They did review and change the policy. Just too late to do any good. The point is that evidence-based medicine has to be treated as a starting point for diagnosis and treatment decisions, not a rigid decision tree.

Of course, none of that makes the CDC's new claims that "vaccines don't cause autism" isn't an evidence-based statement any less absurd. You can't ever realistically prove definitively that X cannot cause Y, because that would require knowing that there exists no combination of recognizable human genetics in which X would cause Y. Evidence-based medicine would mean assuming that X cannot cause Y until evidence exists to prove that it does or can, which has not happened.

What they're doing is rejecting evidence-based medicine based on a belief that the anecdotal information they have should be taken more seriously than the broad evidence to the contrary. This would be fine if that anecdotal information were based on actual brain scans prior to vaccination that showed that the vaccine triggered a change, but it isn't. Rather, involves mistaking correlation for causation, and a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, with a complete lack of any actual plausible explanation for how vaccines could cause autism beyond some vague hand-wavey pseudoscience.

And on top of that, we have a bunch of people who lack enough understanding of the scientific method and/or lack enough understanding of the subject to recognize when it is not being followed properly, and they are getting misled by charlatans with a political or personal agenda, presented in the form of pseudoscientific bulls**t papers that don't hold up to even modest scrutiny by someone with limited understanding of the subject or the scientific method, much less actual scientists in the field.

We also have a bunch of journals that publish papers outside their area of expertise, relying on outside experts that are in league with the papers' authors, and all sorts of other fun scientific fraud, which further contributes to this problem.

I'm not sure how to solve this problem, because it seems like a large percentage of the public simply lacks basic critical thinking skills and the ability to read over a paper and think, "Yes, but did you consider the following twelve common factors that could influence both the proposed cause and effect?" and realize that the paper is garbage. But a good starting point would be to pressure the news media across the political spectrum to hire actual science writers who UNDERSTAND SCIENCE to cover science-based stories.

Another good starting point would be to get more science-based shows on PBS that can talk about these issues and explain them to people and debunk bulls**t every week.

Pedophilia is not just about age or physical characteristics it's about exerting power over a helpless individual.

Once you're an adult in most countries you at least have some agency. But the reason Trump targets children is because they don't have that agency and he enjoys abusing that fact.

So the difference you're talking about might matter for the purposes of a psychiatrist treating Donald Trump for his particular form of psychopathy but from a practical standpoint he is very much a pedophile.

And he is effectively above the law so it's not like he's going to get treatment. He's just an unrepentant pedophile and a substantial number of the people here voted for him knowing that.

Are going to make it back over the Europe right? Also eventually we're going to need to invade your countries in order to loot them and fill our coffers because that's what failing empires do and our empire is very much on the skids.

Now would be a good time for the rest of the world to stage and intervention and maybe try to stop Russia from getting Trump a third term as president.

The problem is you're ruling class is hoping that if America falls they can't get their currency in as the de facto world currency which would put them in the running to become trillionaires.

In other news I'm using Google text to speech to write this out on my phone and it now recognizes the word trillionaire. A year ago it didn't it replaced it with billionaire and I had to edit the b to be a t...

At least what we most commonly refer to as autism. It's genetic.

There are also some factors in the womb that can cause symptoms we associate with autism specifically things like mild fetal alcohol syndrome. That isn't technically autism though and a actual doctor would know the difference.

The beauty of autism from a political standpoint is that the term is used so broadly in the public that you can create a lot of fear and confusion that is highly useful politically. And you can get parents to vote for things that hurt their kids while promising to help their kids.

Along with gender affirming healthcare it's one of the most effective things the right wing has to rob you of your money and your property right now.

Assuming our country and democracy somehow survives the next 3 years then eventually the current moral panics will run their course. Which makes me wonder what the next moral panic will be.

If you happen to know what that is and how the right wing will use it then you could probably make a hell of a lot of money getting out ahead of that. You can be the next Charlie Kirk or Tucker Carlson or Alex Jones...

It also be a monster but hey, you'd be a rich monster right?

Unfortunately, evidence-based medicine has become a code word for "treat everyone with the same illness identically even when the data doesn't support doing so. That's how I ended up fighting a c. diff. infection. I was hospitalized for a related condition, and the first day of antibiotics put me at no fever, but after a day, I got a fever again, and I asked if the antibiotic had changed, and they said no, but maybe the ER gave me something different. They checked, and determined that yes, I had been on a different antibiotic in the ER, but said that they should keep the current antibiotics, and used "evidence-based medicine" as the reason. I had my doubts.

