Back in the early 1800s, some nut [ Samuel Hahnemann ] conceived the idea that all effective medicines, in large doses, produce symptoms in healthy individuals similar to those of the diseases they cure. He advocated treatment using extremely diluted versions of those drugs – often so diluted that the preparation did not contain a single molecule of the original drug. This was of course complete nonsense. It was also quite effective: people had significantly better outcomes when treated with homeopathic medicine than conventional therapies.
You see, on average, conventional medicine was worse than useless in those days, as it had been for thousands of years. Doctors killed more people – a lot more – than they cured.
While homeopathic medicine was a sophisticated way of doing nothing at all – and thus vastly superior to conventional medicine.
The success of homeopathic medicine did not last. For one thing, it sounded ridiculous. The idea that infinitely-diluted substances had potent effects was unbelievable. Also, its rivals learned from homeopathy’s success. Some people in conventional medicine began to realize that it was usually harmful and some of their most stupid therapies became less common. Some MDs moved all the way to therapeutic nihilism – the idea that it is impossible to cure people through treatment. Close to true at the time. Later, with the development of anatomy & physiology, and in particular germ theory, effective therapies were developed, eventually putting many areas of medicine in the black.
However, there are other fields that could benefit from homeopathy’s example. Simply look for disciplines that are, on average, worse than useless. Academic fields that have net negative predictive power, fields that produce graduates that are less effective than barflies. We could construct alternative, low-cost approaches that succeed by doing nothing at all.
They’d inflict less harm, and they would also be considerably cheaper.
Examples are left as an exercise for the reader. Remember that even while doing nothing, you have to pretend to do something, cause you gotsta get paid.
West Hunter 
Given the atrocities committed by zealous governments in the 20th century, perhaps make-work public sector jobs should be considered a feature and not a bug.
I rather enjoyed postmodernist thought while it remained a tool of analysis and exploration, rather than one for governing policy. Its quite interesting to consider the phlogiston theory as a thought experiment, but less so as a means of practical method for accomplishing warmth, hope or social equality.
Postmodernism is crap.
I thnk I recall Theodore Dalrymple (Dr. Anthony Daniels) writing that people didn’t really improve their chances by consulting a physician untiil the 1930’s. Can’t provide a citation, tho’.
There was very little effective medicine until World War II. Vaccines were good. Mercury was used to treat syphilis and had some effect, Arsenicals were a little better but both were pretty toxic. Digitalis was almost the only drug that worked aside from Quinine. Penicillin had been discovered by Fleming but it was not used until Florey produced enough of it to use in treatment in 1941. Sulfa drugs were discovered by Domagk in 1939 but, again, it was a while before they were very useful. There were no useful drugs for high blood pressure until thiazide was released in 1958 but it was not very effective. Reserpine was isolated in 1952 but Rauwolfia, the root that is the source, was used in India for centuries but not for hypertension. It has psychiatric effects and it was mostly used for them.
Thank you for your list.
There was also increased understanding of quarantine, some improved setting of bones because of X-rays, some sanitation advice.
The book to read is
Also there were public heath measures such as modern sewage systems.
John Snow and Florence Nightingale were the heroes in that. Both were before Pasteur but both did analysis and came up with similar conclusions. UCLA Public Health School has a nice John Snow exhibit and web site.
There was preventive medicine. For example, by mid 19th century it was possible to say that whatever caused cholera, it was carried in water. Projects such as sand filtration of water prevented cholera.
You’ve got to act like you’ve got the theory of everything at your fingertips. And that all competing theories are just failed versions of yours.
A lot of homeopaths believe that all cure is homeopathic, and that mainstream doctors are just applying Hahnemann’s similia similibus curentur principle in flawed ways. Vaccines are a good example. Homeopaths believe they work through “like cures like”: If the body is prone to catching flu, then a small dose of flu antigens will push the body back into its natural state of not catching the flu.
