[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.

[krapp]

Why do you keep speaking of the "status quo" as if the scientific method were just a function of inertia and a lack of imagination, or mere politics without any necessary relationship to objective truth? I don't believe at all that being 'different' makes something unscientific. It not being grounded in good science, however, does. I define 'nutty' in this regard as being, simply, unverifiable. Again and again you seem to presume that the establishment is "holding back" innovation yet not once have you given an example of an obviously valid innovation which is being held back.

And you would be correct in stating I was immoral if I were actually arguing that people have no right to do what they like to their own bodies, in fact I believe the opposite. And although I believe your premise is founded on a strawman and a misrepresentation of what science is, in insisting upon the edge case, I won't ignore it.

Let this theoretical person who knows more than "the establishment" do what they like. I believe such people can actually prove their theories and like Galileo and others, will eventually win out. However, their right to do what they wish with their body does not, and must not be extended to an insistence that science, and medicine, accommodate every possible belief, practice or concoction without scrutiny.

The scenario you pose is intractable because it is precisely the claim of quacks and charlatans that the scientific establishment is holding back, dismissing and suppressing their discoveries. What then, are we left with if no set of common standards should exist for science, and no means to enforce them, to differentiate between real, possibly revolutionary claims and spurious ones? Are we simply to let people take whatever bill of goods they're sold and if they're not smart enough to understand the intricacies of DNA testing or nutritional science or genetics then too bad for them?

What i've been, rather consistently I believe, stating is that private enterprise doesn't have the right, nor do scientists in fact, to do what they like to your body without following strict protocols or having a basis for doing so. Human medical experimentation has a particularly nasty history, and it's regulated for very good reasons. I've been neither dishonest nor immoral in this regard.