In America, where I happen to live, football refers to a generally over-praised sport in which two teams of large individuals in foam and spandex run at and smash each other with the intention of getting a squashed-looking ball into an area at the end of a 100 yard patch of grass and preventing the other team from getting it to their end. Though the timer only times one hour, the game stops so much that it takes roughly four hours to play. In pretty much every other country, football refers to a game in which two teams of people in shorts kick a ball back and forth with the intention of getting it to go into a frame with a net attached and to prevent the other team from getting the ball into the other net. There is usually an awful lot of bad acting involved and the patch of grass is so big and the ability of the players to accomplish their objective so limited, the majority of the game is spent sending the ball back and forth without scoring. Americans refer to this same exercise as soccer.
A lot of other countries claim that Americans do not play true football (as the other countries' football is the one actually played with feet) and that the game Americans refer to as football is in every way inferior to rugby, which is basically a rougher version of American football where they wear less padding, supposedly stop less, can't pass the ball forward, and occasionally do a cheerleader formation (in order to block the ball, or something). I say it supposedly stops less because in the rugby I have watched, there is still a considerable amount of time spent setting up and standing around. Americans in turn tend to tell the other countries that they are being silly and should use soccer for the sport played with feet because it is less confusing given American football doesn't have another name by which to call it.
As you might have deduced, I don't have much fondness for any of the sports that are called football. Still, I have to at least partially side with my fellow countrymen. Soccer, as it turns out, is actually a British term used originally as a colloquial name for association football in order to give it a shorter name, but still distinguish it from rugby football, which is the rugby game described above. More on this can be read about here. What I find important about this information is that now the count of sports that are or have been referred to as football is up to three: rugby, soccer, and American football.
My husband loves a game called handball, but this is not the Olympic sport where teams of people hit a ball back and forth at each other with their hands. No, this is handball where you play it like racquetball, except that you replace all rackets with hands. I bring this up because it is another instance of the point I am going to make: naming a game after a body part and following it up with the name of the object that a large number of sports use in some form is a terribly unspecific way to name a game. It gets confusing because any number of sports could be described that way. It is like calling desserts "baked sugar" or "whipped sugar;" I really have no more of an idea of what the dessert is and I can't be sure you don't mean some other dish in which sugar is baked or whipped.
To me, names should distinguish and football really fails to do that; soccer is really only used to refer to one game, thus I consider it preferable. The thing I disagree with other Americans on is that once the net game in shorts is referred to as soccer, football should then be used to refer to the sport with the foam and spandex described above. As I have discussed, it is a really useless name. Thus, I think it would be much better to come up with a new name entirely. So far, my husband and I have come up with merrer (derived from American like soccer is derived from association), but we are not sure that is the best name. Any other suggestions?
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Sensationalism Is Not an Acceptable Substitute for Scientific Reasoning
I read this article recently. "Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don’t respect them, study finds." At first I thought it was an entertaining article. Now it kind of bothers me a bit.
I get that it is popular to find sexism in everything, but that is no excuse for publishing garbage science. Or presenting such a misleading headline. The study just found that female hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes when comparing 2 very unequal sample groups and that when asked about hypothetical hurricanes, people tended to estimate that ones with male names were more devastating. We will discuss the hypothetical storms first.
People consider hypothetical storms with female names less threatening than hypothetical storms with male names. I concede that I may just not be understanding what they did, but from the description in the article, it seems like they just asked people how threatening different storms sounded to them and how likely they would be to evacuate if Hurricane Danny (or Hurricane Debby) was on its way (I borrowed these names from the actual 6 year rotating list you can find here. I don't know if the study used these names, but they probably should have). Apparently people said the female storms were less threatening.
Okay, if this is indeed what they did, all they did was prove that people found female names less threatening (which may be sexist, but it still has nothing to do with hurricanes). They did nothing to show that people actually behaved differently as a result of these names. If you asked me how dangerous I thought an imaginary hurricane was I would have to base my answer on the limited information given me, which seems to be mostly a name; this study found that people perceive male names as more dangerous. If you asked me how dangerous I perceived a real hurricane is I would base my answer on pretty much all the information but the name. In a study room with no real threat, I may be perfectly content to base my assessment of the imaginary off of completely arbitrary things like my dislike of that kid Dean in my 3rd grade class; hey, I decide who I am rooting for in sports that way all the time. In real life, I would never base a decision about evacuating entirely on a name.
Maybe I am alone in this and other people regularly decide whether to risk their lives based on something completely unrelated to the problem at hand. Still, I don't accept that finding that people assess female names that they happen to be told are hurricanes as less threatening than male names they happen to be told are hurricanes as proof that naming a storm after a girl makes it more likely to kill people. There is just a bit too much of a leap there for me. Of course, if you could compare real male and female storms and control for all other variables (besides the name) and you found female storms were significantly more deadly, then you might have something.
So, without further ado, we move on to the study's comparison of male and female storms.
"Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning 1950 and 2012. Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the female-named hurricanes produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities."
So let me get this straight: you took a period of 62 years, took only the 47 most devastating hurricanes (which is a bit of a suspiciously random number by the way. I guess the results were less interesting if they used the top 50), and then used it to determine that people are sexist when it comes to hurricanes. Of course, for the first 29 years, they only gave out female names, so any differences could just as easily be credited to advancements in life-saving technology by the time any male storms were christened. It says it discounted Katrina and Audrey as outliers, but it should have discounted everything before 1979.
Bigger samples are usually better in statistics, but this is one instance where it made the entire thing less credible. In my mind, including storms before 1979 is roughly similar to comparing men and women on eating habits when your samples consist of 25 men found in the mall food court and 75 women, 25 of whom were also found in the food court and 50 of whom were found in a women's gym down the street and then declaring women eat healthier than men. You can't get your samples from unequal places and consider your results sound, particularly when there are obvious reasons that the subjects in one place are likely to produce drastically different data than those in another.
In the latter decades, a really bad hurricane had a 50/50 chance at being named a female name because every other hurricane was given a female name. Before 1979, all hurricanes were female, hence the number difference of 75 to 25 in the analogy above; these researchers are drawing from data where female hurricanes outnumber male ones roughly 3 to 1 (depending on how many hurricanes actually occurred each year). Statistics has ways of dealing with differences in sample size in 2 compared groups, but generally it is still better to avoid large discrepancies; the methods don't eliminate the effects of the differences, they just minimize it. Still, I will let that slide for now. What I will not let slide is the differences in where the information is from.
Think about 1950 for a second. TVs were black and white and by no means something everyone had. Cell phones were the stuff of science fiction and telephones were often party lines, which meant you could only use the phone if none of your neighbors were doing so already. Radios were a common method of obtaining news. Meteorology has also gotten much better in the last 60 years. According to Wikipedia (humor me here) besides the naming of hurricanes, 1950 brought the first successful numerical weather prediction experiment; really, we were just getting started. It isn't until the 1970s that radars are really standardized and organized into networks. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) was also established in 1970. Doppler weather radar didn't become common until after 1980 meaning that before then we didn't really know how fast a storm was traveling; that is kind of a big deal. Now digital satellite, radar, and surface observations are analyzed to predict storm patterns. A lot has changed.
So let's line up this information regarding technological advancements with hurricane naming practices. We have 29 years of female hurricanes and then 33 years of half male and half female hurricanes. We have 20-30 years of very little radar use that aligns with the 29 years of all female hurricanes. Then, 1-10 years after male names begin to be used, we finally started widely using technology that tells us how fast a storm is going. In other words, most male names have been given out after Doppler radar and most female names (that 50 versus the 25) were given out before. Add to that the significant advancements in being able to communicate with the general public, and what we have is roughly 2/3 of the female hurricanes coming from an era where it is quite logical to assume more people would die in a hurricane than now and all of the male names coming from an era where technological advances hopefully minimize deaths.
Not convinced? How about this handy comparison of two hurricanes, Audrey in 1957 (the death toll of which can't be entirely determined but is somewhere between 300 and 700 from the figures I have seen) and Rita in 2005 (note both female hurricanes). "Rita hit the same region of coast with weaker winds (Category 3, 115 mph), but a storm surge even higher (15 feet). Rita destroyed virtually 100% of Cameron, whereas Audrey destroyed 75% of the town. Nearly two years later, Cameron is mostly just concrete slabs and trailers, thanks to Rita. However, Rita caused only one direct death in Southwest Louisiana--a drowning in Lake Charles. The answer is preparedness. Rita was a massive Category 5 hurricane several days before landfall, giving people plenty of time to receive the warnings and evacuate. Warning systems are much better now than in 1957, and Cameron was deserted when Rita hit." To be entirely fair, Audrey formed ridiculously fast, so even today the death toll would likely be higher than Rita, which as the quote points out, gave plenty of warning (though arguably some of that warning was due to better weather tracking). Also, it is important to note that Rita came just after Katrina in 2005; with that devastation fresh in the nation's mind, lack of respect for a hurricane was not really a problem. Still, the difference here was likely the ability to prepare--be it because of more time or more technology--not the lack of respect for a female name versus a male one.