Using this method, when a competing theory succeeds you get to take credit for it.
If the goal of Academic Homeopathy were to maximize utility across society in some sensible way, we have to consider the possibility that for students drawn to the zaniest ideas (Postmodernism?) we’d all be better-off leaving them as enfeebled and ineffective as possible. In other words, there may be fields in which it’s simply irresponsible to intervene.
Yes, I think this might be true.
Vapid sparkly 3rd-wave feminism is the homeopathic alternative to radical 2nd-wave feminism, which could be violent and thuggish.
Incomprehensible Sokal-style critical theory is the homeopathic alternative to Marxism, which could be even more violent and thuggish.
It’s useful to have honeypots, where potentially dangerous people have their efforts and energy diverted to some useless end. Like the ground terminal on a high voltage circuit.
It’s amazing how similar all those specimens of postmodern writing sound to one another. Sort of like white noise. I read Sokal’s piece once and it actually sounded a little different. It actually read here and there as if it was going to make some sort of sense before relapsing into nonsense. It was like a television screen on which some sort of picture was trying to emerge out of the snow and static. Most postmodern writing is just the snow and static. .
Sokal’s paper is too readable. Too many active verbs, and short sentences. Real critical theory takes you down a labyrinth of dependent clauses and dangling participles until you aren’t sure what’s referring to what.
The quotes beginning Sokal’s paper are authentic critical theory. But the actual paper is obviously a mathematician putting on a voice.
It takes skill to produce convincing nonsense, just as it takes skill to do anything. If I try to write random numbers (25723592…) I’ll probably produce a highly nonrandom series of numbers. My fingers will favour certain keys. My subconscious will generate repeatable patterns. Perhaps, as neural nets become more advanced, “random” numbers typed by my hand will ID me as reliably as my DNA.
Yes when trying to produce random digits people unduly avoid repeated digits and try to balance the numbers of the different digits by “correcting” overages of the digits resulting in highly non-random sequences.
So postmodernists are skilled at producing convincing nonsense. At any rate they’ve convinced me.
Somewhere I heard the notion that osteopaths are trained in a theory that is entirely bogus, but many of them become skilled manipulators in spite of that.
The same is true of chiropractors, whose theory is similar to osteopathy. Some chiropractors are quite good physical therapists but usually more expensive.
I had a ton of damage done to my insides and the muscles in my abdomen in middle school. As a result I had back problems amid other problems. Now I have very visible scars from below my xyphoid to my groin. No doctor ever suggested the internal scars might be causing problems until I saw an osteopath. She said, “you have big knots of scar tissue in there.”
She tried to treat them. Later that year I had an emergency appendectomy. The doctor said, “normally, we’d do x, y, and z but we couldn’t work around the mass of scar tissue. It was like a bowling ball.”
Forty years of problems after docs did everything from piercing my bladder to scraping my liver putting me back together and not one of them thought, “huh, might be some problems going on.”
It took someone one step from a witch doctor to even suggest the cause.
I suspect that a replacement for the FBI could do less harm by doing nothing at all.
Of what harm do you accuse the FBI?
They have this annoying habit of collecting racial crime statistics.
erm, conspiring against a presidential candidate?
knowingly using faked dossiers as ‘evidence’ before FISA judges, in order to illegally spy on American civilians?
repeatedly starting investigations, knowing beforehand that the only purpose of the purported “investigation” was to provide pretext to not charge an obviously guilty ( simply on the basis of what they have publicly admitted too ) party? i mean, there were multiple national security felonies just in the bathroom mail server. Uranium One is a combination of the Teapot Dome Scandal and the Rosenberg Espionage case.
FBI’s been doing that since sixties at the very least. LBJ had the Goldwater campaign, plane included bugged and their phones tapped.
Nixon was just the guy who got caught doing that.
The departments in universities that are responsible for recruiting foreign students need to be diverted into some harmless pursuit. Maybe painting the sidewalks in colourful patterns to make things more “vibrant”.
