[daniel-cussen]

Uh, just because I haven't undergone starburns (nuclear explosion burns, they're like sunburns but they pierce the skin) from a weird new metal doesn't mean it's safe. On the contrary, it's unsafe, and you have no idea what the fuck to do about it. At least PFAS and plasticizers, like the Teflon pan I talk about, I can say, OK this chemical is too good to be true, in that it has amazing non-stick properties and simultaneously will harm my masculinity hormonally, on a par with a kick in the testicles for every scratch. I just have to respect it very, very much and it will be useful to me.

Whereas microplastics, you don't know how to deflect or stop the harm. You're like a starburned Hiroshima resident, you realize those guys consistently got shit advice from their doctors, those doctors were of no benefit, fucking waste of money? And as always, like in the Bible for instance, it's very rare for a doctor ever to tell you he's a fucking waste of money. Became a doctor out of love of money, in America at least, it's uniformly like that. Only the greed can get med students through the hazing. I know doctors who also help people, don't just make a lot of money, but they still actually do make a lot of money, they just help people too.

[refurb]

We literally implant plastic objects into people. Those have undergone clinical trials for safety.

Could microplastics cause harm? Maybe. Do we have evidence they or a mechanism by which that harm would occur? No.

[daniel-cussen]

Well there's hundreds if not thousands of different kinds of plastics. Some are amazing and more expensive than gold...I think there's some like that, they're just currently very difficult to manufacture and highly miraculous, like they resist really high temperatures and...endless virtue. Reading Plastics I think makes specialty plastics.

Clinical trials...you know I've lost absolutely all respect for any number that a doctor or hospital reports. The sixes could be upside-down 9's. As the palindrome goes, si es nueve, se ve un seis. Just fudge numbers in embarrassing childish ways, the Sacklers specialize in that. A friend was telling me, initially he thought statistics in medicine could be heavily slanted.

No.

They can make whatever shit they want up, literally no limits. Science as a means of getting knowledge has some benefits and some shortcomings. In particular the scientist can just lie, and the other scientists in general won't verify what he said, the rewards are for coming up with the theory, not dismantling lies. Plus there's careers and power involved, you can't just call a prestige institution scientist a liar, he'll be pissed, he'll go through your science and find your errors and get a colleague he can deny knowing to publish that. Chomsky did this to the Piraha linguist. Academia is sharp elbows. With doctors, holy shit, you can't just say eg Jorge Barros is a bad scientist, he's the dean of a prestige institution, where is your prestige to speak against him? Which prestige institutions have you gone to?

Science is easily prostituted. I did it myself in the sixth grade, handed in work I did at last minute on the bus ride to school, which was supposed to take eight hours. Perfect score. Although apparently the work was correct, I didn't actually do the process to arrive at that answer. It's just not a very robust heuristic for acquiring knowledge. It's easily understood, I learned the scientific method in the third grade, probably a simplified version of it, but I don't see any better in the academic papers I read. Plato said so, science sucks for acquiring knowledge, math yeah but science no.

By this point I don't trust a single FDA number. Like the letters a bit, but not one number. Not one. Can't call them on the phone because I have no idea which numerals are secretly supposed to be which others, don't know the secret codes, when to dial a 3 when it says to dial an 8. Like OK they can make sure bacon is safe even for secular Jews whom are really vulnerable to bad pork, and make sure aspirin I buy at pharmacies for the occasional headache isn't loaded with crystal meth for repeat business, barely. That's about it. Like after the Sacklers bribed them into saying 7 equals 12 it's just not the same. Tortured hundreds of thousands of people--fucking with people's pain medication is for sure torture--and only had to give up a fraction of the ill-gotten gains. Sacklers did that again only in that case it was 60 equals 100.

FDA is just impossible to respect at this point. It's not even 2+2 is 5, that involves addition, it's an understandable mistake for like a 4-year-old compared to this shit, this is just fucking with the identity of numbers. Fucking with the metric system, with the passage of time itself, the units, and all the patients who suffer. Just fucking with all patients, and fucking with me.

Well they've always been known violers. They're captured by big pharma to justify charging crazy prices for chemicals that cost a dollar per gram to manufacture. R&D cost masochism. They fuck over small companies developing new drugs too, in darkness and silence (very muffled screaming). There's tons of cures that don't reach the market because FDA fucks up--openly--medical trials. Human error, but oh whoops you have to pay for it all over again if you want to put it on the market. Well in that case the VC's fucked that company...the company got double-teamed.

FDA is alchemy. Makes gold out of trivially cheap organic chemicals. The opposite of Reading Plastics.

[refurb]

So if I understand you correctly, you just throw out all the science that says it’s safe (and had a long track record of being right) and instead go with “plastics are dangerous” despite having little evidence to back the claim up?

I mean, if science is corrupt it’s corrupt, if you just pick and choose what you believe all the while ignoring how rigorous the analysis was, you’re not following science at all. You're just expressing an opinion without anything to back it up.

[daniel-cussen]

I like science as a concept I think it's a cool technique. I liked science courses I took, and I got very high grades, partly because I understood it's dark side, its secret double life as a whore, and knew when an experiment in class would just never produce the results the teacher could buy into for the grade I needed for the college admission results I wanted. The teachers were good, but usually didn't have the deep knowledge of physics to see when there were fucky things at work in the experiments.

Feynman talks about this in one of his books, he was going to Brazil to help them out with efforts to educate their students in science. So they had a test--I believe a standardized test, multiple choice, or there was a rubric with a right answer and a protocol for demerits for other answers--and it was about a cylinder filled with water rolling down a ramp and onto a table. The right answer was a wrong answer. Feynman told them, clearly you did not actually perform this experiment, the inertia of the water--some turbulence thing--makes it roll...from memory I think it was a seventh longer roughly. Feynman knew. I believe the Brazilians actually then carried out the experiment and saw it knew its master, Feynman was right theoretically. Hey first the teacher must learn, then the teacher can teach the student. So for teachers like that, who didn't have that Feynman scientific depth--but were honest and dedicated and helped us learn--for them you had to massage the numbers. And that massage always had to lead to a happy ending. Or no elite college admission.

So well I was a great student, perhaps the best mathematician in the grade, while also very into science very early on--loved it, loved studying insects, loved carrying out experiments, loved my chemistry kit, my electronics kits, loved soldering to the point I made a sculpture by soldering (wire and lead, the electric hound from Fahrenheit 451), plus I fixed all kinds of stuff around the house, and understood the material, so when it came to pulling numbers out of my ass, a strict necessity in that context, I pulled out some pretty good believable numbers consistent with theory but with maybe a little noise, not to the level of making up systematic error for credibility, but yeah a little noise fudging. And that's what's on the curriculum, get real, a friend actually performed tons of experiments verifying Newtonian physics, only he had to pull numbers every time, Newton did not check out experimentally, my friend had to massage the numbers heavily according to the theory. And they all had happy endings.

Like science is good but it depends on the honesty of scientists, the academic environment, and even then, needs to be taken with a little sodium chloride.

[VictorPath]

> he'll go through your science and find your errors and get a colleague he can deny knowing to publish that. Chomsky did this to the Piraha linguist.

"Go through your science and find your errors" is science. Commendations to Chomsky for advancing science in this instance.