[wissler]

You didn't merely make the bald-faced assertion, you were very rude about it with your snide "ftfy".

I've studied this stuff for years. I understand your status quo view, that thinks that good intentions are a substitute for philosophic rigor. Your view doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny, and it's holding all of mankind back.

[krapp]

>that thinks that good intentions are a substitute for philosophic rigor.

On the contrary, I think that scientific rigor is a good substitute for the free market when it comes to profiting from scientific advances. You can argue that the system in place is flawed and politically biased and perhaps it is, but the alternative is to treat cancer treatments and heart medication the same as vitamins and crystal therapy.

What profound innovations are being held back because of people like myself who demand that certain claims meet a standard of proof before hitting the market?

[wissler]

I don't think you know what scientific rigor is. If you did you'd realize it doesn't operate well under threats of force by bureaucracies.

In any case, this is a complex issue that can be examined and debated from various perspectives, but you're just coming in here to pimp the status quo, as if that's useful. Your kind has already won by a landslide, there's no particular point in bullying people who think you have made a mistake. A person with an actual scientific mindset might be curious about new ideas, not pretend they know everything, and bully anyone who comes to the table with new information.

By the way, you're making various presumptions about my view that are false. I never said anything in support of medical fraud or crackpots. And again, this is the kind of sloppy reasoning I've come to expect from your side of the aisle. Your arguments won't stand up to scrutiny, ergo you fabricate straw men. This in itself demonstrates something to suspect in your viewpoint.

[krapp]

>If you did you'd realize it doesn't operate well under threats of force by bureaucracies

Isn't science itself a form of bureaucracy? Or is peer review also a "threat of force?"

>I never said anything in support of medical fraud or crackpots.

You did, though. Your original statement implied that regulation of medicine itself was the problem. There is ample evidence to suggest that quack science and chicanery would flourish in an unregulated environment, because the overriding principle would no longer be an attempt at scientific plausibility but profit. And rigor costs money.

This is one of those situations where I feel the presence of government is a net benefit over the absence of it. Whether that government is qualified or operating credibly is a different matter.

[wissler]

As I said, this is a very complex issue, I can't hope to address all your points here but let me try to address an important one.

You are equating science with government enforcement of majority opinion. Think back to the time of Galileo. Why would you want to make this equation?

You want to think that times are different now, that the majority is wiser than it used to be. Why should that be so, exactly?

Imagine that leaders in the software industry could prescribe what languages were "safe" and what weren't. Imagine what that would do to innovation. Isn't it better to let people decide for themselves?

You fear that lack of regulation would lead to unnecessary harm and death. Yet, what of those who are intelligent enough to know the risks and wish to try new things, knowing the possible consequences? What of the cancer patient who is sure to die in 3 months, who wants to try a new experimental drug, but is legally barred from doing so? How can you justify this tyranny?

You wish to protect the ignorant from their own bad choices, but does this make them more intelligent or less? And what of those who are smarter than you, who know better than you, and who you have banned from doing things to help themselves? What of the future people who would have benefited from what they could have learned, that you prevented them from learning?

These are the types of questions you need to be asking yourself. You also need to stop pretending that fraud is allowed on a free market. It is not.

[krapp]

>Think back to the time of Galileo. Why would you want to make this equation?

Science isn't an enforcement of majority opinion, and that's not the equation i'm making. I'm asserting that the scientific process is an implicit good, in that it requires claims to be provable, and that experts exist to validate them, and that forcing companies which profit from scientific endeavors to present proofs of their claims is also good.

I don't think one can draw a very strong parallel between the world of Galileo and today, anyway, if that were still the case then Charles Darwin and Edwin Hubble would have been burned at the stake. Just because a premise is unpopular and the scientific mainstream rejects it doesn't necessarily imply it has merit on the basis that the scientific establishment exists to hinder progress.

>Imagine that leaders in the software industry could prescribe what languages were "safe" and what weren't. Imagine what that would do to innovation. Isn't it better to let people decide for themselves

I believe this is, in fact, what many industries and the government do - setting rigorous coding standards which include allowing certain languages, and is one of the reasons mission critical systems are not written, for instance, in Node or PHP. I also believe the entire field of cryptography is more or less based on not blindly trusting everyone who comes up with a clever substitution cipher and just hoping for the best. Note that the parallel here between computer science and medicine is where the application directly affects human lives - nobody really cares about "innovation" in webapps, for instance (except maybe for implementations of crypto) but you're probably not likely to kickstart a new operating system for a surgical robot or spacecraft.

>Yet, what of those who are intelligent enough to know the risks and wish to try new things, knowing the possible consequences? What of the cancer patient who is sure to die in 3 months, who wants to try a new experimental drug, but is legally barred from doing so? How can you justify this tyranny?

I can justify it because your question implies that this treatment necessarily works. What if this new experimental drug is complete nonsense? What if the drug company opts to falsify its studies, or hide its side effects, or market it towards treatments for which it is ineffective or dangerous?

> And what of those who are smarter than you, who know better than you, and who you have banned from doing things to help themselves? What of the future people who would have benefited from what they could have learned, that you prevented them from learning?

People like Jenny McCarthy and Dr. Andrew Wakefield who "know better" than to vaccinate children against disease? Or people who "know" AIDS doesn't really exist? Or everyone who "knew" during the plague years that disease itself was caused by bad foul odors, so they surrounded themselves with perfumes and dropped like flies?

If and when this knowledge can be validated, verified, and reproduced then it's science. But you appear to be conflating opinion and belief with science, when those things exist in opposition to one another.

[wissler]

Furthermore, the scenario here is where someone is informed of the risks/benefits, and they want to take part of a treatment plan you disapprove of. The first thing you do is dishonestly preemptively categorize it as crankishness, as if being different than the status quo ipso facto makes it nutty. This is revealing in itself. But on top of that is the fact that IT IS NOT YOUR BODY. So not only are you dishonest, you are grossly immoral.