I believe exposing some foreign students to America has benefits.
Sure. But I think Rosenmops’ point is that the people who decide on these students do not pick “right” ones and do more harm than good.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s second great theorist, after its founder Hasan al-Banna, was Sayyid Qutb, “the father of modern [Islamic] fundamentalism.” He sharpened his distaste for the West while living in the United States from November 1948 to August 1950. While hospitalized for a respiratory ailment in Washington, D.C., in February 1949, he heard of the assassination of al-Banna, an event which, he later claimed implausibly, set the hospital staff to open rejoicing.
His disgust with the gaudy materialism of postwar America was intense. He wrote to an Egyptian friend of his loneliness: “How much do I need someone to talk to about topics other than money, movie stars and car models.” Moving to Greeley, Colorado, he was impressed by the number of churches in the city, but not with the piety they engendered: “Nobody goes to church as often as Americans do. . . . Yet no one is as distant as they are from the spiritual aspect of religion.” He was thoroughly scandalized by a dance after an evening service at a local church: “The dancing intensified. . . . The hall swarmed with legs . . . Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love.” The pastor further scandalized Qutb by dimming the lights, creating “a romantic, dreamy effect,” and playing a popular record of the day: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” He regarded American popular music in general with a gimlet eye: “Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.”
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/12/sayyid-its-cold-outside
This guy sounds great!
Sayyid Qutb has a point about Jazz. I wonder what he would have thought of hip hop. Other than that, he is a crazy cultist freak and should never have been allowed on Western soil.
Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, fortunately retired, has a PhD in Petroleum Engineering from USC.
“retired” ? Imprisoned by a murderous military coup.
“Imprisoned by a murderous military coup.”
That’s the way things roll in that part of the world.
“Retired” is the correct word. Definition: Withdrawn from one’s position or occupation : having concluded one’s working or professional career.
Not always. Yōsuke Matsuoka
Papa Doc (François Duvalier, President of Haiti 1957-1971) was another successful product of American (University of Michigan, Public Health) education. As Baron Samedi he perfected the voodoo cult.
The problem is that pretty much any field worth a damn has no objective way to measure its effect. To the extent that there is, well, who better to measure it than the experts… because, they’re the educated ones, right?
Does Black Studies make the world objectively better? Well… who can tell? By what metric?
Certainly it makes the world better for Cornel West. Similarly, is climate change really happening? If it is, and it will destroy all life on earth… then we need to know. So who can possibly tell us other than the leading expert PhDs… in climatology.
Here’s Moldbug on the general topic: your entire system of government is incurably insane.
Civil Engineering has bridges that stand as evidence, aside from “Galloping Gertie.”
Math has theorems that can be proven to be true. But they may not be of any benefit. I can’t see how they could be harmful. They might have applications in the future.
What makes someone called “Moldbug” an expert on government, then? How many countries had he governed?
I argued with Moldbug on a couple of topics: in those cases, he didn’t know jack. But maybe those cases weren’t representative. Can someone give me some happier examples?
He recommended buying Bitcoin at $0.90, so people who listened to him have done well.
https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-monetary-restandardization.html
He also sold all his bitcoins years ago because he thought the government would declare it illegal.
Bad timing, that’s all.
Investment recommendations are entirely based on timing. Otherwise, just buy and hold.
His blog wasn’t bad for book recommendations- he strongly encouraged the reading of period historical sources and now out-of-fashion men of letters, a laudable enterprise. Other than that, his ideas are perhaps best summarized with the (possibly-apocryphal) quip of Dr. Johnson concerning things that are both original and good. His popularity likely stems less from any unique insights than from his distinctive and weirdly hypnotic prose style.
