Placebomab

Nature fetish

Daily Mail Dairy farmers will be forced to make raw milk unpalatable under tough new laws after a toddler died from drinking it  28 December 2014

I postulate that raw food and other "nature fetishists" tend to be the least nature-educated. People who want "natural" should also be prepared to accept "natural" consequences: prior to Pasteurisation and other modern "artificial" hygiene methods, over 30% of people in Western Europe died during childhood.

(via ST)

Sovereign default loophole

BBC News UN Human Rights Council backs Argentina on US debt row  24 September 2014 The United Nations Human Rights Council has passed a resolution in Geneva condemning a group of American hedge funds that took Argentina to court.

The US District Court for the Southern District of New York's interpretation of pari passu in Republic of Argentina v NML Capital Ltd [2014] creates a perverse incentive against the fundamental principles of sovereign debt restructuring. Because normal insolvency mechanisms are unavailable in sovereign default, collective action clauses should be applied universally. NML Capital's profiteering upon Argentina's omission of a collective action clause is unconscionable.

Distinguishing causal factors

Via AWSH:

thoughtcatalog.com I Waited Until My Wedding Night To Lose My Virginity And I Wish I Hadn’t  11 August 2014

Wei Hong: The idea that husbands do not have the "same responsibility" as wives in regards to extramarital sex is actually contrary to the Bible. The most distinguishing feature in this woman's account is neither her virginity pledge nor her religion, but rather that she was so prideful in her pledge that it consumed her "entire identity". I feel it is most likely this unusual personality issue, rather than just virginity or religion, that lead to her unusual experience.

AWSH: And hers is the experience that gives this story its validity. Note the proviso that she provides with regards to ones choice in abstaining: 'If you want to wait to have sex until marriage make sure it’s because you want to. It’s your body; it belongs to you, not your church.' Take note also of the many comments to the article attacking her faith and how these attacks resonate with how she came to feel the way she does. Take note also on how these responses do no more than recycle the dogma that became the root cause of her conflict in the first place. I'll say her closing statement is the one line that is golden: 'Your sexuality is nobody’s business but yours.'

Wei Hong: Although I'm not sure what you exactly mean by the "validity" of a story, I agree with the writer's truistic statements that one has ultimate ownership over their body and sexual choices. Such ownership does not conflict with the presence of sexual advice in society, from school sex education to adult self-help books and internet memes. My comments are only for the clarification of gross untruths and to prevent erroneous inferences of causality. I do not bother with anonymous internet article comments as such efforts tend to be unfruitful.

AWSH: On the contrary, I'd say anonymous internet comments are just as telling as the article to which they are directed as it adequately demonstrates the discourse around a given topic as a whole. And as for validity, I refer to the causality detailed in her story that you seek to debunk. Where I will agree that anecdotal stories such as these are downright impossible to generalise across society at large, the causality she points out in her story is valid (rather than untrue or misleading) in as much as they relate to her personal experience.

Wei Hong: I disagree. Anonymous internet comments by their nature select for a non-representative section of society and attract a disproportionate element of "trolls" and opinions from unqualified people, grossly failing to be a reliable representation of intelligent discourse.

I do not seek to debunk the writer's online testimony as these are "undebunkable" by definition. Rather, my comments are to show the reader that the most superficial inference one can make is not always the correct one.

Consider this (albeit exaggerated) analogy:
A man has a background of schizophrenia. One day, he commits a crime because he believes TV commanded him to do so. One cannot "debunk" his personal account that had he no TV, he would not have committed the crime. However, there's nothing distinguishing about having a TV (or religion, or virginity), while there is something distinguishing about having schizophrenia (or another personality issue). While the TV is technically part of the causal chain, one should not misinterpret it as the main element.

Capital punishment versus euthanasia

The Verge Botched lethal injection takes nearly two hours to kill Arizona inmate  23 July 2014

Capital punishment is so hard and yet euthanasia is so easy? It is absurd to argue that capital punishment involves inevitable physical suffering when this is not a significant issue in the euthanasia debate. Despite the shortage of traditional execution drugs, it is medically very easy to painlessly kill someone using drugs that remain widely available. Taking more than 70 minutes to die while gasping and snorting is in itself not an indication of physical distress. People with sleep apnoea for example, will do this for the whole night and not feel a thing (rather than feeling too much because they gasp and snort, they actually gasp and snort because they are feeling too little). Rather than being distracted by medically dubious technical issues, the capital punishment debate should focus on ethics.