Still not convinced? Okay, we will go about this a different (and simpler) way. This article addresses the falling number of fatalities due to hurricanes in the US. The sharp increase in 2000-2010 is pretty much entirely due to Katrina, by far the deadliest hurricane during these six decades, which even the original study declared an outlier. This table shows the breakdown by year, which showed me two things: first we are generally talking about not really all that many people in the grand scheme of things which means statistical analysis is greatly affected by small variations and second, we are really making progress in dealing with hurricanes.
No, none of this proves that sexism does not play a role in how seriously people take hurricanes, but I would say that it does cast reasonable doubt upon the conclusions made by a poorly designed statistical analysis. As seems to always be the case on this blog, the lesson is one of logic; while statistics are a great tool, it takes logic to use them correctly and logic to determine if another individual has used them correctly. In this case, logic seems to have been entirely missing from the analysis. It does make for an entertaining article though.
I get that it is popular to find sexism in everything, but that is no excuse for publishing garbage science. Or presenting such a misleading headline. The study just found that female hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes when comparing 2 very unequal sample groups and that when asked about hypothetical hurricanes, people tended to estimate that ones with male names were more devastating. We will discuss the hypothetical storms first.
People consider hypothetical storms with female names less threatening than hypothetical storms with male names. I concede that I may just not be understanding what they did, but from the description in the article, it seems like they just asked people how threatening different storms sounded to them and how likely they would be to evacuate if Hurricane Danny (or Hurricane Debby) was on its way (I borrowed these names from the actual 6 year rotating list you can find here. I don't know if the study used these names, but they probably should have). Apparently people said the female storms were less threatening.
Okay, if this is indeed what they did, all they did was prove that people found female names less threatening (which may be sexist, but it still has nothing to do with hurricanes). They did nothing to show that people actually behaved differently as a result of these names. If you asked me how dangerous I thought an imaginary hurricane was I would have to base my answer on the limited information given me, which seems to be mostly a name; this study found that people perceive male names as more dangerous. If you asked me how dangerous I perceived a real hurricane is I would base my answer on pretty much all the information but the name. In a study room with no real threat, I may be perfectly content to base my assessment of the imaginary off of completely arbitrary things like my dislike of that kid Dean in my 3rd grade class; hey, I decide who I am rooting for in sports that way all the time. In real life, I would never base a decision about evacuating entirely on a name.
Maybe I am alone in this and other people regularly decide whether to risk their lives based on something completely unrelated to the problem at hand. Still, I don't accept that finding that people assess female names that they happen to be told are hurricanes as less threatening than male names they happen to be told are hurricanes as proof that naming a storm after a girl makes it more likely to kill people. There is just a bit too much of a leap there for me. Of course, if you could compare real male and female storms and control for all other variables (besides the name) and you found female storms were significantly more deadly, then you might have something.
So, without further ado, we move on to the study's comparison of male and female storms.
"Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning 1950 and 2012. Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the female-named hurricanes produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities."
So let me get this straight: you took a period of 62 years, took only the 47 most devastating hurricanes (which is a bit of a suspiciously random number by the way. I guess the results were less interesting if they used the top 50), and then used it to determine that people are sexist when it comes to hurricanes. Of course, for the first 29 years, they only gave out female names, so any differences could just as easily be credited to advancements in life-saving technology by the time any male storms were christened. It says it discounted Katrina and Audrey as outliers, but it should have discounted everything before 1979.
Bigger samples are usually better in statistics, but this is one instance where it made the entire thing less credible. In my mind, including storms before 1979 is roughly similar to comparing men and women on eating habits when your samples consist of 25 men found in the mall food court and 75 women, 25 of whom were also found in the food court and 50 of whom were found in a women's gym down the street and then declaring women eat healthier than men. You can't get your samples from unequal places and consider your results sound, particularly when there are obvious reasons that the subjects in one place are likely to produce drastically different data than those in another.
In the latter decades, a really bad hurricane had a 50/50 chance at being named a female name because every other hurricane was given a female name. Before 1979, all hurricanes were female, hence the number difference of 75 to 25 in the analogy above; these researchers are drawing from data where female hurricanes outnumber male ones roughly 3 to 1 (depending on how many hurricanes actually occurred each year). Statistics has ways of dealing with differences in sample size in 2 compared groups, but generally it is still better to avoid large discrepancies; the methods don't eliminate the effects of the differences, they just minimize it. Still, I will let that slide for now. What I will not let slide is the differences in where the information is from.
Think about 1950 for a second. TVs were black and white and by no means something everyone had. Cell phones were the stuff of science fiction and telephones were often party lines, which meant you could only use the phone if none of your neighbors were doing so already. Radios were a common method of obtaining news. Meteorology has also gotten much better in the last 60 years. According to Wikipedia (humor me here) besides the naming of hurricanes, 1950 brought the first successful numerical weather prediction experiment; really, we were just getting started. It isn't until the 1970s that radars are really standardized and organized into networks. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) was also established in 1970. Doppler weather radar didn't become common until after 1980 meaning that before then we didn't really know how fast a storm was traveling; that is kind of a big deal. Now digital satellite, radar, and surface observations are analyzed to predict storm patterns. A lot has changed.
So let's line up this information regarding technological advancements with hurricane naming practices. We have 29 years of female hurricanes and then 33 years of half male and half female hurricanes. We have 20-30 years of very little radar use that aligns with the 29 years of all female hurricanes. Then, 1-10 years after male names begin to be used, we finally started widely using technology that tells us how fast a storm is going. In other words, most male names have been given out after Doppler radar and most female names (that 50 versus the 25) were given out before. Add to that the significant advancements in being able to communicate with the general public, and what we have is roughly 2/3 of the female hurricanes coming from an era where it is quite logical to assume more people would die in a hurricane than now and all of the male names coming from an era where technological advances hopefully minimize deaths.
Not convinced? How about this handy comparison of two hurricanes, Audrey in 1957 (the death toll of which can't be entirely determined but is somewhere between 300 and 700 from the figures I have seen) and Rita in 2005 (note both female hurricanes). "Rita hit the same region of coast with weaker winds (Category 3, 115 mph), but a storm surge even higher (15 feet). Rita destroyed virtually 100% of Cameron, whereas Audrey destroyed 75% of the town. Nearly two years later, Cameron is mostly just concrete slabs and trailers, thanks to Rita. However, Rita caused only one direct death in Southwest Louisiana--a drowning in Lake Charles. The answer is preparedness. Rita was a massive Category 5 hurricane several days before landfall, giving people plenty of time to receive the warnings and evacuate. Warning systems are much better now than in 1957, and Cameron was deserted when Rita hit." To be entirely fair, Audrey formed ridiculously fast, so even today the death toll would likely be higher than Rita, which as the quote points out, gave plenty of warning (though arguably some of that warning was due to better weather tracking). Also, it is important to note that Rita came just after Katrina in 2005; with that devastation fresh in the nation's mind, lack of respect for a hurricane was not really a problem. Still, the difference here was likely the ability to prepare--be it because of more time or more technology--not the lack of respect for a female name versus a male one.
Still not convinced? Okay, we will go about this a different (and simpler) way. This article addresses the falling number of fatalities due to hurricanes in the US. The sharp increase in 2000-2010 is pretty much entirely due to Katrina, by far the deadliest hurricane during these six decades, which even the original study declared an outlier. This table shows the breakdown by year, which showed me two things: first we are generally talking about not really all that many people in the grand scheme of things which means statistical analysis is greatly affected by small variations and second, we are really making progress in dealing with hurricanes.