They were wrong. And six months later, the general standards for treating the condition I came in with changed, and they now treat it with the antibiotic that the ER gave me instead of one of the two that the hospital put me on afterwards, precisely because the standard treatment had a tendency to make c. diff. take over.

Whoops.

So I'm all for evidence-based medicine as a starting point, but when you realize it isn't behaving normally, you should adjust accordingly. Otherwise, patients suffer enormously.

But in theory, I do agree with you that evidence-based medicine is better than evidence-free medicine based on gut feelings and assumptions that correlation means causation and other fallacious reasoning.

When Google sells a 24-inch tablet, I'll care about Google being able to sell me a replacement that can do this. In the meantime, I want this feature on older, non-Google Android devices. :-)

Actually, I was remembering wrong there. Although TB can spread in other ways, it is primarily an airborne pathogen. So the biggest way to reduce the spread would be to add central heat and air with fresh air mixing and reduce the number of people sharing air for long periods of time. The second best way is contact tracing and prophylactic treatment.

But to add further to the comment about vaccine effectiveness, bacterial vaccines can be at least somewhat effective at preventing disease, e.g. the bacterial meningitis vaccine has something like 65% to 85% effectiveness, depending on age group and other factors, which is way better than nothing.

The TB vaccine only reduces infection risk by 20%. And when you're exposed frequently, that's barely even useful. The reason for this is that it hides from the immune system, which, as a result, takes a long time to start reacting to the bacteria, allowing it time to multiply for a while before you get a reaction. In mouse models, the reaction takes a whopping two weeks.

TB actually infects macrophages (primitive immune cells), and manages to literally hide inside them by adapting its exterior to maintain a neutral pH and by synthesizing enzymes that prevent the macrophages from maturing and that slow down apoptosis, which otherwise would release the bacteria, which would trigger T-cell activation. It's unclear whether there is a realistic way to prevent this delay.

It also plays tricks like triggering certain antigen-specific CD4+ T cells to the point of functional exhaustion while reducing antigens that would trigger other CD4+ cells so that they don't get detected. It somehow brings mesenchymal stem cells (blood vessel/lymphatic/connective tissue precursors) to the infection site, which further inhibit stem cells.

Presumably any better vaccine would have to either convince CD8+ T cells to react even without macrophages recognizing that something is wrong (perhaps by increasing the number of antigens that are included so that they are more likely to recognizing an antigen on the bacterium itself directly, early in the infection process, assuming this is even possible), convince CD4+ T cells to trigger macrophages in spite of signals to not do so, or overcome one of the design limits of the immune system (preventing T-cell exhaustion, increasing random macrophage apoptosis without an infection, etc.), some of which would likely require changing the person's DNA.

So fast diagnosis (universal health care and widespread rapid TB testing), contact tracing, etc. are critical to bringing it under control, and other prevention, such as not having large numbers of people in constant contact in areas with limited air circulation can also help. Meanwhile, vaccines, although not entirely infeasible, are likely to be more of a long shot.

Requoted against the censor trolls with mod points. I should ditto several following related comments, but Slashdot isn't worth that much effort these years.

My top candidates just now:

1. It's just a joke.

2. I'm just asking questions. (Most relevant to this story.)

3. AI is good.

So what's your favorite?

In my typically verbose way, I feel like a few words of clarification are called for. Also another attempted joke or two?

The first one is mostly frequently abused as an excuse for bad behavior, including speech behaviors. In particular, there are many lies that used to be taken as proof of character flaws, but now they are just spun away. In orange particular, "The president was only joking" is no excuse for a job that ain't supposed to be so funny it makes you sick. (Which actually comes back to the theme of the Slashdot story at hand.)

The second one is most damaging as an epistemological attack on the nature of truth itself. It's actually a good thing that science does ask questions, but the goal of scientific questions is to learn more, not to destroy the idea that we know anything at all. Perfect knowledge should not be the ultimate enemy of trying to learn anything at all on the excuse that our knowledge ain't perfect. As if there were any perfect scientists (or politicians), now or ever.

Now about my newish third candidate, the problem is with "good". Options that are closer to the truth might be "AI is a tool too easily used as a weapon" or even "AI is nothing" because it's the human beings who use things, even including AI things.

Just had another encounter with an AI entrepreneur yesterday. Language-related application should have caught my interest, but his money-centric attitude lost it. My bad. What else should I have expected at a VC gathering? The main reason he was there was in hopes of getting some of that sweet, sweet cash and I should congratulate him on his tight focus. (A-hole joke time?)

