly how – and if – you understand the disorder.)
Personally I believe in science above all else and that’s why I don’t think injecting a solution in a mercury based preservative into anyone is ever a good idea.
Not sure if it causes autism, and the loud protests that it doesn’t aren’t helping–please just lay out the case logically without lots of exclamation marks and knocks on the candidates (who aren’t really experts in anything) just wouldn’t take that chance.
thalactaros: “Isaac Asimov used to take kind of the mirror-image of that argument in explaining why he was happy to pay taxes as the price to live in a civilized society—basically, he said that he was happy to pay for things like traffic lights to keep transportation running smoothly, and social programs to help people who otherwise might get so desperate as to start taking from and destroying the society whose smooth functioning he was both dependent upon and part of.”
The right wing delusion is one of superiority. They imagine that their social position was achieved independently, so it would be absurd for them to actual care about those useless dregs upon which they trample. It usually only takes a bit of prodding for them to ‘fess up and talk honestly (sometimes some alcohol helps, sometimes just needling them will get the blurt out).
The only reason I can imagine for such a clear fallacy has to be actually some kind of reaction formation – a deep-seated fear of inferiority that forces them to overcompensate with fantasies of power. It’s the pattern in traditional fascism, and matches up closely with their religion.
Asimov’s biography is great for playing with that (I. Asimov). His ironic egotism is both funny and deeply empathic because he recognizes exactly his smallness and largeness in the world, without fear. You’ve got Heinlein, on the other hand, who is constantly slipping with megalomaniac fantasies of immortality and sexual prowess, and of course the associated right-wingerism; that traditional hidden American fear of impotence is just so obvious.
WNelson:
As the parent of an autistic boy as well, I am offended both by your pushing your son to the fore to attempt to legitimize your argument, and your attitude as displayed here. I’ll amend that to say I’m also ashamed.
I spent about a week in shock after the diagnosis, mostly going through a litany of my own sins in dealing with my son: had he even understood why he’d been punished? Had I missed opportunities to help him earlier? But since then…
I don’t waste my time pursuing blame, not in his case. I don’t care right now what caused it: if there’s anything that might help, that’s great. In the meantime, I want to help him keep up academically while his social skills slowly improve, and I have been attempting to plan for his future. If he needs care as an adult, or assistance in living alone: those are my primary concerns.
I would urge you, wnelson, to stop simply looking at your son as a disease and see him as a person who needs parenting, perhaps for a bit longer and more intensely than most.
And please, in your advocacy, abdicate the position of spokesman for parents of autistic children. You’re embarrassing and crude; not the image some of us would care to project.
Didn’t they find there wasn’t a vaccine-autism link? Did no one think to consider the parents’ ages when they had children? Doesn’t the risk of a child having autism increase when its parents are older? I do believe I read an article saying there’s a link between older-men sperm and their children with autism.
Did anyone think that chemicals in items we use everyday could have properties that may cause birth defects?
“Environmental factors that have been claimed to contribute to or exacerbate autism, or may be important in future research, include certain foods, infectious disease, heavy metals, solvents, diesel exhaust, PCBs, phthalates and phenols used in plastic products, pesticides, brominated flame retardants, alcohol, smoking, illicit drugs, and vaccines”
(http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.28.021406.144007)
Plus, are these children being diagnosed correctly?
Hey “dude”, you DO realize its use was discontinued some years ago? (By the way there’s been no subsequent decline in diagnoses of ASD.)
“On what basis is a non-doctor justified in deciding that a doctor is wrong? Any ideas, Pharygulites?”
Oooh, boy, my hot button just got poked! Whenever the doctor tells me I’m wrong about what I’m feeling. “This drug gives me panic attacks.” “It’s not one of the side effects in my list.” “That’s your problem. It’s giving me panic attacks.” He finally decided that since one of the side effects was anxiety, it could lead to panic attacks in occasional very strange people, like me.
Another one: “This antidepressant is making my sleep worse.” “That’s a symptom of depression. We’ll increase the dose.” A week later: “My sleep is much worse.” “We’ll increase the dose.” I go in a week later, eyes red like traffic lights and a certain zombie-like attitude: “Now I’m not sleeping at all. ” “OK, we’ll try another drug.”
Now my family doctor has me tagged as “one of those people who have weird reactions to drugs” and we get along much better, because she believes me when I tell her what I’m feeling.
Back out of anecdote and into the original question, yes, she knows a lot more about medicine in general that I do, and I like to think I’m a well-educated layman. What helps a lot is that she explains what she’s going to prescribe, what it’s going to do, she’ll answer questions, and modify a treatment plan if I have concerns. So we’ve reached a good compromise – she knows about medicine, I know about me.
I really think a lot of the problem is that doctors often don’t discuss things with their patients, they say “Take this”, “do that” and then they’re out the door. I recently had to deal with a specialist like this, and after a certain amount of unhappiness in both directions, we divorced. (He didn’t want to see me, I didn’t want to see him. Win/Win!) It’s not necessarily the doctor’s fault – they have a lot of time pressure to move patients through, but it leaves patients dissatisfied with their level of care. My GP has made a conscious decision to not take on as many patients, and almost had to move to another practice once in order to continue working that way, and as her patient, I’m grateful. A lot of people don’t have that option, and it would be better all around if they did. Off my soapbox now. I didn’t plan to be this long-winded. (And I’m from Canuckistan. YMMV.)
By the way, thanks to all the people who helped Claudia. As a child born before polio died, all I could do was sputter incoherently.
As I alluded to in my post, when you don’t understand why you don’t share other people’s conviction certain social rituals, expressions, gestures, turns of phrase, customs, etc. etc. ad avalanchum, are so important, it’s easy to dismiss them as stupid and shallow. When your classmates seem to be taking bets among themselves to see whether they can drive you to suicide with the constant abuse, and the various people who spend their lives sleeping on the job of maintaining a safe and orderly learning environment invariably find something else to pay attention to, it’s an absolute necessity for psychological self-preservation.
Even when you’re around decent people, though, it’s easy to develop a dislike for interacting with humans simply because it’s so stressful. This, to those unfamiliar with your mental state, is easily mistaken for a dislike for humans themselves.
Unfortunately, people who’ve already made up their minds and don’t want to be confused by the facts usually, and in this case did, ignore the facts when they were logically laid out without exclamation marks. Over.
And over.
And over.
And over.
Being human and all, eventually we started to get a little bit frustrated.
Imagine that, huh?
Carlie (#165) and Steve LaBonne (#168) (and Claudia) –
I’m not talking about a patient knowing about the latest study which the doctor hasn’t read up on yet or the patient knowing some obscure fact that the doctor has forgotten. Nor am I assuming that doctors are scientists and therefore capable of assessing the merit of the latest study. Granted a layperson can educate herself and become more knowledgeable in a specific medical area than a doctor, although I would bet that in a majority of cases the self-educated layperson’s knowledge consists of factoids rather than serious understanding of the biology involved. A patient can certainly know that Study X says that Treatment A has a better 5-year survival rate than Treatment B, but will our hypothetical average educated layperson be able to understand WHY A is more effective than B and why C is completely unlikely to work?