No, none of this proves that sexism does not play a role in how seriously people take hurricanes, but I would say that it does cast reasonable doubt upon the conclusions made by a poorly designed statistical analysis. As seems to always be the case on this blog, the lesson is one of logic; while statistics are a great tool, it takes logic to use them correctly and logic to determine if another individual has used them correctly. In this case, logic seems to have been entirely missing from the analysis. It does make for an entertaining article though.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Living "Chemical Free": Something that Both Concerns and Baffles Me
I, like many, have a pinterest account. I was on pinterest one day when I came across a pin linking to an article about cleaning your house "without chemicals." I found this intriguing. Given that everything in this world that is a substance of any kind is in fact a chemical, I wanted to know how to clean something without using anything, except maybe willpower and magic.
The article was a bit disappointing. It included a list of different ways to clean stuff without the use of store-bought cleaners. Their favorite substitute was vinegar. I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but vinegar is a chemical. As a mater of fact, it's primary ingredient is acetic acid, also known as CH3COOH.
In all seriousness, I do get what the article was going for; I understand why it would be desirable to have household cleaners that pose the smallest health risk possible, and something that is perfectly okay to use in recipes is also probably perfectly okay to accidentally eat off of a counter due to residue or inhale (though in the case of vinegar my nostrils may beg to differ). Furthermore, I probably won't have to call poison control if I catch my kid drinking it.
That said, I also won't be making a switch any time soon. For one thing, vinegar stinks. For another, I worked as a custodian on my college campus for 4 years to help pay for school and became well versed in how to clean efficiently. We did in fact use vinegar at work, and as such I know its strengths and limitations well. I am not content to scrub something with vinegar when I know I could get the same thing cleaner in less than half the time using something else. I learned early in my custodial career that the trick to safe cleaning is to make sure you are using (and storing) cleaners properly much more than it is making sure everything you use is edible.
Still, I am perfectly fine with someone using primarily vinegar on their own house. You can clean your house with mud for all I care. But there is still something about this all that does concern me, and it is actually one specific logical fallacy.
Natural is Best
For some reason, there is a prevailing belief in our society that what is natural is what is best and by that reasoning what is not natural is therefore bad. This applies to everything from cleaning supplies to behavior, from medicine to clothing. Unfortunately, this is a logical fallacy known in logicians terms as the "appeal to nature." I see this fallacy almost everywhere and have certainly seen a pretty penny made off of marketing it. The rest of today's post will be dedicated to some of the ways I see this fallacy appear, but this is by no means a complete list. It is merely the ones that come to mind right now. So without further ado (we have already had too many paragraphs of ado) and in no particular order, I give you three common uses of the appeal to nature.
Animals do/don't do it so it must be good/bad.
For some reason, animal behavior is sometimes used to justify or condemn human behavior, something I cannot for the life of me understand. I am not a dog (or dolphin, chimpanzee, or platypus), so why should I use this animal as a model for my behavior?
I have been told that I shouldn't drink cows milk because we are the only animal that drinks milk after being weaned and it is therefore unnatural. Apart from the fact that this statement is false (a large number of animals--cats come to mind--will drink the milk of other animals if they can get it), animals display a large number of habits I don't wish to take part in. We are also the only animal that cooks chicken before we eat it, but I don't plan on giving that up. My Dad was once told that a certain behavior (I can't remember for the life of me what it was) was desirable because someone's dog did it; my Dad quickly pointed out that dogs also eat their own vomit. It is possible that drinking cows milk is bad for you (though no one has convinced me yet) and that whatever behavior this dog exhibited is desirable, but the fact that animals do or do not do something is not relevant to determining the value of that thing.
It's an herbal remedy so it is safer than medicine.
This one actually concerns me a fair deal because there are so many people who buy into it and there is considerable risk if you take it too far. The basic idea is that anything you buy in a pharmacy is bad for you, so you should instead use teas, oils, salts, etc. to take away your ills.
I am all for not drugging yourself up unnecessarily. I took Percocet after removal of my appendix and had the weirdest, most unsettling dreams of my life. Consequently, I have refused prescriptions for narcotic painkillers both after having my wisdom teeth removed and after giving birth, though I took a few doses before leaving the hospital with the second. I was also on a medication for a period of time that made me extremely irritable and generally unpleasant to be around. I once took this knock-off of a popular cold medicine and felt like I was groggy and floating for about 24 hours. I totally get why people would want to avoid drugs; they can do scary things to you.
So why do I have a problem with "natural" remedies? It is really quite simple: they are still a drug, but so many people don't think of them that way. While it is true that you probably won't have hallucinogenic dreams from most things you can buy in a store food section, there is still a possibility of side effects. When you start to buy these remedies other places, who knows what is really in them. And frankly, I feel much safer taking something that I can look up studies on than something some lady swears by at a farmers market. You are still medicating yourself. I am not totally against using natural remedies, in fact, my favorite cold medicine is actually an herbal remedy. I am, however, against using these remedies as a medicine "alternative." Just because it hasn't gone through the regulation system of the FDA as a drug does not mean that it isn't one. By all means, use your teas to fix what ails you, just make sure you do your research just like you would with any other drug. And if you are using multiple "natural" remedies multiple times a day, consider if you really need to drug yourself that much.
It only includes ingredients found in nature so it must be good for you.
For some reason, many people think that just because something grows or exists on its own it is better for you than something that has to be manufactured.
I really wish I didn't have to point this out because I feel like this should be obvious to anyone who has thought about this idea at all, but here it is: there are actually a lot of really harmful substances that grow naturally. There are a large number of plants that will kill you if you eat them and quite a few that will give you quite the rash if you so much as touch them. Many hallucinogenics grow in nature, but I hardly think that makes them healthy. Furthermore, just because something is manufactured does not inherently make it a hazard to your health. In fact, many things we have been able to manufacture have increased life expectancy which, while not equivalent to health does suggest that a substance won't kill us, which is obviously better than some plants.
Conclusion
I am not against natural things. I have used home remedies and I rarely buy boxed snacks. What I am against is assuming that because you can place the label "natural" on something it is necessarily the best and because something doesn't occur naturally it is necessarily inferior.
The article was a bit disappointing. It included a list of different ways to clean stuff without the use of store-bought cleaners. Their favorite substitute was vinegar. I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but vinegar is a chemical. As a mater of fact, it's primary ingredient is acetic acid, also known as CH3COOH.
In all seriousness, I do get what the article was going for; I understand why it would be desirable to have household cleaners that pose the smallest health risk possible, and something that is perfectly okay to use in recipes is also probably perfectly okay to accidentally eat off of a counter due to residue or inhale (though in the case of vinegar my nostrils may beg to differ). Furthermore, I probably won't have to call poison control if I catch my kid drinking it.
That said, I also won't be making a switch any time soon. For one thing, vinegar stinks. For another, I worked as a custodian on my college campus for 4 years to help pay for school and became well versed in how to clean efficiently. We did in fact use vinegar at work, and as such I know its strengths and limitations well. I am not content to scrub something with vinegar when I know I could get the same thing cleaner in less than half the time using something else. I learned early in my custodial career that the trick to safe cleaning is to make sure you are using (and storing) cleaners properly much more than it is making sure everything you use is edible.
Still, I am perfectly fine with someone using primarily vinegar on their own house. You can clean your house with mud for all I care. But there is still something about this all that does concern me, and it is actually one specific logical fallacy.
Natural is Best
For some reason, there is a prevailing belief in our society that what is natural is what is best and by that reasoning what is not natural is therefore bad. This applies to everything from cleaning supplies to behavior, from medicine to clothing. Unfortunately, this is a logical fallacy known in logicians terms as the "appeal to nature." I see this fallacy almost everywhere and have certainly seen a pretty penny made off of marketing it. The rest of today's post will be dedicated to some of the ways I see this fallacy appear, but this is by no means a complete list. It is merely the ones that come to mind right now. So without further ado (we have already had too many paragraphs of ado) and in no particular order, I give you three common uses of the appeal to nature.
Animals do/don't do it so it must be good/bad.
For some reason, animal behavior is sometimes used to justify or condemn human behavior, something I cannot for the life of me understand. I am not a dog (or dolphin, chimpanzee, or platypus), so why should I use this animal as a model for my behavior?
I have been told that I shouldn't drink cows milk because we are the only animal that drinks milk after being weaned and it is therefore unnatural. Apart from the fact that this statement is false (a large number of animals--cats come to mind--will drink the milk of other animals if they can get it), animals display a large number of habits I don't wish to take part in. We are also the only animal that cooks chicken before we eat it, but I don't plan on giving that up. My Dad was once told that a certain behavior (I can't remember for the life of me what it was) was desirable because someone's dog did it; my Dad quickly pointed out that dogs also eat their own vomit. It is possible that drinking cows milk is bad for you (though no one has convinced me yet) and that whatever behavior this dog exhibited is desirable, but the fact that animals do or do not do something is not relevant to determining the value of that thing.