I agree. Moldbug had read a great deal of somewhat obscure 18th- and 19th-century intellectual history. He hadn’t just heard about these books; he’d actually read them. This gave his critique of modern liberalism and the current political status quo some philosophical context and intellectual depth. He understood it was nothing new. He also saw that many of the old conservative critics of the Enlightenment were far better at judging their political foes – both the implications of their Enlightenment philosophy and the likely consequences of it – than are their modern conservative peers at judging their contemporary enemies.
In this (and only this), I think Moldbug is similar to both Greg and Paul Krugman. Greg often talks about how the average Western man in the early twentieth century knew more about breeding and basic biology than does the well-educated man of today. Krugman sometimes talks of economists who seem to have learned nothing from the past.
But Moldbug was much better at analyzing the political situation than he was at prescription. Some of his ideas bordered on insane and would’ve forced a reconstitution of the entire political system. I didn’t buy it. Any of it. But I did enjoy reading some of the critiques.
Astrology and traditional religion can be useful. They help people to avoid consulting psychologists, psychotherapists, social workers and evil government postmodernist, feminist, anti-natalist, atomizing propaganda and their foot soldiers.
Nutritionists are useful, because they keep people from ingesting the medicine they don’t need, including lifestyle drugs (sans Viagra maybe), prescribed for them by doctors and pharmacists.
Homeopathic warfare. Assassinate one man right at the top. But that won’t work, violence is always contagious never surgical. But i like the idea of AI being smarter than us and not doing much. Just dropping a few world leaders that fall well below replacement level, to borrow a baseball phrase.
We could construct alternative, low-cost approaches that succeed by doing nothing at all.
the problem being, of course, that most of the high-cost and detrimental and anti-knowledge “Sciences” exist because they justify some shyster raking money out of the society, not out of simple error.
Economists pretend that Debt has no significance to an Economy. because Bankers prefer that everyone ( Micro and Macro ) be indebted.
Economists pretend that there are no deleterious effects to high taxing / deficit spending Gov fiscal regimes. because that provides pretext for Gov officials to spend like drunken sailors. they’s jus tryin ta hep as best they know how! the Economist, he told me i should do it!
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/head-to-head-by-lester-thurow/
While Lester Thurow had the title of an economist, he wasn’t an actual economist – not one that other economists paid attention to, anyway. He was more like John Kenneth Galbraith in that the public thought of him as an economist while his peers did not. His books are crap filled with fashionable nonsense. Read Paul Krugman on Thurow.
Do you mean Paul Krugman the economist, or the imposter who writes teenage journalism?
The election of George W. Bush drove Krugman insane. He hasn’t been the same since. But he was once more of a serious public intellectual than a political hack. His early books and his short essays in Slate in the nineteen-nineties were first-rate. I haven’t read him much in the last two decades, but occasionally I hear about some absurd hackery he’s committed in the NYT.
You are witty buy unjust.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/competitiveness-and-class-warfare/
Thurow learned Econ at Oxford, got his Econ Doctorate at Harvard and was the Dean of the MIT ‘Management’ school.
if you’ve got a problem with Thurow’s Econ, you’ve got a problem with three of the highest profile Universities on the planet.
which was my point.
and i’ve read quite enough of that retard Krugman, thank you very much.
but, since you’ve brought up the Keynesian fanboi, it’s worth pointing out that the pedophile bisexual ( that’d be Keynes ) with no offspring is the one who dismissed a question about the future probable deleterious effects of his policies with the statement, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”
which can only be a satisfying answer to a man who will leave no Posterity.
Krugman is now a hack, but once upon a time he was a serious public intellectual who was willing to attack the stupidity on both sides of the political divide.
Who cares where he went to school? Or where he taught? No economist today cites Thurow’s work, because there is nothing in it to cite, other than favored nostrums and confused analogies.
As I said, read Krugman on Thurow. You can start here.
Keynes was a noted eugenicist and immigration restrictionist. And his views on economics are widely supported today, even among many conservatives, except among the marginal green-eyeshade nuts who worry more about debt than they do about the quality of the overall economy.