Back to my point, what I am challenging Claudia on is her setting herself up as having a better understanding of the nature of vaccines and autism than her doctor does. This is not a case of patient-has-new-information-that-the-doctor doesn’t-yet-have (but would agree with).
Claudia didn’t have any credible new information. She was contradicting a well-established medical fact (I’m sure her doctor told her that) and doing so WITHOUT any understanding of the basic biology of how vaccines work, of how the brain works.
Coming to your own opinion on an issue that’s still scientifically contested is not unreasonable, since no one has enough knowledge to have a definitive opinion. Relying on your own judgment when you’ve seriously studied a subject is reasonable (although the odds are still against your being right and all the experts being wrong). Dismissing expert opinion when your knowledge of the subject is based on superficial self-education is arrogant. That’s what creationists do.
From 191:
I think this last point is very true. I suspect that most doctors who act this way don’t realize the extent to which they’re doing it. It’s probably far down on their list of concerns, and perhaps understandably so. But from a patient perspective, it’s huge. I also think that some patients actually prefer the “just give me a pill and let me get out of here” approach. Me, I want the full detail explanation, with illustration if possible. When they get out the plastic models of body parts, I’m sold.
Anecdote, feel free to skip: in late high school I discovered I had moderate scoliosis that had somehow been missed in the screenings (actually, the uneven shoulder muscling had been noticed but I was told just to “try to use my arms more evenly”). The specialist (that we drove two hours to see) sat me down for five minutes and impatiently told me that a) I should maintain a healthy weight and b) I’d likely get arthritis after I have kids. That’s it, the nurse will show you out.
I figured, that’s that, and nothing else can be done. I actually, weirdly, felt guilty for inconveniencing the doctor by taking up his time. As a result I spent years getting strange back spasms and sharp pains and generally being confused before going to see a second doctor who actually took the time to show me (with a model of the spine!) exactly what was going on. I got the info sheets, list of daily exercises, whole she-bang. And it has been much less of a problem ever since.
So, lesson learned. Now, luckily, I have the luxury of selecting doctors that I like. Less fortunate people often don’t have that option.
Obama *and* Clinton are bothering to talk about a subject which is not worth paying attention to? Well, what a surprise!
They may be our best bets to avoid another 4 years of war profiterring and further bankrupting of our nation, but they are still politicians.
Politicians lie, deceive, and distract, and that, distract, is what this “ongoing rivalry” between Obama and Clinton, as well as this new autism nonsense is. A distraction from the fact that even if one of them elected, the war may end, but the status quo will not change very much besides that.
We, the general populace, will continue to be nickel-and-dimed at ever-increasing rates, and the cheap-gasoline-based economy we all depend on will continue onward, pretending the end is not in sight. And when there’s no food anymore, and bad things begin to happen because nobody knows how to hunt or farm, well, I suppose then the change we all hope for will come. I doubt it will be what we wanted.
@#185 That’s Dr. P, thank you very much. And I underwent therapy as a young child, but because the ASD definitions hadn’t yet been broadened I was never diagnosed. I had the language and social manifestations of the spectrum, which continue to manifest today. However, I saw what occurred in my own school system to children who were diagnosed and I was given more chances to be “normal” because I lacked a label. In this context I came to grow and become a normal functioning adults without the stigma assigned to “the sick”.
Yes, there are children and adults who truly have a disorder, but others are just maturing at a different rate. It is the labeling and medicating of every difficult or “different” child that riles me up. For those who truly need the aid of medication or therapy, these nonsense diagnoses are making it more difficult for them to receive the help they need.
Actually, when I was younger, I DID have the stigma because of the special school I attended for therapy. After awhile though, that was forgotten and I was able to go on without it being an issue.
#59 responded to my #39, I respond back:
So I’m one of the few atheists who doesn’t buy into the whole socialist utopia thing. I’m happy to admit that I actually believe in free markets (personal freedom too). There’s nothing centrist about Clinton unless you compare her to the leftists that have gone entirely off the deep end.
And yes, Obama and Clinton are near the same in motives and methods. Obama has the benefit of not being a Clinton though.
davidstvz:
So you buy into the whole capitalist utopia thing? The magic of the invisible hand bringing freedom and justice to all? And everyone to the left of Ron Paul is a dirty commie bastard?
What a myopic view. Instead of looking at the applicability of specific tactics to specific problems in specific contexts, you prefer to prostrate yourself and worship abstractions. Nothing reminds me more of a Maoist fanatic than a libertarian fanatic; of course both will call themselves “scientific” or “philosophical” and completely rational, despite all evidence to the contrary, and both insist that all they want is full human freedom. Fortunately, we haven’t yet gotten to see the concomitants of Libertarianism in the same way that we have enjoyed the subtle pleasures of Marxist orthodoxy.
When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Oh, they have far more dangerous delusions than that. They all believe that they’re capable of running an economy with central planning.
-jcr
one of the few atheists who doesn’t buy into the whole socialist utopia thing.
Most of my friends who are atheists are also libertarians. One thing that creeps me out about socialists is their faith in governments. Anyone who preaches the sacrifice of individuals, whether it’s to Allah, the proletariat, or L. Ron Hubbard is my enemy.
-jcr
What a myopic view.
What a flimsy straw man you’ve built there.
Freedom doesn’t imply utopia, it just happens to be the best way for each of us to pursue our own happiness, and historically it’s obvious that the freest societies have also been the most prosperous. Some will succeed, some will fail, some will fail many times and then succeed.
Freedom doesn’t require justification, force does. Anytime you propose to use force against another person, the burden of proof is yours.
-jcr
JCR:
And capitalism doesn’t require force… Like your imaginary property lines aren’t made real by the real and constant threat of force against those who have never consented to them. Any social system depends on a mixture of force and consent, from the simplest village life to the most complex urban society. What a flimsy fantasy you’re pushing, as if humans were exempt from the biological rules of primate violence.
Additionally, it’s simply untrue historically that the “freest societies have also been the most prosperous.” Rome was one of the most successful states in world history, and yet one of the least free. Egypt was freer, but had significant central planning of the economy – and was successful for 5 millenia, but spatially was never as expansive as Rome. The Aztecs literally ate their opponents and yet were the most widespread meso-american society; and the Incas, who had a totalitarian state that made the Soviets look like anarchists were the largest scale Pre-columbian south American society. And that’s all without looking at the colonial societies of Europe which dominated the Earth for half a millenia, subjecting most of the human race to serfdom (even if they reserved a bit of freedom for their local middle class).
If anything, prosperity and success is inversely correlated with freedom. At most, individual freedom may be correlated with stability, since in that sense the least hierarchical social systems are primitive village level societies, some which have survived for 10s of millenia.