It's an herbal remedy so it is safer than medicine.
This one actually concerns me a fair deal because there are so many people who buy into it and there is considerable risk if you take it too far. The basic idea is that anything you buy in a pharmacy is bad for you, so you should instead use teas, oils, salts, etc. to take away your ills.
I am all for not drugging yourself up unnecessarily. I took Percocet after removal of my appendix and had the weirdest, most unsettling dreams of my life. Consequently, I have refused prescriptions for narcotic painkillers both after having my wisdom teeth removed and after giving birth, though I took a few doses before leaving the hospital with the second. I was also on a medication for a period of time that made me extremely irritable and generally unpleasant to be around. I once took this knock-off of a popular cold medicine and felt like I was groggy and floating for about 24 hours. I totally get why people would want to avoid drugs; they can do scary things to you.
So why do I have a problem with "natural" remedies? It is really quite simple: they are still a drug, but so many people don't think of them that way. While it is true that you probably won't have hallucinogenic dreams from most things you can buy in a store food section, there is still a possibility of side effects. When you start to buy these remedies other places, who knows what is really in them. And frankly, I feel much safer taking something that I can look up studies on than something some lady swears by at a farmers market. You are still medicating yourself. I am not totally against using natural remedies, in fact, my favorite cold medicine is actually an herbal remedy. I am, however, against using these remedies as a medicine "alternative." Just because it hasn't gone through the regulation system of the FDA as a drug does not mean that it isn't one. By all means, use your teas to fix what ails you, just make sure you do your research just like you would with any other drug. And if you are using multiple "natural" remedies multiple times a day, consider if you really need to drug yourself that much.
It only includes ingredients found in nature so it must be good for you.
For some reason, many people think that just because something grows or exists on its own it is better for you than something that has to be manufactured.
I really wish I didn't have to point this out because I feel like this should be obvious to anyone who has thought about this idea at all, but here it is: there are actually a lot of really harmful substances that grow naturally. There are a large number of plants that will kill you if you eat them and quite a few that will give you quite the rash if you so much as touch them. Many hallucinogenics grow in nature, but I hardly think that makes them healthy. Furthermore, just because something is manufactured does not inherently make it a hazard to your health. In fact, many things we have been able to manufacture have increased life expectancy which, while not equivalent to health does suggest that a substance won't kill us, which is obviously better than some plants.
Conclusion
I am not against natural things. I have used home remedies and I rarely buy boxed snacks. What I am against is assuming that because you can place the label "natural" on something it is necessarily the best and because something doesn't occur naturally it is necessarily inferior.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Whose Fault is the Government Shutdown?
For some reason in our society, we like to assign fault. I guess it is natural, then, for us to try to assign fault in the government shutdown. A recent poll said that about 70% of those polled believed the shutdown was the fault of the Republicans. I can't say I agree with that sentiment, but I am not going to say it is the fault of the Democrats either.
To assign fault, we first have to decide what process of assigning fault we would like to take. There are many methods of doing this and I will examine several.
Who Broke the Rules?
The first method I will examine is the process much like how we assign fault for a car accident. This is essentially to determine who broke the law. I examine this method because of the number of comments on news articles and such that claim that something is a violation of something or other.
The Congress has many jobs, but we will look at the main outline. In a world with no conflict, the bill starts in one of the two parts of congress. For simplicity, we will just say it starts in the House. Once the House passes the bill, the Senate gets to pass it. Then, it goes to the President for signing. Of course, in a world with no conflict, we would hardly need Congress. So, in reality, the bill can go back and forth numerous times with people arguing about this and that and trying to change all sorts of things. The Senate can refuse to pass what the house has passed and the president can refuse to sign what the Senate and House have both passed. The Congress can overrule the president with 2/3 majority in both houses. Furthermore, the judicial branch can step in and overthrow laws agreed on by the Congress and the President if the Supreme Court finds the law violates the Constitution, and this whole thing can take forever. Democratic republics have some major strengths as a form of government, but speed is not one of them.
The above is the basic concept of checks and balances. The idea, as you probably learned in about 2nd grade, is that the more people you have involved in a decision, the less likely they are to make a mistake. You see, our government was kind of set up by a bunch of paranoid people; they were also very intelligent and educated, but they were paranoid nonetheless. They really didn't want anyone to have very much power, and the slower the government as a whole worked, the less it could control people's lives (like they felt King George and Parliament had controlled theirs).
So now we come to the current issue. Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA). President Obama signed it. The Supreme Court did not declare it in violation of the Constitution. All of that is legal. Then, we got to the start of the shutdown. At the beginning of the shutdown, the House had passed a budget. No, it was not the budget that the Democrats wanted, but Congress is not obligated to give any party what it wants (that would defeat the purpose of having a Congress in the first place). The Senate refused to pass that budget (which they are perfectly allowed to do) and President Obama likely would have not signed it either (which he is perfectly allowed to do). The Senate did send another budget back to the House (which they have not approved). Then the government shut down. The Supreme Court has not weighed in on this instance because no one has asked them to. Of course, one reason no one has asked them (apart from there being no law for them to examine) is because they know the answer would be that no one is violating the Constitution, which is about all you will (and should) get out of a Supreme Court.
Basically, the conclusion of all this is that it is rather ridiculous to try to assign fault this way in this instance. No one has done anything illegal. Well, at least on the surface. I can't exactly rule out corruption, but I frankly think that affects both parties fairly equally. It is not my experience that any trait--corruption, honesty, intelligence, stupidity, stubbornness, flexibility--is solely that of one party or the other.
Who Caused It?
So now we come to another way of assigning fault. Who did the thing that caused the shutdown? Well, the event that happened directly prior to the shutdown was that the House refused to pass the budget the Senate passed. Also, if the House had passed it, the shutdown would not have happened. So that means it is the House's (Republican's) fault, right?
Well, no. This is a logical fallacy. Two logical fallacies, actually. First we have assumed that whatever happened directly prior to something caused it, that is to say, A precedes B, therefore A causes B. This is a classic case of "post hoc ergo proctor hoc," an extremely common logical fallacy.
Second, we have assumed that because a certain action would have prevented something, not taking that action caused it, that is to say, If A not B, therefore not A then B. This is a false conclusion, because there is logically nothing preventing neither A nor B from happening (not A and not B). For instance, It is true that if the House had agreed to the Senate's budget (A), the shutdown would not have occurred (not B), but it is also true that if the house had not agreed to the budget of the Senate (not A), but the Senate agreed to the House's budget, we would also not have had the shutdown (not B). This logical fallacy is simply a fancy way of Denying the Antecedent (the "not" makes it all confusing, but the basic idea is the same).
Of course, just because that argument was a logical fallacy does not mean that the Republicans didn't cause it. There is still the possibility that the causes were all their fault. Of course, it is also possible that it was all the Democrats' fault.
Assigning cause is hard. In science, we assign cause by setting up detailed experiments with controlled variables (and even then fail to be completely conclusive much of the time). Since we can't exactly control the variables of history, we like to simply look back at events and argue about it, but unfortunately we have a hard time proving anything. I have written a lot of history essays analyzing causes of something, but the reality of the situation is these analyses (and everyone else's) are no more than an opinion. When we analyze history as recent as the shutdown, emotion colors our views a lot (of course we also have better context than the people 100 years down the road--trade offs). I feel confident that the causes are really shared between the two parties, partially based on my observations of the situation, but partially based on my observations of what is usually true in history (both sides are to blame). If we are all honest with ourselves, either side could have prevented this, both sides acted in ways that led to it, and we are in a standoff because no one is willing to give in.
Perhaps fault can be assigned by determining what caused the shutdown, but I think if you employed this route, you would find that fault falls to both sides. I think this is just fine, but it probably is not very convenient for anyone out for blood.
Who is least representing the majority of the American People?
This is really a very interesting measure of fault. Is it the minority's duty to give into the majority? Well, on a basic level, yes. I mean, if your side loses in the vote, you shouldn't challenge the other side to a duel (not that they didn't get in physical fights in early congress). However, as we discussed earlier, congress is set up so the majority has to win in two separate houses before they win the overall majority vote. This is where it gets complicated. If the House wants something the Senate does not, who is the majority? In this case, the majority of the house wants something different than the majority of the Senate. Seems a little unfair to say the Senate majority has to give into the house majority, or vice versa.
