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wedrifid comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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In my last post on Health Optimization, one commenter inadverntently brought up a topic which I find interesting, although it is highly contraversial - which is HIV/AIDS skepticism and rationality in science.
The particular part of that which I am interested in is proper levels of uncertainty and rationality errors in medical science.
I have some skepticism for the HIV/AIDS theory, perhaps on the level of say 20-30%. More concretely, I would roughly say I am only about 70% confident that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, or 70% confident that the mainstream theory of HIV/AIDS is solid.
Most of that doubt comes from one particular flaw I in the current mainstream theory which I find particularly damning.
It is claimed that HIV is a sexually transmitted disease. However, the typical estimates of transmission rate are extremely low: 0.05% / 0.1% per insertive/receptive P/V sex act 0.065% / 0.5% per insertive/receptive P/A sex act
This data is from wikipedia - it lists a single paper as a source, but from what I recall this matches the official statistics from the CDC and what not.
For comparison, from the wikipedia entry on Gonorrhea, a conventional STD:
So it would appear that HIV is roughly 100-500 times less sexually transmittable than a conventional STD like gonorrhea.
So in my mind this makes it technically impossible for HIV to be an STD. These transmission rates are so astronomically low that for it to spread from one infected person to an uninfected partner would take years and years of unprotected sex.
If you plug that it to a simulation, it just never can spread - even if everyone was having unprotected sex with a random stranger every single day, it would still require an unrealistic initial foothold in the population by other means before it could ever spread sexually.
And of course, if you plug in actual realistic data about frequency of unprotected sexual intercourse with strangers, it's just completely impossible. Bogus. It doesn't work. It can not be an STD.
As gonorrhea (and I presume other STDs) are hundreds of times more transmissable than HIV, their low rates in the population place bounds on HIV's sexual transmission.
Finally, these rates of transmission are so low that one should question the uncertainty and issues with false positives - how accurate are these numbers really?
It takes courage to voice a low but not negligible degree of doubt in a emotionally salient mainstream position. I would expect it to result in almost as much social punishment as in the case of outright denial. (Emotional backlash isn't good at math.)
More concretely, I would roughly say I am only about 70% confident that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, or 70% confident that the mainstream theory of HIV/AIDS is solid.
I am surprised that those two confidences happen to be the same. Is it not a distinct possibility that HIV is, in fact, the sole cause of AIDS even when the mainstream theory is itself rubbish? (For example, if the theory got important details such as mechanism completely wrong.)
I like this sentence.
I tend to think of "HIV being the sole cause of AIDS" as the central tenet of the mainstream theory, but sure that could be true even if much of the details are wrong. Actually, I think many within the mainstream would admit most of the details are wrong - last I checked all the important details, such as how the retrovirus could come active after many years and damage T-cells and what not are all still hot research items.
And most of the specific results have been failures - no vaccine yet, just some drugs with a bunch of side effects which may or may not even improve mortality, etc etc.
I find hypotheses in the middle more likely overall - examples: that HIV is a mostly harmless retrovirus but in some people with (X, Y, Z cofactors) it can cause immune damage.
And I yes, I am at least mildly concerned about taking an HIV skeptic position in a public internet forum - and just thinking about the reasons for that causes me to slightly update to be more skeptical.