The Emerging Republican Advantage

[ImTheCaptain]

goddamn liberals

 

[SkinsNDeacs]

Here is a great article about some results suggesting that liberals are more biased than conservatives when evaluating academic articles. Liberals - especially the Whole Foods crowd - are very anti-vaccination.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...s-in-social-psychology-personal-experience-ii

That's interesting and that falls in line with my (apparently dated) opinion on the anti-vax crowd. I find that "liberals" (depending on how you define "liberal") are anti-science when it comes to food and health science and are far more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.

 

[ONW]

Here' is a great article about some results suggesting that liberals are more biased than conservatives when evaluating academic articles. Liberals - especially the Whole Foods crowd - are very anti-vaccination.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...s-in-social-psychology-personal-experience-ii

"To be clear, no one said, “You cannot say liberals are more biased than conservatives.” We just could not get the paper published when we did say that and we did get it published when we did not say that."

Fantastic study. Money well spent. :rulz:

 

[ONW]

That's interesting and that falls in line with my (apparently dated) opinion on the anti-vax crowd. I find that "liberals" (depending on how you define "liberal") are anti-science when it comes to food and health science and are far more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.

Link?

 

[PhDeac]

That's hilarious. Their paper didn't get published because they made huge generalizations probably based on a small sample and a flawed experiment.

 

[WFFaithful]

A "war" the left is manufacturing. Science is what created the entire controversy in the FIRST place.

Scientists claimed autism rates are rising rapidly and it's a major health concern. It's trumpeted by the media.
Scientists claimed it has to be due to something man has done driving more media hysteria...the "man has fucked things up" meme.
Finding the source meant being the autism hero so everyone was in hot pursuit..to stop evil man.
A scientist published the vaccine link in one of the biggest peer reviewed medical journals Lancet...so science was arguing the safety of vaccines (a concept that's now being ridiculed).
The media trumpeted the link as the biggest science story of the year...as a huge science WIN...that stopped evil man!!!!!

But...

There is no link between autism and vaccines. Autism rates aren't increasing either, it's the way we define it. But most people still believe autism is a major health problem and that's OK to believe...even though the flaws in the original studies were glaring and subsequent real analysis shows it was diagnosis, not disease. People still cling onto the latter though because they want to believe man fucked up everything.

The lamestream liberal media is responsible for creating the conservative anti-science congregation.

 

[SkinsNDeacs]

Link?

#anecdote

However, I am very confident that the nonsense, non-scientific crap that comes from the Whole Foods crowd is spouted by people that self identify as liberals. And a large portion of the tin foil hat crowd is from the "liberal" / libertarian crowd. Again, that is why I said it depends on what you mean by "liberal".

 

[ImTheCaptain]

meh

 

[ONW]

#anecdote

However, I am very confident that the nonsense, non-scientific crap that comes from the Whole Foods crowd is spouted by people that self identify as liberals. And a large portion of the tin foil hat crowd is from the "liberal" / libertarian crowd. Again, that is why I said it depends on what you mean by "liberal".

"Very confident"..."non-scientific crap"..."self identify as liberals"...."a large portion of the tin foil hat crowd is from the liberal crowd"...

http://www.mintpressnews.com/us-vaccination-debate-looks-like-rest-world/201931/

"Andrew Wakefield, the poster boy for the modern-day anti-vaccination movement, freaked out parents around the world by linking autism to vaccines in a now discredited paper published in The Lancet in 1998.

The study was debunked and withdrawn by the prestigious medical journal, and Wakefield, who the British Medical Journal described as a “fraud,” was struck off the UK General Medical Council’s register.

But the damage was done."

 

[SkinsNDeacs]

What does your link have to do with my post(s)?

 

[bym051d]

I hate all those liberals who want to teach only abstinence and deny evolution.

 

[BigTreeDeac]

It's never been clear to me how to even run an adjuvant clinical trial. I suppose the FDA would make you run one arm with a known vaccine and one arm with the new adjuvant and the same vaccine conjugate. They might even want an arm with just the vaccine conjugate. But the adjuvant would have to improve the existing vaccine I believe..the "gold standard" issue. That might be hard to do with a lot of the standard vaccines because they work so well now. It would be hard to improve them. It would probably be best to use the new adjuvant with a new vaccine, but the vaccine makers want the new vaccine to work as well so it's a bit of a risk. They'd rather stick to Alum and make sure the new vaccine worked. It's tricky.

Congress needs to do something about the natural product issue...at least as it pertains to small molecules. I suspect the recent rulings will force reliance on use patents but...there needs to be labeling protections too.