Some would say the side that wins is whatever the majority of people want, but I disagree on the basis of two aspects of governmental structure and the complicated nature of laws (and the tendency of politicians to tack on clauses that would never pass on their own).
The first aspect of the governmental structure that is important is the fact that we have representatives instead of having everyone vote on everything. This means that if a group of people is roughly divided on something but they only have one representative for them, they only get one collective vote. In several cases, the popular vote can actually be for the opposite of what happens. For instance, if there were five areas of 100 people being represented and two of them were 100% against something, but the other three were 51% for it and the representatives voted strictly with the majority of the people they represented, only 153 of the 500 people would want something, but it would pass 3 votes to 2.
This hardly seems fair, but you have to remember two things. One, our government was set up as the United States of America, but the States aspect was very important. The idea is that the states are their own entities, not just convenient divisions. Of course, the initial strong preference for that has faded and we fought a pretty bloody war about if it should stay that way, but the structure is still there. Second is that the alternative is to have the entire country vote on everything. This would mean we only make decisions once a year or so (and the ballots are extremely long), or else we are constantly having to interrupt out lives to vote. I, personally, love the fact that I get to vote, but the actual process is not really something I would like to do every day or take a whole day doing once a year. Plus, either option would be really expensive. The end result of all this is that even if a congressman is doing exactly what the people want, the majority may not win. The congressman is elected to represent the interests only of his group of people, so he or she should not be looking at the overall popular vote. Furthermore, most measurements of the popular vote are simply polls. These are not necessarily accurate measures. To get a more accurate measure, you would have to have an actual vote, which as before stated, would be a mess (and defeat the purpose of having representatives).
The second aspect of governmental structure we need to examine is the make up of the congress. The House of Representatives is set up to have representatives from each state according to the population of the state as determined by the once-a-decade census. The Senate has an equal number of representatives from each state. If you look back to about second grade, you may remember that this was the result of "the great compromise" between the big states (like Virginia) and little states (like Rhode Island). The idea was to mix the idea of a more population based system with a more state based system to partially satisfy everyone. Logically such a system will not always lead to the same result as a popular vote.
You can argue that these aspects of government should not be this way until you are blue in the face, but short of a constitutional amendment, this is the way it is. I see no reason, given this structure, that anyone in congress should feel the need to give into what a national poll says.
Now we come to the nature of laws. Laws are long and written in a language not everyone understands. There are often a lot of phrases that have a legal meaning that are beyond the average layman. Consequently, I have a strong suspicion most people in the country have not read the ACA (it is nearly 1000 pages), or very many other laws. I further suspect that several others did not understand much of it. I don't pretend to understand it all, and frankly, I am blessed to have had more education than many people.
Congressman on the other hand, are not your average layman. They have often been to law school in order to learn to read and understand just this kind of thing. Furthermore, they are chosen by their peers (us) to represent us, presumably because we trust their judgement on the topics of laws. I understand I paint an idealized picture here and often our elected officials fail to live up to our expectations, but it is truthfully our duty to try to elect individuals we believe will represent us, and if we are displeased with them we get to vote them out the next election.
There has long been a debate about what the duty of a congressman is: to do what the people he or she represents tells him or her to do to the letter, or to use his or her own intelligence, wisdom, and education to determine what would be the best course of action for the people he or she represents. I honestly think it is a bit of both, because, frankly, they can see things I cannot, but they have to respect my wishes as well. Thus, I don't think it is ever a congressman's duty to adhere to even the popular vote of the area he or she represents regardless of his or her own feelings on the subject, though the opinion of the people should always factor in.
But all the objections to popular vote aside I will now humor the idea to display how complicated even this question is. Despite the most popular the ACA has been in a while, only 38% of those polled actually like it (and 43% dislike it). In other words, no one is representing the majority in that aspect, but the republicans do have a slight edge on the democrats. On the flip side, a lot of people do want the shutdown to end. In fact, I would venture to guess the majority of people do. So in that sense, if congress is to go with the majority, they should all be rushing to end it (which neither side is). But then there is the question of what side should give in (because, lets face it, someone has to). Though I found articles that said 70% of those polled think the shutdown is the republican's fault, I was unable to find anything that indicated how many think each side should give in, and thinking something is someone's fault is not the equivalent to saying that you disagree with them. In fact, at least 13%, it seems, believe that it is the republican's fault, but don't like the ACA. Of course, that 13% (or more) could not like the ACA but want the republican's to give in. Statistics are fun, aren't they? I think they are the only way to completely lie while saying nothing but the truth.
In any case, I would be tempted to say that if asked only which side should give in, more people would say the Republicans (but I don't have any numbers to back it up), so in that sense, it should be the Republicans. Still, from the approval of the ACA, I would guess that several of those same people would say that, ideally, the republicans would win the fight to not fund it, but simply believe it won't happen and that we should just end the misery now. In that sense, perhaps it is the Democrats that should give in. Please note, however, that all of this paragraph are my own guesses and are in no way meant to be taken as anything but that.
Conclusion
Okay, I admit it, this was all just a really long post to say I think this fault finding is ridiculous. I do have an opinion on what I would like to have happen. I have an opinion on the ACA. I have an opinion on all sorts of things in this situation, but the only one I am sharing with you is simply this: To blame one side is short-sided, close-minded, and unproductive. Sure, I think everyone is being really stubborn here. No one is willing to compromise (though truthfully, there is little room for it in this situation). But on the flip side, I honestly believe that the vast majority of Congress and the President are truly doing what they think will be best for those they represent in the long-run. Perhaps I have too much faith in people, but despite the corruption of politics, I still believe a lot of them really are doing what they do because they think it is what they need to do. Are they all right? Probably not. Have they all gone about it the best way? Probably not. But that doesn't mean it does any good to call each other names and push the blame entirely on someone else's shoulders. Why can't we all view this like grownups?
To assign fault, we first have to decide what process of assigning fault we would like to take. There are many methods of doing this and I will examine several.
Who Broke the Rules?
The first method I will examine is the process much like how we assign fault for a car accident. This is essentially to determine who broke the law. I examine this method because of the number of comments on news articles and such that claim that something is a violation of something or other.
The Congress has many jobs, but we will look at the main outline. In a world with no conflict, the bill starts in one of the two parts of congress. For simplicity, we will just say it starts in the House. Once the House passes the bill, the Senate gets to pass it. Then, it goes to the President for signing. Of course, in a world with no conflict, we would hardly need Congress. So, in reality, the bill can go back and forth numerous times with people arguing about this and that and trying to change all sorts of things. The Senate can refuse to pass what the house has passed and the president can refuse to sign what the Senate and House have both passed. The Congress can overrule the president with 2/3 majority in both houses. Furthermore, the judicial branch can step in and overthrow laws agreed on by the Congress and the President if the Supreme Court finds the law violates the Constitution, and this whole thing can take forever. Democratic republics have some major strengths as a form of government, but speed is not one of them.
The above is the basic concept of checks and balances. The idea, as you probably learned in about 2nd grade, is that the more people you have involved in a decision, the less likely they are to make a mistake. You see, our government was kind of set up by a bunch of paranoid people; they were also very intelligent and educated, but they were paranoid nonetheless. They really didn't want anyone to have very much power, and the slower the government as a whole worked, the less it could control people's lives (like they felt King George and Parliament had controlled theirs).
So now we come to the current issue. Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA). President Obama signed it. The Supreme Court did not declare it in violation of the Constitution. All of that is legal. Then, we got to the start of the shutdown. At the beginning of the shutdown, the House had passed a budget. No, it was not the budget that the Democrats wanted, but Congress is not obligated to give any party what it wants (that would defeat the purpose of having a Congress in the first place). The Senate refused to pass that budget (which they are perfectly allowed to do) and President Obama likely would have not signed it either (which he is perfectly allowed to do). The Senate did send another budget back to the House (which they have not approved). Then the government shut down. The Supreme Court has not weighed in on this instance because no one has asked them to. Of course, one reason no one has asked them (apart from there being no law for them to examine) is because they know the answer would be that no one is violating the Constitution, which is about all you will (and should) get out of a Supreme Court.
Basically, the conclusion of all this is that it is rather ridiculous to try to assign fault this way in this instance. No one has done anything illegal. Well, at least on the surface. I can't exactly rule out corruption, but I frankly think that affects both parties fairly equally. It is not my experience that any trait--corruption, honesty, intelligence, stupidity, stubbornness, flexibility--is solely that of one party or the other.
Who Caused It?