Keynes was a noted eugenicist and immigration restrictionist.
sweet talking me isn’t going to induce me to ignore the salients of the argument.
also note that those two issues would impact Keynes personal quality of life, whereas he has no Self Interest in whether or not other people’s children are enslaved by Trillions in Debt.
since he has no Posterity of his own to be concerned about.
except among the marginal green-eyeshade nuts who worry more about debt than they do about the quality of the overall economy.
depreciating the currency is always a fantastic way to goose the economy … right up until it stops working. that was known more than 2000 years ago.
i’ll point out here that the Federal Reserve’s publicly stated goal of ~2% annual inflation ( but NEVER deflation ) is designed to destroy any commodity backed currency ( such as the bimetallism required by the Constitution ). how can any Currency simultaneously be assigned to be exchangeable for a fixed quantity of some commodity … while also Inflating annually? it makes no damn sense, logically or mathematically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_Conference
and that’s the system your vaunted pedofagboi Economist created.
i also note your unsupported assumption:
that a productive economy is impossible without extensive Debt. ( note well that i’m not advocating the elimination of all Debt ). curious then that the US was already the industrial leader of the planet by the late 1800s, without the benefit of a national bank.
the massive US trade deficits wouldn’t even be possible without all the Quantitative Easing ( even without the formal QE program, the FedRes enables the better part of a Trillion dollars in Inflation annually simply via the annual Deficit; 2015 Budget of $3.8 Trillion vs 2015 Revenue of $3.18 Trillion )
“Modern productivity researchers have shown that the period in which the greatest economic and technological progress occurred was between the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.[2][3][4] During this period the nation was transformed from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world, with more than a third of the global industrial output. This can be illustrated by the index of total industrial production, which increased from 4.29 in 1790 to 1,975.00 in 1913, an increase of 460 times (base year 1850 – 100)”
– note that this entire period is PREVIOUS to the creation of the Federal Reserve and AFTER Jackson had destroyed the 2nd National Bank.
how, oh HOW did we manage that without a Central Bank? i mean, Central Bank economy planning is an essential part of every modern economy, isn’t it?
you wouldn’t lie to me, would you?
the Federal Reserve is not our First National Bank ( just as the First National Bank was not our first national bank ). nor our Second. we’ve done this before, in the United States. and Bankstas do what the Bankstas always do. devalue the Currency, balloon the Debt. the Federal Reserve will be destroyed, eventually, due to the malfeasance of the Bankstas, just as the previous central banks were destroyed. because it will come down to the destruction of the Fed or the destruction of the Nation.
because devaluing Currency and ballooning Debt is fantastic for the Bankers, not so good for everybody else.
“The way to crush the Bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
Vladimir Lenin
I mentioned them only because you brought up the equally irrelevant topic of Keynes’ sexual preferences. What? You don’t think hard-money conservatives have sexual perversions?
The range of debt the U.S. has had in its history seems to have little correlation with economic growth rates, levels of employment, or even inflation.
The U.S. has had mild inflation – averaging around 3 percent – built into it over the course of the last eight decades. Yet only once during that entire eight-decade span, for a period of around ten to fifteen years, did mild inflation break out into moderate inflation (around 5 to 15 percent). For most of that eighty-year period, economic growth in the U.S. has been very strong and inflation mild, with one period during the fifties and early sixties being the best economy the U.S. has probably ever had in its entire history.
In fact, the growth in the twentieth-century U.S. economy is estimated to be about what it was in the 19th-century U.S. economy, which kinds of puts a crimp in your idea that debt impinges on growth.
Yes, in theory, at some level, debt will negatively affect growth. In the late eighties and early nineties, for example, the payments on our federal debt were becoming onerous. They were taking up an increasing size of the budget. And a lot of hard money conservatives were predicting awful things.