New adjuvants for vaccines there isn't an effective one for right now are still hard to get much traction on (my adjuvant would potentially be used in many new vaccines against pathogens we don't have any vaccine against). Lots of things go into this. It is just frustrating to spin your wheels with something you truly think can help out a large number of people.

Natural products are a grey area. How much regulation and what types of regulations are needed will likely be refined in the coming years/decades but for now I would prefer they continue to err on the side of not patenting natural compounds/products so we can avoid another BRCA disaster. People shouldn't die of breast cancer because they can't afford to pay a company a couple of grand to run a simple fucking PCR to detect the presence of a mutant allele.

 

[BigTreeDeac]

A "war" the left is manufacturing. Science is what created the entire controversy in the FIRST place.

Scientists claimed autism rates are rising rapidly and it's a major health concern. It's trumpeted by the media.

This is sort of true. I mean the rates did look like they were rising but of course it was more a result of enhanced diagnosis not actual increase.

Scientists claimed it has to be due to something man has done driving more media hysteria...the "man has fucked things up" meme.

This was, and still is, a pretty small subset of Autism research. The vast majority of research was/is looking for genetic and environmental factors, not the human smoking gun. But a few rotten apples can spoil the whole bushel

Finding the source meant being the autism hero so everyone was in hot pursuit..to stop evil man.

Again, meh. There was definitely pressure to find a cause and/or cure for the publicity/fame but that is true of every disease ever studied. Plenty of good scientists find correlation and/or causation for diseases all the time without manipulating/falsifying their data. The pressure has always existed, in rare instances scientists cave and falsify their work. That isn't an indictment of science, it is an indictment of their lack of character.

A scientist published the vaccine link in one of the biggest peer reviewed medical journals Lancet...so science was arguing the safety of vaccines (a concept that's now being ridiculed).

Science wasn't really "arguing" the safety. Like journals should, they published what appeared to them to be a proper and controlled study. Then they let the scientific community see if a debate was necessary. Nobody could reproduce anything similar at all, so no debate really happened. Vaccine safety is always a minor debate amongst us academics but it is, for the most part, a purely academic one because vaccines are safe and very effective. And it is really hard for journals to find manipulated/falsified data on the first round. When retractions happen for falsified data, it happens because nobody is able to reproduce it. This was the work of one man, not a vast failure by science in general

The media trumpeted the link as the biggest science story of the year...as a huge science WIN...that stopped evil man!!!!!

This is the only completely factual portion. As such, I think your angst should be directed at the media and the anti-vax crowd for bastardizing science that wasn't even accepted in the field. Not with the scientific field itself.

But...

There is no link between autism and vaccines. Autism rates aren't increasing either, it's the way we define it. But most people still believe autism is a major health problem and that's OK to believe...even though the flaws in the original studies were glaring and subsequent real analysis shows it was diagnosis, not disease. People still cling onto the latter though because they want to believe man fucked up everything.

This is the wrong tree to be barking up re:science and its failures. This is an example of science operating as it should (publish controversial findings, reproduced/debate findings, etc) where John Q Public decided to jump in after Step 1 and make a conclusion. This isn't a failure of science, it is a failure of everybody else to understand science and how it operates.

And in conclusion, fuck Andrew Wakefield. You should be charged with 100 counts of murder for convincing entire segments of the population to risk all of our health by not vaccinating. Seriously fuck you.

 

[pourdeac]

That's interesting and that falls in line with my (apparently dated) opinion on the anti-vax crowd. I find that "liberals" (depending on how you define "liberal") are anti-science when it comes to food and health science and are far more susceptible to conspiratorial thinking.

I think it's related to trust in the media and their storylines. They are the gatekeepers about all of this info. If the media goes bonkers over some scientific finding, it almost becomes doctrine and progressives trust the media more than conservatives. They get to decide what science is 'real' and what is not.

IMO progressives also dislike the "evil" corporations that create a lot of the technology and worry that it's going to cause far more harm than good (eg GMOs). The media folds it under their "man is fucking up the earth" storyline (or if they whipsaw things, "conservatives are science deniers") and progressives spend their dollars to get riled up. Easy money...not to be cynical or anything.

 

[pourdeac]

Regardless, it's antiscientific to ignore the basic arithmetic principles behind increased vaccination lowering chances of disease for population, regardless of effectiveness.

It's about INDIVIDUAL risk, not being anti-scientific about population statistics. Everyone has a general sense it's good from a population statistics viewpoint but the media frenzy over the vaccine thing hurt their confidence in how it relates to them individually. The same media told them 2 different stories.

