Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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http://www.alternet.org/culture/wer...-tyson-unloads-anti-science-crank-press-event

Neil deGrasse Tyson blasted an anti-science skeptic who confronted him at a press conference last week when the man tried to convince him that the Large Hadron Collider is an existential threat to mankind but that HIV is not because it doesn’t cause AIDS.

Gizmodo’s Ryan F. Mandelbaum was on the scene to watch the astrophysicist bat aside the skeptic’s arguments and attempt to explain to the man how scientific consensus works. DeGrasse Tyson said that one lone research paper does not make a significant impact on scientific opinion, especially if no other researchers arrive at the same conclusion.

“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you,” deGrasse Tyson said. “It doesn’t give a rat’s ass how your five senses interact with this world.”

DeGrasse Tyson was meeting with reporters after the dedication of the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Among them was conspiracy blogger Anthony Liversidge, whose website Science Guardian maintains that science has fallen prey to “crowd prejudice, leadership resistance, monetary influences and internal professional politics” and abandoned its truth-seeking principles.

Liversidge believes in the crank theory that the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is putting the planet in jeopardy with its use of the Large Hadron Collider as well as the discredited theories of physician Peter Duesberg, who has claimed since the 1980s that HIV does not cause AIDS.

When Liversidge told deGrasse Tyson that there are researchers who claim that everything we know about string theory could be wrong, the author and astrophysicist patiently explained to him that there are researchers saying all kinds of things, but only when multiple research teams arrive at the same conclusions does a theory become more than just a theory.

“When you have scientific inquiry,” he said, “and you make a discovery and publish that discovery, it’s not yet the truth. He’s gotta do research, and get the same result as you. She’s gotta do the research and [the results] don’t have to be exactly the same, they have to be approximately the same. Then someone is going to invent a new apparatus that you haven’t dreamt of yet that’s going to test the same thing. If she gets the same answer, we have a new emergent truth. Then that goes into the textbook.”

Prior to that, he said, the world of theory is a “bloody, messy place. Ideas come and go like the breeze. If there’s not yet a consensus of observation and experiment, there is no yet established truth in that field.”

Nonetheless, Liversidge charged ahead and presented wild theory after wild theory. At one point, he said, “Black holes don’t make a lot of sense right now.”

“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you,” deGrasse Tyson replied.

“It has a duty to make sense to you,” said Liversidge.

DeGrasse Tyson responded, “It doesn’t give a rat’s ass how your five senses interact with this world.”

After Liversidge said that he “just wants reassurance” that scientists know what they’re talking about, deGrasse Tyson said, “No, it’s good! We have competent people thinking about this stuff. We’re not just making shit up.”

He told Liversidge that he welcomes his “open skepticism,” however.

“Many scientists don’t,” the blogger said. “Biologists, for example. There’s horrendous misleading by the consensus that are obviously wrong. I’m referring to AIDS being caused by HIV. This was demonstrated to be clearly wrong 30 years ago. [The link has] been disproved in the literature and everyone ignores the literature.”

DeGrasse Tyson challenged Liversidge to find anyone other than Peter Duesberg whose work says there is no link between HIV and AIDS.

“You’re going to find me a research paper that says HIV doesn’t cause AIDS?” he said. “One published paper is not the truth.”

“Why not? It could be,” said Liversidge.

“No, hold on,” deGrasse Tyson said. “One paper is not what makes a scientific truth. It has to be verified by competing groups, people that design experiments differently. Only if all of these results point to the same direction can we then say this person made a discovery.”

Later, he said, “If somebody published a paper that the Earth was flat, would you say, in the last 30 years, no one has written a paper to refute that result. Would you invoke that as evidence that the Earth was really flat, or would you invoke it as evidence that the person has his head up his ass and didn’t do it right?”
 
With regards to the article, I've never personally understood the whole HIV doesn't cause AIDS thing, though I've never really looked into it. I'm not one for conspiracy theories; not that some of them aren't compelling or even accurate, I just don't ordinarily take interest in them. For the most part I agree with what Tyson is saying in this specific article. String theory, one of Tyson's favorite things to talk about, thus far has very little research, results, or data supporting it, so I think it's completely reasonable to question that.