But the economy grew, we controlled spending, and we paid down the debt. Over the course of a decade our debt disappeared. And all without suffering anything more than a nine-month recession in the early nineties.
The problem with your ideas about the economy is that there just isn’t much empirical evidence to support them. We’ve had mild inflation built into the economic system for at least four generations of Americans. At some point, your dire forecasts have to come true for you to continue to hope that someone else outside your gloomy circle will believe them.
What? You don’t think … conservatives have sexual perversions?
does the name Dennis Hastert mean anything to you?
i wouldn’t let children spend any time around John Boehner or Mitch McConnell either.
And a lot of hard money conservatives were predicting awful things.
there’s a couple of very specific and obvious Central Bank reasons for why those consequences have been deferred. are you going to pretend that you are unaware of them?
the most obvious are the absurd, stupidly low, ahistorical interest rates. which are being held this low for a very specific reason. err, +20 trillion very specific reasons.
there are other CB issues, let’s see if you can work them out.
probably the only non-CB reasons why the USD has not yet collapsed are:
1 – our PetroDollar agreement with Saudi Arabia ( which was why there were practically no consequences to SA for 9-11 ).
2 – China ( still an overtly Communist country dedicated to the destruction of the US ) hasn’t yet found it expedient to refuse payment in USD
regardless, there are numerous externalities and uniquely advantageous aspects related to being a winner of two World Wars ( and the only major industrial area left unscathed by those wars ) and the sole remaining Super Power. there will, however, come a time when the rest of the world begins to wonder why they should value ZogBux at all.
Yes, in theory
the Money Supply could consist of a single dollar. just gotta, you know, get that Velocity high enough.
In fact, the growth in the twentieth-century U.S. economy is estimated to be about what it was in the 19th-century U.S. economy, which kinds of puts a crimp in your idea that debt impinges on growth.
IF the US economy can grow as fast or faster ( which you admit too ) without a Central Planning Bank
THEN why do we need to pay Bankers to plan our economy?
the Federal Reserve is not an example of Regulatory Capture. because Regulatory Capture presumes that a governing agency had served the public good and then been suborned.
the Federal Reserve has ALWAYS been wholly owned by the Commercial Banks and has never served any purpose other than theirs.
Bob, I replied to you below.
It’s a very engineering view of human nature to think that medicine is primarily about combatting disease, and whether what we’re doing actually works.
Part of what people want from medical care is precisely the care part, and this is because it makes them feel better. The care meets actual objective psychological demands, and the utility of this perhaps often exceeds the utility of a (quicker) cure. To some extent people behave as though they would prefer to be cared for, rather than cured.
In judging the efficacy of medical cures, patients buy into a socially-sanctioned belief structure, rather than doing any sophisticated cognitive assessment. Whether they feel cared for is something more directly within their own experience, and while trusting in the appropriate socially-sanctioned practices produces some of this sense of being cared for, it is not the whole of it: there’s also a tender manner, and human attention, and love.
Homeopathy works and survives because it is a medium for people to provide this care.
In instrumental terms, it invokes placebo responses, which is a valuable achievement in itself.
Perhaps most valuably, it reveals another dimension for understanding what we are really doing when we seek medical care and when we provide it to each other. What other social practices are primarily a medium of care?
We are then left to decide whether we can bring ourselves to tolerate people participating in a mistaken belief structure which does actually facilitate their access to this care, or whether instead we need to set them right and extirpate their heresy.
Even if doctors and nurses couldn’t cure, could perhaps offer opium for pain, or a cool glass of water and other comforts. And what about setting bones? Didn’t doctors do that? And stitching up wounds.
They could often kill you while taking your money: that has to count for something.
Great feature, love the subtle humour
I’ve read some opinions that a lot of the cancers “cured” these days were silent cancer that would have sat quietly in the body for years if left alone. According to this idea, most of the cancers that kill are either the aggressive types that they can’t do much about or in old age when the immune system weakens.
Needless to say this opinion is not popular with doctors and hospitals.
