[FRIAM] Liberal "othering" or statement of fact?

Tue Aug 31 13:22:20 EDT 2021

For this to give the woo-woos further conviction, one would have to identify a traditional remedy that is effective (e.g. an immunomodulator of some kind?), and that hadn’t yet been discovered because no one thought to look.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2021 9:59 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Liberal "othering" or statement of fact?

I don't know, there are many reasons why a pharmaceutical company might fail.

One of the most spectacular is illustrated by googling "glycoRNA".  So, a whole class of biological compounds, short RNA sequences decorated with glycans (also known as polysaccharides), first suspected to exist in 2019 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/787614v1.full) turn out to exist in 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.04.023) in spades, all over cell membranes.  Nobody knew these compounds existed, so no one was looking to develop them or antagonists to them into drugs.

On the other hand, the snake oil sellers don't just kill their customers, they also traumatize the survivors.  If the advertisers on Tucker will screw you, who can you trust?

-- rec --

On Tue, Aug 31, 2021 at 11:35 AM uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com<mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
Yeah, I suppose a locus on the left centers around the concepts of "natural", "organic", or "holistic" whereas on the right it's more fractured, objective oriented. And since much of science is structured by focused objectives, the righties tend to align with targeted science and the lefties tend to align with things like "emergence" and multifarious conditions (like chronic lyme disease or fibromyalgia or ... climate change). It would be fun to find out how many casual yoga goers describe themselves as left or right. (I imagine actual yogis would avoid the question. 8^D)

In the end, nonlinearity is hard for everyone. Where pharma has a crisp target, it will find a treatment. But where the target's not so crisp, it'll likely fail.

On 8/31/21 8:15 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> On one hand there is woo-woo, but others have semi-reasonable concerns that drug candidates don't make it through the medical establishment.   I am skeptical about that because pharma stands to make money from any compounds that work, and they have huge investments in high throughput screening.   So it seems to me they'd probably find the chemistry behind herbal remedies.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2021 7:31 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Liberal "othering" or statement of fact?
>
> I don't want to be a "both sides" person. But there's plenty of that on the left, too. I suppose it's for products like Paltrow's: https://goop.com/ Or reiki. Or crystals. Snake oil is non-partisan.
>
> One thing that's a toss-up for me is the NCCIH: https://www.nccih.nih.gov/ On the one hand, I'm an integrationist ... and my contrariness demands I respect *complementary*. But some of the stuff they support research into looks like hogwash to me. I try to keep an open mind, though.
>
> On 8/31/21 7:09 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> *//*So saith Paul Krugman:
>>
>>
>>
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformation-supple
>> ments.html
>> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformation-suppl
>> ements.html>
>>
>> Once you’re sensitized to the link between snake oil and right-wing politics, you realize that it’s pervasive.
>>
>> This is clearly true in the right’s fever swamps. Alex Jones of Infowars has built a following by pushing conspiracy theories, but he makes money by selling nutritional supplements <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/how-does-alex-jones-make-money.html>. It’s also true, however, for more mainstream, establishment parts of the right. For example, Ben Shapiro, considered an intellectual on the right, hawks supplements.Look at who advertises <https://tvrev.com/whos-still-advertising-with-tucker-carlson-at-the-end-of-q2-2021/> on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. After Fox itself, the top advertisers are My Pillow, then three supplement companies.Snake oil peddlers, clearly, find consumers of right-wing news and punditry a valuable market for their wares. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find many right-leaning Americans ready to see vaccination as a liberal plot and turn to dubious alternatives — although, again, I didn’t see livestock dewormer coming.
>>

--
☤>$ uǝlƃ

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