मुक्त @ mukt @lemmy.ml

Skeptic

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5 yr. ago

He had to caution the lady about the taste of the bull's milk.

The swissknife of digital video.

... BBC's long term Japan correspondent wrote an article about it when he finally left, and I'm pretty sure he's fluent.

I wouldn'y be too sure about being fluent part. I am an Indian and I have seen bulk of so called indologists (professors in American and European academia) unable to pronounce common sanskrit words - despite writing bestsellers on the subject.

Xeno Biden doesn't care.

Hello! I've been searching for a reddit alternative, and yes, I've picked Lemmy and Raddle, but here's the thing. My morbid curiosity is perked up, and a part of me wants to join the "free speech" alternatives, like Saidit, Poal, etc. What's wrong with me that I want to join toxic places? I mean, yes I'll find a whole new perspective (albeit wrong), on political topics, but a part of me wants to be the antagonist, and post lefty memes, and music with a left-leaning message (bands from r/rabm) I know that's like kicking the hornet's nest, so you don't need to start in with "that's a bad idea" I know it is. My main point/question is, is it wrong to join a site with potential hate speech? Does it make someone a bad person?

It's ok to explore/try everything from a safe distance.

Am I the only one who remembers "My pleasure" ?

Says the guy who needs no evidence for his beliefs.

I'm not sure why you have such obsession with apples,

I do not have an obsession with apples. I took it up as a specific example and remained consistent. Do you find consistency difficult to understand?

... but clearly it's not the only unreasonable thing in your brain. After my first message I thought your answer would me something like "that's a stupid example for the sake of argument, nobody would really think that". In that, I was wrong, and a bit less hopeful for the sake of humanity.

So you wanted me to behave in a predictable manner, but I didn't. That should actually increase your hope from humanity. Give it some thought.

I'll just invite you to make your research about how apples will cure COVID, or any other illness. You seem to bet highly on it, and you think medical research can be done in the side, easy peasy. You clearly have easy too much time.

I'd take up on your offer if you can provide an isolated sample of the virus culture. Deal?

Please don't forget to post the mandatory "haha! I won, my logic was unbeatable!". Won't be seeing that notification though.

Lol. You are definitely not a good loser.

Whatever makes you feel better. I am done here. I'll leave some reading material for you though.

• UK - 01
• US - 02

If you haven't read actual Russian propaganda so far, I'd highly recommend reading the entire Big Serge's Substack for a rather informed take from perspective of a Russian in USA.

Enjoy these long reads with good tea.

Flat eathers actually give what they think is evidenxe fir their claims.
Looks like you haven't actually read much there either.

That making a proper medical study is something too hard for a single person to do on their spare time is not appealing to authority, it just shows how complex and rigorous a proper study has to be to be usable. A study with 100 subjects is considered small, now think how long it would take to interview them, take samples, analyze them, follow up... and all that to check a random fruit?

On what basis did you come up with sample size of 100? I have read studies with samples less than that size, including control groups.

I know that for indian traditional medicine you can just say "it's on an ancient book!" and "somebody who followed it lived to 100 years" but they don't have to prove it.

I am not aware of testing techniques involved in Indian traditional medicine and have no comments on their scientific-ness. Also, for the record, I don't think Ramdev/Patanjali have developed their cures for modern ailments in accordance with whatever traditional testing techniques used to be.

Why single out known drugs, but exclude known foods?

I haven't said you can't, just that if you are going to go to the massive work that's a proper study, you want a proper justification for it.

Justification is easy : An apple offers numerous benefits over allopathic medicines and if it is found to be a replacement of any medicine, it should be replaced.

Is there anything in apples that makes it seem useful?

Nutritive value alone settles that question as far allopathic drugs are concerned.

... else, why apples? why not pears? peaches? oranges?

I haven't ruled any of them out.

For example, some drugs that were used in treatment of covid symptoms were identified by combining the results of thousands of patients and seeing that some that were using that drug to treat a different condition were doing better. Based on that the hypothesis that that drug was the reason was done and the experiment started, tested and validated.

They did all of that, and other things, because they didn't have any drug that worked, but they specifically wanted only a combination of drugs to work, so they just did whatever jugglery they could.