Possibly the new treatments that use the body’s own immune system would not fit in that class.
Aggressive cancers are often the easiest to cure.
True because they are rapidly reproducing and most chemotherapy works on gene replication.
The fundamental problem with chemo is that cancer cells (unlike bacteria) are not very different from ordinary cells, and thus it is difficult to find chemo agents that hit the cancer cells hard without injuring healthy cells.
p53
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24966-more-harm-than-good-antioxidants-defend-cancer-in-body/
I attended a meeting on Cancer one time when a surgeon from Britain and the NHS voiced the opinion that breast cancer is never cured. Outside of the NHS, I think few surgeons agree with that.
I would think that skin cancer, for example, is often curable.
Melanoma “survivor” here. Skin cancer is curable if they find it and excise it. Melanoma has the bad habit of spreading before it is found and destroyed, including to other organs, after which point it’s often adios. In my case yeah, they got rid of it.
That´s true. Oncology tries to make cancer a chronic illness like diabetes. There will be no cure for “cancer” as cancer is in the most cases a disorder of the whole body. Cancer is then only the last symptom. Therefore the best strategy is to design medicine (surgery and pharmacy) to extend lifespan to some acceptable value.
Most oncologist will tell you that (surgeons or chemotherapist).
The real cure for cancer lies in prevention.
“cancer is in the most cases a disorder of the whole body. Cancer is then only the last symptom. ”
No.
Well, for example, the inflammation processes in body promote tumor development and growth:
https://www.jmolecularsignaling.com/article/10.5334/1750-2187-11-2/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994795/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994795/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22359662
An interesting perspective on cancer developemnt is also given by Dr. David Servan-Schreiber http://anticancerbook.com/story.html
The term “homeopathic” seems to have a dual meaning. Most people I talk to have no awareness of the historic meaning of the term (i.e., extreme dilution), and believe it simply refers to “natural” or “herbal” remedies (which of course can be effective). I haven’t checked, but I have a suspicion that when an over-the-counter medicine is described as “homeopathic” it’s usually meant in this common sense, rather than the historic sense.
The field is unregulated and it’s not a protected term. Anyone doing anything can call themselves a homeopath.
Classical homeopathy is kind of a pain in the ass (the dilution process involves shaking bottles hundreds of times, or buying an expensive machine), so a lot of people practice bastardised version of it.
My suspicion though is that if we are talking about commercial remedies — something you might buy over the counter at your local CVS — we aren’t even talking about a bastardized version of homeopathy, but rather that the word is simply being used to hype some random alternative medicine that has nothing at all to do with homeopathy in its original sense. As I said, I haven’t researched this, but in my experience this is what “homeopathy” means to most people these days.
So this is second order fakeness. Fake fake medicine.
Fake squared?
One of the most beautiful monuments in DC is Hahnemann’s:
http://www.welovedc.com/2008/09/05/monumental-hahnemann-memorial/
While at a university library a few years ago, i looked up the bound copy of a PhD dissertation of a sociologist I’d had a few talks with. What I read was positively homeopathic. She’s made a nice living off that diluted pile of nothing. Her students, who learn absolutely nothing, are probably thus inoculated from the brain parasites doled out by more authentic practitioners. Is this the kind of thing you had in mind, Greg? I mean, damn, he wasn’t asking that much from us, people. Lol.
Homeopathy is not that bad as it induces placebo effect in some patients: “More recently, however, experts have concluded that reacting to a placebo is not proof that a certain treatment doesn’t work, but rather that another, non-pharmacological mechanism may be present.”
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9439295
Return to the soil.
probably the MOST essential field to homeopathisize ( to coin a word ) would be Education. John Taylor Gatto is critical reading for the origins of the centralized indoctrination that we’ve been practicing since the early 20th century.
time to open a Montessori school?
