I want to talk to you about science today.
The concept of science.
For those of you that might think science
is boring, or too difficult to understand,
hang on for a minute- I'm going to make this
interesting.
And in order to do that, I need to talk to
you about history.
I mean the concept of history.
People seem to think that science is such
a simple, binary concept.
A bit of research will prove this, or it will
disprove it.
Which paper towel is more absorbent?
Did you ever do that in elementary school?
I think it's 50% of kids first science experiment.
Does the generic paper towel brand, at half
the price, work as good as the name brand
paper towel?
No.
The answer was no- they're basically sandpaper
without the sand.
Get the name brand- I prefer Bounty Soft Touch.
It's much better.
Anyway, at that elementary level, it's fairly
simple to design a study, run the study, then
get a pretty clear cut result.
When you get into the realm of real-word science,
it's not so black and white.
People will readily admit this about history-
to an extent.
We can all agree that World War II happened,
right.
Mostly?
There are some folks who will argue the holocaust
didn't happen, but in general the World War
II thing seems to be common.
If you could speak Japanese, Mandarin and
English fluently, and were to read their school
history books on World War II, do you think
they would all tell the same story?
I'll save you the trouble- They won't.
The Chinese history book will spend considerable
time on the Rape of Nanking, where Japanese
soldiers went on a mass rape and killing spree
in China in 1937.
The US history books will give it a good mention.
Many of the Japanese history books will give
it one sentence.
This was an event in China were hundreds of
thousands of Chinese civilians were raped
and murdered and in many Japanese history
books it barely gets a sentence.
Why is that?
It's history- it's an objective truth, a bona
fide event that happened and should be discussed.
How can we disagree on such an obvious, easy
to understand story?
Even Wikipedia references multiple sets of
statistics about this event- those coming
from different sources.
Maybe the Japanese officials trashed their
original datasets on what actually happened.
Regardless, Japan has created multiple government
and independent agencies in an attempt to
tell the story of World War II accurately.
They fight and bicker about history.
About events that happened in the past.
Why?
It matters.
There is national shame.
There is national pride.
There are a thousand emotions, weak and strong,
that play into the structure of sentences,
the choice of words… was it brutal and merciless
massacre of civilians, or was it a quick attack
on the Chinese?
They've gone though a hundred different versions
of the history books in the last 80 years.
I was speaking to a certain immunologist from
Ukraine, and she remembers when the Soviet
Union broke apart in the early 90's- the first
change her and her classmates noticed in school
were their history books disappeared.
They were gone until the correct history books
could be written.
What was wrong with the old ones?
They were just an account of events that had
happened in the past.
History?
How could they have been wrong?
Ok- ready for a zinger?
Science is history without the guns.
Got it?
Science is history without the guns.
It's a collection of indisputable events that
were witnessed by a group of people, and for
those people who weren't there to see it happen,
they retell the story.
It's that simple.
Or is it?
Science is history without the guns, but it's
even more… difficult.
History's events are usually chronicled by
those who are detached from the events itself.
For them, history happened organically, without
a conscious effort on their part.
Sure they will have bias and shape the story
that is told, but it's even trickier with
science.
They create the events which they will then
write about, ideally without bias.
But it's impossible.
Want to do a study on a low incidence rate
disease?
Well do you WANT to see the disease, or do
you NOT WANT to see it?
If you don't want to see it, design the study
with as few subjects as possible.
If you want to see the disease, design the
study with as many subjects as possible.
If it's a low number you want, use chimps.
If it's a high number you want, use mice.
These are just some simple tricks that may
or may not work, but you get the idea.
Even in the design of a study, before an aluminum
containing "placebo" is injected, your bias
towards what kind of outcome you want to see
can affect the results.
Can vaccines cause autism?
I've read a lot of studies that have
convinced me they can.
But guess what, there are other studies that
say they don't.
Are you surprised?
How is this possible?
It is much more difficult to say that vaccines
never cause autism, than it is to say vaccines
may sometimes cause autism.
I mean- to say that, you'd have to have some
serious double-blind, triple-blind multi-country
multi-racial studies, human studies, right?
I mean- it'd have to be water-tight, like
Flex Seal tight, to be able to say that vaccines
never cause autism.
Or might the bias allow someone to come to
that conclusion regardless of the events?
Might the bias cause someone to design the
study in such a way they don't find what they
are looking for?
Or do they just do what the CDC does and trash
the data when it doesn't say what they want
it to say?
Too farfetched?
Most everything is until it isn’t anymore.
If you really want to understand what's going
on with vaccines, I'd read more than what
the CDC puts on their website.
If you really want to understand what happened
in World War II, I wouldn't just read the
Japanese version.
For some reason, people are able to accept
that history is inevitably biased, even though
it's simply a chronicle of a set of events
that have already happened.
With science, when those who will be interpreting
the events that come out of the study are
actually creating the events themselves, the
bias is even more difficult to overcome.
The history book might has well have been
written before the war.
And that is my incredible opinion.