For the record, there is still no drug to cure covid.

On the same manner a lot of drugs were shown to be useless, and even that is important information for those looking for a good one. Just like on real life, if you lose your keys at home, you make the hypothesis that they are in your coat and check that hypothesis. You don't just say "I'm going to check on the fridge". It's not impossible, it's just not the most likely scenario so it's far from your first guess.

As far as curing covid is concerned, ALL drugs are still useless. IN REAL LIFE.

What you are suggesting here is reverse of what following scientific method would lead to: First check apples, and if a positive result is there, then go check for components.

No, not at all. First step is to make a hypothesis based on some observation.
If you have made an observation that people that eat apples seem to fare better with an illness, then you can make he hypothesis that's because of the apples and then define some measurable variable for validation the hypothesis. You don't say at random 'why not apples?' and then mobilize a team. You don't have a reason for it. If for instance, apples are rich in a component that is shown to be good, they might check giving apples for the experiment. Again, without reason, why apples and not kiwis?

They checked the drugs at random. Four years of hit and trial and there is still no method to the madness that happened.

Hypothesis in checking apples is trivial, and actually similar to one involved in testing any drug.

I haven't said the opposite. Just that there doesn't seem any reason to test for apples.

The only clear reason that remdesivir got tested before apples is that big pharma, or anyone else systematically funding doctors, does not see any jump in bottomline when apples are black-marketed.

In a complex set of assumptions, reasons do not exist. They are invented to butter the side of bread that suits one.

Sure you can, and you’d be as right as big pharma is in curing baldness. You’d be with less money though, and without that money, doctors who line up supporting big pharma are unlikely to line up for you.

I'm sure some quack Guru would be happy to use that to sell their services to fools like you. It's really funny to see how much money fake medicines make and their defenders saying "big pharma bad because profit".

I am all for profit, if made legitimately. But I have seen single dose of remdesivir (which wasn't curing anything) sell for over $1000... in India.

Can't say I enjoyed the conversation, but I'm done. You either lack the skills to understand or have too much bad faith to have an honest argument.

Unfortunately, most people mistake familiarity of ideas with their truth, and you are no different. This is why big lobbies get their way through propaganda, and people's will is generally meaningless.

Why did the countries choose to join NATO?
Maybe it was because Russia is a threat. A fact that was later proved by the invasion of Ukraine which actually made more countries join NATO.

If we are making hypothesis, USA bullying smaller countries into joining its own gang is much more probable. After all, it is not disputed that USA has been bullying everyone into forcing sanctions against Russia and only big countries like India and Germany have been able take a stand against American bullying.

You haven't substantiated your own assertion about NATO not invading Russia. It is your point at stake. I simply pointed you to an undeniable fact that torpedos your assertion, and pointed you to relevant literature, which you are refusing to look into.

Your point stands logically punctured. Feel free to flee.

That last example is extremely bad and reeks of bad faith argument.

And there you go, someone found it out real quick - it was actually a bad faith argument, all the way from the beginning.

Calling an argument bad faith or good faith is unscientific. In fact, it is what church used to do to science before science became popular.

This is why I did not respond to that guy. It touched his nerve, when I declared traditional Indian medicine as unscientific.

I didn't actually go to your links and didn't know till now that you are targeting Indian medicine. The form of your argument itself is a fallacy called appeal to authority and it hardly matters what you are targetting or what you feel about it.

He then decided to create a loaded comment, and if it wasn't already evident, their comment is fallacious - it deviates from the topic I had originally intended to discuss - by directing the blame on modern science being controlled by scary "illuminati" and "weeping angels" in corporate suit and boot.

Lol. Your words, your emotions. Not mine.

Too bad his BigPharma scare tactics don't work in the Indian context, and also makes him look like a QAnon weirdo to the western folks over here. Mechanisms of ayurveda, unani, siddha and homeopathy fail in front of modern science with simple theories like the atomic model theory, or Avogadro constant. But hey, his favorite party bought the Ministry of Ayush in India, why would he let a 'brown sepoy' like me insult the supreme leader?

Now that you are the one spouting conspiracy theories close to your heart, you are legitimately the one using scare tactics.

