9 ms·

My favorite part was on the last page, which I’ll include below as I assume most won’t read to the end. After 4,000 people died in the army from beriberi, the

• hyperpallium 7y ago
  The two training ships seemed like pretty suggestive experimental evidence. Just not fully controlled laboratory evidence.
  • dalbasal 7y ago
    In purely philosophical terms, you could say it's "scientific." But... in practice science is an institution as much as it is a method. In that sense "unscientific" means that something doesn't come from the scientific institution/culture.. regardless of who is on what side of a Karl Popper test of science.
    • mannykannot 7y ago
      I would say that on very practical terms, one could call it scientific, taking advantage of a situation that made possible an trial that could not have been approved as a fully-controlled clinical experiment, given the official opposition to Takaki's ideas. Takski's hypothesis also met Popper's criterion for falsifiability, and the Tsukuba could have suffered similar beri-beri rates as did the Ryujo.
• rjf72 7y ago
  There's a near identical tale behind scurvy. Scurvy, most of everybody now knows, is caused simply by a deficiency of vitamin C. But this is something that took thousands of years to grasp, with millions of people falling victim to it in the interim. During the age of sail losing large chunks of your crew, largely due to scurvy, was just part of life. Part of the reason the cure was so difficult to discover is because it sounds folksy or homeopathic. As scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, a simple way of preventing it is eating fresh fruits or meats. Imagine somebody told you you could prevent some terrible and frequently fatal disease, that's spread worldwide, by eating limes. And this was already well within the age of formalized science and medicine. This was also further confounded by the fact that the vitamin content of things such as lemon juice degrades over time in storage, and even more rapidly in certain types of storage. And so some scientific experiments to test its effectiveness were inadvertently hamstringing themselves. It's made even more fun by the fact that humans need external sources of vitamin c while some common lab animals such as mice and rats do not - and internally make their own. You can withhold external vitamin C from a mouse for years and you'll never see scurvy. Its ironic that I think this particular tale has slowly been lost to many in society, even though we have so many direct references to it. For instance the slang for a Brit as a limey came from the fact that the British Navy was the first to start dosing their sailors with lime, with tremendously positive affects to show for it. Maybe the biggest one is vitamin C itself. Vitamin C is now called ascorbic acid. But when it was first discovered it was known as hexuronic acid. So huge was the effect of scurvy it was renamed for its discovered anti-scorbutic (against scurvy) effect. Ascorbic was just a shortening of anti-scorbutic. And this happened as recently as the 1930s!
  • leoc 7y ago
    https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm which has been submitted here previously is an (as far as I know) great telling of that story, a real Science Is Hard parable.
  • L_226 7y ago
    A cocktail that I quite enjoy is the gimlet [0], it apparently was possibly invented to encourage sailors to drink lime juice. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimlet_(cocktail)#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimlet_(cocktail)#Etymology
• dba7dba 7y ago
  Quick side note. Japanese army and navy in WW2 were famously, well how should I say this, antagonistic against each other. They didn't share information with each other. Army even had own aircraft carriers to transport planes to distant islands. They couldn't or didn't want to rely on the Japanese navy.
  • dao- 7y ago
    There were similar rivalries in Germany (e.g. Gestapo vs. SS vs. Wehrmacht) -- different state rackets competing with each other is a common feature of fascism.
    • Wohlf 7y ago
      The Allies were not immune to this either, especially the Soviets (NKVD vs military). In the democratic countries it was more on the individual level, with certain powerful people fighting to get their way (i.e. MacArthur).
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • greedo 7y ago
      From 1936 onwards, the Gestapo was entirely subordinate to the SS, as were most of the police organizations in Germany. There was no rivalry between it and the SS, nor with the Wehrmacht.
      • dao- 7y ago
        The Gestapo becoming subordinate to the SS was the result of said rivalry, so it's odd to present that as evidence that there was no rivalry.
        • greedo 7y ago
          The Gestapo was born of rivalry between the SS and the SA. The Gestapo WAS the police arm of the SS, just as the SD was a part of the SS.
• vegardx 7y ago
  Reminds me a little of this joke: A Marine and a sailor are taking a piss. The Marine goes to leave without washing up. Sailor says, "In the Navy... ...they teach us to wash our hands." The Marine turns to him and says: "In the Marines, they teach us not to piss on our hands." It's funny, because it's true. We went weeks in the same clothes without much more than the wet wipes packaged with MREs. But the moral of the story is to wash up when you can.