Theo-idiocy

Humans of New York

June 30, 2014

"I've been a deep believer my whole life. 18 years as a Southern Baptist. More than 40 years as a mainline Protestant. I'm an ordained pastor. But it's just stopped making sense to me. You see people doing terrible things in the name of religion, and you think: 'Those people believe just as strongly as I do. They're just as convinced as I am.' And it just doesn't make sense anymore. It doesn't make sense to believe in a God that dabbles in people's lives. If a plane crashes, and one person survives, everyone thanks God. They say: 'God had a purpose for that person. God saved her for a reason!' Do we not realize how cruel that is? Do we not realize how cruel it is to say that if God had a purpose for that person, he also had a purpose in killing everyone else on that plane? And a purpose in starving millions of children? A purpose in slavery and genocide? For every time you say that there's a purpose behind one person's success, you invalidate billions of people. You say there is a purpose to their suffering. And that's just cruel."

Wei Hong: Typical question of theodicy. If this story is true, perhaps he missed the subject back in pastor school.

VI: It's just a short quote from what I assume is a much longer and substantial rationale. I don't think the idea that a class at school can inoculate you against a life time's worth of experience is reasonable.

Wei Hong: Abridged as the account may be (I was unable to substantiate the quotation online and the only source does not cite a name), this does not affect the underlying issue, which remains on the single question of theodicy. While some people may need "more than 40 years" to learn that suffering exists in the world, others may find that this lesson is immediately very obvious, such that "a lifetime's worth of experience" is unnecessary.

Skerrett et al, 2014

A recent study (Skerrett et al, 2014) found that LGBT suicides are more likely to be associated with relationship problems rather than familial conflict when compared to non-LGBT cases. Some commentators have interpreted this as evidence that worse health outcomes among LGBT people are caused by problems inherent to the nature of LGBT relationships, rather than by societal discrimination. Such presumption is untenable. Confounders in this finding include selection bias and reporting bias.

The study identified 35 LGBT cases among 5966 suicides recorded in the Queensland Suicide Register (QSR). Previous studies have found that 2.6% of men and 2.3% of women in Australia identify as homosexual or bisexual (Smith et al, 2003), and that people in same-sex relationships are greatly overrepresented among suicide cases (Mathy et al, 2011). Based on these figures, one would expect well in excess of 137 LGBT cases in the QSR. The methodology used in the Skerrett study grossly under-identifies LGBT cases while disproportionately selecting for LGBT people who live away from their biological families. People may be expected to experience less familial conflict if they live away from their families.

The QSR data is generated chiefly from police interviews with next of kin. While a domestic partner normally takes precedence, this rule may not have been followed in LGBT cases because Queensland law did not consistently recognise same-sex partners as next of kin during most of the study period. This introduces further potential bias in the attribution of factors associated with the LGBT suicides.

A basic principle of scientific evidence is that observations can only be interpreted within the context of the observer. Findings in variables where confounders are not controlled for do not constitute valid evidence, but at most can only raise further questions that require further appropriately designed study to explore.

References:

1. Mathy RM, Cochran SD, Olsen J, Mays VM. The association between relationship markers of sexual orientation and suicide: Denmark, 1990-2001. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol 2011.

2. Skerrett DM, Kõlves K, De Leo D. Suicides among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender populations in Australia: An analysis of the Queensland Suicide Register. Asia Pac Psychiatry 2014.

3. Smith AM, Rissel CE, Richters J, Grulich AE, de Visser RO. Sex in Australia: sexual identity, sexual attraction and sexual experience among a representative sample of adults. Aust N Z J Public Health 2003.

Democracy?

Wei Hong shared Barack Obama’s photo:

Actually, US society has been willing to take some basic steps towards gun control. A huge majority of the population supports some legislation against the current situation of effectively unrestricted gun access. However, powerful lobby groups such as the NRA exploit loopholes in the legislative process, undermining the idea that the US is a democracy.

Right to sex?

Reuters Men have a right to prostitutes? Really? 23 May 2014 The male orgasm is unimaginably trivial in comparison to the human rights devastation that prostitution inflicts on whole swathes of the globe's female population, writes Caroline Norma.

A friend commented that this article reminded her of a lecture in medical school about access to sex (prostitutes for disabled patients funded by the public health system) as an important component of holistic health.

Wei Hong: When I heard the "access to sex" tutorial as a medical student, my thought was "Wow, I'm getting even less than these disabled people, I need to report to Human Rights Watch that my human rights are being violated!" :P

Right to be forgotten?

BBC News EU court backs 'right to be forgotten' in Google case 13 May 2014 A top EU court has ruled Google must amend some search results at the request of ordinary people in a test of the so-called "right to be forgotten".

The EU ruling enforcing the supposed "right to be forgotten" impinges on the "right to knowledge" and conflicts with the legal precedent that a valid total defence against a "defamation" charge is "truth."

Accountability

The Australian Catalyst statins show breached ABC code A CONTROVERSIAL television program on heart disease breached the ABC’s standards on impartiality, an internal investigation has found.