So now we come to another way of assigning fault. Who did the thing that caused the shutdown? Well, the event that happened directly prior to the shutdown was that the House refused to pass the budget the Senate passed. Also, if the House had passed it, the shutdown would not have happened. So that means it is the House's (Republican's) fault, right?
Well, no. This is a logical fallacy. Two logical fallacies, actually. First we have assumed that whatever happened directly prior to something caused it, that is to say, A precedes B, therefore A causes B. This is a classic case of "post hoc ergo proctor hoc," an extremely common logical fallacy.
Second, we have assumed that because a certain action would have prevented something, not taking that action caused it, that is to say, If A not B, therefore not A then B. This is a false conclusion, because there is logically nothing preventing neither A nor B from happening (not A and not B). For instance, It is true that if the House had agreed to the Senate's budget (A), the shutdown would not have occurred (not B), but it is also true that if the house had not agreed to the budget of the Senate (not A), but the Senate agreed to the House's budget, we would also not have had the shutdown (not B). This logical fallacy is simply a fancy way of Denying the Antecedent (the "not" makes it all confusing, but the basic idea is the same).
Of course, just because that argument was a logical fallacy does not mean that the Republicans didn't cause it. There is still the possibility that the causes were all their fault. Of course, it is also possible that it was all the Democrats' fault.
Assigning cause is hard. In science, we assign cause by setting up detailed experiments with controlled variables (and even then fail to be completely conclusive much of the time). Since we can't exactly control the variables of history, we like to simply look back at events and argue about it, but unfortunately we have a hard time proving anything. I have written a lot of history essays analyzing causes of something, but the reality of the situation is these analyses (and everyone else's) are no more than an opinion. When we analyze history as recent as the shutdown, emotion colors our views a lot (of course we also have better context than the people 100 years down the road--trade offs). I feel confident that the causes are really shared between the two parties, partially based on my observations of the situation, but partially based on my observations of what is usually true in history (both sides are to blame). If we are all honest with ourselves, either side could have prevented this, both sides acted in ways that led to it, and we are in a standoff because no one is willing to give in.
Perhaps fault can be assigned by determining what caused the shutdown, but I think if you employed this route, you would find that fault falls to both sides. I think this is just fine, but it probably is not very convenient for anyone out for blood.
Who is least representing the majority of the American People?
This is really a very interesting measure of fault. Is it the minority's duty to give into the majority? Well, on a basic level, yes. I mean, if your side loses in the vote, you shouldn't challenge the other side to a duel (not that they didn't get in physical fights in early congress). However, as we discussed earlier, congress is set up so the majority has to win in two separate houses before they win the overall majority vote. This is where it gets complicated. If the House wants something the Senate does not, who is the majority? In this case, the majority of the house wants something different than the majority of the Senate. Seems a little unfair to say the Senate majority has to give into the house majority, or vice versa.
Some would say the side that wins is whatever the majority of people want, but I disagree on the basis of two aspects of governmental structure and the complicated nature of laws (and the tendency of politicians to tack on clauses that would never pass on their own).
The first aspect of the governmental structure that is important is the fact that we have representatives instead of having everyone vote on everything. This means that if a group of people is roughly divided on something but they only have one representative for them, they only get one collective vote. In several cases, the popular vote can actually be for the opposite of what happens. For instance, if there were five areas of 100 people being represented and two of them were 100% against something, but the other three were 51% for it and the representatives voted strictly with the majority of the people they represented, only 153 of the 500 people would want something, but it would pass 3 votes to 2.
This hardly seems fair, but you have to remember two things. One, our government was set up as the United States of America, but the States aspect was very important. The idea is that the states are their own entities, not just convenient divisions. Of course, the initial strong preference for that has faded and we fought a pretty bloody war about if it should stay that way, but the structure is still there. Second is that the alternative is to have the entire country vote on everything. This would mean we only make decisions once a year or so (and the ballots are extremely long), or else we are constantly having to interrupt out lives to vote. I, personally, love the fact that I get to vote, but the actual process is not really something I would like to do every day or take a whole day doing once a year. Plus, either option would be really expensive. The end result of all this is that even if a congressman is doing exactly what the people want, the majority may not win. The congressman is elected to represent the interests only of his group of people, so he or she should not be looking at the overall popular vote. Furthermore, most measurements of the popular vote are simply polls. These are not necessarily accurate measures. To get a more accurate measure, you would have to have an actual vote, which as before stated, would be a mess (and defeat the purpose of having representatives).
The second aspect of governmental structure we need to examine is the make up of the congress. The House of Representatives is set up to have representatives from each state according to the population of the state as determined by the once-a-decade census. The Senate has an equal number of representatives from each state. If you look back to about second grade, you may remember that this was the result of "the great compromise" between the big states (like Virginia) and little states (like Rhode Island). The idea was to mix the idea of a more population based system with a more state based system to partially satisfy everyone. Logically such a system will not always lead to the same result as a popular vote.
You can argue that these aspects of government should not be this way until you are blue in the face, but short of a constitutional amendment, this is the way it is. I see no reason, given this structure, that anyone in congress should feel the need to give into what a national poll says.
Now we come to the nature of laws. Laws are long and written in a language not everyone understands. There are often a lot of phrases that have a legal meaning that are beyond the average layman. Consequently, I have a strong suspicion most people in the country have not read the ACA (it is nearly 1000 pages), or very many other laws. I further suspect that several others did not understand much of it. I don't pretend to understand it all, and frankly, I am blessed to have had more education than many people.
Congressman on the other hand, are not your average layman. They have often been to law school in order to learn to read and understand just this kind of thing. Furthermore, they are chosen by their peers (us) to represent us, presumably because we trust their judgement on the topics of laws. I understand I paint an idealized picture here and often our elected officials fail to live up to our expectations, but it is truthfully our duty to try to elect individuals we believe will represent us, and if we are displeased with them we get to vote them out the next election.
There has long been a debate about what the duty of a congressman is: to do what the people he or she represents tells him or her to do to the letter, or to use his or her own intelligence, wisdom, and education to determine what would be the best course of action for the people he or she represents. I honestly think it is a bit of both, because, frankly, they can see things I cannot, but they have to respect my wishes as well. Thus, I don't think it is ever a congressman's duty to adhere to even the popular vote of the area he or she represents regardless of his or her own feelings on the subject, though the opinion of the people should always factor in.
But all the objections to popular vote aside I will now humor the idea to display how complicated even this question is. Despite the most popular the ACA has been in a while, only 38% of those polled actually like it (and 43% dislike it). In other words, no one is representing the majority in that aspect, but the republicans do have a slight edge on the democrats. On the flip side, a lot of people do want the shutdown to end. In fact, I would venture to guess the majority of people do. So in that sense, if congress is to go with the majority, they should all be rushing to end it (which neither side is). But then there is the question of what side should give in (because, lets face it, someone has to). Though I found articles that said 70% of those polled think the shutdown is the republican's fault, I was unable to find anything that indicated how many think each side should give in, and thinking something is someone's fault is not the equivalent to saying that you disagree with them. In fact, at least 13%, it seems, believe that it is the republican's fault, but don't like the ACA. Of course, that 13% (or more) could not like the ACA but want the republican's to give in. Statistics are fun, aren't they? I think they are the only way to completely lie while saying nothing but the truth.
In any case, I would be tempted to say that if asked only which side should give in, more people would say the Republicans (but I don't have any numbers to back it up), so in that sense, it should be the Republicans. Still, from the approval of the ACA, I would guess that several of those same people would say that, ideally, the republicans would win the fight to not fund it, but simply believe it won't happen and that we should just end the misery now. In that sense, perhaps it is the Democrats that should give in. Please note, however, that all of this paragraph are my own guesses and are in no way meant to be taken as anything but that.
Conclusion
Okay, I admit it, this was all just a really long post to say I think this fault finding is ridiculous. I do have an opinion on what I would like to have happen. I have an opinion on the ACA. I have an opinion on all sorts of things in this situation, but the only one I am sharing with you is simply this: To blame one side is short-sided, close-minded, and unproductive. Sure, I think everyone is being really stubborn here. No one is willing to compromise (though truthfully, there is little room for it in this situation). But on the flip side, I honestly believe that the vast majority of Congress and the President are truly doing what they think will be best for those they represent in the long-run. Perhaps I have too much faith in people, but despite the corruption of politics, I still believe a lot of them really are doing what they do because they think it is what they need to do. Are they all right? Probably not. Have they all gone about it the best way? Probably not. But that doesn't mean it does any good to call each other names and push the blame entirely on someone else's shoulders. Why can't we all view this like grownups?