  • glandium 7y ago
    That joke comes in many flavors doesn't it? I know a version with 3 Engineers, one from MS, one from Oracle and one from Intel. Essentially, this one: http://www.jokes.net/threeengineers.htm http://www.jokes.net/threeengineers.htm but with different companies.
    • oblio 7y ago
      My guess, the joke is as old as time and there's variations of it with different nationalities instead of professions.
      • kragen 7y ago
        I heard it with universities. Harvard and Yale, I think.
        • Gupie 7y ago
          Said by Churchill, Eton vs Harrow.
        • InitialLastName 7y ago
          The version I always used is "Difference between a university and a tech school"
    • Kurtz79 7y ago
      How do you tell a white collar worker from a blue collar worker? The white collar worker washes his hands after going to the bathroom stall, the blue collar worker before.
• brazzy 7y ago
  I really don't think the problem was "belligerence towards pre-scientific human knowledge" - the problem was that the Army did not want that knowledge because it came from the navy, and used "it doesn't meet scientific standards" as an excuse to ignore it. You see the same in lots of discussions, where people make a claim and, when presented with evidence to the contrary, reject it because it's too small a sample - without holding their own claim to the same standards.
• SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  Bad science is the same as bad pre-scientific knowledge. I don't think anyone is for the utter rejection of pre-scientific knowledge, we just want to know why and if it works. If it's found not to, I don't think it holds any intrinsic value simply because it's traditional. Keep the aspirin, reject the humors.
  • sametmax 7y ago
    You can often read it on HN actually. Quite often you'll see people offering word-of-mouth solution to a problem, and the comments following will dismiss it for being pseudo-science, request "link to studies", etc. Too much of good thing can be a bad thing.
    • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      I think that goes back to the "why and how it works". A home remedy has a neutral value to me until I have evidence, and my own anecdotal evidence doesn't have a lot of value to me - when I have a cold eating a gallon tub of ice cream would make me feel better for a time, but it doesn't actually help anything and is generally a bad idea.
      • HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
        Next time you have a cold, I recommend sleeping all day. It's worked great for me!
    • Retra 7y ago
      That's because word-of-mouth is very capable of transmitting abject nonsense and fantasy. If you're going to be taking some medicine, you should be sure it isn't, and the way to do that is with thorough study & evaluation.
      • sametmax 7y ago
        Not the point. The point is that we are the opposite of the facebook mum. She believes anything that is posted without evidence, while we don't dare to even try something without 4 white papers. It's especially funny given that meditation, psychedelic and open source software were all ridiculed concepts 30 years ago, and now we are promoting them in this very comment section.
• kevin_b_er 7y ago
  Yes, but read up a bit: > For thousands of years, diseases had been seen through the lens of kampo, traditional Chinese herbal medicine. In kampo, disease was caused by heat or evils and was treated with herbal remedies. > Sometimes the medicine was hokey, but other times it worked—as was the case with azuki and barley supplements for beriberi. We can find, using science, if some folk medicine is hokey or useful. That is the key. Ground rhino horn still doesn't cure squat. Science fights "pre-scientific human knowledge" here in an uphill battle that will probably result in extinction of rhinos before this "pre-scientific human knowledge" is countered by science and reason.
  • Bartweiss 7y ago
    My favorite demonstration of the value of science is scurvy. Before scurvy was lastingly solved, the cure was discovered at least three distinct times within a century. In every case, the discoverer found a cure (like oranges, lemons, or raw meat) then made an untested assumption about the active agent (like acid, or avoiding tainted meat). They never tested those theories, but simply relied on circumstantial evidence and logic. The resulting treatments like lime juice and better food hygiene conformed to their theories, but did nothing to prevent scurvy. From the present, it's easy to underestimate the power of the scientific method. We tend to think of it as what happens at universities, or as a format for writing a paper with a hypothesis, data, conclusions, and so on. The mere concept of testing one's theories seems too obvious to be a modern breakthrough. But that simple idea - that a theory shouldn't be accepted until its specific claim has been tested - was regularly ignored as late as World War One. It's hard to blame the Army for insisting on experimental evidence when "traditional medicine" and "statistical speculation" had been leaving soldiers with easily-curable scurvy only 20 years earlier.
    • emiliobumachar 7y ago
      A great write up on part of that history: https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm