Black lives matter -Explained

Over at the intertubes, one redditer had a wonderful way of explaining racial inequality and the need for a 'Black lives matter' movement. I quote the full text (with minor edits), so you don't have to visit Reddit and spend the better part of 6 hours jumping from one sub-reddit to another.

Imagine that you're sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don't get any. So you say "I should get my fair share." And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, "everyone should get their fair share." Now, that's a wonderful sentiment -- indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad's smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn't solve the problem that you still haven't gotten any!The problem is that the statement "I should get my fair share" had an implicit "too" at the end: "I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else." But your dad's response treated your statement as though you meant "only I should get my fair share", which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that "everyone should get their fair share," while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out. That's the situation of the "black lives matter" movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society. The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn't work the way... Societally, we don't pay as much attention to certain people's deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don't treat all lives as though they matter equally.
Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase "black lives matter" also has an implicit "too" at the end: it's saying that black lives should also matter. But responding to this by saying "all lives matter" is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It's a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means "only black lives matter," when that is obviously not the case.

In summary, saying "all lives matter" as a direct response to "black lives matter" is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.

Homeopathy

There was a report published by NHMRC Australia that found, "Based on the assessment of the evidence of effectiveness of homeopathy, NHMRC concludes that there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective. People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness."

It is surprising to believe that in this day and age that people flock to this pseudoscience but then people have always been enamored by snake oil salesmen with their panaceas. It is shocking though that some in the medical research community, *cough* my father *cough cough*, continue to defend practices such as homeopathy. Let me reassure you, dear reader, that I have no skin in this game. I am not paid by big pharma and if there is a global conspiracy to discredit homeopathy, I haven't been receiving their newsletters. 

There are two ways to approach the problem of effectiveness of a health system; the social sciences approach and the scientific way. The social sciences approach is simply to ask people who have used a medical treatment if they thought it was effective in curing them.  One of the pillars of the argument for homeopathy seems to be based on this "It worked for so and so". Clearly this is a tempting proposition. But fraught with danger. For one, it will almost entirely miss the "Didn't do a damn thing to me" demography. That is, if we are predisposed to believe in a treatment, we'll remember all the people who claimed that it worked and don't count the people who have had partial or no success with this approach. Call it confirmation bias. This works just as well for the opposite view. Say I am skeptical about a particular medicine, then I am bound to remember the negative reviews than the positive ones. 

Researchers can work to control this bias in their studies. If a questionnaire was sent to a hundred people asking what they thought of kittens, you can bet that the people who take the time to respond will be predominantly cat-lovers. This selection bias can be accounted for in a study but the layperson who says that they heard from their sister that her friend's mom had a colleague whose niece suffered from asthma which was miraculously cured when they went to a homeopath.... not so much.

The scientific method would be to look at the theory behind the medicine and try to understand the mechanisms by which they cure the disease. For instance, to say that chemical compound A has effect X on organ Y which releases a secretion of  Z which results in reduction of a particular symptom. The problem that scientists have with homeopathy is because this particular line of enquiry yields terrible results. Homeopaths make claims about "water memory" or "super-dilution" that have been tested and the results show that the active ingredient in the "medicine" is so minuscule that it cannot actually effect change in the human body. That is, there is no difference between a sugar pill with no trace of active ingredient and a real pill with a one-thousandth trace of the active ingredient. 

(Side note: western medicine has a similar problem sometimes, when scientists are not able to trace all the causal links and have to say that they don't know which reaction causes particular symptom to vanish but it does. Yes, we don't know everything but the body of knowledge is growing and we are understanding things that we didn't before)

So, why does homeopathy seem to work? It could just be the placebo effect or it could be more complex than that. Many complimentary medical treatments talk about holistic medicine and demand changes in the lifestyle choices of the patient. For instance, the homeopath may demand that you give up meat during the treatment. Or to go on early morning walks. Or breathing exercises. These may allow the natural immunity of the body to fight back and get better. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this. 

It is important to note that the claim that a homeopathic medicine works (it does not and from what we know about chemistry, it cannot) is debunked but they may still have value as lifestyle gurus. Governments and medical institutions have an obligation to call them out for what they are, so that the unsuspecting public may make informed decisions. The NHMRC report is a step in the right direction.

The blind leading the blind

What do you make of Chetan Bhagat, considering he's often credited to have gotten more and more Indians to read through his books?

I don't know. Is it that you write third rate books and people can't do much better than to read those third rate books? Is it really an achievement? What is the achievement exactly?

We can't count Chetan Bhagat as an airport novelist. He's not an airport novelist -- he apparently writes about important, relevant things. In other countries when they are having kind of a moment in which they are writing about significant things, you see some great literature come out. Chetan Bhagat is not great literature. 

...

Chetan Bhagat doesn't find an audience because no one outside India can read him. He might just be a symptom of the fact that in English, India is basically a semi-literate country and Chetan Bhagat is the best it can do.

It doesn't seem to me that we need to look for a deeper explanation.

- Aatish Taseer