Friday, September 27, 2013
Vaccines
My first post is going to jump right into the controversial topics, but this is something I feel very strongly about. We will start with a story.
RhoGAM
My blood type is A-. Being a negative blood type introduced me to something fantastic called RhoGAM. I say this half sarcastically and half not. For those that do not know, RhoGAM is a shot given to women during pregnancy who have a negative blood type. After the baby is born, he or she is blood typed, and if he or she has a positive blood type, the mother is given another shot within 72 hours of the birth. It is a shot into the hip/butt and is honestly not really pleasant.
So now, given that I had to get two of these for my son (who is positive), why would I say this is fantastic? Well, lets go back to the early 60s (and before) and look at what happened before this invention. There used to be this disease called Rh disease. It killed an estimated 10,000 babies a year in the US, but you have probably never heard of it; that is because of RhoGAM.
The negative in my blood type means I don't have something in my blood that all you positive people do called Rh. Furthermore, if exposed to Rh, my body gets very upset about it. Even though you all live with it just fine, my body will identify Rh as a kind of germ and make war. During said war, I would develop antibodies to Rh.
So how does this kill babies? Well, lets say I hadn't had RhoGAM with my son and I was exposed to his blood during pregnancy or birth (which is really common) and thereby exposed to Rh. My body then developed antibodies to RH. Nothing would have happened to my son, but I am now what you call sensitized. If I become pregnant with another baby that has Rh, my body will get very upset and make war--on the baby. My body will, instead of recognizing the baby as a pregnancy, recognize the baby as a foreign object. In mild cases, the baby will just have mild anemia. In most cases, it will have severe anemia, usually leading to death of the fetus. My sensitization would be discovered in all the blood tests they would do at the beginning of the pregnancy and I would be on close watch the whole pregnancy. The baby would likely need multiple risky blood transfusions in the womb. The womb would be a very hostile environment and the minute doctors thought it could live out of the womb, I would have the baby and the fight for its life would continue. Can you imagine knowing that your body intentionally killed your baby?
RhoGAM masks a baby's positive blood from the negative mother, thereby reducing the chance of sensitization to 0.1%.
The Trouble with Science
So now, what is controversial about this? Well, I never realized it was controversial (I never thought about it as a vaccine) until I was pregnant and was doing some more research. I am a bit of a nerd and I like to know things beyond just what the side-effects are. I turned to Google and I happened upon pages of misguided women who wanted to refuse the shot because of their baseless fear of any kind of vaccine. I say baseless because there has never been any proof of a link between vaccines and autism. Ever. There was a study done by a since discredited doctor that indicated a link. He got it published and received a ton of attention and money (which was what I think he was after). Turns out he falsified his data.
I fully admit that there has also never been a study done that disproves a link between autism and vaccines. There have been a ton of studies that failed to find a link, but they will almost all end with a disclaimer along the lines of "this does not disprove a link." That is just good logical science; disproving things is not science's strong point. Logically, it is much easier to say this does happen sometimes than this never happens. To say the first, you just have to find an instance where you know it happened. To say the second, you would have to examine every instance in the universe through all time and determine that it never did happen. Thus, science's way of saying "this doesn't happen" is saying "we haven't found an instance where this does happen."
So if all you need is one instance, what about my sister's neighbor's cousin's kid who was diagnosed with autism after getting vaccinated? This is not proof. There was a lady on one of the articles I read about RhoGAM who told a heart-breaking story. Her daughter had received the shot at 28 weeks (the recommended time to receive it during pregnancy). Within a week, she lost the baby. "Obviously," the woman said, "it was the RhoGAM." I cannot imagine the pain this mother (and grandmother) must be going through. I have never lost a baby at 28 weeks, but I know I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. But blindly blaming RhoGAM in this case is not wise.
Answers
I believe the whole war on vaccines is almost entirely due to the natural human tendency to want answers to tragedy. When we grieve, be it the death of a baby at 28 weeks pregnant or the diagnosis of autism at 3 years, we naturally ask ourselves what we could have done. We want to know why. The unfortunate result of this natural instinct is that we often start to play the blame game. We feel better if we can say "I know what it was that caused this." We feel even better if we think it was not our fault and we can prevent it in the future. Blaming the RhoGAM shot is convenient because we can push blame onto something specific and we can avoid the problem in the future (by refusing the shot).
Unfortunately, something happening prior to something is not the equivalent of it causing it to happen. Just because your autistic child has had his shots doesn't mean they caused autism. Just because you had a RhoGAM shot prior to loosing the baby does not mean RhoGAM caused the pregnancy loss.
Of course, I have no proof that RhoGAM did not cause her to loose the baby. I have no idea if the doctors could prove that in her case or not. Due to the fact that RhoGAM side-effects are not listed to include pregnancy loss, I am willing to conclude that RhoGAM causing this loss is not likely and that is the best science can do.
I understand that it is really hard to hear that there is something wrong with your child and not be able to explain it. I studied psychology in college and had a professor whose area of expertise was autism; I am sure he understood that sentiment better than some: his son was diagnosed with autism. But even he said that we do not know what causes autism. Sure, he had theories--it was his life's work--but he did not know causes.
Ethics
We now get to the never-ending question of ethics; we get to weigh the cost benefit ratio, which is honestly a rather unpleasant process most of the time. We have to decide if the problems of such and such are outweighed by the benefits
I have already discussed how RhoGAM saves an estimated 10,000 babies a year. It has almost entirely eliminated a disease in the US. Several other vaccines have also nearly eliminated diseases (though some, such as pertussis, are making a comeback due to more people failing to vaccinate their children and get their booster shots as adults). Vaccines do prevent disease and save lives.
But, on the flip side, they could (meaning we haven't absolutely proven that they don't) cause autism and other unpleasant things. They do in fact cause severe allergic reactions in a very small number of patients.
So, using the RhoGAM example: On the cost side there is a theory based on no factual information that this shot could cause autism in or death of my baby. There is also very small risk that I will have a severe allergic reaction the first time I receive the shot, which can result in all sorts of problems for me. On the benefit side, this shot will almost completely eliminate the chance that my body will develop the desire to kill at least roughly half of my subsequent babies (from 16% down to 0.1%). I feel like this one is obvious. Theoretical problems and minuscule chances versus fairly high chance that my body will kill subsequent babies? Give me the shot.
Father's Blood Type
I feel it only fair to address that my husband has a positive blood type. Since Rh is roughly a dominate trait, I don't know if he is double dominate or dominate recessive, but I know I am double recessive. If he is double dominate, all of our kids will be dominate recessive, which theoretically means every one of them would be positive. If he is dominate recessive, about half of our kids will be dominate recessive and positive and half double recessive and negative. Thus, roughly 50%-100% of our kids will be positive. Theoretically.
So that means if my husband was negative instead, all of our kids would be double recessive, which would mean all of them would be negative. In this case, there should be no reason you need the shot, right? No Rh means no sensitization and no babies dying. Theoretically.
So why does everyone get the shot? I wondered this myself. I assumed it was doctors covering the possibility that the "father of the child" was not in fact the father. Apparently, there are even some doctors who don't suggest it for women' whose husband is negative. I don't know if I can really fault someone for refusing the shot under these circumstances.But, I think I should point out what I found out about this from my fabulous sister.
My sister is weird. She wants to study blood for a living. No, seriously. Right now she is finishing up an internship for her bachelor's degree in analyzing body fluids (I couldn't make this up) and plans to go on to specialize in blood. I asked her about why they would give the shot to everyone. She agreed with my initial assessment but had something else to add. Rh is not just an on and off trait. You can be different degrees of positive, some of which will seem to be negative on a test. She herself is only positive if you remember to shake the tube or something. Furthermore, you might be truly negative but still have the gene to make a baby positive. I guess dominate doesn't really mean dominate. I don't know what the chances of such a thing are, but it is something else to weigh in your cost to benefit ratio.
RhoGAM
My blood type is A-. Being a negative blood type introduced me to something fantastic called RhoGAM. I say this half sarcastically and half not. For those that do not know, RhoGAM is a shot given to women during pregnancy who have a negative blood type. After the baby is born, he or she is blood typed, and if he or she has a positive blood type, the mother is given another shot within 72 hours of the birth. It is a shot into the hip/butt and is honestly not really pleasant.