Gatto is full of shit.
http://professorconfess.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-picture-sure-is-worth-alot-of-words.html
Gatto is full of shit? well, that’s a well reasoned refutation.
so, you dispute that educational standards have fallen since the implementation of Universal State Schooling?
you dispute the social indoctrination aspects? you reject Gatto, whole cloth? you assert that he’s just making quotes up?
Government schooling is about “the perfect organization of the hive.”
H.H. Goddard, Human Efficiency (1920)
perhaps you’re a good little worker bee. i’m not much interested in being a drone in a hive.
As far as I can tell, every single thing Gatto ever said was nonsense.
I wen to one of those awful public schools, which is probably why I know that worker bees are all female, while drones are … wait for it… drones.
Greg has written more about education eg here and .
My reading: as a state goes from educating an elite 10% to educating nearly everyone, the quality of the average student drops, even if the school system is just as good as it was before.
This is also true when the educated % stays the same but the percentage of low scoring students increases, as has happened in recent decades in the United States.
I don’t think we have a good handle on what “indoctrination” is, or whether modern schools are worse along that axis than, say, an 18th century Jesuit mission, or a 6th century Scola Palatina.
wow my link sucked
Never use anything other than dead simple HTML (like italics) with WordPress commenting because you cannot either preview them or edit them after you post them.
I despise the WordPress commenting system.
WordPress itself is a good product, I use it daily. But we use Disqus commenting.
Dr Doom (name of the writer at your link) makes the completely wrong argument: that college graduates have falling IQ from 1900 to 2010 because something is making them dumber.
But 1900 grads were an elite.
Maybe you dispute that elites are, on average, more intelligent. But this is especially true in the US and Canada where many were self-made elites. They didn’t inherit a royal title but became well off due to their own labour.
Their children would inherit that, although there would be a regressing to the mean at some point (although economic historian Gregory Clark finds that the elite stay elite for much longer).
Bob Mando, (continued from above)
We probably don’t, but that’s not your argument I’m taking on right now.
Your stripped-down argument is that the work of central bankers leads to excessive debt and loose money which leads to runaway inflation and a depreciated currency which finally leads to an unproductive economy and, ultimately, the fall of Rome. It’s all spiraling down the drain … you know, because of Keynes.
Some version of this argument has been around for what seems like forever. But is it true?
There’s no evidence for it. Yes, mild inflation is now part of the U.S. economy in a way it was not in the 19th-century. But economic growth is not slower. Unemployment, to the degree we can even make a comparison between the centuries, doesn’t seem to be any higher. And if we eventually go the way of Rome, my guess is that inflation won’t be the primary cause.
A good argument can be made that the Central Bank has rounded off the edges of the business cycle. The highs are not as high, but the lows are not as low. At least since the Great Depression (where the Central Bank was neutered and feckless, in large part because it was still operating under many hard money assumptions).
Few people today know about the panics of the nineteenth century, but they were awful scourges. If many Americans at the time hadn’t been self-sufficient they would’ve been even worse. The Panic of 1893, for example, took seven years to work itself out of the economy. By some estimates (economic stats are naturally hard to come by for the period) unemployment went as high as 18 percent and stayed above 10 percent for six years.
And there was no Central Bank to blame for it. It was all due to the wonder of the free market and hard money. As Krugman points out, if you think inflation is bad, try deflation.
Look, even Milton Friedman made his peace with Keynes. I think the rest of you guys ought to think a little harder about what you’re arguing and dig into whether there is any proof for it.
Yet where’s the inflation?
Greg, I’d really like to hear your views on the opioid epidemic, since it looks like a great example of doctors and pharmaceuticals gone insane.
A typically original and perceptive insight Dr. Cochran. For my penny’s worth I nominate: Architects.
– although contra homeopaths many ancient practitioners were competent — or at least not outright fixated on peddling ugliness…
Oh my goodness yes, architects should be near the top of the list. Indeed they are fixated on “peddling ugliness”.
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