sciencebollocks – Page 2

Nicotine-Use Disorder .. Wait, what?

Published on February 17, 20103 Comments

Found via Unspeak, from a draft proposal to the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association: nicotine use disorder:

A maladaptive pattern of substance use leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as manifested by 2 (or more) of the following, occurring within a 12-month period

Which is followed by a list of supposed symptoms of this, including gems like “Craving or a strong desire or urge to use a specific substance” and “there is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance use”. All the symptoms are on this “well, duh” level or generic to any sort of addiction, as if the proponents of this addition have just cut and pasted a list of symptoms in under various headers, as indeed somebody has.

Does it matter, this reclassifying of various addictions as “disorders”? I think so, as it’s both offensive and misleading to suggest that somebody who is addicted to cigarettes, booze or drugs is immediately suffering from a disorder. You may have problems, sure, but are they psychiatric problems? Or do you just, engage in behaviour psychiatrists have labeled as such, like homosexuality used to be until surprisingly recent? Attempting to solve such “disorders” with psychiatric methods is liable to cause more damage than do good, while the medicalisation of societal problems does nothing to address their root causes. You can’t solve everything with a little blue pill.

Steve Fuller – what an asshole

Published on November 9, 2009

I believe that Levitt’s ultimate claim to fame may rest on his having been as a pioneer of cyber-fascism, whereby a certain well-educated but (for whatever reason) academically disenfranchised group of people have managed to create their own parallel universe of what is right and wrong in matters of science, which is backed up (at least at the moment) by nothing more than a steady stream of invective. Their resentment demands a scapegoat –and ‘postmodernists’ function as Jews had previously.

From Steve Fuller’s obituary of Norman Levitt in which he accuses him of wanting postmodernists like Fuller to be sent in unheated cattlecars to a death camp in Poland, gassed and the gold fillings pried out of their mouths before their corpses are burned in the gas ovens. Fuller would of course never put it like this, as that would show not just how grossly offensive, but also how absurd this comparison is. But that is what he’s implying, and for no better reason that that Levitt said nasty things about his work. Words have meanings, though it’s no great surprise that an intelligent design defender and socalled “postmodernist” like Fuller doesn’t understand that

Oh A. N. Wilson No!

Published on November 5, 2009

Driven Nutts by the debate on the sacking of the government’s drugs policy advisor, A. N. Wilson comes out with this gem on his way to an argument by Hitler:

The trouble with a ‘scientific’ argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts.

Facts! As Richard Herring once said, “you can prove anything with facts”. No wonder A. N. Wilson is disdainful of them, of those scientists in their “university common rooms” and behind their “Hampstead dining tables “. They don’t have common sense, like A. N. Wilson has, the common sense that tells him scientists were wrong to trust the MRR vaccine, know global warming is real or believe in evolution. Scientists are arrogant and the new Catholic Inquisition because they beleive in research and facts and cannot bear to have anybody contradict them! Yeah!

Oh dear. And I quite enjoyed the Victorians and After the Victorians too. But what a great example of how crackpot ideas attract each other: global warming, MRR, evolution doubts — it’s like playing crackpot bingo.

UPDATE: I forgot that he also came out in favour of eugenics — sterilising the poor and feckless.

Swine flu

Published on April 27, 20094 Comments

I was somewhat surprised at the wall to wall hysteria about that outbreak of swine flu on display in the free newspapers here this morning. SARS and bird flu has us primed for worry about any novel flu epidemic, but is there really any reason to get so panicky about it? Especially when so far there haven’t been any Dutch cases whatsoever, nor all that many in Europe. So much tosh is talked about these “pandemics”, when the death rates even in Mexico are barely hitting three figures. It’s just embarassing how quickly we get paniced by these stories.

Some people may have ulterior motives for getting all het up about swine flu though, a certain kind of science fiction fan for example. Let Dr Elmo explain:

It is anthropologically interesting that SF fans are among the most eager hand-wringers. I think this is probably because it’s the kind of thing that allows an SF fan to demonstrate how Heinleinian they are–how prepared they are, how authoritative their flu kit is, how they reduce their chance of catching it, how exemplary is their (self!) treatment when they do catch it, compared to the mundanes, who are ignorant and incompetent.

Evolutionary psychologist is just another word for loon

Published on March 13, 2008

Two years ago I blogged about Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist who argued that Asians cannot make basic contributions to science, despite being, well, you know. Now if that wasn’t enough to completely destroy the already dodgy reputation of evolutionary biology, he’s upping his game this year. Not content with just slandering whole races, he’s now blogging on how much better the war on terror would’ve gone with president Coulter in charge:

Both World War I and World War II lasted for four years. We fought vast empires with organized armies and navies with tanks, airplanes, and submarines, yet it took us only four years to defeat them. … World War III, which began on September 11, 2001, has been going on for nearly seven years now, but there is no end in sight. There are no clear signs that we are winning the war, or even leading in the game. … Why isn’t this a slam dunk? It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire. We are not even allowed to call our enemies for who they are, and must instead use euphemisms like “terrorists.” … Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history. Until now.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.