But don’t let reality disrupt your religious fantasies.
#199, I try to keep an open mind, that’s all. I’m not an ardent libertarian. I think that government is generally inefficient, and it would usually be for the best if government stayed out of things. Of course, there are some things in which it is worth enduring the inefficiency of government to guarantee that something gets done (trash pick up, roads, police, maybe even medical care if we can come up with a system of vouchers that will prevent everyone from acting like a hypochondriac, let it exist freely alongside higher quality private care, provide tax deductions for people who opt not to use their vouchers and also provide a mechanism by which someone can donate their voucher to an individual who is in need and out of vouchers… or something along those lines).
“What a myopic view.”
What? Your mischaracterization of my view? Yes that is myopic. By the way, for the record libertarianism is not “far right”. It’s far left on personal freedom issues, and far right on economic freedom issues. And again, I’m not an ardent libertarian, I just think we’d do well to move in that direction for a while).
Here’s a simple example. I live in Louisiana (incidentally the state with the highest incarceration rate in the nation (incidentally the nation which has the highest incarceration rate in the world; it’s a wonder I’m not typing this from jail)). We just enacted legislation to ban smoking in restaurants. Why? Most restaurants already had their own smoking ban, and no one was required to eat at the ones that didn’t have a ban. Some restaurants intelligently banned smoking during the day, but allowed it at night when the kitchen closed down and the location converted to a bar. Now such establishments can only be one or the other. Whether you’re a bar or a restaurant is determined by which percentage of your sales is highest (food vs. alcohol). It’s also not legal to set aside a sealed and ventilated area for smoking. Government intrusion frequently ends up forcing one-size-fits-all decisions on people and businesses who could make decisions much more intelligently for themselves.
Here’s the problem: The antivaxers are better at getting their message out.
Try Googling “vaccines autism” sometime, which is probably the extent of the research Obama’s, Clinton’s and McCain’s people did. The first three links are antivax garbage links; the CDC pages don’t show up until links four and five, sandwiched between more antivax woo.
Here’s the problem: The antivaxers are better at getting their message out.
Try Googling “vaccines autism” sometime, which is probably the extent of the research Obama’s, Clinton’s and McCain’s people did. The first three links are antivax garbage links; the CDC pages don’t show up until links four and five, sandwiched between more antivax woo. (And the CDC doesn’t say flat-out that there is no link; it just says that there’s no evidence for it but because parents are concerned they’re still studying it.)
Since Dr. P apparently has no intention of engaging my experience or arguments, or backing her blanket statements up with anything other than vague and partly secondhand anecdotal observations, I’m not going to bother with her other than to observe that her claim to acknowledge that “there are children and adults who truly have a disorder” is difficult to reconcile with her blanket dismissals of ASD and other diagnoses in children, and to remind all three of the people who need to be told this that her implicit claim that simply being treated like a normal child will tend to have beneficial results for children with ASDs is difficult to reconcile with, um, the entirety of reality.
As for davidstvz…wow, it’s amazing what you can make it look like a good idea to scrap by counting the misses and forgetting the hits, isn’t it?
davidstvz: “By the way, for the record libertarianism is not “far right”. It’s far left on personal freedom issues, and far right on economic freedom issues.”
Yeah, plenty of personal freedom, if you can pay for it and don’t have some large organization quashing your ability to use it in practice. It just puts the coercion under the covers by privatizing it. I trust libertarians with my personal freedom as far as I trust Marxists with my economic freedom: both promise the exact opposite of what they will actually deliver.
On the other hand, your “smoking” case is actually very interesting. Smoking bans have clearly been over-reaching; but without government action I doubt, radically, that anti-smoking forces would have reached the ubiquity they have. In other words, without significant government action we would not have reached the point where voluntary action like in Louisana would have reached significant market penetration. You can see that by comparing our conditions with those in other nations where the government has not taken significant action against smoking – in most places, restaurants and workplaces have not taken significant steps on their own.
Markets are naturally stability seeking, just like populations, ecosystems, etc. I tend toward believing that a mass propaganda campaign and banning advertisement would have been successful in reaching our current state, without the silly and Draconian anti-smoking laws we have. But of course, that option was never seriously considered. One party would have screamed “Liberty or Death!” and the other would have called it accomodationism, and we get neither life nor liberty.
It’s very similar to the silliness of our drug laws. Instead of legalizing and taxing the drug trade, but eliminating all advertising, mass-marketing and corporate production, we get totalitarian drug laws since “the only” other option is turning it into the alcohol trade. The same rules should apply to any intoxicants – you can make it, sell it with a license and profit on it, but you can’t advertise it beyond trademarks in bars, and you can’t raise capital for it on the stock markets, and you can’t escape liability by incorporating. A sensible compromise instead of ideologically driven drivel.
re claudia at # 90
“What makes mumps or measles different?”
measles is deadly .I REMEMBER having the measles at age 5 …i ran to get my kids vaxed rather than have them go thru that sort of misery.
My much, much older cousin was crippled by measles as a child. I’d always thought she’d had polio, until my mom told me what had really happened after I’d had my kids vaxed.
I’m not one of the, natural equals stupid, crowd
Which mostly sounds fine by me. Didn’t I say I’m not an ardent libertarian (twice)? But don’t act like the Democratic party supports your idea of drug reform. Even with your concessions (i.e. regulations), that idea is far more the domain of libertarians than liberals.
And tobacco usage spread as a kind of fad before it was known to be dangerous, but has been declining ever since (although quite slowly since it’s incredibly addictive). Education and freedom are better than government intrusion into personal habits any day of the week.
Libertarians, imo, take things too far, but so do liberals. I’d love to see a “libertarian-Democrat” if such a thing could exist. It would be a politician that valued personal freedom and efficient government, but not to the point of being unable to have the government enact obvious regulations.
Re: davidstvz, #204
I take it that you consider the health of restaurant employees who are exposed to smoke completely unimportant.
#204
I’ll freely admit that the employees are the best reason to ban smoking. What’s next though, banning smoking in bars? Why don’t we simply require better ventilation? Why does it always have to be all or nothing? Ban ban ban. I’m sick of bans.
davidstvz: “Libertarians, imo, take things too far, but so do liberals.”
Liberals are a far less monolithic block than big L Libertarians, who have a simple ideological basis that reduces everything to a simple-minded freedom vs. coercion, in a manner similar to Marxist reductionism. I just hate ideology – it’s just a cover word for theology. But they push the right pushes the Overton window so far, that it’s almost impossible to have a rational discussion on anything. Social security becomes an ideological struggle rather than a fairly simple accounting problem. Everything becomes “Socialism” rather than simply taking a pragmatic approach to problems, even when the common sense solutions involve concerted action.
You do realize that almost everything you’ve said would be called “Central Planning” and “Socialism” to our friend JCR, and most of the Republican party? It’s not liberals you’re afraid of, but the bogeyman the right has created, and some of the ideologues on the left that would be rightly condemned by a large portion, if not a majority, of liberals.