Further investigations suggest that the experts featured in the episode had ulterior commercial interests. Meanwhile, people may have died as a result of that episode. If medical practitioners give incorrect recommendations, they may be liable for severe penalties including conviction for manslaughter. I am happy for others to give health advice if they are willing to face the same penalties.

Moral absolutism

In a discussion on his wall, CYY argued that the existence of moral dilemmas (such as the “trolley problem”) indicates that “moral relativism” overrides “moral absolutism.”

WH: Given that there are an infinite number of possible moral situations, one cannot feasibly create a rulebook that dictates every course of action. Moral absolutism is the assertion that one or more principles apply regardless of situation. This need not mean rigidly applying an action to an indication (“in every situation, maximise the patient’s life”), but rather guiding one's action according to underlying principles that are nevertheless situation-independent (“in every situation, balance the patient's quantity of life with quality, autonomy, and distributive justice”).

To demonstrate, I have little trouble in answering CYY's runaway trolley challenge, for by simultaneously invoking “utilitarianism” and the “categorical imperative” as moral absolutes, I “steer the trolley to the one worker, but don't push the fat man.”

YT: Assuming the same set of moral absolutes are consistently applied, is it correct to surmise that the consistent application of the same set of principles does not necessarily lead to the same outcomes for every scenario?

WH: Yes, the same set of principles need not lead to the same outcomes for every scenario. This is true regardless of whether one is absolutist or relativist. If I invoke “always give the medicine with best probability of success,” of course the outcome will vary, because an optimal course of action can still be probabilistic.

YT: What if we eliminate probabilistic effects, and assume a deterministic system? This is obviously not possible in many real-world scenarios, so I wonder if it would be applicable to set up an artificial ideal test case.

You posed the example of “in every situation, balance the patient's quantity of life with quality, autonomy, and distributive justice” earlier. If we assume that the parameters can be quantified and the outcomes predicted with 100% accuracy, and are faced with these scenarios:

#1: Patient A's quantity of life could be increased by 90% if treatment is administered, with a 2% decrease in quality of life.

#2: Patient B's quantity of life could be increased by 2% if treatment is administered, with a 90% decrease in quality of life.

#3: Patient C's quantity of life could be increased by 2% if treatment is administered, with a 90% decrease in quality of life AND a 100% overriding of the patient's autonomy.

Is it correct to surmise that, according to the proposed principle, the optimal outcome for the three scenarios might be different?

WH: Yes, if the inputs are different, then the output will obviously be different.

YT: Alright, thanks. One last question, for now – what is your understanding of moral relativism, and how does it differ in nature from your proposed definition of moral absolutism?

WH: My definition of moral absolutism it that “there is at least one absolute moral principle.” The definition of moral relativism is that “there are no absolute moral principles.”

YT: Alright, I lied. Here's one more question. :D If we can assume quantifiable parameters and accurately predicted outcomes, and eliminate probabilistic factors, under your moral absolutist framework, is it also possible to predict the optimal outcome for each scenario? If so, how? If not, why?

WH: Moral absolutism is the idea that “there is at least one absolute principle,” not necessarily “here is the complete set of those principles.”

Nevertheless, for the sport of it, by invoking “maximise autonomy” and “maximise utility (quality-adjusted life-years)” as moral absolutes, I can answer (assuming the quality-of-life reduction applies to the entire post-treatment lifetime, not just the added lifetime) “give the treatment to patient A, but not to B or C.”

Ex nihilo

From YT’s wall:

arXiv Spontaneous creation of the universe from nothing The problem of singularity can be avoided naturally as the universe can be spontaneously created from nothing 4 April 2014

This paper does not actually describe “creation from nothing” but rather “creation from metastable false vacuum” which, by definition, is far from “nothing.” True ex nihilo creation contradicts the fundamental laws of thermodynamics.

Probabilistic utilitarianism

CY: If you have the power to kill one innocent man to save ten innocent men's lives, are you morally obliged to do it?

WH: I am using this as a prelude that as doctors we often do this - every time we start someone on warfarin, or put a 30 year old through a CT scanner.

CY: I am using this as a prelude that as doctors we often do this - every time we start someone on warfarin, or put a 30 year old through a CT scanner.

WH: I would disagree with that line of debate. I would one day like to write about my personal concept of "probabilistic utilitarianism". When we perform an intervention with risks, although it may save some and kill others, we proceed anyway if the expected value E[X] is positive. 

CY: It's different in terms of "intention" but it is the same in terms of consequentialism.

WH: Through my above argument, I would argue that there is therefore no meaningful anthropocentric distinction between deontology and utilitarianism. 

