denialism blog

Calling Facebook on its Empty PR

Category: Privacy

Those of you who read Mark Zuckerberg's oped in today's Washington Post might appreciate my take on how Facebook talks about privacy in tomorrow's San Francisco Chronicle: The Privacy Machiavellis.

Posted by Chris H at 12:28 AM • 2 Comments

The New Scientist Debates Denialism

Category: Denialism • General Discussion • Global Warming Denialism • HIV/AIDS denialism • Holocaust Denial

Luckily they don't make the mistake of actually debating denialists. The feature of last weeks issue, "Age of Denial" is a series of articles by skeptics and one laughable rebuttal, discussing the nature of denialism and tactics to use against it. They do quite a good job covering the basics, starting with Deborah MacKenzie and her article "Why Sensible People Reject the Truth":

Whatever they are denying, denial movements have much in common with one another, not least the use of similar tactics (see "How to be a denialist"). All set themselves up as courageous underdogs fighting a corrupt elite engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the truth or foist a malicious lie on ordinary people. This conspiracy is usually claimed to be promoting a sinister agenda: the nanny state, takeover of the world economy, government power over individuals, financial gain, atheism. ... All denialisms appear to be attempts like this to regain a sense of agency over uncaring nature: blaming autism on vaccines rather than an unknown natural cause, insisting that humans were made by divine plan, rejecting the idea that actions we thought were okay, such as smoking and burning coal, have turned out to be dangerous.

Here she has it exactly right. Denialism starts with ideology, which most of us possess to some degree or another, and a conflict between that ideology and reality - at least so far as science allows us to understand it. In order to regain control of one's beliefs, and protect them from being challenged, one has to prove that the science is wrong. And that requires one to believe in some form of non-parsimonious conspiracy theory, after all, how else could it be that science has come up with such an answer if not for the concerted malfeasance of thousands of individuals, all working together to undermine the TRUTH?

Further she cites these as tactics of denialists:

How to be a denialist Martin McKee, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who also studies denial, has identified six tactics that all denialist movements use. "I'm not suggesting there is a manual somewhere, but one can see these elements, to varying degrees, in many settings," he says (The European Journal of Public Health, vol 19, p 2). 1. Allege that there's a conspiracy. Claim that scientific consensus has arisen through collusion rather than the accumulation of evidence. 2. Use fake experts to support your story. "Denial always starts with a cadre of pseudo-experts with some credentials that create a facade of credibility," says Seth Kalichman of the University of Connecticut. 3. Cherry-pick the evidence: trumpet whatever appears to support your case and ignore or rubbish the rest. Carry on trotting out supportive evidence even after it has been discredited. 4. Create impossible standards for your opponents. Claim that the existing evidence is not good enough and demand more. If your opponent comes up with evidence you have demanded, move the goalposts. 5. Use logical fallacies. Hitler opposed smoking, so anti-smoking measures are Nazi. Deliberately misrepresent the scientific consensus and then knock down your straw man. 6. Manufacture doubt. Falsely portray scientists as so divided that basing policy on their advice would be premature. Insist "both sides" must be heard and cry censorship when "dissenting" arguments or experts are rejected.

Sound familiar? That's because McKee cites us in his paper. We'll forgive her for not identifying the original source, after all McKee gives the credit.

She does get a few things wrong, likely due to her unfamiliarity with just how absurd some denialists are. For instance when she says:

The first thing to note is that denial finds its most fertile ground in areas where the science must be taken on trust. There is no denial of antibiotics, which visibly work. But there is denial of vaccines, which we are merely told will prevent diseases - diseases, moreover, which most of us have never seen, ironically because the vaccines work.