So now, given that I had to get two of these for my son (who is positive), why would I say this is fantastic? Well, lets go back to the early 60s (and before) and look at what happened before this invention. There used to be this disease called Rh disease. It killed an estimated 10,000 babies a year in the US, but you have probably never heard of it; that is because of RhoGAM.
The negative in my blood type means I don't have something in my blood that all you positive people do called Rh. Furthermore, if exposed to Rh, my body gets very upset about it. Even though you all live with it just fine, my body will identify Rh as a kind of germ and make war. During said war, I would develop antibodies to Rh.
So how does this kill babies? Well, lets say I hadn't had RhoGAM with my son and I was exposed to his blood during pregnancy or birth (which is really common) and thereby exposed to Rh. My body then developed antibodies to RH. Nothing would have happened to my son, but I am now what you call sensitized. If I become pregnant with another baby that has Rh, my body will get very upset and make war--on the baby. My body will, instead of recognizing the baby as a pregnancy, recognize the baby as a foreign object. In mild cases, the baby will just have mild anemia. In most cases, it will have severe anemia, usually leading to death of the fetus. My sensitization would be discovered in all the blood tests they would do at the beginning of the pregnancy and I would be on close watch the whole pregnancy. The baby would likely need multiple risky blood transfusions in the womb. The womb would be a very hostile environment and the minute doctors thought it could live out of the womb, I would have the baby and the fight for its life would continue. Can you imagine knowing that your body intentionally killed your baby?
RhoGAM masks a baby's positive blood from the negative mother, thereby reducing the chance of sensitization to 0.1%.
The Trouble with Science
So now, what is controversial about this? Well, I never realized it was controversial (I never thought about it as a vaccine) until I was pregnant and was doing some more research. I am a bit of a nerd and I like to know things beyond just what the side-effects are. I turned to Google and I happened upon pages of misguided women who wanted to refuse the shot because of their baseless fear of any kind of vaccine. I say baseless because there has never been any proof of a link between vaccines and autism. Ever. There was a study done by a since discredited doctor that indicated a link. He got it published and received a ton of attention and money (which was what I think he was after). Turns out he falsified his data.
I fully admit that there has also never been a study done that disproves a link between autism and vaccines. There have been a ton of studies that failed to find a link, but they will almost all end with a disclaimer along the lines of "this does not disprove a link." That is just good logical science; disproving things is not science's strong point. Logically, it is much easier to say this does happen sometimes than this never happens. To say the first, you just have to find an instance where you know it happened. To say the second, you would have to examine every instance in the universe through all time and determine that it never did happen. Thus, science's way of saying "this doesn't happen" is saying "we haven't found an instance where this does happen."
So if all you need is one instance, what about my sister's neighbor's cousin's kid who was diagnosed with autism after getting vaccinated? This is not proof. There was a lady on one of the articles I read about RhoGAM who told a heart-breaking story. Her daughter had received the shot at 28 weeks (the recommended time to receive it during pregnancy). Within a week, she lost the baby. "Obviously," the woman said, "it was the RhoGAM." I cannot imagine the pain this mother (and grandmother) must be going through. I have never lost a baby at 28 weeks, but I know I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. But blindly blaming RhoGAM in this case is not wise.
Answers
I believe the whole war on vaccines is almost entirely due to the natural human tendency to want answers to tragedy. When we grieve, be it the death of a baby at 28 weeks pregnant or the diagnosis of autism at 3 years, we naturally ask ourselves what we could have done. We want to know why. The unfortunate result of this natural instinct is that we often start to play the blame game. We feel better if we can say "I know what it was that caused this." We feel even better if we think it was not our fault and we can prevent it in the future. Blaming the RhoGAM shot is convenient because we can push blame onto something specific and we can avoid the problem in the future (by refusing the shot).
Unfortunately, something happening prior to something is not the equivalent of it causing it to happen. Just because your autistic child has had his shots doesn't mean they caused autism. Just because you had a RhoGAM shot prior to loosing the baby does not mean RhoGAM caused the pregnancy loss.
Of course, I have no proof that RhoGAM did not cause her to loose the baby. I have no idea if the doctors could prove that in her case or not. Due to the fact that RhoGAM side-effects are not listed to include pregnancy loss, I am willing to conclude that RhoGAM causing this loss is not likely and that is the best science can do.
I understand that it is really hard to hear that there is something wrong with your child and not be able to explain it. I studied psychology in college and had a professor whose area of expertise was autism; I am sure he understood that sentiment better than some: his son was diagnosed with autism. But even he said that we do not know what causes autism. Sure, he had theories--it was his life's work--but he did not know causes.
Ethics
We now get to the never-ending question of ethics; we get to weigh the cost benefit ratio, which is honestly a rather unpleasant process most of the time. We have to decide if the problems of such and such are outweighed by the benefits
I have already discussed how RhoGAM saves an estimated 10,000 babies a year. It has almost entirely eliminated a disease in the US. Several other vaccines have also nearly eliminated diseases (though some, such as pertussis, are making a comeback due to more people failing to vaccinate their children and get their booster shots as adults). Vaccines do prevent disease and save lives.
But, on the flip side, they could (meaning we haven't absolutely proven that they don't) cause autism and other unpleasant things. They do in fact cause severe allergic reactions in a very small number of patients.
So, using the RhoGAM example: On the cost side there is a theory based on no factual information that this shot could cause autism in or death of my baby. There is also very small risk that I will have a severe allergic reaction the first time I receive the shot, which can result in all sorts of problems for me. On the benefit side, this shot will almost completely eliminate the chance that my body will develop the desire to kill at least roughly half of my subsequent babies (from 16% down to 0.1%). I feel like this one is obvious. Theoretical problems and minuscule chances versus fairly high chance that my body will kill subsequent babies? Give me the shot.
Father's Blood Type
I feel it only fair to address that my husband has a positive blood type. Since Rh is roughly a dominate trait, I don't know if he is double dominate or dominate recessive, but I know I am double recessive. If he is double dominate, all of our kids will be dominate recessive, which theoretically means every one of them would be positive. If he is dominate recessive, about half of our kids will be dominate recessive and positive and half double recessive and negative. Thus, roughly 50%-100% of our kids will be positive. Theoretically.
So that means if my husband was negative instead, all of our kids would be double recessive, which would mean all of them would be negative. In this case, there should be no reason you need the shot, right? No Rh means no sensitization and no babies dying. Theoretically.
So why does everyone get the shot? I wondered this myself. I assumed it was doctors covering the possibility that the "father of the child" was not in fact the father. Apparently, there are even some doctors who don't suggest it for women' whose husband is negative. I don't know if I can really fault someone for refusing the shot under these circumstances.But, I think I should point out what I found out about this from my fabulous sister.
My sister is weird. She wants to study blood for a living. No, seriously. Right now she is finishing up an internship for her bachelor's degree in analyzing body fluids (I couldn't make this up) and plans to go on to specialize in blood. I asked her about why they would give the shot to everyone. She agreed with my initial assessment but had something else to add. Rh is not just an on and off trait. You can be different degrees of positive, some of which will seem to be negative on a test. She herself is only positive if you remember to shake the tube or something. Furthermore, you might be truly negative but still have the gene to make a baby positive. I guess dominate doesn't really mean dominate. I don't know what the chances of such a thing are, but it is something else to weigh in your cost to benefit ratio.
Welcome to the Blog
This blog is going to be dedicated to my feelings on pretty much any topic I want to write about, some of them controversial. I will set a few ground rules:
- This blog is dedicated to my opinion. I am not going to pretend like I am unbiased. However, I am going to take my high school history class approach and completely ban the word "biased" from this site. I will delete any and all comments that call another comment or my post biased. Anything that anyone says is biased. In fact, all the news stations that consider themselves "unbiased" are full of garbage. On the most basic level, since they can't report everything, they have picked what they think is news and in doing so shown a bias. Bias is not bad, it is just a fact. Here, I will accept that fact and then move on. There is no point in debating facts. On the other hand, what is useful and interesting is pointing out how one's experience has colored his or her perception of the world. This is not merely dismissing a point of view because of past experiences coloring perceptions, but rather discussing the strengths or limitations of a perception by taking the past experiences into account.
- I reserve full right to delete comments. This is my blog, not your public forum for free speech; it is my public forum for free speech. I will not delete a comment merely because I disagree with it. I will delete it if it is offensive or calls someone a name (like biased).
- I may reply to your comment simply with identifying a specific type of logical fallacy you used. In extreme cases, I may delete your comment for a logical fallacy.
- This is my blog. If you want to be in charge, get your own.
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