CY: If there is a magic switch in front of you where a random innocent man would die while ten random innocent men who would otherwise die would now survive. Is it morally justified to do it?
How is this different from the 10 people whom you save by CT imaging but 1 person you have now given cancer to? You don't know which 10 you are saving and which 1 who will get cancer in 30 years time. But it's still the consequence of our doing. 

WH: Under act utilitarianism or consequentialism alone, the two scenarios are the same. Under my "probabilistic utilitarianism" framework, the two scenarios are different, for only the latter is Pareto efficient.

Pseudo Robin Hood

The Age We don't want a US-style army of working poor 11 March 2014 The nature of work will be transformed once workers relinquish penalty rates.

Before deciding what they want, people must realise that regardless of how employment laws are construed, mandated higher wages and penalty rates above the market equilibrium necessarily come at the cost of fewer jobs, shifts, and services. A higher rate is useless if one doesn't have the shift in the first place.

While I strongly support social justice, misguided efforts can have the opposite result. This stereotypically unbalanced article was written by a union representative who purports to be supporting low income workers. Such rhetoric conceals an ulterior motive, for in reality, it is well known that efforts such as these benefit established union members, but come at the cost of the most disadvantaged workers. Therefore, however well-intentioned or disgustingly sinister the writer's underlying motivations, I remain sceptical regarding mandated penalty rates. I believe in helping the poor by taking from the rich. I do not believe in helping the poor by disingenuously taking from the poorer.

http://singularity24601.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/unintended-consequences.html

(via ST’s wall)

Fat absorption

BBC News Seaweed ‘may be key to weight loss’ 1 March 2014

Typical journalistic ignorance. We already have effective treatments that block fat absorption. The problem is that the unabsorbed fat comes out as unpleasant greasy diarrhoea. Dietary fat is often an unhelpful distraction in the fight against obesity, where we should rather focus on total caloric intake. 

Historical amnesia

Wei Hong commented on ST’s link:

The Skeptical OB Jan Tritten crowd sources a life or death decision and the baby ends up dead 21 February 2014

First World society is affected by what I call "natural fetishism," particularly in areas such a health. People have forgotten that before the advent of modern medicine, a "natural childbirth" meant a significant chance of the mother or baby dying. I would be happy for anyone to give medical advice, as long as they face the same severe liabilities as medical doctors do if the advice is incorrect.

Moral relativism is merely nihilism with sugar coating

ST via Secular Pro-Life

survivingsibling.wordpress.com The Challenges Of Being Pro Life And A Non Christian 24 January 2014

During a lengthy debate on ST’s wall, some people denied the existence of moral absolutes.

Wei Hong: Moral relativism seems to be a fashionable leitmotif of modern Western worldviews. I contend that the very concept, on deeper inspection, is in fact oxymoron. While derivative morals obviously do vary across situational and societal contexts, each contextual interpretation must nevertheless remain founded upon a smaller set of fundamental absolute principles. To deny that morality necessarily contains an absolutist subset is to deny any tool that could make a real moral judgement, in turn denying the very notion of morality. No action, no matter how heinous, can be be morally wrong if I can simply create a new culture where it is not wrong. Moral relativism is merely nihilism with sugar coating.

Someone referenced Steven Levitt’s argument that legalised abortion reduces crime.

Wei Hong: I do not agree with what is arguably Levitt's Freakonomical centrepiece. His methodology contained flaws that lead him to include a revised analysis, together with raw data, in the newer edition of Freakonomics. However, he neglected to mention that the correlation in his revised analysis is in fact not statistically significant. I found this disappointing for a book that otherwise extols objective evidence over “conventional wisdom.”

Several people emphasised that laws should not have “grey areas.”

Wei Hong: While the law must strive towards black and white where feasible, in practice it is necessarily grey, simply because it becomes impossible to divide all situations into legal versus illegal when there are effectively an infinite number of them. On reading the statutes, one notes the abstruse legalese designed to minimise ambiguity, but also a significant reliance upon undefined "grey" concepts such as “reasonableness.” For example, one may be held liable of negligence unless they took “reasonable care” in trying to avoid the negative outcome.

Automotive industry subsidies

Sydney Morning Herald Ongoing financial support for car industry 'not warranted': Productivity Commission report 31 January 2014 Australia faces the end of an era, with the Productivity Commission recommending the federal government stops providing financial assistance to the embattled local car industry.

While I support temporary policies to ease switching costs, indefinite state subsidisation of economically unviable industries is ultimately equivalent to using taxpayers' money to employ one person to dig a hole and another to fill it up again.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

BBC News NSA 'engaged in industrial espionage' - Snowden 26 January 2014 US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has alleged the National Security Agency engaged in industrial espionage.

Public security is the only real argument that could justify some invasions of privacy. Spying for commercial interests constitutes an act of economic warfare.