the anti-cult cult
Date: June 07, 2004 06:45PM
Warytraveller responded:
"Thank God for the Food and Drug Administration. GSK is also the makers of Tums, Contac, Tagamet, to name a few. Do you think we should stop using them in light of this scandal?"
Heavens no ! If you think LGATs are taking heat, join the Life Extension Foundation (I have for other reasons, and think it is well worth the money if you know what you're doing... although many don't know biochemistry from a toilet plunger and consume all the wrong supplements for all the wrong reasons) which is rabidly anti FDA. However, the LEF has exposed abuses and incompetences within the FDA and probably improved the organization by daring to publicly take them to task, in print and in court.
I do strongly believe that one should be exceedingly wary of any single scientific experiment which claims to prove anything (a serving of cold fusion, anyone ?) much less surveys and social inquiries which assert that they know what's in other people's heads. A brief stint in the marketing world drilled this lesson into my thinking rather well.
My mother, too, was a specialist in psychometry, or psychological testing and measurement. My dad was an attorney. Both were constantly struggling with the problem of "what are the facts" versus "what is the truth"
For example, the famous psychological test, MMPI, or Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, is held out by some ignorant devils as a perfectly objective test of some parameters of the "real self". Completely untrue, which is why you can't buy the test instruments unless you are a degreed professional. The authors of the MMPI insist that no objective evaluation can be made based on the MMPI scores alone. The whole form of life of the subject must be taken into account. Results which may indicate severe disturbance in one personality type/intelligence level may indicate high creativity and ability to see from unsusal perspective in another.
In brief, a tremendous amount of digging, cross checking, restating of questions, retesting, submitting results to more than one statistician for mathematical confirmation, and so on are necessary before you can say you have a pretty good idea something is what it appears to be.
I learned this twice over from my dad who was forever having to test the evidence that was being submitted by opposing parties. The most dangerous of these was photographic evidence because of the strong presumption that pictures don't lie. But often pictures do lie. Depending on the filter you put on your camera for a black and white photography, the scene can be dramatically transformed, dark things made to appear light, light things made appear to be dark, but to the judge it looks like an honest depiction, right there in black and white. Until, that is, the judge sees a second photograph that shows the scene unaltered. Then you have one very angry judge.
The take home lesson is that knowing things demands getting out of the box, particularly when somebody with an agenda has taken pains to construct a box for you, paints it blue and calles it Paradise.