Back to the AI threat. I suppose the main angle for this story should be examples of AI slop attacking vaccines in particular and the CDC in general. Too depressing to websearch for some examples, and you can get AI help if you want some. I'm more focused on the GAIvatar threat. I considered "GAIvatar are harmless" as my third candidate, but the portmanteau is not frequent and I've been unable to find any standard usage describing generative AI used to imitate specific people. Rarely they may offer a few bits about chatting with a fake Einstein or an AI ghost of a grandparent. Recently read an interesting SF story about solving a major math conjecture with the aid of an AI postmortem copy of a deceased father...

So I used to focus on the use of individual GAIvatars to predict and control individuals (though carefully crafted and targeted prompts). But now I'm wondering about creating a group GAIvator to predict and control the behaviors of an entire class of people. It could even become a kind of circular definition, where group membership is defined on a sliding scale based on how closely a particular candidate member conforms to the GAIvator's predictions and prompts.

So have a nice Friday?

Me? I'll take my chances with the vaccines. Much better odds than they'll give me in Vegas or the stock market.

Unless of course they've got some mod points to blow, but seriously fuck you guys.

Nobody here is so stupid that they don't know this is both wrong and horrific and doesn't understand exactly why that's the case.

And I know there are a bunch of trump voters here on slashdot

For the people who weren't just fooled I wonder what you got out of it?

I know a lot of people are enjoying watching random people with brown skin pulled off the streets and sent to African nations they've never been to.

Funny thing is every one of them thinks they're Christian.

There is a belief among the evangelicals that so long as you believe in Christ you are saved and you can basically do anything you want. Faith and not works is what gets you into heaven.

But you know what, do you really have faith if you voted for trump?

I mean if your boss gives you an order you go do it because you know damn well your boss is real and so are the consequences of ignoring your boss.

Jesus gave you all kinds of orders that you ignore. Unlike your boss you don't think Jesus is real do you?

Basically the evangelicals are closeted atheists. It's just an identity they put on. Something to excuse some of their bad opinions. The Bible is a collection of disjointed texts and books and letters to various denominations so it's easy to find a reason to do just about anything you want to do.

But eventually reality is going to come calling for you. We're going to take away your social security and your Medicare. After that you'll lose your house when you mortgage it to pay for your bills. I wonder who you will blame then and I wonder which passages of the Bible you will use to do it...

Meanwhile I have the entire Republican party telling me that fucking 15-year-old girls doesn't make you a pedophile. What a fucking world we're in.

So... Did you work on Microsoft Excel, the Intel Pentium, or both?

I don't know why you think this is relevant to the discussion. If we get to a point where the Supreme Court is ignored, do you think the decision of some jury made of regular people would matter a damn? The nullification will be ignored, and the jury members would be lucky if they only get deported.

So the backlash is basically irrelevant. Even if valve can get some Linux hardware into people's hands the majority of operating system purchases for computer desktop and laptop hardware or for corporations and business and Linux does not have anything approaching active directory.

So they can ignore any complaints. Because realistically the average user can't do anything about it..

Meanwhile AI has the potential to replace hundreds of billions if not trillions of worth of wage labor. Remember AI is not a product for you. It's not even a product for your boss or your boss's boss. It's a product for the 8,000 billionaires on this planet who are sick and tired of the answer to the question "who's going to buy their products"?

Nobody. Nobody's going to buy their products because they're not going to have products. The goal is to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a new kind of feudalism.

Not unless you give it absurd amounts of computer power that is incredibly expensive.

AI is worth the money when you're replacing workers with it. But unless it can cut your headcount the cost of the competing resources exceeds regular computer software.

Right now I see it being used a lot to do reports nobody reads. The kind that used to be done by hand or if somebody's clever with a script. But if you have that kind of job you have it because you are somebody's head count.

I've said this before but conservatives are about to get a taste of all the efficiencies they keep clamoring for and they are not going to like it. The real thing AI is doing is letting every CEO know that there might be stuff in their organization they can automate.

And they're firing a lot of essential staff too. Really doesn't matter how important you are. It took me months to sort out a prescription because the company that makes it fired all their staff and replaced them with nothing.

We have hard evidence for the improvements to grades you get when you have free school lunch and breakfast. But we can't do that because the Christians won't let us. Specifically the evangelicals.

We could give parents actual support in raising their kids but every time anyone suggests that it gets shut down. Always by the think of the children crowd too.

Doesn't matter if you have the potential to be a useful genius if your parents are both working three jobs leaving you with a television set and no books and your classroom has 45 students in it 10 of which in the back have to stand because there aren't enough chairs and you had sleep for dinner last night and nothing for breakfast.

For about 30% of the country cruelty is the point and for the other 70% we're too busy fighting back against the damage done by that 30%.