"Fear of science will kill us"

R

Rakawi

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MBTI
INFJ
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I watched this the other day, I made it about 2/3rds of the way through then turned it off. I agree mostly (not all, but most) with what he is saying, but god damn I can not stand his personality one bit.

Vaccines are good things, I know this, believe me. However, I do not trust all of them. The chemicals involved in the production of some vaccines outweigh the benifits of them for most people (healthy people), a good example would be flu shots. I have extensive background in chemistry and metabolism, I agree with many things but not all, and some stuff I can't trust, it just really rubs me the wrong way.

I am more versed in supplements and food related stuff, not so much with vaccines. Nevertheless, I used to be pretty gung-ho about health food and never eating that was said to be bad for you, such as high fructose corn syrup. After learning about how fructose is metabolised in the body, and what it does on a detailed level, I came to realise that it isn't as bad as it is made out to be. Yes if you have abnormally high ammounts of it you will have a lot or problems, but moderation is indeed fine. Same goes with sugar subsititues like sucralose and aspartame. While I distrust those a lot more then I do with high fructose corn syrup, in very small amounts it is fine.

He also fails to point out that studies about controversial topics like this can, and go get skwed by interest groups (this has happned with the artifical sugar industry back in the 80's).

We need to get Morgain in here, she will know much more about the vaccine side of this stuff, and I would love to hear what her take on it is.
 
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After listening to him I realize my hesitance with these hot button topics is less so about the proposition but rather are connected to possible bad PR that would dash the hopes of some of the ideas without a fair shot.

As far as vaccines are concerned they were debated in the swine flu vaccine thread and as I said there, there is no supportive evidence that show more problems from taking the vaccines than if one were to go without.
 
Dark Urine!! :D GO!

I think it's a good presentation, but I dislike his motives. His journalist work is related to GM foods, so he wants more funds for it. And that's what most people do. They choose to work on something and then insist on how it would save the world and: hey, give us more money for it.

That's not how this type of human decisions should be carried out, because in the end, of course, the most money go to whoever is the most aggressive, manipulative, acquisitive, controlling, expansive, and decisive. In our case - to the military.

There's no problem with GM of anything, as long as there's patience, planning, careful testing. Nobody has the environment for this today. People are crazy. More science in the hands of more crazy people is not the best idea. Allow people to not be so crazy, and not by giving them pills, but naturally, and then people's science would not be so crazy, as well.
 
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I don't think fear of science will kill us but it is possible that science will kill us. I think we are on a breaking point where we can choose to go back to more respect for nature or we can choose to go on and play for God more and more. I'm not against science and I think it has improved our lives tremendously. Like he said, the polio vaccins have done a lot and there are many scary diseases that are gone now. But also improvements in hygiene and the knowledge about virusses and bacteria take a big part in the cause of those improvements.

But we are raping the planet right now and saying that we need science to fix that problem is not the right thing to do because it is science who has caused it in the first place so unless we start to be humble again and connect to nature again, this will be a never ending story, in my opinion.

the pharma should start to think about what they are doing but right now they are thinking with there pockets. Do we really need a flu vaccin? Is a vaccin the best way to battle flu? I don't think so. The reason we get flu is because our imuune system is down. Why is it down, because we are all stressed up and not taking the time to relax. decades ago the winter was the period of the year where there was not much work to do. It is the period of time where nature takes a break and built up strength for the next summer. but of all creatures of this planet, man is the only one who doesn't acknowledge this fact and we just go on like we are not defined by natures rules. Is flu a deatly bug, not so much, so why don't we focus on diseases that are live treatening like TB or malaria? For the simple reason, people with flu can pay for the vaciin but people with malaria doesn't have the money...

there is a documentary serie on television in my country about environement issues and the other day they showed this big egocentric American who has found THE sollution. We should put more iron in the ocean because plancton will eat the iron, algues will eat the plancton and will use CO2 to grow and fish will eat the algues. So there will be less C02 and more food the feed the hungry!!!!! But he hasn't done any research on what the influences will be on a larger scale. You can do the experiment in a bassin and it wil have this effect, but do it in the ocean and you have a zillion more variables to concider. It could end up like a catastrofe, like the toads in Australia. But he is just showing of and screaming for attention, trying to make money, completely disconnected from nature! People like this scare me a lot ...
 
The threat that science poses is that of rationality. Our perception of reality is a "psychic" or psychological phenomena. Our psyche is vast and deeply irrational at its core. Rationality has exposed the falsity of many of our traditional, irrational projections that our psyche puts onto the physical world. But we can not abandon our irrational core with out loosing our ability to perceive reality.
 
IndigoSensor said:
I watched this the other day, I made it about 2/3rds of the way through then turned it off. I agree mostly (not all, but most) with what he is saying, but god damn I can not stand his personality one bit.
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Perhaps a passionate INTP?
 
I don't think anyone fears science. I think they just don't trust what they are hearing anymore.

Anyway, bird flu, swine flu, and mad cow disease..? Sounds like farmageddon!
 
Jack said:
I don't think anyone fears science. I think they just don't trust what they are hearing anymore.

Anyway, bird flu, swine flu, and mad cow disease..? Sounds like farmageddon!
Click to expand...

yes and do you believe that it is so hard to make a decent flu vaccin? I don't think so, I kind of think they just don't want to because a new vaccin every year gives more profit...
 
As far as vaccines are concerned they were debated in the swine flu vaccine thread and as I said there, there is no supportive evidence that show more problems from taking the vaccines than if one were to go without.
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That makes sense though, after all, the government only funds the pro-vaccine side of the debate. Lack of funding generally means lack of research beyond reasonable inferences.
 
I think we need to always be critical about the quality of science. One of it's major flaws is that of funding, because funding comes from impartial sources, there ends up being a bias towards science that comes up with answers that the funders want to hear, rather than absolute truth. So you end up with masses of weak studies supporting one hypothesis that drown out a few strong studies that don't support it.

Another problem is paradigm shifts, if the initial framework that we used to analyse or define a certain issue turns out to be wrong it is very hard to go back on that, whole fields of science can crop up which are possibly fundamentally flawed in their premise but by the time people start to realise these flaws that intitial hypothesis has had such a snowball effect and has so much momentum and vested interest in terms of reputations and livelihoods that overturning it becomes next to impossible. You have to wait for the established scientists to get old and die before significant paradigm shifts can occur.
 
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