richardvallee.bsky.social
I play language. Mostly irreverent. Debugger.
AI. Global warming. Integrity. Health. Science.
Chronically ill punk rocker.
I think about the future a lot.
631 posts
1,530 followers
542 following
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I don't think anyone who says such a thing actually means it. They know it's BS, it just sounds convincing, and unfortunately this is the easiest way to get ahead in life.
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Unfortunately, humans are still stuck with the traditional solution of fucking our way out of this mess, aka making way more babies than people get killed.
Even though we no longer do that, have below replacement level birth rates.
We're, uh, not very wise.
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Hey, maybe the underground pyramid can serve as a good storage space for grains.
Now that's thinking in EBM brain!
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In hindsight, making the Cochrane thing to be some "gold standard" was a really fucking stupid idea.
It took zero hindsight to know that, but hindsight makes it all especially stupid.
Naturally the regressive plan is "more of that, please". An entire underground "pyramid of evidence".
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To be fair, this was all super predictable. And predicted.
Which makes it all even worse, but no one's ever said that this was a smart thing to do.
But stonks must go up. A billionaire might have had to skimp out on their next few yachts otherwise. Madness. Mayhem. Basically anarchy.
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Preventing illness is now woke, and woke means bad, so, you know, QED and all that.
Turns out it's not a good idea to adopt quack ideas, because the quacks are always next in line getting through the door.
The quack ideas are super popular now. "Natural infection". "Immunity debt". And so on.
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Seems to be committing a similar error that many authoritarian leaders do in assessing war, and failing to understand that it's mainly about logistics and supply chains.
This is "unlimited ammo with instant reload and infinite respawn" mentality, aka "surely the odds will always be in our favor".
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I don't know what it will take for the medical profession to wake the hell up about having destroyed millions of lives for delusional fantasies, but it's proving just how deeply irrational humans can be.
Even the damn medical profession will fall for it hook, line, sinker, fisher and boat.
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Instead the profession has been holding on to delusional fantasies about magical mind powers, new superstitious nonsense replacing old superstitious nonsense.
The foolish psychosomatic models they invented to deflect from their ineptitude will never amount to anything. It's astrology for doctors.
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Most won't even if it's pointed out to them in steps simple enough for a child to understand. Too many people have been sacrificed already. The sacrifices must go on.
It's holding on pretty well so far. Explains so much about why human history is mostly horror. The monsters are us.
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It makes so many other efforts at preventing deaths so bizarre.
Sometimes it's super important. Other times, identical in all but a few details, it's good, must be encouraged, in fact more are needed.
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At least we have some idea of how many human sacrifices the average person is willing to accept.
Turns out it's a lot, as long as the lie that it's all happening through some sort of vague fate, or whatever, is maintained.
Nope. Nothing we can do here. Just accept the many deaths.
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*Monkey paw curls*
Lord of the rings, the musical, got it.
Noooooooooooooooooooo!
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Ha! As if life just gives out free lemons.
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Pretty much all epidemiology textbooks say that you have to tell the truth, all the time, the whole truth.
No one ever does that. It's always white lies, leading to gray lies, leading to Big Lies.
Now the Big Lies are reproducing fruitfully. Congrats. Soon everything will be endemic. Enjoy.
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What will happen if polio comes back? If people apply the same messaging that was loudly belched about COVID?
Most people recover from polio with no problem. Very few people die. Thus proving it right to go for natural immunity.
"Train your immune muscle", they'll say. They heard it from MDs.
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When you treat public health as public relations instead, sometimes you cross the beams.
Never cross the beams. They crossed all the beams, and they can't be uncrossed.
This fallacious reasoning will apply to all pathogens, until the same lessons are learned all over again.
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Many journals have moved to a (usually arbitrarily enforced) policy giving veto rights to the authors for retraction.
This is apparently a change that is considered positive. It pretty much guarantees that due retractions won't happen, while undue ones will.
The EBM industry is eating itself.
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We might imagine that the evidence synthesists (who also often lack the subject-matter expertise necessary to identify errors, and reflexively embrace RCTs as "gold standard") could rely on prominent journals and peer review to do the work they don't have the training for.
Unfortunately, no:
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Clearly it's only a chemical if it was made in a factory, checkmate libs
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bsky.app/profile/mark...
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The so-called medical "pyramid of evidence" is basically an underground structure.
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At least it provides a solid refutation for "incels", the far-right trolls kind, how it's not being involuntary celibate that turns them into misogynistic jerks, but rather that it's because they are misogynistic jerks that they are involuntarily celibate.
But, hey, no one cares about that.
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It is these attitudes that have led to the dismissal and neglect of people with ME for decades and prevented the very progress needed to find effective treatments. We demand good quality research that can drive evidence-based treatments.
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None of this would happen without the complicity of the medical profession, which prefers to stick to old delusional fantasies about psychosomatic pseudoscience than actually do their job here.
Ultimately it's their fault more than anyone else. They choose this hateful disaster.
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Oddly enough, they don't even care about each losing billions. It's rounding errors to them, blips.
Long Covid has already cost the world trillions, and no one in charge cares. They'd rather lose trillions more, and they will, than do something, anything, about it.
Humans are freaking weird.
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All this talk of safety nets really sidesteps the basic fact that a net is, by definition, is full of holes.
Holes large enough for millions to slip through. Because, it turns out, even millions of people disappearing can go completely unnoticed.
And the medical profession cares even less.
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Their behavior is the same, just about a more narrow slice of life.
Their dishonesty is just as offensive, and so is their lack of basic professionalism. Some fantasy "astrological medicine" would work and behave in much the same way, with the same results.
The last great bullshit system.
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A century ago, most educated people believed in all sorts of weird esoteric stuff like astrology, ESP, or maybe some vibe-based pseudoscience like phrenology.
Those bullshit systems have been pushed out, but beliefs with similar roots about illness, psychosomatic ideology, remain very fashionable.