This is demonstrably false, as we have encountered denialists who do deny the efficacy of antibiotics and all of Western medicine, as their particular ideology requires them to believe in the primacy of religion (Christian Science, New Age Nonsense) or in the magical properties of nature. She goes on to describe the work of our good colleague Seth Kalichman and the good things he's done to fight HIV/AIDS denialism. Overall, a good summary of the problem. I also like how she stays non-judgmental and reflects on how pseudoscience is ultimately a complement to science:

This is not necessarily malicious, or even explicitly anti-science. Indeed, the alternative explanations are usually portrayed as scientific. Nor is it willfully dishonest. It only requires people to think the way most people do: in terms of anecdote, emotion and cognitive short cuts. Denialist explanations may be couched in sciency language, but they rest on anecdotal evidence and the emotional appeal of regaining control.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, this certainly applies to pseudoscience. After all pseudoscience is a reflection of the authority science has as the arbiter of truth. If being on the right side of science wasn't so important, cdesign proponentsists and global warming denialists wouldn't fight so hard to warp it to fit their ideology, and by doing so, implicitly seek its approval.

Jim Giles contributes an interesting article on an example of how a lie travels twice around the world before the truth gets its boots on with Unleashing a Lie, but then the series gets a bit more problematic with the contributions of noted skeptic Michael Shermer (also anerstwhile global warming denialist and persistent libertarian) and an amusing counterpoint from the otherwise wonderful Michael Fitzpatrick, a British GP who fights the good fight against autism quackery.

Read on »

Posted by MarkH at 6:00 AM • 18 Comments

QOTD: Fuckin Magnets, How Do They Work?

Category: Wasting your time

A response is requested from a non-scientist.

Posted by Chris H at 11:40 PM • 7 Comments

Age and Privacy

Category: Privacy

Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people "are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are." This report is among the first quantitative studies evaluating young adults' attitudes. It demonstrates that the picture is more nuanced than portrayed in the popular media.

A UC-Berkeley Law/U. Penn Annenberg team recently commissioned a telephonic (wireline and wireless) survey of internet using Americans (N=1000) on privacy. The findings are presented in How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies?

The major findings include--

• Large percentages of young adults (aged 18-24) are in harmony with older Americans regarding concerns about online privacy, norms, and policy suggestions. In several cases, there are no statistically significant differences between young adults and older age categories on these topics.
• Where there were differences, over half of the young adult-respondents did answer in the direction of older adults. There clearly is social significance in that large numbers of young adults agree with older Americans on issues of information privacy.

Why does it seem then that young adults behave with such license, particularly on social network sites?

A gap in privacy knowledge provides one explanation. 42 percent of young Americans answered all of our five online privacy questions incorrectly. 88 percent answered only two or fewer correctly. The problem is even more pronounced when presented with offline privacy issues--post hoc analysis showed that young Americans were more likely to answer no questions correctly than any other age group.

We conclude then that that young-adult Americans have an aspiration for increased privacy even while they participate in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data.

Cross-posted at Technology | Academics | Policy

Posted by Chris H at 2:00 AM • 1 Comments

Conservatives and the Census

Category: Privacy

Naftali Bendavid reports today in the Journal on a problem facing conservatives: how should they assure their supporters, many of whom are suspicious of government activity, to participate in the US Census? After all, the Census sounds suspiciously like something Tiberius would like. But Moses was a fan too. And now Karl Rove is pitching the Census.

Ron Paul argues:

"The census should be nothing more than a headcount," Mr. Paul wrote this month in his weekly column. "It was never intended to serve as a vehicle for gathering personal information on citizens."

It should be noted that Paul is factually incorrect. Jefferson and Madison were strong proponents of expanding the enumeration, from the very first Census. But it is also true that privacy concerns have always plagued the Census.

Congress has an opportunity to address some of these privacy concerns. As I've written elsewhere, advances in "reidentification" have made it possible to determine the identities of Census participants. The Census Bureau has known about this problem for a long time, and has engaged in serious, well-respected research into solving it. However, the law has not kept up with the problem. Under 13 USC § 9(a)(2), the Department of Commerce is prohibited from "mak[ing] any publication whereby the [Census] data furnished by any particular establishment or individual under this title can be identified." Thus, the Census Bureau must protect the identities of those who participate in the enumeration. But this law does not restrain private action. As a result, companies and others are free to try to strip citizens of their anonymity when participating in the Census, and even sell back the data to other government entities.

