The h Bar

I had heard that X-ray radiation exposure vs cancer studies have been done, but I thought the effects were rather minimal (except if you're doing a yearly/monthly CT scan or something)

Mostafa

5:01 PM

@BalarkaSen Most of the studies done/claims by physicians are not reliable.

see this for example

Or even this (I've shared it before):

everything we eat both causes and prevents cancer

ACuriousMind

@Mostafa So how do you know that the radiation is more harmful than they claim, and not less?

Balarka Sen

I always back off from a discussion when the primary premise of the discussion is the data provided by community is fluke. I mean, it can be true, but it destroys the standpoint of a logical discussion on these issues.

Mostafa

@ACuriousMind Becuase they tend to handwave everything even they literally screw everything

In such circumstances, when they say "don't worry, it's ok", you know that you have to worry

ACuriousMind

Who are "they"? Painting a whole field of researchers with one broad brush does not strike me as very scientific, nor concluding from some faulty results that other results must be faulty, too.

Mostafa

@ACuriousMind physicians

ACuriousMind

5:12 PM

Even if I grant that their studies are unreliable, that still gives you no reason to believe that radiation is more harmful than claimed. If a study is invalid, that's it - you can't use it as evidence, and in particular you cannot use it as evidence that the opposite of what the study found is true.

So the rational position given "I do not trust these studies" would be "I have no idea how harmful radiation is".

But not only do you sound very convinced that the studies on that are unreliable (which does not follow from studies on carcenogenic substances being unreliable, or indeed any other study not about radiation being unreliable), but that in fact it is true that radiation is more harmful. I'd urge you to consider whether the process by which you concluded that is more reliable than the studies you dismiss.

heather

can I just point out that physicians are actually rather impressive. look at the work they've done coming up with vaccines, treatments, etc. just compare medicine in the middle ages to medicine now and tell me if you still think physicians "tend to handwave everything" and "literally screw everything". @Mostafa

Mostafa

@ACuriousMind All I'm saying is that I'm exposed to two times the radiation dose I was supposed to receive. and this is clearly more harmful than one x-ray. and that merely saying that "studies have shown it's no big deal" doesn't change this fact.

heather

also, you trust a Vox diagram over a scientific study?

ACuriousMind

@Mostafa That (weak) claim was not at all what I got from what you said, but with that I have no issue (except that if it is no big deal, then it's a fact, but it's not a very important fact).

Mostafa

@heather apart from the precise instruments made available to them by the engineers and physicists, I don't really see much difference with even Egyptian medicine. They had even brain surgeries at that time, but with terrible instruments.

@heather I mean the physics/technology part has advanced a lot. But the biology part is almost the same

(apparently, things are starting to change, with stem cells, biophysics, etc.)

ACuriousMind

5:26 PM

@Mostafa There is a very large difference in cutting someone's skull open to free the evil spirit trapped within or cutting it open to remove e.g. a tumor where you actually have evidence that it is the cause of the disease. You're being very dismissive towards a discipline that has eradicated entire diseases and improved the quality of human life by immeasurable amounts. Our understanding of our biology is incredibly more advanced than that of any historical culture.

The Egyptians didn't even know that the brain was where our cognitive process happened, they thought it was the heart - so "the biology part is almost the same" is manifestly false

0celo7

What the hell is going on here

Loong

@BalarkaSen A panoramic dental X ray image causes maybe 0.008 mSv.

A complete skull CT about 1–3 mSv.

Sid

@0celo7 What were you doing, actually?

It went over my head.

Mostafa

@0celo7 You're a nuclear engineer. you're supposed to know a lot about radiation exposure and stuff

Loong

5:43 PM

Most engineers at my plant know almost nothing about radiation exposure. :-|

Mostafa

@ACuriousMind Most of what they've done in health care is enabled by modern technology. The recent increase in human life expectancy is to a large extent due to the increase in the societies' general hygiene and general quality of life, again enabled by technology. How can you miss this?

Maybe I'm not well-aware of the history of biology and medicine, but this is really obvious that they couldn't do much better than the ancient physicians if it wasn't for the availability of better tools (for example, optical microscope)

ACuriousMind

@Mostafa Our notion of "hygiene" itself is a modern concept and was only made possible by the research of people like Pasteur and Semmelweis, who showed that diseases where indeed transmitted by contamination through germs, which went again established medical and public opinion at the time.

That's not an advance in technology (though the microscope helped later, Semmelweis' observation that doctors washing their hands reduced the rate of infection was not in any way enabled by technology), but it was crucial to our modern idea of medicine and hygiene was we know it.

0celo7

@Sid trying to get a little more performance out of my CPU

uhh

why does it look like that

@ACuriousMind are you seeing that

ACuriousMind

Yes

Loong

@0celo7 leading spaces

ACuriousMind

5:53 PM

Did you enclose it in backticks, preface it with a tab, or click the "fixed font" button that sometimes appears next to the chat window?

0celo7

:38813585 test

@Loong test

@Loong what?

@JohnRennie Increasing the core voltage seems to make it stable. But I'm still getting performance drops...only now I can't attribute them to CPU spikes because I'm no longer maxing the CPU.

Maybe the CPU is spiking for so short an amount of time that the monitoring software doesn't pick it up?

Mostafa

@ACuriousMind I agree with this. This is why I said most of the...

