@carl and @richard talk to Nick Mailer about bad science: how to recognize it and avoid it. Nick gives many examples of how we have been conditioned through language to accept bogus claims. The source of this bias may surprise you.
Episode #72 - Bad Science with Nick Mailer
It was such fun speaking to the Dudes. Theyâre amazing people.
daon
#4
I thought this was an amazing episode with Nick Mailer and very insightful. I wanted to comment on the topic brought up towards the end of the podcast. The topic of the âVaccine that lowers cholesterol offers hope of immunizing against cardiovascular diseaseâ. Given Nickâs explanation of the use of the word âVaccineâ in order to make this poison palatable, (of course you canât be against a vaccine or you are an anti-vaxor (sp?)) it brought to mind a very recent Weston A. Price email I received about updates to repeal California SB 277 summarized below.
What worries me is by calling this new drug that lowers cholesterol a Vaccine, will they start giving it to children and in states like California, the parent has no say in not vaccinating their child?
Just another way our parental rights are being placed in the hands of the government. Iâm very concerned about the Vaccine wording and was just wondering if others are too?
SB 277 eliminated the personal and religious belief exemptions for vaccination in order for children to attend public or private school, pre-school or daycare.
Because of SB 277, Californiaâs kindergarteners are now required to receive twenty-five doses of different vaccines â including for a sexually transmitted disease â before they can attend school. And the law is not limited to kindergarteners. It applies to all students K-12, forcing parents to give their children more than 40 doses of 10 federally recommended vaccines in order to attend school.
School aged children who are not up-to-date on every mandated vaccine are required to home school without options for classroom learning. The only exception is for medical exemptions, which are very difficult to obtain.
bokkiedog
(Nick)
#5
Thank you for your lovely compliment, daon. I agree that the hijacking of the term âvaccineâ is very worrying. I know too well that proper vaccines have been miracles for our species: the fact that weâve wiped out smallpox, and children no longer spend their lives in iron lungs because of polio is a profound blessing. But to be a parasite on that legacyâs rightful reputation is downright evil.
djindy
#6
Somehow missed this episode until now.
Overall, a nice episode, but there did seem to be a lot of problems when they tried to branch out around the 35 minute mark and seemed to get a lot of the history of actually several philosophies and religions wrong.
For one, itâs a bit dubious to say so simply that Judeo-Christianity âcame out of the Greeksâ. While Israel and Greece are not super far apart and both lands are around the Mediterranean Sea, itâs a rather big leap to say the one came out of the other. Hellenization, including in Israel and the surrounding regions, was certainly under way by the First century when Christianity developed (or had, rather, had to a degree run itâs course and given way to the similar, but a bit distinct, influence by the Romans, who certainly were themselves highly influenced by Greek philosophy and religious ideas to a degree), that canât really be said so well of the 11th-10th century B.C. when the Judeo traditions first began to get written down (by some datings anyway, and that would be by those more skeptical of the writings). Essentially the writings are usually thought to spring up initially, though not in completion or current forms, during the Reigns of Kings David and Solomon, a time when Israel was expanding and decently prosperous so that there were funds and advancement enough for people to be able to spend their lives in writing and study. By that time there had already been a decent amount of development and history, of course. To put a reference point, Socrates around the 5th-4th century BC, and Alexander the Great started spreading what we largely call Hellenization in the 4th Century BC (there can be plenty of talk about how much it had already started by then and other nuances about the version that comes from the Macedonians under Alexander). Greek philosophies existed before Socrates, but Iâll save discussion of that for another time.
By the time Christianity comes on the scene, certainly they were aware of the Greeks, and some certainly had influence from Greek instruction (it was not uncommon for the educated to know Greek and have studied various Greek philosophies), but there was likewise still a lot of tension with that Greek influence, even a lot of rejection of the philosophies (pagan philosophies, as some called it). You could also say by this time too that there was a lot of influence and awareness of unrelated other philosophies from other regions as well (from the East, from Egypt, from Ethiopia, from Persia, etc). In any case, the tension between Christianity and Greek Philosophy continued for centuries, with many ups and downs, the the extent that some attribute Thomas Aquinas in the 14th Century with finally reconciling Greek Philosophy with Augustinian Philosophy (and more or less creating Thomism as a result), but even that is a debatable oversimplification. But, a particularly important illustration of this tension is the story from the Acts of the Apostles of Paul in Athens when the Athenians are initially very interested in what he is saying (seemingly because they are interested in any ânewâ ideas), but scoff at him and mostly reject what he is saying when he talks about the resurrection, the one of the central doctrines (in his letters, Paul also claims the crucifixion is âfoolishness to the Greeksâ). Paul clearly tried to even use Greek philosophy to explain Christianity to the Greek people, so there is influence in that sense, but there was also a sense of Christianity being âin spite ofâ rather than âout ofâ Greek philosophy at that stage.