By the way, one of the current bogeymen of the right, Markos of DailyKos fame, considers himself a liberal libertarian. They at least putatively exist – businessfolk who want to be free to run their business, but also recognize that some problems are outside of the scale of business.
The difference between Libertarians and Liberals is that one hardly has any offices held anywhere, and the other holds roughly half the offices in the country. I’m far more worried about liberal excesses than libertarian excesses at the moment.
If social security is a simple accounting problem, then why have all the recent Democrats been espousing this “lock box” crap? It is a simple accounting problem actually, but not to Democrat politicians. To them it is an emotional issue to play up in order to get elected. At which time they may very well not do anything about it. As for me being afraid of some “bogeyman” created by the right, don’t insult my intelligence (or your own). Surely you can’t possibly believe that government is efficient? The real question is whether or not the inefficiency is worth it, and *that* is a matter of ideology regardless. Good luck cleansing politics of emotions (I can cite certain studies if you like).
davidstvs: Surely you can’t possibly believe that government is efficient?
Surely you can’t possibly believe something as simplistic as government = always inefficient and business = always efficient?
I am glad to see that you accept that some level of inefficiency is worth putting up with in order to accomplish important social goals.
It makes no difference who you or I will vote for. The election will be close and the repubs will steal it. What else is new?
Claudia: The graphs you linked to in #119 appear convincing at first glance but they are out of context, and the site they are on is quite alarming! I urge you to not base any decisions on information from it!
The author, Ian Sinclair, has a story about raising his son on a “natural health” diet. Healthy food and unflouridated water. His son does not go to the doctor (not because he doesn’t get sick, because he waits out the illness). He scoffs without supporting evidence at the Australian policy of making school kids wear sunhats when they’re outside – more sun is better! Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world – approximately four times higher than USA/Canada/UK – due to increased UV radiation from the Antarctic ozone hole. His son appears to be half Aborigine, so lucky for him he won’t crisp up like the white kids.
He also claims that it is better for kids to suffer childhood disease and be stronger as a result (!?!).
I am very conscious that I am not a biological scientist, but this is clearly NOT the kind of site you should be getting information from.
Pat @ 188:
I guess I would ask you to put the same effort into answering my posts, as you did ignoring their content.
Let’s set the wayback machine to February:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/government-concedes-vacci_b_88323.html
Azkyroth #76. I’m on your side. I wouldn’t want this guy speaking for me either. What I’m reading tells me that he has an ultra-indecent slant toward christian fundamentalist thinking processes. Something of which I am quite familiar. His take on “medicalizing sadness” is just pure crap; I know, I have first hand experience with that as well; through my own experiences, and through those that I had with my children.
wnelson #126 In reference to your following comment to Azkyroth:
Azkyroth @ 76 Get back to me when you can keep the word “fuck” out of your posts.
I have an autistic son.
As though you do? If it was such an intimidating or morally debasing word, why would you repost that word and then emphasize it with quotation marks?
wnelson #126 I’m real sorry, medicalizing “sadness” and prescribing Ritalin for precocious boys — and Prozac for the adults, is no answer, despite being the “Science” of the day. This is were studied godlessness fails humanity. Dehumanization is as dehumanization does.
I can guarantee you that there is a major difference in ADD/ADHD labeled children, and “precocious boys”. Do you think there are no girls who suffer from ADD/ADHD? That is a remarkably sexist statement. Ritalin isn’t administered for precocity. I suggest you look up the word precocious before you attempt to reuse it in an argument concerning attention and hyperactive disorders.
My oldest son was ADD/ADHD classified. He was born with Spina Bifida Occulta, which they didn’t find until he was seven, he had a mild case of the measles, koplik spots and all, around nineteen months old, and a short series of seizures right around three. I had to take him to a doctor (military) when he was a little over three because I simply could no longer get his attention in any way. It was like living in the house with an untamed lower primate. There were two older boys in the family unit with whom there were no discipline problems at all.
Before this though, I started teaching him letters and numbers around the age of two. By the time he was two-and-a-half, he could pick words from among the array of flashcards that I began making when I found out I was pregnant with him, and form grammatically correct sentences, laying the cards out in order on the table. He had no attention problems at all. We played math and word games together, as well as built lego constructions, drew on paper, colored, created artwork, watched cartoons, and fed the ducks in the park I liked to frequent. This is about the time that he began to deteriorate in mental functionality and reason. Over a period of about six months he worsened to the point that I felt as though he could not really grasp the reality of either his surroundings, or my immediate presence. My son’s original Pediatric Neurologist said that my son had the most advanced case of ADD/ADHD she had seen. Ritalin brought functionality and reason to my son, and peace to my entire family (and some of my neighbors, some of my neighbors animals even).
My two middle sons turned out precocious; but my youngest was ADD/OCD Manic Depressive, which is another long story filled with stupid and ignorant people. My father was finally put on psych meds after a nervous breakdown he suffered not very long after the last of us kids moved out of his house. I have personally been diagnosed with Manic-Depressive Disorder (Bi-Polar Disorder), clinical depression, anxiety/panic disorder, and short bouts of catatonic schizophrenia. Supposed mental disorders ran rampant on my mothers side of the family, but not on my father’s. Are you seeing anything relational in all of this?
How dare you come along and try to dispel and dismiss these drugs as though ADD/ADHD disorders are easily treatable with stringent discipline – they are not! Don’t speak for those of whom you know nothing about. I think I need to go before I get irrational and have a Monique Davis moment.
#127 (David)
I said: It seems to me to be much more worthwhile to give my children the advantage of never having had it at all, than to subject them to the disease and hope the antibiotics do their job. And what of them? Are they poisonous too? Would you deny your child penicillin or tetracycline?
David said: Never mind — tetanus is caused by a virus, so antibiotics don’t apply.
Angel says: I like borrowing from the university presses. This is from the Oxford University Press’s “World of the Body”:
Tetanus–The immediate cause of this presentation of a disease state is the presence of a circulating poison (toxin) produced at the site of a wound by spores of the bacterium Clostridium tetani…
Because the muscle spasms may cause airway obstruction, such as by closing the jaw and the larynx, or may render the respiratory muscles functionally useless because contractions are sustained instead of rhythmic, tetanus is potentially fatal, but it can be treated successfully by antibiotic drugs. Meanwhile the patient may need to be sedated or, in more severe intoxication, to be paralysed by muscle relaxant drugs and artificially ventilated.
Tetanus is not contagious.
david #215: “If social security is a simple accounting problem, then why have all the recent Democrats been espousing this “lock box” crap? It is a simple accounting problem actually, but not to Democrat politicians. To them it is an emotional issue to play up in order to get elected. At which time they may very well not do anything about it. As for me being afraid of some “bogeyman” created by the right, don’t insult my intelligence (or your own). Surely you can’t possibly believe that government is efficient? The real question is whether or not the inefficiency is worth it, and *that* is a matter of ideology regardless. Good luck cleansing politics of emotions (I can cite certain studies if you like).”
