= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
advancedatheist comments on LINK: Diseases not sufficiently researched - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (38)
It seems to me that research funding is surprisingly well calibrated with a bias for infectous diseases as opposed to what I as an amateur would call "structural failure" collecting ischemic heart disease, stroke, injury and so on.
Looking at the "overfunded" category the worst offenders are HIV and cancer. I suppose cancer research is overfunded because people donate to causes their loved ones suffered and cancer tends to kill old people with a lot of money. But I have no good explanation for the overfunding of HIV which is a completely preventable disease on the personal level by using a condom and refraining from using IV drugs. BTW, the most successful HIV reduction programs give out free needles and condoms, reducing the need for medical treatment and of course human suffering in the first place.
Looking at the "underfunded" category we have injury, ischemic heart disease, COPD, depression, stroke. Injury is something that disproportionally affects poorer people, so I use the reverse reasoning to cancer. I have no good explanation for the underfunding of the other diseases here, except for maybe depression which has a bit of a stigma to it. At best I'd guess that heart attack and stroke do not have the spectacular, drawn out suffering like cancer and HIV treatment have.
The transmission rate per-infected-capita has declined dramatically from the height of the epidemic and continues to drop:
http://www.microbiologybook.org/lecture/transmission-lg.gif
(Figures I can find indicate that the figures today are less than 2/3 the rate at the end of that graph circa 2005, and that while there are a few particular age subdemographics in which male-to-male sexual transmission rose slightly over the last decade total male-to-male transmission constantly declined.)
Annual figures from Russia indicate a massive decrease in spread in the early 2000s, and a major downward phase-shift in spread amongst infected people in the homosexual population circa 1996 when you compare the fraction that are infected via different routes with the total number of cases.
http://darussophile.com/2009/03/myth-of-russian-aids-apocalypse/
As near as I can tell the disease is now sub-replacement in the United States, with each person who gets it (a bit over half of all new infections now being male-to-male sexually transmitted) on average infecting less than one additional person over their expected lifespan, and this was true both just before and after antiretrovirals began massively extending life. That's a hell of a behavior change from the early days of the epidemic.
Mike Darwin has an interesting little history of the gay organizing around fighting HIV: http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/05/31/going-going-gone-part-3/index.html
That article appears to be a partial white washing of the early history of AIDS.
Cuba doesn't even figure in to the "early history" of HIV. The earliest confirmed case in the States was in 1969, twelve years prior to Cochrane's weasely "first noticed cases."
Cuba is the size of Tennessee and had less than one-twentieth the population in 1980. It also had and continues to have among the highest number of doctors per capita in the world.
There's a reason Cochrane mentions Cuba and not, say, China, where quarantine attempts failed.
Previously.
Indeed, organizing politically was something of a existential imperative. The parallels with cryonics are... strained? I don't know.
The 1980s just called, and they want their misinformed, odious, uncalled-for moral panic back.
Wow, do you have anything resembling an argument to go with that list of boo lights?
What would such an argument look like?
I could reply with the various statistics showing that gays and lesbians in the states have become more monogamous in the past thirty years, but since advancedatheist has already assumed all such behavior is "self-destructive", it wouldn't matter much whether they were monogamous or non-monogamous, would it?
We could peruse the literature and determine that the basic template of this one-liner is much in the vein of similar ill-informed remarks made by preachers, politicians, and other pundits over the past thirty years, thereby establishing that in fact, it was "misinformed... moral panic" from the 1980s, but who would really be convinced by such a thing? No one who hadn't lived through decades of it, probably.
Anyway, didn't we do this a couple months ago? If risks like these are "self-destructive behavior", then OP probably shouldn't leave the house too often.
Well, that would actually be on topic, and then advencedatheist or myself could actually look at your statistics to see whether the size of the effect was significant or whether the statistics themselves are BS. I haven't look at the statistics in detail but from what I've seen of society that does not in fact appear to be the case.
Well, you'd need to establish that those remarks were themselves "ill-formed" and you can't do that just by looking at what they said, you'd have to compare it to reality.