To a degree, there is also a problem of mistakenly conflating a lot of rather different philosophies, and in a way that doesnât even necessarily represent the larger trends of those philosophies. The Greeks after all had both the Stoics and the the Hedonists, among many, many others. For that matter, for much of the development they didnât even really agree on what the term âgoodâ consisted of (for more on that, Iâd recommend Alasdair MacIntyrâs Whose Justice? Which Rationality?). Thatâs just looking at the Greeks too, if we go abroad further into Europe we of course get more diversity, though less records dating back so far. But we certainly find many religions and philosophies that actually emphasized the body rather than the mind, or ways of living in harmony with the ânatural environmentâ around in various ways. For that matter, in the East we find plenty of the idea of mind over the body (actually, Iâd think more of certain Eastern philosophies for that kind of concept than I would of the Greeks). There are some general trends between East and West that can be harped on a bit without too much damage, but thatâs a huge discussion on its own.
More particularly, aversion to the flesh would have early on (and still today depending on which branch you look at) as opposed to Christianity, rather than a result from it, as would the idea of the Mindâs ability to Master or Conquer nature (for that matter, the term ânatureâ they would refer to would mean something like whatever is proper to a thing in all itâs aspects, rather than what we usually mean today of natural vs artificial). Indeed, the idea that man would be able to âovercome anythingâ with the power of the mind would be certainly foreign to most of Judeo-Christianity (where you place the Gnostics in all that is debatable), but I also suspect foreign to most (perhaps not all) of even the pre-Christian Greeks. The Christians believed and believe that the Mind actually canât overcome or conquer anything really (at least not anything for good). Rather, while both the mind and the body are considered good, they are both also considered fallen and out of tune with what they are meant to be, and thus need actually Divine intervention to be set straight (man cannot fix himself, as it were). However, both the body and mind (and more) can be oriented or even mutually assist each other in cooperating with the Divine to fix the whole person (hence, you do find both mental practices for assisting the progress of the body or against carnal flaws, as well as physical or bodily practices for assisting the progress of the mind or spirit or against spiritual flaws). That the mind and intellect can conquer all is really more of the idea of a Modern idea (understood as the last few centuries) that we sometimes read into earlier writings or practices. There is also a lot of confusion today when others look at the moral teachings and think they are indicating the flesh is in itself evil or something (itâs like if an outsider saw all our promotion of fasting and concluded we believe food is evil. Thatâs probably a pretty appropriate example too considering the common ancient practices of fasting for religious or philosophical purposes).
Now, there did exist in the west, and heresies in Christianity, that would suggest some of the things that were alluded to in that part of the podcast. Things like Dualism would often see the fleshly or bodily as evil, and it took on many forms. Gnosticism also suggested the flesh was evil and that the escape was essentially to separate from the Flesh while possessing specific secret Knowledge. Puritanism is kinda a late development that also saw much of the flesh as evil, commonly anyway, but remember there is a reason they fled Europe: they were greatly at odds with the mainstream philosophies. Most of the examples of this probably most people are probably not aware of (how many people know about the Catherism?). To go into that aspect and itâs developments until what we have today would take a lot more, and Iâm clearly already going on for a long time.
So⌠the tl;dr version: that wasnât really an accurate description of Western (or even Eastern, honestly) philosophies and religions, and the matter is simply far more complicated and diverse if one wants to dive into it.
bokkiedog
(Nick)
#7
Hi,
Lots of useful points there. Of course, you are quite correct that the history is complex and, indeed, problematised - I specifically invoked that word. There are plenty of different strains of philosophy and identity. But each has left its mark on the basket of ideas that still have currency today. For example, gnosticismâs memes remain potent, even though, as a religious movement, it has essentially died out.
We were certainly not suggesting that there is a simple narrative here. Far from it! But we must acknowledge that there is a narrative, and that the complex tensions between different religious philosophies still shadow our discourse, even if we believe we are secular.
As for the âmindâ in all of this: the very ambiguity of the notion of the logos at the heart of it all holds what Derrida called a âpharmakonâ. Whatever Heraclitus did or did not mean by it, the shimmering ambiguity of it prefigures many of the terrible troubles that Christianity has had in enunciating a coherent theology - let alone philosophy.
tl;dr We had a condensed description of some of the currents and eddies in Western philosophy that have led to some of the peculiarly âappositeâ food obsessions we find ourselves suffering from. That the matter is complicated and diverse is no reason not to dive in and see what treasures we might find beneath the surface 
djindy
#8
There is a narrative, indeed, but what I was suggesting is that the narrative suggested at that point in the discussion was way off, even as far as a one minute brief overview goes. Though it did seem to reflect some common modern assumptions of what such a narrative would look like (there was a lot really quickly packed into a minute there).
I certainly agree that the complication of a matter is no reason not to dive in. In fact, I hope people do dive into these particular matters. But, the dudes always ask for any objections or corrections about anything said, and thus I provide. This is also closer to my own training and interests than usually come up so, while I believe what I said above is actually itself over simplified and condensed, I couldnât just let it lie (my background has some similarities to yours, as it turns out, as I double majored in Theology and English, though I currently work in software QA/DevOps).