And why have all recent Republican candidates spouted all the nonsense about SS bankruptcy? And why do the Libertarian lackeys constantly call it a pyramid scheme? Because, as you imply, a big portion of the electorate is composed of cretins. Not much you can do about that but continue to be as rational as possible, and discuss things with the non-emotionally damaged part of the population.
But this “government is inefficient” line is exactly the kind of bogeyman I’m talking about. It’s not government that is inefficient, in particular, but bureaucracy – when you scale up any organization, you pay for the efficiencies of scale in certain aspects with other inefficiencies of scale. So the trick is to find where, in particular, you can scale up and where you can’t. SS is a great example of where bureaucracy goes down by scaling up – it has administrative costs on the order of 2% by having a fairly simply, flat and universal structure.
On the other hand, health care is inefficient at it’s current scale. The private businesses that run health insurance schemes have huge administrative overheads. They’re too big to have a clue at actually treating people, and too small to simplify the bureaucracy. You pay the price, and get none of the benefits.
You’re afraid of the word government, rather than looking deeper at the real structural issues; sometimes government is inefficient, sometime big business is inefficient and sometimes individual action is inefficient (try to build an irrigation system one person at a time).
Posted by: frog | April 24, 2008 10:19 AM
Damn well put, frog. While we could definitely use some scaling up in social programs like SS, we could also do extremely well to scale down in many other aspects of the bureaucracy you identified so knowledgeably as the base of inefficiency in any organization, especially governmental ones.
“Surely you can’t possibly believe something as simplistic as government = always inefficient and business = always efficient?”
That’s the problem with a lot of hardcore liberals. You’re always ready to think the worst of your opponents. Of course I don’t think that government is always inefficient and business always is. I think that inefficient businesses fail and the other ones might succeed (or they might fail too for other reasons). Inefficient government organizations generally drag on for a while and request more funding. Efficient ones have their funding cut… which acts as a disincentive (generally) against efficiency.
“But this “government is inefficient” line is exactly the kind of bogeyman I’m talking about. It’s not government that is inefficient, in particular, but bureaucracy”
Government bureaucracy is more inefficient than private bureaucracy (again, because when government is inefficient it just requests more money instead of failing and letting the gap be filled by a competitor). Government doesn’t *have* to be extremely inefficient, but it tends towards inefficiency because there is no mechanism (as in free market) to force it to tend towards efficiency. You can hire and fire agency heads and such based on the agencies efficiency, but that either isn’t done very often or doesn’t work (clearly).
More likely, being a fundy scumbag, he thinks there are no precocious girls.
As for the “government concedes” think, that’s already been debunked. Concluding that there’s a better than 50% chance that vaccines might have caused a bad reaction in a particular child with an unusual genetic condition resulting in multiple symptoms, a few of which sorta vaguely match those of autism, has absolutely no bearing on whether vaccines cause cases of actual autism in children who don’t have that genetic condition, and pretending otherwise is either diabolically dishonest, or dumb-as-a-brick. Seriously, it’s like “tiger sharks have stripes; they must be feline species!” dumb.
brokensoldier and frog,
well put, AND things change ! Huge things, both for the nation and for the world, like demographics, environement, resources availability. And identifying which parts of governements need to be scaled down and which scaled up need to vary over time, to adapt to the new conditions.
And that is the problem with any ideology: it’s not the ideology per se which is the problem, but the fact that some people are hooked on a specific one because they feel it has worked best for them and they refuse to understand why real change is needed, even for their own sake.
david: “That’s the problem with a lot of hardcore liberals. You’re always ready to think the worst of your opponents.”
That’s the problem with you hard-core rightwingers, they over-generalize and mud-sling (Cue the Sarcasm).
david: “Government bureaucracy is more inefficient than private bureaucracy (again, because when government is inefficient it just requests more money instead of failing and letting the gap be filled by a competitor). Government doesn’t *have* to be extremely inefficient, but it tends towards inefficiency because there is no mechanism (as in free market) to force it to tend towards efficiency”
The tendency toward inefficiency is due to safety in resisting feedback mechanisms. In government, we have elections; in business, we have markets. In both, if you get large enough within the system, you can resist inefficiency. In both, it can positively in your self-interest to be inefficient (health care is a great example). Sometimes markets drive out inefficiency – but it’s not a general trait of markets, anymore than it’s a general trait of democracy that inefficient/incompetent administrators get canned. It depends on the structure of the specific market – who are the customers vs. who are the consumers, and the relative roles of vendors, their scales, information asymmetries, and market dominance.
The devils is always in the details. In general, I’m suspicious of big government; in general I’m suspicious of big business. And I’m particularly suspicious at the intersection of the two. The best thing about each is that they can be used to check the other.
I’m not right-wing. I’m a centrist with a slight libertarian bent (yes, sarcasm I know, but I just want to be clear in case there was any doubt).
For everything you wrote about inefficiency, you basically ceded my point. Markets always have a strong feedback mechanism (consumers) that punish businesses that don’t provide what consumers want. Consumers choose between competing products and services on a day to day basis, and they generally understand the products they are choosing from.
Government, on the other hand, has long period voting and the voters are frequently duped because they’re trying to choose, once every several years, between competing leaders who want to fill jobs they hardly understand. I don’t know what can be done about it though, except in a few cases where the government could provide for a competitive environment (vouchers for health care and *gasp* even schooling would probably be advisable).
Just thought I would interject a general observation here. The political viewpoints presented here are VERY US-centric. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, seeing as most people posting on here are American. But maybe a dose of worldwide perspective might help.
I am Canadian. Yes, one of those friendly guys from north of the Great Lakes who says “eh”. We have “universal” healthcare. However, it has been my experience that most Americans don’t realize that the way the system works is that my GP is a private businessman. It just happens that every single resident of the province is on the same insurance plan, and that plan gets run by the government and taxes. You get economies of small scale due to the fact that you have less bureaucracy, but you get economies of large scale since the government sets the amount doctors get paid per procedure. Don’t get me wrong, this system is far from perfect (as my fellow Canadians will attest QUITE strongly). But it seems to me to be a step in the right direction. Europe also works this way in many countries, including those that have some of the highest peace, HDI, and happiness rates in the world.
What is considered “left” in the States, is centrist by Canadian and European standards. Hell, in my country, the party called the Liberal Party of Canada has run the country for well more than half of our history. And we seem to be doing fine.
The classic problem of communism and socialism is “Why should I work if I’m taken care of no matter what?” But the classic problem of capitalism is social inequality and exploitation. What about taking the best of both worlds? Everyone gets a bed, healthcare, basic nutrition, and free education (needed to succeed in todays world). But if you want that flat-screen TV, or to feed your 5 dogs Science Diet, you better work your butt off.
