Like a Snowflake in the Summer Sun

Darwinian paradigm is the bedrock on which all biological sciences are now based, and no psychological explanation can hope to survive if it is incompatible with it.
-- Stevens and Price (2000)

Something the Wessely school will never be able to explain: What evolutionary advantage would it offer if an important system – as the perception of fatigue undoubtedly is – what advantage would it offer if such an system breaks (and not to mention why it should break at the level of the psyche, as doubtlessly no psyche as we have in the humans is involved in the sensing of fatigue in other animals).

Call it what you want, Evolution has happened

If you don't like the word evolution, I don't care what you call it, but life has changed. You can lay out all the fossils that have been collected and establish lineages that even a fool could work up. So the question is why, how does this happen? It's not covered by Genesis. There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I've read from the lips of any God.
-- Richard Leakey

(via)

On "the truth"

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
-- André Gide

Karl Kraus on the Unimaginable

The unimaginable is happening, because the people can't imagine it.

Das Unvorstellbare geschieht, weil die Leute es sich nicht vorstellen können.
-- Karl Kraus

Occam's Razor

The theory is usually the correct one, that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities, while retaining sufficient explanatory power.
-- Occam's Razor (Parakoch edition)

"Unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness"

There’s another reason I think popularizing science is important, why I try to do it. It’s a foreboding I have—maybe ill-placed—of an America in my children’s generation, or my grandchildren’s generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when we’re a service and information-processing economy; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest even grasps the issues; when the people (by “the people” I mean the broad population in a democracy) have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas; when there is no practice in questioning those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.
-- Carl Sagan, Wonder and Skepticism

As long as the patient will suffer, the cruel will kick.

The mild and the long-suffering may suffer forever in this world. As long as the patient will suffer, the cruel will kick.
-- Sidney Smith

(Kudos again to Maarten Maartensz)

Robert Gallo is an honest scientist

Robert Gallo was honest about HIV if and only if (iff) Luc Montagnier was not.

(Kudos to Maarten Maartens giving me the idea for the "if and only if (iff)" phrase)

Hanlon's Razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
– Hanlon's Razor

Einstein's corollary:

… but don't rule out malice.

My corollary:

… and first check for confirmation bias.

Walk a mile in my shoes

Before criticizing someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you are a mile away… and you have their shoes.
– Jack Handey

On the scientific method

Science never asks you to trust the scientist, or be loyal to them – the scientific method is always about distrusting the theories, methods and evidence, regardless of its source.

Quotes by Karl Popper on the Scientific Method

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.


If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.


The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.


There are all kinds of sources of our knowledge; but none has authority ... The fundamental mistake made by the philosophical theory of the ultimate sources of our knowledge is that it does not distinguish clearly enough between questions of origin and questions of validity.

-- Karl Popper

Disservice

"Anyone who says this is a lab contaminant has drawn the wrong conclusion and has done a disservice to the public"
 – Judy Mikovits (via)

Compare to:

"In retrospect, I say I did the disease a disservice. I might have done the patients a disservice, and I might have done the field a disservice."
– Elaine DeFreitas (page 682 "Osler's Web")

CBT/GET: Misguided if well-meant treatment

The headline reads: 'Research showing ME is a physical disease'. We don't go along with the fashion among some doctors and researchers who tend to denigrate the very concept of a 'physical' disease. Such professionals prefer to emphasise instead that all disease, including ME, is a mixture of the physical and psychological. As I said when I was on the panel at the MEA Question Time in Huddersfield recently: 'Try telling that to someone with a broken leg.' No-one should let academic arguments obscure their common sense.
…
has now placed the second poster in our awareness raising series prominently on our website.

The message reads: 'ME is just fatigue, right? WRONG'.

The striking photo features one of our members, tube-fed because she could not at that time eat for herself. We have all read so much nonsense about ME in the press this year. It is time to tell it like it really is and to forward this link far and wide.
See the poster here: http://bit.ly/tt-wrong

The good news is that, after she and her family declined graded exercise treatment and managed her illness carefully, avoiding any treatment 'programme', this little girl has come through the worst of the illness and grown into an independent-minded, academically gifted young woman with a strong sense of justice for children with ME.

How many times do I hear a similar story of improvement through withdrawing from misguided if well-meant treatment?

Bad Joke

What are hundreds of thousands of people, who are sent home by their doctors with the words: 'You just imagine that'?

Isolated cases.

Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments

Bertrand Russell’s “Liberal Decalogue”…
The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Via.

"Nothing left over"

Nothing left over: Able to carry out the work, but nothing left.
Barely able to get up in the morning, missing a lot work, feels terrible every day, tired

Lucinda Bateman about a ME/CFS patient

A quote I picked up over at cpnhelp.org

"When Going Thru Hell, Just Keep Going"
Winston Churchill