In general, I very, very much dislike Neil deGrasse Tyson. He is arrogant as they come, ridiculously pretentious, and condescending. He is fine as a science popularizer, and while I haven't read any of his books, I've heard that he does a respectable job of making some of the physics that he knows more easy to understand for the lay person. So I will say that I respect that. What I do not respect is that he seems to feel he is the man to tell everyone how stupid they are and how incredibly intelligent he and all his posse are; if you disagree with him, you are a bumbling buffoon who is either misguided or too dense to separate out emotion from the almighty "science".

He has said a number of things that I disagree vehemently with and that, I think, make him look fairly foolish. In one such instance he made some preposterous Facebook post about a nation called "Rationalia", which dripped so thickly of elitism and arrogance it made me upset. He feels the need to comment on popular movies frequently, critiquing their science, even when those movies are not particularly interested in being fully accurate scientifically. He's like the person who always has to put up a finger and say, "Well, actually..." when many people understand what he is about to say already, or could frankly care less. I also think his blind hoard of sheep who follow him, make memes of him, and quote him as if his word is creed when it comes to all things, not just his domain of astrophysics, make me dislike him even more.

On top of all of this, he isn't some wildly successful scientist. He has his PhD and has done some, but not a ton of, research. This isn't a man who is some beacon of creative research, outstanding results, etc, and don't get me wrong, I am not critiquing anything he says based on that alone. An argument has to be evaluated on its own, independent of its speaker. I just find it funny that he is so full of himself given that he is no different from any other scientist, save for the fact that he has made a large name for himself and gained a huge following by being both a good science popularizer and a loud, controversial figure. He is not distinguished as a result of his research or of his being a scientist. He frustrates me greatly and I tend to not take much of what he takes overly seriously.

Another example of something he has said that doesn't make much sense to me, is that he has, on more than one occasion, advocated the idea of our universe being simulated. I can't help but chuckle when someone like Tyson, who is so fervent in his atheism, doesn't recognize the implications of suggesting that such a thing may be the case. It's just a long list of problems I have with him that have caused me to have very little respect for him outside the realm of popularizing basic science, which I think I is obviously important.
 
Ah, Neil "the good thing about science is that it's true" deSmug Tyson. Can't stand the fellow.

As for HIV/AIDS, it's not a "conspiracy theory" (I'm not one for them either), although it qualifies as a "Carlin conspiracy" ("You don’t need a formal conspiracy where interests converge") - see the thread from 2008 on Liversidge's Science Guardian site here which in part discusses the debate that took place on change.org to take a new a look at AIDS (a discussion which I took part in... I'm the Laura Ogar named as one of the "enlightened posters").

I think two good places to start on the subject are Celia Farber's Serious Adverse Events, and Henry Bauer's HIV/AIDS blog.
 
I don't know much about the HIV/AIDS conspiracy. Are they claiming that HIV does exist, but doesn't cause AIDS? Because as part of my university studies, we went in depth into the HIV virus, its structure, mechanism of entry/action, etc. It would be awfully hard to advance a conspiracy that would involve innumerable virologists and laboratorians alike to be in on it, with the number of such people with hands on experience working with the virus in various ways. I just don't understand why TPTB would go to such lengths. What is the pay off there? Who benefits from the HIV/AIDS conspiracy? And how?

NDT is a jerk. They took an otherwise very ordinary scientist and made him a media star. I'm thinking precisely because he was so unremarkable in his career and intellect. Not to say he isn't intelligent. But not remarkably so. This makes him easier to control. Good mouthpieces need to be controllable. Einstein was/is famous because his work and his intellect was remarkable. But could anyone control him? No way. He would have been a terrible choice as a mouthpiece for the scientific intelligencia.
 
You don't need a conspiracy to produce bad science - lots of money helps though. HIV/AIDS is a multi-gazillion dollar industry. As I quoted Christine Maggiore in the page I linked to, HIV/AIDS is rather "the unfortunate outcome of a desperate desire for medical answers that coincided with political concerns, research funding needs and drug company interests … influenced by widespread fear, an uncritical media and a new and powerful type of activism.” A perfect storm of factors, to which I would also add and emphasize Robert Gallo's need for fame and immortality.

It's an incredibly complex subject, and there is disagreement about the role, if any, of HIV. Some, like those of the Perth Group, maintain that HIV has never been properly isolated (which is not the same as saying it doesn't exist). Others, like Peter Duesberg, believe it to be a harmless passenger virus.