Moral of the story: Capitalism-esque systems are probably the best wealth generating system known to history. The trick is to create a system where that wealth is real, helping people lead a good (and as free as possible) life, and not just numbers in the account of some investment banker.
david: “Markets always have a strong feedback mechanism (consumers) that punish businesses that don’t provide what consumers want. Consumers choose between competing products and services on a day to day basis, and they generally understand the products they are choosing from.”
That’s where your mistake is. Consumers are not the same thing as customers. In many markets, they are disjoint – the feedback isn’t coming from the “end-user”, the individual who is actually supposed to be making the value-added transaction, but a third party. You see this in health-care, you see this in software, and umpteen other markets. The feedback mechanism then becomes deranged, and you get inefficiency.
Do you think the television consumer is the customer for broadcasters? What you get is this tangled web of relationships, and the entire system no longer is tied to supplying goods to end-users, but a self-supporting system untied to any real demands or desires. It’s the problem of any complicated system – you get loops between the feedbacks, and soon the system is amplifying it’s internal noise, and not connecting inputs to outputs. That’s when the whole thing start to look just like “government”.
There’s no general solution. But to assume that one social form is inherently superior to another cuts out tactics that can be used to clean up the mess – when the problem is markets, government might be the solution, and visa versa. Or maybe some new social form, or some really old one.
I’m sorry, I just can’t agree. For example, broadcaster’s have to work with networks that provide content, and consumers who consume the content. If they play nothing but crappy shows or commercials, then the consumers will tune into other stations and the advertisers will stop paying and the broadcaster will fail (or their profits will go down prompting investors to question the existing management). The point is, the constant pressure is there during every quarterly report. Contrast government where the leaders are reelected every 2, 4 or 6 years.
And again, it doesn’t matter if inefficiency enters into a business, the point is that the inefficiency, however you like to measure it, is lower than when government gets involved. Or at least, that’s the impression I get. That’s not very scientific, I know, but what other options do we have in politics? There are no absolutes here.
david: “If they play nothing but crappy shows or commercials, then the consumers will tune into other stations and the advertisers will stop paying and the broadcaster will fail (or their profits will go down prompting investors to question the existing management). The point is, the constant pressure is there during every quarterly report. Contrast government where the leaders are reelected every 2, 4 or 6 years.”
Either you don’t watch TV, or have lower standards than me. I can only name 2 hours of television a week, out of 24*7*500 channels that I don’t find to be complete and utter crap. It’s not that folks enjoy the crap, particularly – it’s just that they don’t have to, just put up with enough to satisfy the advertisers. Do people really want insipid pap? No, advertisers want insipid pap. Market discipline only keeps television from being too absolutely horrendous that everyone just turns it off.
The constant pressure by the quarterly reports sometime is in the direction of “efficiency” – but sometimes it’s simply a self-sustaining loop between different social groups that don’t satisfy any actual consumers. I’m primarily in science, which is a government function basically. I can attest that the efficiency I’ve seen in some science is much higher than the efficiency I’ve seen in another area I’ve spent time in: corporate software development, where vaporware is common, where kickbacks eat up 20% of the budget, and the lowest common denominator is always the goal.
There’s a lot of bad government out there, but also a lot of bad business which continues without market correction. Find me a mutual fund which has a load as low as Social Security, with as low a level of risk and as high a growth rate and I might reconsider my position.
Look at the Scandinavian socialist countries – they have growth rates as high as the US. If government was inevitably more inefficient than business, you’d never get cases like that. Why does the US have as high an unemployment rate as France, when you compare apples to apples (at about 11%)? Why has the Deutschemark (including it’s descendant the Euro) quadrupled in value in comparison to the dollar since currencies were floated in the early 70s? Why has Chilean growth been more stable and higher under socialist governments than in the preceding Friedmanite years?
The problem is you can’t reduce economics to the behavior of it’s elements, any more than you can reduce astrophysics to quantum mechanics. The common sense reality that if I give you two apples in exchange for an orange will motivate you to produce more oranges efficiently doesn’t scale up to global economies, any more than the central planning model of the Soviets followed from the common sense reality that if the master of the household beats his slaves they’ll work harder and produce more to avoid beatings. Common sense is useless outside of everyday events – science never follows common sense.
“Either you don’t watch TV, or have lower standards than me. I can only name 2 hours of television a week, out of 24*7*500 channels that I don’t find to be complete and utter crap. It’s not that folks enjoy the crap, particularly – it’s just that they don’t have to, just put up with enough to satisfy the advertisers. Do people really want insipid pap? No, advertisers want insipid pap. Market discipline only keeps television from being too absolutely horrendous that everyone just turns it off.”
I can’t believe you’re making this argument. You and I are doubtless far more intelligent than the target audience for most of what’s on TV (network prime time especially). The stuff that’s on there appeals greatly to a large number of folks… or else it wouldn’t be there. I associate with a lot of people you wouldn’t expect an intelligent atheist to associate with, and I can tell you that for every TV show you think of as stupid or insipid there is someone who laughs there ass off right along with the canned track. Haven’t you ever heard of ratings? American TV is very clearly driven by market forces. It’s almost like there is an ideology that is blinding you to this obvious truth. Now, I’m not claiming that the synergy between viewers, networks and content creators is flawless, but it’s definitely there, and it’s definitely the primary motivator in determining what kinds of shows get on the air and stay on. I seriously have to question everything you say at this point.
As for inefficient businesses, you don’t need to keep mentioning them. I know they’re out there and some of them find ways to survive. By and large, I don’t care though because individual consumers and investors are keeping said businesses alive. If anything illegal is going on, then let the government deal with it if they can.
As for all the comparisons to other countries, what does that demonstrate? The American dollar was doing just fine for quite a while and now it’s not. Economies cycle. Who’s to say that if those countries didn’t become more capitalistic that their economic metrics wouldn’t increase even more. Etc. When it comes to economic theory, I really don’t know anything. I’m not convinced that you do either though.
david: ” I can tell you that for every TV show you think of as stupid or insipid there is someone who laughs there ass off right along with the canned track.”
Of course. But a whole lotta of the folks watching it aren’t watching because they’re laughing their asses off – they’re watching because they’re doing the laundry and have gotten used to background noise. But putting something on that seriously interests them is also likely to turn off a lot of viewer – and advertisers prefer “high ratings” to intense interest, even if with same amount of resources you could make a whole lot of people more interested and more satisfied, as customers. But the viewers are only secondary customers – the advertisers are buying eyeballs, it’s not viewers buying entertainment. Note how different movies are from TV.
david: “As for inefficient businesses, you don’t need to keep mentioning them. I know they’re out there and some of them find ways to survive. By and large, I don’t care though because individual consumers and investors are keeping said businesses alive. If anything illegal is going on, then let the government deal with it if they can.”
I don’t keep on mentioning them out of some perverse pleasure – you keep on trying to pass of that businesses are almost always disciplined by the market, and government is run roughshod.
