



Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?



Update: seemingly not



Update: Oh yeah!

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Industrial scale woo



I don't see any particular reason for having a different name for pseudoscience when it's carried out by science organisations. This is woo too.



By way of scale ...



But the latest documents demonstrate that the company had data hinting at Avandia’s extensive heart problems almost as soon as the drug was introduced in 1999, and sought intensively to keep those risks from becoming public. In one document, the company sought to quantify the lost sales that would result if Avandia’s cardiovascular safety risk “intensifies.” The cost: $600 million from 2002 to 2004 alone, the document stated.



That's roughly equal to the amount that the NHS would spend on woo over the next hundred years, at the 2005-8 rate of spending. In general, Stalin killed more people than Hitler because he was in power for longer; Hitler killed more people than Peter Tobin because he was in charge of an industrialised state. In general, what makes people and things dangerous is their capacity to do harm, not their intrinsic badness (I'm reminded of Noam Chomsky's Parable Of The Ants).

this item posted by the management 7/14/2010 12:32:00 AM