 

[pourdeac]

This is the wrong tree to be barking up re:science and its failures. This is an example of science operating as it should (publish controversial findings, reproduced/debate findings, etc) where John Q Public decided to jump in after Step 1 and make a conclusion. This isn't a failure of science, it is a failure of everybody else to understand science and how it operates.

Absolutely. I was just recounting the messages John Q Public heard. Most people don't realize what it really meant or could mean. The public heard "science says...." all the time.

Apparently the conclusion was not even statistically significant in the original paper (which I didn't realize until today)...so you might want to add Lancet and its peer review to your "fuck you" list. . Kind of reminds me of the gulf war deaths paper that got in there...somehow.

yeah almost 20 years ago, pour

Meh...not exactly. The media trumpeted the autism/vaccine link in 1998-2000. Researchers took it seriously and then looked to repeat the work and but couldn't. The other 10 authors who co-wrote the paper pointed out in 2004 that the data did not REALLY show a correlation but one was suggested...but they raised the possibility and it caused havoc. That was the first real..it's probably bogus moment, just 10 years ago.

We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between (the) vaccine and autism, as the data were insufficient. However the possibility of such a link was raised, and consequent events have had major implications for public health. In view of this, we consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally retract the interpretation placed upon these findings in the paper, according to precedent.

The Lancet paper was not even retracted until 2010. Science doesn't have a Supreme Court decision maker that dictates things like..."Today, on Feb 29, 2006 we decree the autism/vaccine link bogus" and then everyone must believe or be called an idiot.

 

[BigTreeDeac]

If I started adding journals that have published bad data to my "Fuck You" list, it'd be an incredibly long list. Stuff gets in all the time without statistical significance and things get in all the time with statistical significance that have no biological significance. That is more on the reviewers than the journal but that may be splitting hairs a bit. My problem would be with the peer reviewers and believe me when I say I have many problems with how reviewers actually approach peer review. Too many PIs hand off papers to improperly trained junior personnel to review and things just get missed. Horrible, inexcusable errors get published. And as you have pointed out, once the study is out there and the media get a hold of that press release (often in response to pressure from admins) there is no putting that cat back into the bag.

 

[BigTreeDeac]

And this entire discussion of vaccines/autism exemplifies the real Catch-22 of scientific research (especially as it concerns research relating to public health). In order for science to take its proper course, it needs to essentially be done in secret from the general public until it is established. Such an approach, of course, doesn't breed trust in the public for science. On the flip side, when science attempts to be more transparent (like putting out studies for general public consumption before they are even confirmed 1 time) it opens itself up to this type of scenario where bad science dictates bad policies (individually or institutionally). And on top of that, when research then becomes retracted that was hurried out to the public the public stops trusting research. I mean it really is a situation of "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Well that is unless we actually educated people on science and how it works in primary education but that might be too much to ask for (no SAT for how to think like a scientist) and a discussion for a different thread.

 

[deacdiggler]

https://medium.com/the-nib/should-you-vaccinate-your-child-7810fd781903

 

[93Deac]

And this entire discussion of vaccines/autism exemplifies the real Catch-22 of scientific research (especially as it concerns research relating to public health). In order for science to take its proper course, it needs to essentially be done in secret from the general public until it is established. Such an approach, of course, doesn't breed trust in the public for science. On the flip side, when science attempts to be more transparent (like putting out studies for general public consumption before they are even confirmed 1 time) it opens itself up to this type of scenario where bad science dictates bad policies (individually or institutionally). And on top of that, when research then becomes retracted that was hurried out to the public the public stops trusting research. I mean it really is a situation of "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Well that is unless we actually educated people on science and how it works in primary education but that might be too much to ask for (no SAT for how to think like a scientist) and a discussion for a different thread.

While I understand the concern about bad science, I'm more concerned about (a) those who apply political or entertainment filters to poorly substantiated and simplistic interpretations of scientific findings and (b) non-scientist journalists hyping basic research findings as if they were the key to translational, next gen drugs. University PRs are a great example. I just saw something hit the mainstream news describing the identification of a novel RNA-based contribution to rhinovirus capsid assembly as a rosetta stone for antiviral development. Who in the their right mind believes that an RNA-disrupting small molecule (which is likely to be very promiscuous) is going to be an easier and more specific therapeutic target than something disrupting a viral-specific enzyme? My dad is all excited about it based on the hype alone...

I fully agree that an improved understanding of the scientific method should a priority for K-12. Discriminating among good science, bad science and what is still open to interpretation is tricky even for those of us that do this full-time!