Whether electron micrographs really show HIV virions, and whether what happens in laboratories after scientists prod their samples into showing activity has anything to do with what ever happens in a human body, who knows. New HIV "discoveries" are a dime a dozen and always end in failure.

The film House of Numbers is very good and I think it would answer your questions, Vault. And while HIV/AIDS dogma is not itself a "conspiracy," the efforts to suppress dissent and dialogue have been brutal and effective.
 
My friends Aunt has HIV since 1986, still alive and overweight (she's obese) no medication used. Its one person I know
 
It's debatable whether someone who tests "positive" on an HIV test "has HIV". This interview with journalist Neville Hodgkinson is an excellent overview of the subject.

 
The World as Representation

"...Another factor was the rise of the sort of belligerent scientific materialism exemplified, as noted earlier, by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Scientific inquiry itself is philosophically neutral—it’s possible to practice science from just about any philosophical standpoint you care to name—but the claim at the heart of scientific materialism, the dogmatic insistence that those things that can be investigated using scientific methods and explained by current scientific theory are the only things that can possibly exist, depends on arbitrary metaphysical postulates that were comprehensively disproved by philosophers more than two centuries ago. (We’ll get to those postulates and their problems later on.) Thus the ascendancy of scientific materialism in educated culture pretty much mandated the dismissal of philosophy..."

"...I’ve written here several times already about the trap into which institutional science has backed itself in recent decades, with the enthusiastic assistance of the belligerent scientific materialists mentioned earlier in this post. Public figures in the scientific community routinely like to insist that the current consensus among scientists on any topic must be accepted by the lay public without question, even when scientific opinion has swung around like a weathercock in living memory, and even when unpleasantly detailed evidence of the deliberate falsification of scientific data is tolerably easy to find, especially but not only in the medical and pharmaceutical fields. That insistence isn’t wearing well; nor does it help when scientific materialists insist—as they very often do—that something can’t exist or something else can’t happen, simply because current theory doesn’t happen to provide a mechanism for it.

Too obsessive a fixation on that claim to authority, and the political and financial baggage that comes with it, could very possibly result in the widespread rejection of science across the industrial world in the decades ahead. That’s not yet set in stone, and it’s still possible that scientists who aren’t too deeply enmeshed in the existing order of things could provide a balancing voice, and help see to it that a less doctrinaire understanding of science gets a voice and a public presence.

Doing that, though, would require an attitude we might as well call epistemic modesty: the recognition that the human capacity to know has hard limits, and the unqualified absolute truth about most things is out of our reach. Socrates was called the wisest of the Greeks because he accepted the need for epistemic modesty, and recognized that he didn’t actually know much of anything for certain. That recognition didn’t keep him from being able to get up in the morning and go to work at his day job as a stonecutter, and it needn’t keep the rest of us from doing what we have to do as industrial civilization lurches down the trajectory toward a difficult future.

Taken seriously, though, epistemic modesty requires some serious second thoughts about certain very deeply ingrained presuppositions of the cultures of the West. Some of those second thoughts are fairly easy to reach, but one of the most challenging starts with a seemingly simple question: is there anything we experience that isn’t a representation? In the weeks ahead we’ll track that question all the way to its deeply troubling destination..."
 
The World as Representation

"...Another factor was the rise of the sort of belligerent scientific materialism exemplified, as noted earlier, by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Is a Black Hole, Sucking the Fun Out of the Universe

Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe,
communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it.
 
You don't need a conspiracy to produce bad science - lots of money helps though. HIV/AIDS is a multi-gazillion dollar industry. As I quoted Christine Maggiore in the page I linked to, HIV/AIDS is rather "the unfortunate outcome of a desperate desire for medical answers that coincided with political concerns, research funding needs and drug company interests … influenced by widespread fear, an uncritical media and a new and powerful type of activism.” A perfect storm of factors, to which I would also add and emphasize Robert Gallo's need for fame and immortality.

It's an incredibly complex subject, and there is disagreement about the role, if any, of HIV. Some, like those of the Perth Group, maintain that HIV has never been properly isolated (which is not the same as saying it doesn't exist). Others, like Peter Duesberg, believe it to be a harmless passenger virus.