And why do you assume that I want to ban in some sense everything less than perfectly efficient? Sometimes there’s no solutions to problems, sometimes alternatives can be put in without putting in bans, and sometimes the subject is trivial – who really cares whether TV is a pile of crap, it was just an example about how markets can be perverse. A little PBS funding is more than an adequate solution for my tastes (which is primarily a desire that there be a few cartoons that weren’t just commercials for Barbie).
“As for all the comparisons to other countries, what does that demonstrate? The American dollar was doing just fine for quite a while and now it’s not. Economies cycle. Who’s to say that if those countries didn’t become more capitalistic that their economic metrics wouldn’t increase even more. Etc.”
What does it prove? That we can’t say with any empirical certainty that government programs are, as a rule, less efficient than private enterprise. There are no controlled experiments in large-scale economics – the best you can do is natural experiments.
But as for economies cycling, Western Europe has been growing faster for more than sixty years. Partly that’s because they started from nothing, having bombed themselves into the ground. But maybe they are doing something different from us, that at least works for them?
“When it comes to economic theory, I really don’t know anything. I’m not convinced that you do either though.”
Yes! But then neither does anyone else (being hyperbolic). Most economic theory from every school is just crap or propaganda for some political group. It’s best to be humble and try different things, than to assert that certain tools are better than others with little evidence. All we know is the border cases – that feudalism doesn’t work very well, that Marxism is useless and destructive, that unconstrained capitalism leads to gangsterism (which is why we gave it up). We just don’t know what combination works best – and probably some better option hasn’t even been tried. Pragmatism and data is better than bias, ideology and common sense (which is just common prejudice).
I want to see better economics that isn’t laden down by ideological preconceptions. We need a Newton or Einstein of economics. Some work by real mathematicians – but they avoid the field for the same reason they avoid biology: the problem is just too hard, and smart non-masochistic people prefer to work on solvable problems.
Just try figuring out the behavior of just a few amplifiers cross-linked by somebody else – you can spend a lifetime at it. They just don’t scale from their single unit behavior. Economics is that problem, but people keep on trying to claim that they know how it works by applying a little algebra – BS’ers all.
Claudia @ 119
Ian Sinclair, who runs the website you use as “proof” is well known amongst the medical and legal fraternity of Australia as a kook of the highest order. He has repeatedly been shown to fake results and provide false information to further his agenda. I believe, and I may be wrong, that he as done jail time for fraudulent sales of “alternate ” health products. Be very, very warned about this man, he is a complete liar and his agenda is simply to scam money of people.
I give up. You’re splitting hairs. Of course TV isn’t a perfect market, each channel has to serve the interests of too many people. With digital cable you see a lot more specialization (and on the Internet even more so), but as the target audience gets smaller and smaller there is less and less of a budget to produce the material. You see the same thing in video games. My only point ever was that the viewers have a significant effect on TV content. Yes, their choice is diluted (compared to normal consumer purchases), but so what? The effect is still there. If you try to deny that I’m going to reach through my computer and slap you! What do you want government controlled TV? I doubt it. So what the hell are we trying to figure out here?
In your last paragraphs you’re basically asserting that we don’t know anything useful about economics. That may be true. So where would that leave us? We’d have nothing left to discuss and any policy decisions would be guesses based on non-representative situations (market segments, other countries).
What’s my point? What’s my point?
My point is simple – that ideologically or “common sense” approaches are crap. That anecdotes don’t do us any good. I’m not asserting that we “can’t” know anything useful about economics, but that what we have is at best rules of thumbs, and that eliminating approaches a priori is foolish – taking our heuristic generalizations as anything more than just that is a mistake (a mistake that everyone continually makes).
Explicitly, saying “government is less efficient than business” is useless as a generalization. It may be true to specific cases – we should stick to the most specific and simplest case we can, and work from the details of the situation.
Generalization is going to take mathematical, and not verbal descriptions. And it’s going to be hard math, which should be done, but hasn’t (to a large extent).
david: “. Yes, their choice is diluted (compared to normal consumer purchases), but so what? The effect is still there. If you try to deny that I’m going to reach through my computer and slap you! What do you want government controlled TV? I doubt it. So what the hell are we trying to figure out here?”
I explicitly said “so what?” for TV. At the end of the day, crap TV is just crap TV. But it shows a general rule – which I’d prefer to apply to health care, but that’s a much more complicated case that is difficult to discuss on a comment thread on a blog. What I do care about is that – health care. You get similar effects, and in that case, we’re talking about life and death decisions. We shouldn’t eliminate, a priori, all options – from the British system, where the state is the health care provider, to the French system, where the state is just the insurance provider but health care itself is private, to the German system where insurance and health care is private but highly regulated, to the Chilean system where there is a public system and a private system, all the way down to a completely de-regulated system where there is no insurance, and all health care is pay-as-you-go private.
It depends on the details of what we need, our current conditions and on a thorough understanding of providing health care. There is probably no general solution, and it needs to change over time. We probably agree on that – but a lot of Americans have a tendency to yell out “socialism” or somesuch ideological nonsense instead of looking at the details of the program in question. That’s what pisses me off! Going by rules of thumb like “business is more efficient than government” is just a waste of breath.
davidstvz #229
You’re a Democrat? *rimshot*
Sorry, just being flippant. Hi to all the other non-Americans out there :)
That’s the theory, whether it applies to the real world is debatable. Cell phone plans in United States are inferior for the poor service, choice of phone models and vendor lock-in they offer, for example. Collusion between the major players in a market can prevent better services from being offered in the first place. Businesses must strive for profit, while government agencies need not. Government agencies need not advertise or duplicate the infrastructure of opposing businesses.
Anyway, sorry if I’m ranting. Free market dogma is a pet peeve of mine. Free market capitalism is a good principle and has a nice darwinian feel to it. The problem is ensuring that you have a sufficient population of products available, and the correct fitness function to cull out the bad products. Unfortunately most of the real world is laughably far from a free market.
Just to throw a little more gasoline on the fire, I’d take the BBC over everything American TV produces.
Another metaphor: Biology follows the laws of physics, but that doesn’t imply that by knowing some dynamics and thermodynamics that you have even an inkling about what goes on in biological system. In the same way, consumer demand can not be eliminated from market behavior – it does constrain it. But in many markets, it tells you next-to-nothing about the market behavior other than eliminating extreme cases.
The same applies to government. Governments (even the most repressive) are constrained by democratic demands – even the Maoists couldn’t work without most people at some level or other consenting. But that feedback mechanism can be so deranged that it tells you next to nothing about the actual functioning of government – it doesn’t determine it, or even create significant rules of behavior. Other forces are often dominant, both for business and government.
So to say the “market forces correct inefficiencies in business” is like saying “democratic forces correct inefficiencies in government” – it’s just not true, except by setting boundaries.