Conservatives could take a step towards allaying these concerns by extending Title 13 to prohibit private-sector efforts to reidentify participants of the Census. Germany has already done this. Unless this step is taken, it's just a matter of time before this government-mandated enumeration results in an enormous transfer of personal information to those unethical enough to reidentify and attempt to profit from it.

Posted by Chris H at 1:59 AM • 0 Comments

Is This Punk?

Category: Wasting your time

What is this business about the Broadway opening of Green Day's American Idiot? Both the Journal and the Times have reported on it, and in the process, defamed an entire genre by describing Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong as a "punk" rocker.

This musical, which opened at the Berkeley Rep a few months ago (to an audience that will ovate any performance), was pretty disappointing. The musical is essentially a "buddy movie," but typically in buddy movies, some great thing is accomplished. It might be some caper or venal activity, but at least one can care about its execution. Not so with this thing. These buddies hardly do anything. They wallow, and while the women in the play are more interesting, the playwright stripped them of identity such that they were mere appendages to the men (one of the women was named "Whatsername;" I don't think this was ironic). In a momentary respite from appendagehood, one of the women ends her relationship with her manchild, perhaps because he was attached to a couch. I'm really not sure why the relationship ended, because I was adjusting my earplugs in response to the howls of joy emitted from the Berkeley Rep's audience; they seemed impressed by this action in light of the general atmosphere of torpidity and self-pity.

I think Patrick Healy of the Times is trying to tell us something by closing his article with this description:

In a "ballet of rubber tubing," as members of Green Day have called the choreography, the lovers tie themselves together with the kind of band that heroin addicts use to tie off body parts when finding a vein to inject. The lyrics declare, "My beating heart belongs to you."

"To take this scene of Johnny and Whatsername doing heroin and turn it into some of the most beautiful and evocative shapes I've ever seen -- it was an incredible moment," said Mr. Dirnt, the Green Day bassist. "Real theater."

Posted by Chris H at 1:57 AM • 0 Comments

Christian Libertarian Wefare Queen

Category: Wasting your time

Shamelessly stolen from Gawker: Brick Fatwa Libertarian Also Gets Fat Government Checks. For what? A preventable disease! Oh, what ever happened to personal responsibility?

Illustration: A typical American male libertarian in its natural habitat

Posted by Chris H at 12:12 AM • 3 Comments

Surgery

Category: Medical Education

I have now completed almost a year of surgical internship, and as I'm sure you've noticed from my sparse blogging, I've had little free time for writing. It's a shame too because surgery is just so cool.

Intern year is mostly about learning to manage surgical patients, basically people in varying degrees of health who have the added stress of having surgery recently performed on them. Although the 80-hour workweek and case requirements have pushed more exposure to the operating room into the process than previously existed, it's still mostly medical management of patients at this stage. We are required to perform at least 750 cases in our 5 years of training. Of these cases, we are required to have exposure to a broad range of different surgeries with certain "defined" major cases counting towards specific quotas. For example, a recent requirement was added that we have at least 85 surgical endoscopy cases, including upper endoscopy and colonoscopies before we graduate. As a result, most of my day is spent dealing with medical issues with post-surgical patients, and if I'm lucky I get to go to the OR and, with an attending of course, learn some simple procedures.

As your training progresses you take care of more critical patients, with your second year largely devoted to ICU care. You also are involved more extensively in complicated cases, so by the time you're a third year you are able to help attendings with complex surgical cases, are responsible for evaluating surgical admissions, and begin to manage patients as a chief in some cases. In fourth and fifth years you are in charge of managing whole surgical services and are operating a majority of the time. By fifth year you are a chief, and you should be preparing for eventually operating on your own as an attending or for additional specialty training in a fellowship position.

