A depressing thread

[Krill]

edit: xpost

Obviously not, since you hadn't posted it yet. What you just posted contains no details about how they actually classified people as exposed or unexposed and whether there could be confounding factors (they covered the basics, but I would expect exposure correlates strongly with other environmental factors peculiar to service in Vietnam).

In addition, I take a default position of "assume it is worthless crap" about any individual medical study, because

1) I have observed that the people who work in these fields frequently suck at experimental design and have only the barest glimmerings of understanding of statistical methods ("well you just do this thingy in SPSS").

2) It has recently become the vogue to perform metastudies to examine the reproducibility of studies in various fields, and to my knowledge these consistently show something like half of all published articles in medicine as being unreproducible.

Reproducing the entire article would be a rather blatant form of copyright infringement, which I thought you were against. That is the abstract, which is enough to show you the basic results (obviously).

I gave you the exact details of where you can find it: Cancer [0008-543X] Chamie, Karim yr:2008 vol:113 iss:9 pg:2464 -2470

If you want to go and read it you can go find the journal, but your response being nothing more than "lala I don't believe you because I think you are all wrong and crap at research", it shows that CM perhaps isn't that great a university for educating kids.

[kentonio]

Yes, but source on the billions please.

There was me thinking that you wouldn't be stupid enough to go there.

I already posted a link in this thread to the VA paying out $2.2b in payments.

[Kuciwalker]

Reproducing the entire article would be a rather blatant form of copyright infringement, which I thought you were against.

I'm aware. The point was to clarify that I hadn't read either article ahead of time; I read the first one after you linked it (the copy you linked is ungated, btw, that's how I was able to).

That is the abstract, which is enough to show you the basic results (obviously).

Abstracts can mislead; for example the abstract you posted for the first article implied that they had found some kind of credible evidence of an effect, but when I read the actual article it appears that they did not.

I gave you the exact details of where you can find it: Cancer [0008-543X] Chamie, Karim yr:2008 vol:113 iss:9 pg:2464 -2470

I don't have ready access to medical journals, and I'm not going to buy some stupidly expensive subscription just to read this one :P

If you want to go and read it you can go find the journal, but your response being nothing more than "lala I don't believe you because I think you are all wrong and crap at research", it shows that CM perhaps isn't that great a university for educating kids.

Come back to me when y'all stop pretending p-values of 0.05 are significant.

[Kuciwalker]

There was me thinking that you wouldn't be stupid enough to go there.

Dude, the US government spends probably hundreds of billions of dollars on useless giveaways every year.

[Krill]

It's significant enough if I'm going to risk someone's life on it. Perhaps you missed that point.

[Kuciwalker]

It's significant enough if I'm going to risk someone's life on it. Perhaps you missed that point.

It isn't significant at all in a field rife with publication bias.

[Kuciwalker]

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/09/reliability_of_new_drug_target.html

http://lifescivc.com/2011/03/academic-bias-biotech-failures/#0_undefined,0

[regexcellent]

..and of course the VA hand out literally billions of dollars for pretend illnesses because the government just loves giving away free money, right?

It's famous for it, actually. It's what it does best. For some value of "best."

[Kuciwalker]

btw, remember, of course, that the challenge isn't to establish that dioxins are toxic (that's trivial), but to establish that they have the effects attributed to them in the concentrations present in Agent Orange as it was used in Vietnam.

[regexcellent]

Can someone explain to me where this teen right wing fantasy about agent orange and GWS being myths has come from? Because there's always some really stupid and/or wildly offensive opinions spewed out at this site, but this one takes the biscuit. May we assume that this is a Beck/Limbaugh talking point?

It doesn't come from being "right-wing." It comes from being interested in reality as opposed to complete nonsense. It comes from the idea of being skeptical, and questioning your beliefs. It comes from actually trying to demonstrate to yourself why something is true, instead of believing it out of hand. Right wing politics has nothing to do with this.

In my senior year of high school I had to take a geoscience class. One of the topics was global warming. The teacher didn't tell us what global warming is and whether it is happening. He took us through the evidence chain of how we know that it is probably happening. The Vostok ice core, how we estimate past temperatures from things like Hanseatic grain prices, and so on. He didn't expect us to believe it because he told us. He didn't expect us to "believe" anything. He expected us to know things because we had proved it to ourselves.

[Aeson]

Pony up boys. 2-4-D is on the shelves. What's the price that would convince you (over and above whatever X for smell/taste) to consume it or expose yourself to it?

Otherwise we'll just have to assume you're talking out of your ass about how it's not harmful at all.

[Aeson]

btw, remember, of course, that the challenge isn't to establish that dioxins are toxic (that's trivial), but to establish that they have the effects attributed to them in the concentrations present in Agent Orange as it was used in Vietnam.

Except reg was saying you could drink the stuff with no negative side effects because we're not herbs

[Aeson]

It doesn't come from being "right-wing." It comes from being interested in reality as opposed to complete nonsense. It comes from the idea of being skeptical, and questioning your beliefs. It comes from actually trying to demonstrate to yourself why something is true, instead of believing it out of hand. Right wing politics has nothing to do with this.

Kuci could perhaps make this claim. You can't. You obviously have no idea what you're talking about, and have made patently ridiculous claims already in this thread about how and why it's safe to consume Agent Orange. We aren't herbs

[Hauldren Collider]

Kuci could perhaps make this claim. You can't. You obviously have no idea what you're talking about, and have made patently ridiculous claims already in this thread about how and why it's safe to consume Agent Orange. We aren't herbs

No, his claim was that it is safe because people have actually drunk it and were fine, you idiot. Apparently it was a USAF hazing ritual.

[regexcellent]

Except reg was saying you could drink the stuff with no negative side effects because we're not herbs

That's not what I was saying. I was making a simplistic statement about "stuff designed to kill plants isn't nearly as lethal to humans as it is to plants."

For instance, DDT. Of course that's a whole other can of worms.