3 ms·

> Unfortunately, we're left here to speculate on the internet. If we made scientists responsible for hand-holding every crackpot on the internet through the bo

> Unfortunately, we're left here to speculate on the internet. If we made scientists responsible for hand-holding every crackpot on the internet through the body of research leading to their conclusions, the scientific progress of our civilization would stall. Case in point, this information is readily available to you yet you would rather speculate than get off you ass and hunt it down: > I don't believe the regulatory agencies are doing most of that. I believe it's an FAA/Boeing self-certify situation. Why, you might ask, don't I get off my ass and hunt it down for you? I could. I know where it lives. Through experience, I also know the look of a horse dead-set on not drinking, so why should I waste time leading you to water?

linuxftw 6y ago
Oh, you 'know where to find them' meaning, you don't actually know of their existence at this point, but if you did care to look, you're sure they'd turn up. How convenient for you to just know things exist without any evidence. > If we made scientists responsible for hand-holding every crackpot on the internet through the body of research leading to their conclusions Oh, sure, label people as 'crackpots' when they show you a study that supports their argument while providing none of your own. My position is "These studies should exist, and don't" and your position is, what exactly?
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  > Oh, you 'know where to find them' meaning, you don't actually know of their existence at this point No, I do. Developing an informed opinion on this matter is about a thousand times harder than figuring out who is supposed to regulate this, how they are supposed to regulate it, and where their documents live. You can't even be bothered to do the latter, so I conclude that you have no genuine interest in the former. In my experience, it takes 5 minutes to spin a crackpot theory and 5 hours to assemble, review, and summarize studies to craft a "bespoke" refutation. The moment I do, the crackpot spends another 5 minutes to spin another crackpot theory, and it takes another 5 hours to craft another bespoke refutation. See the problem? That's why I don't do bespoke refutations anymore. I can't. Nobody can, at scale. Nobody gets paid to track down every ill-conceived half-idea posted to facebook or HN and carefully assemble a refutation. There might not be enough scientists in the world to do it even if people were willing to pay. Instead, we point to experts and scientific consensus. Are they fallible? Yes. Very. But they're a lot less fallible than crackpots. A crackpot theory is a broken clock that's right twice a day. Scientific consensus is a shaky compass needle that usually points somewhere in the vicinity of North unless you shake it too hard.
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    So what you're saying is, that study I linked to was published by a bunch of crackpots, and there's actually no need to study the relationship between vaccines, their ingredients, and autoimmune disorders. There's a lot of information available in that study I linked, you should check some of it. Careful, it might challenge your deeply held dogmatic beliefs, though.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      You: "Look, I found a paper on google scholar that seems to support my opinion!" PhD: "It 10 minutes I can find a 10 papers that seem to support your opinion and 10 more that seem to contradict it. 2/3 of everything published is meaningless due to methodology mistakes and 99% of what remains has extremely narrow scope and implicit context. At best the paper you have found is a small piece of a big puzzle. To understand the big puzzle I'll have to take a class, read a textbook, read 3 annualreviews (or w/e the equivalent is in immunology), and conduct a literature survey of about a hundred papers. Then I can call my opinion somewhat informed." The authors of the paper you linked are not crackpots. Someone who thinks they can skip the long and arduous process of developing an informed opinion because they found a paper that says something is a crackpot. I don't know that you're a crackpot, but I need to see strong evidence that you aren't a crackpot before engaging in scholarly discourse in order to avoid the 5 minute / 5 hour problem. One sufficient piece of evidence would be if we met in a scholarly context. HN is not a scholarly context. Another sufficient piece of evidence would be a demonstrated familiarity with research techniques. Your inability to find the most basic regulatory filings in this field does not bode well on that front. I don't know that you're a crackpot, but you haven't passed my filters for not being a crackpot, and that's why I'm unwilling to engage in scientific discussion with you.
      - linuxftw 6y ago
        None of what you're saying is relevant whatsoever. Since there are no studies to disprove the hypothesis, the hypothesis is valid. We're also not talking about some fringe medical condition, we're talking about autoimmune disorders, which should, as you might imagine, be one of the first and primary things considered when injecting things into people that affect the immune system. I would call this a "Glaring Omission" and probably not one of chance. You can't tell me nobody thought about this and considered it a valid question. You and I both know how controls for vaccines studies work in human populations. So if a condition is broadly related to vaccines or common ingredients (adjuvants), the control group very likely will have the same incidence as the test group. Since we can't rely on human studies to show cause and effect, we need to rely on animal studies. Unfortunately, unless there is clinical presentation of symptoms during the very brief study period, any longer term effects are going to go unnoticed. Nobody is going looking for 'autoimmune disorders' in vaccine clinical trials. It stands to reason that at some point some test subject should have presented autoimmunity during the clinical trials just due to normal population incidence, but in all the studies I've read, I haven't come across that. I do know of one autoimmune disorder definitely linked with vaccination, and that's GBS. Of course, they never caught GBS during clinical trials, that was done retrospectively. What I want to see is a study that definitely answers the question: "Under what conditions will this vaccine or any of it's components trigger an autoimmune condition." How many mg of Aluminum Hydroxide can I inject into a creature before it starts having any measurable long term or short term effects in any amount greater than the control. If it's 2x the amount in a single vaccine dose, well, we've got a serious problem then, don't we. There are so many variables in the actual real world that aren't covered under clinical trials. Things like contraindications and proper handling and storage of vaccines are almost never adhered to in your standard office settings. There's not studies to indicate that proper administration procedures are being broadly followed (AMA wouldn't allow that, now would they?). The fact of the matter is, you don't have the required studies to say with any level of certainty that any vaccine is free from inducing long-term chronic illness. Keep flaunting your credentials and trying to control the dialogue. The information is out there, we're going to keep asking these hard questions that you can't answer, and you're going to increasingly look like tools of the industry.