But the medical studies we talked about above are not like these. They're not causal inference. Almost all of them are (probably flawed) statistical inference.

0celo7

@ACuriousMind Isn't the rational response to conclude there is doctored data?

Occam's Razor

Balarka Sen

I think it's a little crankish to claim modern biology and medicines have made no advancement in the past few centuries, but I am not going to argue with that.

Slereah

That's insane, really

Medicine before 1950 was pretty poor compared to today

ACuriousMind

6:01 PM

@0celo7 (nice pun :P) Not really, because studies can be flawed in many ways without intentional deception.

0celo7

@ACuriousMind Oh, I fear you took me seriously.

Mostafa

@BalarkaSen Not no advancements, but little, compared to other fields.

0celo7

@Mostafa What exactly are you trying to argue here?

Mostafa

This is due to the complexity of biology compared to physics; but we're not talking about the reason.

0celo7

@ACuriousMind btw, what's with those random prerendered cutscenes in TW3

they're compressed to hell

Mostafa

6:03 PM

@0celo7 that most of the studies done in medicine are not reliable, and so are lots of the claims made by the doctors.

Slereah

Do you believe in the infectious theory of diseases, @Mostafa

or evolution

or genetics

Mostafa

@Slereah Yes

Balarka Sen

@Mostafa It's still pretty crankish to claim that improvement of hygiene in daily life has extended average life expectancy of humans more than modern medicines.

ACuriousMind

@Mostafa Semmelweis' observation was precisely that, statistical inference - washing hands decreases the rate of infection. Before Pasteur actually showed the existence of microbes, the causal mechanism was unclear. There is nothing wrong with statistical inference, it's a staple of scientific reasoning.

If the statistics are flawed, that's another thing (and I'll not claim that all studies are perfect), but statistical inferences are precisely what tells you where to look for causal relations in such messy subjects.

Slereah

After all, all of physics is statistical inferrence, too

ACuriousMind

6:06 PM

I'm confused as to what, exactly, your claim is. No one argues against "Some medical studies are flawed". That doesn't mean all medical studies are flawed, that one should intrinsically distrust medical studies, or that medicine has not advanced.

0celo7

@BalarkaSen The improvement in mean life expectancy is largely due to a lower rate of infant mortality.

ACuriousMind

^indeed

Slereah

Also a large part is due to a big lowering in the old killers of people

Balarka Sen

I don't see why statistical inference should be viewed as generically flawed, or even if you have beef with it. There are very very efficient methods to correlate datas using statistical methods.

0celo7

People are not getting older as much as they are not dying as babies.

Slereah

6:07 PM

Dysentry, pneumonia, heart attacks

Those kind of things

Nobody dies of dysentry anymore

0celo7

How does one even get dysentry

Balarka Sen

I mean, hell, antibiotics are a thing. That's hell of a major advancement in medicine after the Egyptians :P

Slereah

Eating bad pork, for instance

Sid

@0celo7 Eat spoiled food

Slereah

Dying of wicked diarrhea

Sid

6:09 PM

Heart attacks are a very major death-causing thing.

Slereah

Much less so today

Nowadays people get old enough to die of cancer

Lucky them

0celo7

@BalarkaSen i.redd.it/jvqnmxjqty9z.png

Slereah

@0celo7 Please @0celo7, you weren't born that this joke was already old

Mostafa

@BalarkaSen Take another look at the above diagram (cancer causing foods)

0celo7

@Slereah Hotline Bling is a 2015 song...

Slereah

6:14 PM

I mean the wrist cutting thing

Not across the road but along the highway

That joke is like 20 years old

0celo7

@Slereah Yeah, everyone knows that.

It's a fresh twist on an old meme.

Slereah

As far as memes go it's right along the Magna Carta

Oh man

I once read a 19th century book

That contained references to 19th century memes

it was great

user228700

@JohnRennie So you didn't die, after all! :-)

Balarka Sen

@0celo7 That's a fine joke

Sid

I don't see how cutting wrists does anything good to anyone

Cows

6:20 PM

Coming back

Been hard at work

2 programing jobs, a chemistry class and analysis self study

Been saving money!

What's going on donkeys

. . . .

:D

Slereah

econlib.org/library/Mackay/macEx13.html

19th century memes

"Many years ago the favourite phrase (for, though but a monosyllable, it was a phrase in itself) was QUOZ. This odd word took the fancy of the multitude in an extraordinary degree, and very soon acquired an almost boundless meaning."

"a man was asked a favour which he did not choose to grant, he marked his sense of the suitor's unparalleled presumption by exclaiming Quoz!
When a mischievous urchin wished to annoy a passenger, and create mirth for his chums, he looked him in the face, and cried out Quoz! and the exclamation never failed in its object. When a disputant was desirous of throwing a doubt upon the veracity of his opponent, and getting summarily rid of an argument which he could not overturn, he uttered the word Quoz, with a contemptuous curl of his lip and an impatient shrug of his shoulders."

""What a shocking bad hat!" was the phrase that was next in vogue."

They are all great memes

0celo7

@ACuriousMind apparently there's a Walden video game

Balarka Sen

@0celo7 Do you know the instant regret videos list?

0celo7

@BalarkaSen r/instantregret?

Balarka Sen

nah on youtube

It's like my jam

Let me dig something out