I'd like a strawman with a side order of false dichotomies, please? Oh, wait, no I wouldn't.

Nobody with any wit thinks that any given piece of technology is going to be well and truly flawless. Not even the technology used to land a plane. That's why we design them with multiple backups, failsafes, and alternatives. Rather than blindly trust the things we designed, we instead design so that we don't have to trust them. Even if something goes wrong, there's always another backup or alternative.

That's what this particular design fails to do. By hamstringing the last-resort failsafe (i.e. the pilots), it requires blind trust in the technology. That is simply not a sane approach.

Is there really no room for any other sort of reaction, in between blind faith and knee-jerk opposition?

From time to time, technology fails. This is a simple fact of life, and normally, the people making the technology will be the first to tell you this (the people selling the technology, not so much, which is a source of tension between the two). It doesn't take a Luddite to see that one needs to have failsafes in place. This is, in fact, what the word "failsafe" means.

It's unlikely for any company to get the "best qualified" in absolute terms, because every one of them is competing for the best qualified. But you go for the best qualified among whatever is available.

But ultimately, that's not the only factor. You need someone who will provide a decent value for what they're asking. If the best qualified person is asking well over the value of their work, then you've got to take that into consideration as well. People who you cannot afford are essentially unavailable, and so you're back to looking for the best-qualified person who is.

On the one hand, machines will never exceed human intelligence until we figure out how to model irrationality: the source of creative insight. But once we do that, there's nothing stopping them from growing into the same sorts of failings that we have.

On the other hand, maybe that will only make it more likely for them to come to these conclusions.

I'm inclined to agree. Even if one accepts his arguments, what he did is essentially a form of vigilantism, up to and including the strong risk of not ending well.

It doesn't sound to me like the grandparent was an antivaxxer. The rather unkind things they said about Jenny McCarthy should stand as a pretty strong argument that he (she?) isn't.

But it's true: vaccines are not perfect. They give a big boost, and they can help a lot of people, but the fact is that some of their effectiveness really does depend on having very high participation: herd immunity helps the immunized almost as much as it helps the un-immunized. Which only makes it more of a travesty that the antivaxxers are pulling this BS. It's not just that they're screwing their own kids out of immunity, though that would be bad enough on its own. But they're even managing to reduce the protection that the properly-immunized have. One could draw parallels to secondhand smoke.

There's also the fact that some people actually have a legitimate need to be leaning on herd immunity. For example, I've got all my shots except one. I reacted very badly to my first dose of whooping cough vaccine (which needs three doses), so the docs tried a half-dose for my second but I reacted just as badly, so they stopped it entirely. I'm vaccinated against everything else; they even found separate vaccines for measles and mumps (which are usually done alongside whooping cough in a combined vaccine called MMR) and gave me those, and I got through those just fine. But I've got that one hole in my immunity, and I had to get all kinds of waivers for exceptions and stuff going through school because of it. But I'm glad that the waiver system is there, and that I needed to go through it.

I keep up on the rest of my shots, partly out of a sense of duty: I must depend on the herd for protection from one disease, so it's even more important that I contribute back to the herd's immunity from every other disease. I've got no quarrel with those who actually react badly to a given vaccine (being one myself), and I don't even mind the relatively few people who avoid vaccines for religious reasons (though I'm not one of them). But the McCarthyite antivaxxer is another matter entirely: honestly, I'm starting to think that they should be classified as a public menace.

So yes, dear antivaxxers: stop spoiling herd immunity. Some of us need that. No love, me.

Constant review and scrutiny is supposed to be part of science. The successes of hoaxes like the Lysenko affair, the kinase cascade theory, Piltdown Man and cold fusion (but not the butt-head astronomer), more than one claim of inducing pluripotency in somatic stem cells, and countless others past and present show that even today, science-as-practiced often falls far short of science-as-idealized.

Oftentimes, this doesn't result in much trouble, because even when review and scrutiny don't happen, most scientists are basically honest. Their data is decent (or at least not deliberately flawed), their experiments are more or less sound, and things turn out to work anyway. But it is very easy to get lulled into a false sense of security by this assumption of basic morality (a sentence that could be applied equally well to some other things), and that sense of security is what allows the quacks and hoaxers to thrive even as their colleagues get caught all around them.

The other thing to note is that humans can directly understand distinct moments in time that are well under one second apart. Not all THAT much under -it varies a little from person to person, but it's usually between 1/50 and 1/60 of a second- but the fact remains that even if we try to measure the human "clock rate" as the smallest distinct points in time that we can distinguish, we're faster than 1Hz.

A more appropriate time scale would be to say that 50 clock cycles of CPU time equals one second of human time. The numbers don't look quite as impressive when you do this -a cold boot takes just under 650 years, as opposed to some 32,000 years- but it still drives the point home that humans are slow. Some of the smaller time scales also become useful as metaphors: for example, the main memory access takes 7 "seconds": much like something you have to struggle a bit to remember, but it still seems to come quickly.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say "a looong" time ago: it's only been a year since Blink was even announced. But you're fundamentally correct.

Webkit and Blink (the engine behind Chrome and, now, Opera) share a common ancestry, but they are no longer the same engine, and have not been for some months. For that matter, even when Chrome was WebKit based, it never used the same JavaScript engine as other WebKit browsers, and this was one of its strongest initial selling points.

No one is threatening to fire him, but very few people have the power to actually do that. By calling him unfit to lead, they're essentially doing the equivalent.

What do you mean by "that"? Whose comments are you talking about?

I don't actually know if I'd go that far. Your heuristic will pick out a single bully in a class of victims, but it will also pick out a single victim in a class of bullies, and I'd argue that the latter is by far the more common case.

They are not "nothing", but the psychological mechanism is what does the work. The trigger is in fact "nothing", in that it plays no part in the medical effect.

The tree-bark studies you use are more along the lines of herbalism than holistic medicine or homeopathy. The yew extracts commonly used in chemotherapy should also be considered here.

This is not just a matter of the fact that they use herbs. They fail homeopathy by not relying on the "memory of water" effect that homeopathy claims to rely on: indeed, homeopaths would be horrified at the doses used. Likewise, holistic medicine is generally quite keen on not introducing foreign substances into the body, which these clearly do.

These aren't the only herbs to be shown effective, either. And when they are shown effective, medicine incorporates them. But a great many herbs have been shown to have no effect at all, or even to cause harm, and science has rejected these, as it should. The resulting dosage tables from these tests bear little resemblance to herbalism as the herbalists tend to think of it.

Essentially, herbalists stumbled onto a couple of patterns, and thought this meant they knew everything. When we put it to the test, we found a few accidental discoveries: it's not unlike the way that alchemists accidentally discovered gunpowder. But the methods the herbalists used were bunk, and a lot of the resulting knowledge was bunk, and even when it wasn't, they turned out to know far less than they thought they did.

But if the medicine relies on the placebo effect to work, then it's a sham. You could do just as well (and a lot more cheaply) with a sugar pill.