linuxftw 6y ago

Oh, you 'know where to find them' meaning, you don't actually know of their existence at this point, but if you did care to look, you're sure they'd turn up. How convenient for you to just know things exist without any evidence. > If we made scientists responsible for hand-holding every crackpot on the internet through the body of research leading to their conclusions Oh, sure, label people as 'crackpots' when they show you a study that supports their argument while providing none of your own. My position is "These studies should exist, and don't" and your position is, what exactly?

jjoonathan 6y ago
> Oh, you 'know where to find them' meaning, you don't actually know of their existence at this point No, I do. Developing an informed opinion on this matter is about a thousand times harder than figuring out who is supposed to regulate this, how they are supposed to regulate it, and where their documents live. You can't even be bothered to do the latter, so I conclude that you have no genuine interest in the former. In my experience, it takes 5 minutes to spin a crackpot theory and 5 hours to assemble, review, and summarize studies to craft a "bespoke" refutation. The moment I do, the crackpot spends another 5 minutes to spin another crackpot theory, and it takes another 5 hours to craft another bespoke refutation. See the problem? That's why I don't do bespoke refutations anymore. I can't. Nobody can, at scale. Nobody gets paid to track down every ill-conceived half-idea posted to facebook or HN and carefully assemble a refutation. There might not be enough scientists in the world to do it even if people were willing to pay. Instead, we point to experts and scientific consensus. Are they fallible? Yes. Very. But they're a lot less fallible than crackpots. A crackpot theory is a broken clock that's right twice a day. Scientific consensus is a shaky compass needle that usually points somewhere in the vicinity of North unless you shake it too hard.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  So what you're saying is, that study I linked to was published by a bunch of crackpots, and there's actually no need to study the relationship between vaccines, their ingredients, and autoimmune disorders. There's a lot of information available in that study I linked, you should check some of it. Careful, it might challenge your deeply held dogmatic beliefs, though.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    You: "Look, I found a paper on google scholar that seems to support my opinion!" PhD: "It 10 minutes I can find a 10 papers that seem to support your opinion and 10 more that seem to contradict it. 2/3 of everything published is meaningless due to methodology mistakes and 99% of what remains has extremely narrow scope and implicit context. At best the paper you have found is a small piece of a big puzzle. To understand the big puzzle I'll have to take a class, read a textbook, read 3 annualreviews (or w/e the equivalent is in immunology), and conduct a literature survey of about a hundred papers. Then I can call my opinion somewhat informed." The authors of the paper you linked are not crackpots. Someone who thinks they can skip the long and arduous process of developing an informed opinion because they found a paper that says something is a crackpot. I don't know that you're a crackpot, but I need to see strong evidence that you aren't a crackpot before engaging in scholarly discourse in order to avoid the 5 minute / 5 hour problem. One sufficient piece of evidence would be if we met in a scholarly context. HN is not a scholarly context. Another sufficient piece of evidence would be a demonstrated familiarity with research techniques. Your inability to find the most basic regulatory filings in this field does not bode well on that front. I don't know that you're a crackpot, but you haven't passed my filters for not being a crackpot, and that's why I'm unwilling to engage in scientific discussion with you.
    - linuxftw 6y ago
      None of what you're saying is relevant whatsoever. Since there are no studies to disprove the hypothesis, the hypothesis is valid. We're also not talking about some fringe medical condition, we're talking about autoimmune disorders, which should, as you might imagine, be one of the first and primary things considered when injecting things into people that affect the immune system. I would call this a "Glaring Omission" and probably not one of chance. You can't tell me nobody thought about this and considered it a valid question. You and I both know how controls for vaccines studies work in human populations. So if a condition is broadly related to vaccines or common ingredients (adjuvants), the control group very likely will have the same incidence as the test group. Since we can't rely on human studies to show cause and effect, we need to rely on animal studies. Unfortunately, unless there is clinical presentation of symptoms during the very brief study period, any longer term effects are going to go unnoticed. Nobody is going looking for 'autoimmune disorders' in vaccine clinical trials. It stands to reason that at some point some test subject should have presented autoimmunity during the clinical trials just due to normal population incidence, but in all the studies I've read, I haven't come across that. I do know of one autoimmune disorder definitely linked with vaccination, and that's GBS. Of course, they never caught GBS during clinical trials, that was done retrospectively. What I want to see is a study that definitely answers the question: "Under what conditions will this vaccine or any of it's components trigger an autoimmune condition." How many mg of Aluminum Hydroxide can I inject into a creature before it starts having any measurable long term or short term effects in any amount greater than the control. If it's 2x the amount in a single vaccine dose, well, we've got a serious problem then, don't we. There are so many variables in the actual real world that aren't covered under clinical trials. Things like contraindications and proper handling and storage of vaccines are almost never adhered to in your standard office settings. There's not studies to indicate that proper administration procedures are being broadly followed (AMA wouldn't allow that, now would they?). The fact of the matter is, you don't have the required studies to say with any level of certainty that any vaccine is free from inducing long-term chronic illness. Keep flaunting your credentials and trying to control the dialogue. The information is out there, we're going to keep asking these hard questions that you can't answer, and you're going to increasingly look like tools of the industry.