Logic Bomb

[rinue]

There is a weeping sore on my forehead, which for lack of a better option I have decided to find attractive.

The last few days have been all-work-all-the-time, which I enjoy but which is a monotonous subject.

Ciro has registered for his final set of classes, which means another few months of hard slog for him, and then . . . graduation! He insisits the only appropriate way to celebrate this is to act like he is 22 and hold a kegger, which I think I will opt out of (unless perhaps there are video games).

Although my day-to-day is going smoothly, it has been a difficult time for me intellecutally. I do not agree with the Christian Right in many areas, but I do agree with them (1) that it is alarming to be unable to assume that the people around you share your values [which is a situation they and I are both in, although the values we want shared are different], and (2) that I'm tired of postmodernism. I am tired of people who think consensus is automatically suspect. I am tired of people who don't believe in expertise. I am tired of people appointing themselves experts and trying to blow my mind with things that are not supported by data. I am tired of the fact that doctors have training but patients are the only ones doing the research, accumulating vast data without being able to tell whether it's good or bad, so that the doctors are wrong and the patients are also wrong. I'm fed up with magical thinking. I'm fed up with inequality, and I'm fed up with people trying to solve inequality by just declaring things equal. I am tired of people following their hearts and doing what the spirit moves them to do because it feels right. I am tired of your feelings. I am tired of talking to you when you have decided irrationality is the answer. And I am tired of being quiet about it when it directly endangers me.

It is a difficult world when fully a quarter of the people I can depend on to even care about whether they are behaving logically are named Tom. At least there are two friends of mine named Tom. I am on the verge of becoming very savage, because I don't see the point of things when I am outnumbered this badly even by people who are nominally on my side.

P.S. Somebody anonymous did bring donuts to work, which I acknowledge as a shared value, especially when they leave me the one with coconut sprinkles.

Comments

[valancy.livejournal.com]

Okay, I grant I'm pretty much on the opposite side in that the more I read (even men's infertility is based on in-utero; apparently we could be in a crisis: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/out-for-the-count-why-levels-of-sperm-in-men-are-falling-1954149.html) the more I think I should practically lock myself in a safehouse and eat nothing but food I grow, but I really do feel your pain on unnecessary worries, because, my God, there are so many real ones already.

Tangentially, Sus sent me an email linking to a site all about celebrating women's bodies after birth, and it made me sick to my stomach. Now that's some effective birth control. Cripes, do you want women killing themselves when they get pregnant? No every woman ends up that way! Look at Kim! Think hopefully!

Oh, Kim. Now I'm depressed again. I cried half the morning. On the upside, his heart is NOT enlarged (latest update), so they must have caught it early.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

I am glad Jackson's getting seen to; I tend to be optimistic since if whatever it is hasn't killed him already it's probably fixable. It is amazing how many of the people I know went through horrible childhood medical traumas with no ill effects. I perhaps have a false sense of security, but right now I'm seeing this as something stressful the family will get through rather than something likely to be terminal and tragic. I mean, how many miserable medical disasters have you been through? You're still here, thank goodness. :)

As far as your other point . . . a lot of that stuff is not so statistically significant. There's a disproportionate amount of press about the things we can control, but it's a little bit like . . . it doesn't matter if you have a perfect roof or a crappy roof if a tornado hits. 8% of live births in the U.S. involve birth defects, of which about 6% are immediately reversible. That first number has been stable for a long time. The second has gone up over time. The number of birth defects attributable to environmental factors like what the mother eats or whether her neighbor used pesticides is maybe only 2%. In other words, of that 8%, 98% are due to replication errors - random chance - or genetic factors.

There's a point at which I say there is too high a cost of trying to prevent a tiny percent of an already small fraction, especially when the things one would have to stop would mean large numbers of people starving or dying of malaria or any number of other terrible things. Let alone the sanity of the mother.

I will say straight up regarding men's infertility that there's a lot of credible evidence that it's the result of a lot of soy consumption (as fetuses, as children, as adults), because soy is a pseudoestrogen. That seems to be one of the credible actual dangers. However, generally, I'm skeptical of a lot of the numbers of "increasing rates of whatever due to environmental factors of the last 50 years" because one of the reason we're seeing increasing rates of all kinds of things as adults is because in the past those people wouldn't have survived to become as adults, or we wouldn't have had the sophistication to diagnose their problems and database them. If something doesn't have a clear effect over a 10 year period or shorter, I discount it because there are too many complicating factors. I say this as someone who's studied econometric analysis, which is what a lot of these long-term studies rely on.