According to his logic, an uneducated charlatan in saffron robe, who looks like a "pious" guru has the utmost right to insult dying doctors and sell cow urine (I am not making this up, his company "Patanjali" sells it for real). And his Coronil kit - which I've previously mentioned in the post, has destroyed the livers of many of the unfortunate ones due to heavy metal poisoning, who could not afford to buy the vaccine - and now, their financial burden has increased tenfolds. Yet, there's no accountability. This scammer earns crores of rupees, fooling the citizens of not just India, but also Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and also hippies from the west - USA, UK, Germany, you probably know how much the reach is. Vulnerable people consume pseudo-science garbage prepared by shady gurus and godmen.

Patanjali is not my company, nor do I follow Baba Ramdev or consumed his coronil kit. But I can assure you, damages done by them are dwarfs compared to ... well, have you read about what Johnson & Johnson did to infants?

And why does it matter that I've made this post? Because a board-certified doctor established in California is promoting pseudoscience - and mind you, none of the universities in the US or Europe recognize any traditional snake-oil medicine degree, maybe except for homeopathy. How is he not held liable for fooling people on the other side of the world?

See, appeal to authority again.
And somehow you believe that I am making bad (faith) arguments.

This kind of studies is not something a random person, or even a trained nurse, can do on their spare time. You couldn't just give apples to some people and look a week later for results. You need control group, you need to account for extra factors.

This reinforces my point that medicine is not a science being conducted by scientific method. It is being conducted through authority, and using terminology of the church (like good faith / bad faith) to steer clear of logical criticism.

And before the experiment you need to have a reason for it. Can a drug that works for other coronavirus work here? Some compound that has the opposite effects mitigate the symptoms?

Why single out known drugs, but exclude known foods?

Why would even check "apples"? They might consider a component that exists on apples, but why apple itself? Unless there's an external event that correlates apples with a result, it's a bit weird.

What you are suggesting here is reverse of what following scientific method would lead to: First check apples, and if a positive result is there, then go check for components.

You really need to check your assumptions that were involved here.

Natural sciences without scientific method are not science. If you don't test and validate the hypothesis, you're just making things up.

Hypothesis in checking apples is trivial, and actually similar to one involved in testing any drug.

Without it, I can say apples cure baldness and blame big pharma for not letting this being published.

Sure you can, and you'd be as right as big pharma is in curing baldness. You'd be with less money though, and without that money, doctors who line up supporting big pharma are unlikely to line up for you.

That last example is extremely bad and reeks of bad faith argument. Eating apples, as with fruits and fresh produce in general, has been tested multiples times and some of it's benefits measured.

You are missing the point. There are hundreds of pieces of published research on stuff that didn't work or not work during corona virus like remdesivir, ivermectin, azithromycin, paracetamol, etc... but, where is the published research on effect of apples?

Maybe doctors were too busy (or too pre-occupied with furthering interests of the pharma lobby) and didn't pay attention.

• Could the nurses have done the research on apples? Probably.
• Is it published anywhere? No.
• Would it be science if done with scientific method? Probably yes, though the current institutions controlling science would probably disagree.

Russian side of propaganda is not too difficult to find, even in the English world. Why don't you do a google search by yourself and list 10 results of what you found ?

Maybe find a source for the quoted text first.

Economics has been there as an academic subject since centuries, but it wasn't classified as a science till around one generation ago. The same goes for other social sciences. In fact, social sciences used to be known as social studies.

Scientific method isn't the criteria of determining what is science even in core sciences as of today. Take the field of medicine, for example. It filters out all knowledge and research which is not done by qualified doctors. Who becomes a medical doctor is very tightly controlled by institutions, and doctors are heavily disincentivized to speak against the given lines.

So much so, the research in medical field has been reduced to statistics of administration of pharma drugs to humans. In medicine, one no longer tests whether consumption of say, an apple, will have any impact on a patient. Testing apples, and finding them beneficial will not only not be publishedas research, it is considered "pseudo-science" by many.

I'd be happy to be corrected, but there is no clear definition of what constitutes science, short of blindly following authority of some institution prone to funding politics.

In medicine, funding is known to be ultimately controlled by big corporates, making "established science" murkier than, say, funding of standardization of SI Units.