My day starts at about 5AM, when I pre-round on patients, collect the data from the previous day for the all-important list, and get signout (news on what happened overnight) from the intern who was on call. By 6AM the chief arrives, you round on the patients, and formulate a plan for the day. You've got to discharge patients who have recovered, manage the medical issues of your post-surgical patients, admit new patients and see the new surgical consults. Basically general surgeons get training to be excellent medical doctors who also learn to do surgery.

The day ends around 5-6PM when you either sign out to the surgeon on call overnight, or take signout from the other services you will cover overnight. Surgical interns usually cover 3 services overnight, so I might be taking care of pediatric patients, plastic patients and urology patients, or emergency surgery, minimally invasive surgery, and surgical oncology patients for 12 hours until the next shift comes in the morning. This means you work for about 30 hours straight, the maximum allowed by the new hours limitations. You address any issues that come up in the night, staff any consults that can't wait until morning, and every once in a while deal with some terrifying emergency that arises at 2AM. It's not that bad, but after a full shift you sleep like the dead. Saturday calls are of course the worst, because you start at 6AM on Saturday and don't go home until around noon the next day, basically losing your whole weekend. Usually we only have to take one Saturday call a month so we don't lose our minds.

So that's why I haven't been blogging. When not at work I'm usually eating, sleeping, or trying to keep my life in some kind of order. The goal though is to get back into this, to manage my time so we can still talk about medicine, and crankery, and the ever increasing tide of denialist movements. Not to mention TV shows. Anyone else seen Jesse Ventura's new show? It's like crank crack. Leave it to Ventura to figure out how to free-base illogical thinking.

Posted by MarkH at 12:06 AM • 2 Comments

Healthcare reform

Category: Health Care

With the recent victory of this administration in passing health care reform I felt it was time to talk again about the importance of this issue and some of my own experiences in the last year of my surgical training.

I was, and still am of the belief that reform, whatever form it might take, will be successful as long as we manage to make health care universal. Partly because our system already is universal but defective. No matter if you have insurance or not, if you show up in a hospital with a problem that needs to be addressed, we'll treat it. We ethically can not turn people away because they lack insurance. People therefore who lack insurance regularly show up in the ER for primary care, or worse, with a problem that could have been addressed by a primary care doc weeks before but now has become so severe they have no choice but to get treatment whether they are insured or not. For instance, I had a patient who arrived in the ER with a gaping, necrotic sore on his cheek. It had started as an abscess, gotten progressively worse, and he tried draining it himself, inadequately, because he was uninsured. Over the course of a week though the sore had eaten through his face until it actually communicated with the inside of his face. The result? Two teams of surgeons later, an ICU stay, and an extensive reconstruction, a 10 dollar problem became who knows? A 50 thousand dollar problem? More?

We have a choice here. We can have an ethical system that treats people who need care in a thoughtful, sensible fashion, addressing problems through prevention, and appropriate care at the right time. Or we can have a system where people get their primary care in ERs, often showing up long past time their problem becomes critical and inevitably, more expensive. Guess which is less expensive? It's not necessary to have a single-payer system like Great Britain, Canada or New Zealand. It's not even necessary to have a public option as countries like the Netherlands demonstrate. You can even have a very generous system that is based on highly-regulated private insurance with subsidization for the poor, as in France or Germany. All of these systems beat ours with regards to cost and performance. What do all these systems have in common but is lacking in ours? It's simple, they're universal.

Read on »

Posted by MarkH at 6:00 AM • 4 Comments

Hiatus!

Category: Wasting your time

Dear Readers, we've been completely derelict in maintaining Denialism Blog. Please accept our apologies. Mark is training to be a surgeon, and Chris recently had an enormous baby! We hope to get back blogging soon. Please excuse our absence until life is back in order.

Posted by Chris H at 12:46 AM • 1 Comments