The economy -- are we replacing or repairing?

Curse the FDA like many of my buddies with RA.

Kurt Ullman wrote in news:TL- dnYWEjaWt2pbSnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

There are other COX-2 inhibitors still on the market (eg Celebrex), and there are non-ASA NSAIDS with a more cox-2-specific profile. The "problem" is that they all should have the Vioxx side-effects too.

I remember a young Bohemian woman from the university area telling me she was having trouble finding a job, this was in the mid 1990's. I asked her if she thought her green hair may have something to do with it and she said she would wear a hat. I then inquired about her 47 ear rings and other piercings? Her response was "Oh, I'll take them out." I don't think she was covered in tattoos. ^_^

TDD

They do. It is just that Vioxx got sideways of the activists. Most of the OTC NSAIDs also have similar problems, but are studiously ignored.

Kurt Ullman wrote in news:PuWdnaCoscmz_5bSnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

Vioxx had heavy-handed marketing, and Merck shoved negative studies under the rug until they no longer could. The other NSAIDS are not ignored in this respect, but there is indeed not much ruckus about it. FWIW, the exact mechanisms by which Vioxx et al do the bad stuff has not yet been fully explained. Despite efforts by really smart people, life is still more complicated than the sum of all known biochemical pathways. Also, since man is not an inbred strain of a lab animal, the biological diversity is too great to make uniform rules ...

OK, Ed, you're now wandering into netloon territory.

Well, he graduated the same year as Bush Jr IIRC and he's been starving for most of the interim.

Economics essentially owns applied statistics. Political science was a junk field, no better than sociology, until economics colonized it and taught the political scientists how to do regression...and stuck around long enough to see that they did it.

Nope, I've covered the bases on both sides. Don't get huffy about the physical-science superiority until you've dealt with good scientists in biological sciences, econometrics, and even many social scientists. Their science is generally as good as, and often better than, the science perpetuated by physical scientists. It's just a different thing, working mostly with probabilities.

Think of it as something like quantum mechanics.

I agree completely. Political science would have been fine if they had used another word for it. Now that they use many of the methods of econometrics, they can call it science.

Does he smell real bad or something? He has a law degree from Yale and he's starving? Perhaps he has such high morals which keep him from the practice of law? o_O

TDD

He never learned to steal big ticket items, like the other lawyers?

Nahh, he just goes in to the office, does as little as possible, then goes home and does as little as possible.

Like I said, he steals small. Starting with his pay. :)

Ah, I think that most universities will disagree with you about that.

Narrow-minded instrumentalists, many physical scientists have an ahistorical understanding of the term. Instrumentalism is just one facet of science.

You're describing instrumentalism, not the entire scope of science. An anthropologist may use the scientific method to study the interaction of cultures, but can't predict what would happen if those same cultures were to meet for the first time all over again. If they use the methods of science to gain knowledge, that's science.

By the same token, a scientist specializing in quantum mechanics can, at best, give you only a statistical probability about where a particle may be at some time in the future.

It is a STATISTICAL model of probabilities. The entire field is probablistic, never deterministic.

Hmmm.. something like economics. d8-)

It's not very helpful to one's understanding of the world of knowledge to trap oneself in instrumentalist models of science. Historically, strict insrumentalism is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it reflects a narrowing, not an expansion, of understanding. And it's only one aspect of science, which applies particularly to the physical sciences.

Here we have envious 'scientists' who can't produce rigorous and verifiable mathematical models attempting to downgrade the ones who can.

jsw

Here we have self-important physical scientists, who have excellent vocational training but not much of what one could call an education, thinking that science starts and stops at their doorstep.

Aren't they the ones who call 18 feet of snow in Anchorage "Anthropogenic Global Warming"? (kumbaya)

-- We are always the same age inside. -- Gertrude Stein

Physical scientists are well aware that only some areas of their disciplines are prescriptive and others remain descriptive, as they once were entirely. The difference is they can admit to uncertainty, in fact they have to seek it out for Ph.D thesis subjects.

The less firm the understanding social scientists have of cause and effect, the more adamant and defensive they are of their conclusions. They could be safely left alone to bicker if they weren't trying so hard to impose public policy.

jsw