OK, if you want concrete arguments:
The first thing wrong with this statement is the knee-jerk association of HIV with the gay community, which disregards the difference between the vulnerability gays had during the past century and their better standing today. Gays kept their sexual life secret because mainstream culture routinely feared, hated and misrepresented them. In such conditions they were much more exposed to STDs, because clandestinity made it much harder to establish and maintain stable relationships, and stigma gave them less incentive to seek medical attention.
Also, the antibiotic boom had lessened the fear of the old STDs, all of which were now curable. This, together with the contraceptive pill, was a huge boost to the 1960s sexual revolution, which made the 1970s a period of relaxed attitudes about safe sex. Thus, the 1980s were wholly unprepared for a new STD. The fact that the disease was first detected in the gay community is only attributable to the marginalization they already lived in. This disease can be used as a proxy indicator of which group has the least autonomy and freedom to protect itself, which makes it not at all surprising that currently the demographic sector at most risk for AIDS is heterosexual housewives.
One side effect of the AIDS epidemic was to expose the hypocrisy of having had a sexual revolution that didn't acknowledge the existence and validity of the gay experience. However, gay political activism had started well before AIDS; remember the Stonewall riots occurred in 1969.
Nobody would have described the gay experience as "self-destructive" before the AIDS epidemic. The closest that you would have heard would have been prophets of doom citing God's nuking of Sodom as a scare tactic that was getting older every time they repeated it.
It is not being gay per se which kills you; it is being forced to live in secret and not having anywhere to go for help. If you take an entire segment of the population, declare them not fit for public viewing, and object to their every movement, you can't act surprised when they're hit first and hit hardest by a new disease.
But there is another, more sinister layer of meaning beneath the description of the gay experience as a "self-destructive behavior" that they "don't want to change." You're basically describing them in the same language used to demonize drug addicts, and thereby you're disrespecting both populations. Addictions involve a physical dependence that impairs proper decision-making, and accusing them of simply not wanting to change goes against the facts and against compassion. By using the same language to describe the gays, you're falling into the gay-as-a-choice trap, which is not only a myth, but an insult to their intelligence. Apart from true addictions like nicotine, ordinary people are smart enough to stop doing something that kills them. In any case, it is not their desires that's killing the gays; it's lack of legal protections and lack of human compassion. Blaming them for their desires is completely beside the point.
Um, during the 1960s and 1970s old STDs were showing up and coming out of the wood work. The straight community responded to this by stopping and winding down the free-love sexual revolution. The gay community refused to do this and eventually a lethal STD showed up.
And yet the disease has never broken into the straight community, despite decades of predictions that it was on the verge of doing so.
Um, they would describe having homosexual sex as a sin, which in this context means more-or-less the same thing as "self-destructive behavior". Similar to the way gluttony was considered a sin.
The "argument" in this paragraph appears to boil down to "neither gays nor addicts have a choice in the matter; therefore, its wrong to use the same language to describe them", with a lot of boo lights and emotional language thrown in to distract from the fact that the argument doesn't make any sense even on its (rather dubious) premises.
Um, basic observation of humanity suggests otherwise.
Also social pressure applied to people doing destructive (or self-destructive) things is a great way to encourage them to stop. Telling people they can't help but do those things is a terrible way to help them.
Whoa, déjà vu.
I have a prediction...
EDIT not overwhelmingly likely given further examination.
When did that happen? Only some fanatics created the Moral Majority, but the Actual Majority just ignored them.
What? What planet are you looking at?
That's a different type of argument. The notion of sin rests on assumptions that are alien to facts. An objective description of a self-destructive behavior will need more solid arguments.
Let me put it in more neutral terms: being gay is not destructive or self-destructive at all. As simple as that. If society wants to minimize harm, it must focus on the specific factors that cause harm. For a concrete example: nobody denies that anal tissues are more delicate and facilitate the transmission of infections. But from there it's a very long jump to claiming that men loving men is lethal.
There's a lot less random sex today then there was during the 1970's. Heck, half the things going on back then would probably qualify as "rape" under the definition being pushed by modern feminists.
Earth, what planet are you looking at?