You guys keep picking unusual examples to demonstrate that free markets aren’t, in fact, the cat’s pajamas. I know there are anomalies, but even in most of those cases things are still doing alright. The cell phone market sucks? Maybe it could be better than it is, but I doubt the government could have stepped in and helped. Plans have gotten less and less restrictive (in terms of number of minutes and such). Anyone who doesn’t want to get locked into one carrier for a year or two is free to not get on one of those plans where they get a free phone, but most people figure it will save them a few bucks. So people freely sacrifice some of their market freedom and flexibility to save money in this case. I love it (even if sacrificing said market flexibility has reduced the effectiveness of market selection somewhat).
“My point is simple – that ideologically or “common sense” approaches are crap.”
I’m not advocating one size fits all here, but as a practical matter, history indicates to me that we ought to try a free market before we try government. In theory, a free market will never be perfectly efficient, but to do better, some intelligent individual will have to come up with an extremely effective central plan, which is very hard to do if history is an indication. Now if we can identify cases where the free market is particularly inefficient or where we need to provide some level of guarantee (health care), then go ahead and invite the government in ahead of its time.
So I guess in review, the effectiveness of free market pressure breaks down to some extent when the consumers either aren’t educated about what they’re choosing, or when consumers get stuck with a particular choice for a long time (or god forbid both). That’s why TV news sucks worse than print news, and people repeatedly vote in a slew of politicians that ought not be running things.
david: “The cell phone market sucks? Maybe it could be better than it is, but I doubt the government could have stepped in and helped.”
Maybe? We’ve actually had the experiment done. In Europe, the government (France & Germany, primarily) sat down and created standards for cell phone interfaces. I’ve worked on it; it’s crappy, silly and bug-ridden, but it’s standard, and no worse than the proprietary standards that were used in the US. That left the actual production of cell phones and the providing of network services to the market – but they all had to be GSM.
What happened? Much higher penetration of cell phones in Europe, and a world-wide dominance of European cell-phone manufacturers. Partly this was due to the crappy land-line monopolies in Europe, but mostly it was that any phone could work with any network, which made the value for the consumer much higher and the costs for smaller secondary players much lower; then other countries went with the standard for those same reasons, locking us out.
What we got in the US was the unregulated free market, which instead of maximizing profit for the vendors in the long term, and value for the consumers, maximized quarterly profits to the detriment of all. Motorola invested decades late in developing a GSM stack, cutting them out from world-wide dominance; consumers still get sucky services and phone lock-in. The market still has to fully correct, and the only reason it is correcting at all is because of European competition disciplined by a regulated market in Europe. If the EU hadn’t set standards, both us and them would have much worse quality cell-phone services as of today.
On the other hand, if the EU had nationalized their service providers, they would have shot themselves in the foot – wrong time and space scale.
david: “Now if we can identify cases where the free market is particularly inefficient or where we need to provide some level of guarantee (health care), then go ahead and invite the government in ahead of its time.”
We agree. Case-by-case is the best, with things that are long-term investments where risk has to be minimized being the best targets for government intervention; and always in a mixed economy model, where most services are offered by the smallest kind of organization that is practical (I’d rather have a private doctor than an HMO employee, for example).
davidstvz,
another point, today, our models do not incorporate any superior limit to the amount of resources one may consume.
Free markets may become less efficient in various segments of the economy when one is forced to introduce such a maximum limit (for instance because of AGW or other resource limitations).
Moreover, all of the post-industrial era has been based on growth. Growth of the population, of productivity, of wealth, of consumtion,etc…All our models our based on this. We are just seeing the begining of a new era, one where these models might show their limits. We just don’t know how things will work out. We will need to keep on trying successive iterations, between scaling up vs scaling down various areas of governement.
The biggest risk right now, when entering in a new phase in our development, not one of growth, but of stabilization, will be to assume that what has worked before, will necessarily work in the future.
I’ll continue distrusting the government quite a bit, but I will concede that government intervention can be valuable in certain cases.
The cell phone example in Europe is interesting, though I wouldn’t attempt to minimize the effect of crappy landlines. I think Japan had the same problem and cell phones quickly became ubiquitous there. It would be interesting to learn whether or not their cell systems developed via the free market or with any help from the government there.
By the way, I thought of my own example of a market decision being made by entities other than consumers. The Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war recently ended with Sony being crowned victorious. And how did they win? They won because they included a Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 which gave Blu-Ray enough automatic market penetration for the movie studios to confidently focus on it exclusively (the last thing the content provider wants is two different platforms… as long as they don’t expect the singular provider to abuse their monopoly… Sony has had a record of not doing that in the video game industry although competition may explain that). Plus Blu-Ray is so much easier to say than HD-DVD (easier to type too thanks to lack of caps lock). That might have been a minor contributing factor.
“any policy decisions would be guesses based on non-representative situations (market segments, other countries).” – davidstvz
Emphasis mine. Love it. One of the best parodies of OWHITUSAC symdrome I’ve seen in quite a while!
I actually had to Google that to figure out exactly what it means (though I got the gist), and you are apparently the inventor. Congratulations.
In any case, you completely misunderstood my meaning. If I was in Europe, and I based a policy decision on what happened in the USA, the USA would be an “other country” to that European country in exactly the same way (and hence the USA would be “non-representative” (or not perfectly representative as I really intended to say)). The reason is that the citizens in each of our countries behave quite differently.
Just because I don’t fall exactly in line with typical liberal politics doesn’t mean I’m some redneck prick that thinks other countries don’t matter or count.
Re davidstvz #246 Nothing in the preceding discussion limited it to policy decisions in the USA; indeed one contributor said they were Canadian, another I know is Australian, and there had been considerable discussion of the EU. So the USA focus was just your default assumption. I know OWHITUSAC syndrome is not limited to rednecks – I encounter it quite frequently among US liberals, though much less on this blog than most places. In large part, it’s simply a consequence of the USA being a large and uniquely powerful state; but it also stems from the religious doctrine of American exceptionalism, which is key to the US right’s views, but by no means absent from those of the US left. For example, even on this blog, Jefferson and Lincoln are cited with extraordinary frequency, and the revolution of 1776 is often regarded not just as an event of great significance (which it was), but as the birth of democracy, and a clean break with the hereditary privilege, corruption, exploitation and war of European culture, which it wasn’t.
Oh piss off. I clearly explained that in the example you chose I had no focus on America in particular. What’s all this crap you’re spouting now? If you want to get an idea across to people (off topic though it may be), state the idea with sufficient supporting evidence. People don’t enjoy being arrogantly labeled by pretentious jack-offs who invent their own acronyms.
I would advise exercising cognitive content selling, let me explicate. You can get a video professionally created for about $47.00 97.00 (30-60 seconds) viewing your splendid desk drawer slide. You can even demonstrate how easily it is to destruct your contenders and blast it around over 100 internet video sites for as little as $5.00 per site to be done manualy!You can get keyword research done for you professionally, keying the keyword words that will get you a respectable amount of search volum, yes with smaller competing pages. Thank you for this article! I’ve just retrieved a truly big news blog about true marketing Try it!