Whether electron micrographs really show HIV virions, and whether what happens in laboratories after scientists prod their samples into showing activity has anything to do with what ever happens in a human body, who knows. New HIV "discoveries" are a dime a dozen and always end in failure.

The film House of Numbers is very good and I think it would answer your questions, Vault. And while HIV/AIDS dogma is not itself a "conspiracy," the efforts to suppress dissent and dialogue have been brutal and effective.


SSE's Henry Bauer is another "HIV is not the cause of AIDS" advocate. I've never gotten past the empirical results argument. Excuse my ignorance of many of the complexities of this issue, but multi-drug antiretroviral therapy targeting the HIV virus is now widely used to prevent the HIV virus from multiplying in the body. This apparently really does in clinical practice give the immune system a chance to recover. Apparently this type of treatment is very successful in many thousands of patients with AIDS in allowing them to live much longer lives. Suppressing the HIV virus apparently suppresses the AIDS spectrum of illnesses. I have a friend who has greatly benefitted. Surely empirical results like this should be the most important factor in evaluating such a question.

If this is really just a conspiracy, it would seem to have to include not only the drug companies, but also all the innumerable doctors administering the treatment, and also (somehow) the patients. You might also wonder why the big medical insurance companies that fund these treatments with so many patients haven't confirmed these claims and denied payment in all these cases. The insurance companies certainly have a strong financial incentive to debunk antiretroviral drug therapies as treatments for AIDS, and they would presumably be willing to spend plenty of money to do so. After all, they don't have to pay for a useless or fraudulent treatment.
 
His twitter is a treasure trove of profound philosophy.

Edit* I guess I should have added a /s.
 

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Yes, I agree 'HIV/AIDS' is a gigantic mistake of epic proportions. Once you go down into the rabbit hole exploring it it becomes apparent "HIV" was an easy way to sweep whatever the 'original' AIDS was. It's become such a huge money thing that questioning it is nearly impossible now, but the original science papers by Gallo and Montagnier are just terrible garbage.

And I also agree with the electric universe folks about the black holes, or rather their non-existence. Another area of junk science.
 
With regards to the article, I've never personally understood the whole HIV doesn't cause AIDS thing, though I've never really looked into it. I'm not one for conspiracy theories; not that some of them aren't compelling or even accurate, I just don't ordinarily take interest in them.
I think I can give you some idea of what is claimed by Henry Bauer.

1) The HIV test is very non-specific - people are more likely to test positive (spuriously) if they are pregnant, or have just had flu etc.

2) The symptoms of the disease known as AIDS have changed with time. A cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma was common among the men with AIDS in the 1980's, and is now rare. The symptoms now resemble the side effects of the extremely toxic drugs used to treat AIDS. On the other hand,perhaps this is because most AIDS patients are treated early?

3) AIDS patients get other diseases because of their damaged immune system. In particular they get fungal infections.The drugs used to treat AIDS are also very effective anti-fungal drugs (if you ignore their toxicity) so many AIDS patients feel better soon after starting these treatments. It is suggested that many 'AIDS' deaths in Africa are diagnosed simply by observing that the person died of TB!

4) Estimates of the infectivity of AIDS have dropped and dropped. Heterosexual couples with one HIV+ partner can have unprotected sex for many years without passing the disease on!

5) The epidemiology of AIDS is inconsistent with its supposed mode of transmission.

6) It is claimed that AIDS was originally caused by extreme damage to the gut caused by certain ways that homosexuals used to clean their gut prior to sex. There is something called leaky gut syndrome.

7) Some people with HIV remain well even without treatment - Baccarat (above) quotes an example of someone he knows.

8) A deadly disease, passed on by sex, with a 10 year incubation period seemed like it might just about wipe mankind off the planet. It is certainly remarkable how this disease has not spread and become the problem that was predicted. It is hard to believe most people with HIV ever get treated -even in the West, never mind the Third World.

I don't want to jump in on one side or the other, but clearly the picture is considerably more murky than you might expect. I found this paper from a GOOGLE search, which seems to confirm that there is a problem with false positives in the HIV test:

http://fieldresearch.msf.org/msf/bi...ositive+HIV+rapid+diagnostic+test+results.pdf

If you look at some of the diseases listed there, these are obviously going to be more common in Africa.

Please follow links from Henry Bauer's blog if you are interested.

https://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/

David
 
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