DISQUS

I'm curious how topical cortisone (specifically cortisone inhalers used for asthma) affects this. If I understand correctly, cortisone decreases the production of a wide range of inflamatory signaling chemicals, and also decreases the numbers of some cell types (mast cells and eosinophils) in the lungs. Is that likely to make your body's initial response to a flu infection slower or less effective?

Steven Hawking was the first name that came to mind, and I'm pretty sure I could come up with more than a hundred names without all that much trouble; I suspect most of your readers could dew the same. But the set of people interested enough in science to read a virology blog is perhaps a slightly different population than the one L'Oreal sampled.

It's important to note a big caveat to your description of wall street. They not only fooled *outsiders* into imagining they were smarter (and safer) than they really were by the use of complicated mathematical models and computer simulations, they fooled *themselves*. A bunch of those guys lost a *lot* of money, many more ended up looking like fools. Many lost their jobs, too, as Brother Brown pointed out. But the fact that they lost their money is strong evidence that they were drinking their own kool-aid, not just selling it to the rubes.

A fascinating aspect of the Simon Johnson article was his explanation of how the finance industry had captured the hearts and minds of most of the policymakers and journalists. I think there's something there that is deeper than just too many people believing Republican talking points on free markets. When a bunch of people have enormous confidence, demonstrated success in some demanding area, great wealth and all its trappings, it's hard not to think that they know what they're talking about, even in areas not all that close to their demonstrated success. Add complicated math (and honestly, most politicians and lawyers and nearly all journalists can be intimidated into silence with a couple equations and a haughty handwave) and computer models and old, respected companies and big, impressive marble buildings, and few people could question them.

That makes me wonder where else that's happening in our society. Where else do we defer to a high priesthood because they use confusing words and lots of mathematical formalisms and computers and have intimidating buildings and offices and titles? Probably a whole bunch of places. (And yet, you have to guess that often, those apparently-impressive people really are impressive, when not called upon to go outside their areas of expertise.)

As another datapoint: Our pediatricians' office has handouts explaining the potential problems with the vaccines our kids get, and those discuss the low-probability really bad stuff. But the only warnings I have gotten from the doctors and nurses themselves have been for mild stuff ("his arm may be sore for a day or two; give him ibuprofin if it's a problem"), never for the low-probability scary stuff like encephalitis. I assume if I had asked about the scary risks, they'd have discussed them with me, but I've never tried it.

Yes! Evaluating even surface-level disputes outside your own expertise is hard. The only thing you have to go on, many times, is expert opinion. To the extent that expert opinion is shaded for political or social or economic reasons, it becomes much less useful. And that comes back to bite us every day. If I know about cases where the "official story" is politically-motivated BS, then it's easy to believe that in cases where the "official story" is true, and thus it becomes much easier for me to buy into nonsense because I just don't have the background knowledge to evaluate the truth.

Think about the antivaccination movement as an example of this effect. I have to guess that people who've seen the official, respectable sources conceal or shade the truth, or lend credence to nonsense, in other cases (Iraq and WMDs, corn-based ethanol as a path to energy independence) are going to find it more plausible that the official, respectable sources are concealing or shading the truth w.r.t. connections between autism and vaccines. That leads to horrible outcomes like kids dying of stuff for which they and all their classmates should have been vaccinated. My suspicion is that there are a lot of other examples of this effect.

I don't exactly know what to do about this, other than to suggest that we should all cry foul when we see respectable sources lending support to politically-connected nonsense, lying or shading the truth for social or political or economic goals, etc.

Irami:

Your comment about derivatives and "the smartest guys in the room" raises another big problem, nothing the president can hope to solve in the first months of his term, maybe not even solveable: How do we restructure our society, so fewer of our smartest people are going into zero-sum stuff like stock trading and tax law? It can't possibly be a good allocation of resources to have guys bright enough to get PhDs in math or physics working to extract some tiny advantage over one another on the trading floor. What would our world look like if those smart people (and most of the smart people in tax law and corporate law and high-tech weapons design) were building something *useful*?

Yeah, after the bailout of Wall Street, all that "personal responsibility" rhetoric sure takes on a different tone. (Just last week, I saw a banker buying steak and beer in the grocery store in front of me. Damn welfare parasites.)

How about really working out some kind of Federal disaster preparedness, so the next Katrina doesn't leave a couple thousand people dead? The current situation seems to be that if the local authorities have it together, you'll be okay, and if not, you'd better have the money and other resources to take care of yourself. We could spend some of the zillions of currently wasted homeland security dollars on that.

I don't know how to fix public schools in poor neighborhoods, but that's got to be the most important thing we could do--screwing thousands of kids out of a decent education is about the dumbest possible thing for us to do, bad on every conceivable level.

Heinlein (not exactly a progressive voice!) had a story in _Expanded Universe_ in which a black woman became president and then enacted a bunch of oddball Heinleinian ideas.

I think the last book or two of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan franchise had a black fighter pilot as the VP, but I might be mistaken. (I gave up on Clancy much later than I should have--at this point, Jack Ryan is occasionally walking across lakes and calming storms with a rebuke.)

Actually, this is the kind of straight answer you'd like to get from the cook/waiter/manager. My son has a peanut allergy, and I really appreciated it when the manager of a restaurant more or less said what's on the card to me: We'll do our best, but we're not set up to keep everything with peanuts segregated from the rest of the food, so there's a risk of getting cross-contamination.

It's *way* too common to have a waitress or waiter just casually say "no, I don't think there are any peanuts in there" without giving any thought to the answer. I don't like endless proliferation of warning labels and lawyer-written notices, but getting some kind of straight answer from the restaurant staff, when they really can't avoid getting peanuts in your food, is worth a lot.

So, the interesting question is which of those four blog posts were you not so sure were worth reading....