I thought I remembered that the Public Health Service intentionally infected people in order to see what would happen, but Wikipedia seems to say that they intentionally withheld treatment from people who were already infected and deceived them about this, rather than causing the infections themselves (although some of the study subjects spread the disease to other people during the course of the study, which were new infections that could have been prevented by treatment).
There must be cases where this isn't practical. E.g., if the normal treatment for greyscale is to cut off the arm before it spreads, how could you try any alternative treatment?
It isn't, and the answer is "you can't get good data". A good example would be immunotherapy for cancers, which has to be tested alongside treatments with adverse impact on immune function
2. As a result of #1, more people would have been subsequently infected.
Additionally:
3. Distrust in healthcare is engendered amongst a marginalized population, with potential to lead to further incidences of undiagnosed ailments.
The net result is similar, more people are infected than would otherwise have been. Just because the infection mechanism is less obvious doesn't necessarily make it less bad.
He has described symptoms well, but his explanations only make sense if you ignore other immigrant groups. Latin American immigrants come from similar range of poor, politically unstable backgrounds, yet their children aren't being driven to academic excellence by their parents. In fact, instead of outperforming the white American natives, they substantially underperform them. Why the difference?
Let me give an answer: it appears to be genetics. Why else are the very different experiences of mainland Chinese, Chinese Hong Kongers, Chinese people from Taiwan, Chinese people from Singapore, Chinese people from Indonesian and Malaysia resulting in only minor differences in average outcomes in the USA?
I have a hard time believing this about Australians:
"...Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me. She beat me with her fists and kicked me. "
To be technically correct, France and Britain had a well-publicized mutual-defense treaty with Poland (among others), and when Germany attacked Poland (knowing full well of the alliance) the signatories had no choice but to declare war. In fact, Britain and France gave Germany an ultimatum to pull out of Poland before initiating hostilities.
Furthermore, Germany actually didn't even bother declaring war on Poland first before launching their first attacks.
In other words, this was not a Pearl Harbor, Germany knew full well what they were getting into. Yeah, Britain and France were not iconic examples of bully victims, but if you're suggesting Germany is, you'd be mistaken.
The analogy is that while the enemy wasn't beating him up and "occupying" him as badly as they did others, he still had to deal with a bit of a blitz and ended up using his ingenuity to break their enigmatic code, develop a radar against future attacks, and ultimately develop a world class force of his own to contend with them.
Of course, the analogy breaks down around there unless he made friends with an even-less-bullied kid and another bully who suddenly became outcast and bullied in his own right, and worked together to defeat the other bullies once and for all.
There's also politically correct censorship going on, amazingly. This morning I submitted this: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/medias-bias-toward-englis... . It was dead on arrival, marked [dead] immediately, presumably because that blogger is "divisive" and "racially insensitive". Please read that and judge for yourself if it is interesting.
I would think that about 90% of Sailer's articles are too trollish for HN. (Consider the title of his book about Obama: "America's Half-Blood Prince".)
This article, however, made a very salient point, which I have heard from other people as well, particularly in regards to the conflict in South Ossetia. (Basically, he says that the American media is too sympathetic to English speakers around the world.)
"Or, possibly, the reason that teams with a higher number of white reserves have been winning more games is because whites are better team players about sitting on the bench without complaining about not starting. Perhaps white back-ups are less likely than black back-ups to poison the atmosphere and ruin the team spirit."
How could you possibly argue a point like that? It's pure trolling.
Anyways, I don't know if he's trolling a whole 90% of the time, but certainly < 10% of his articles are appropriate HN material.
i'd say it's a lot more likely it was killed because of the political slant. very few political articles are allowed to live around here, because they lead to divisive and unproductive arguments.
Stories about politics have a very high threshold to clear to be on HN, because there are many other places to discuss politics online, and few others to discuss the core HN topics.
I suppose reasonable minds can differ, but it doesn't delight my mind. I should be deeply interested in such an article, as an American who reads a foreign language (Chinese) and has lived abroad, but maybe precisely because I have that background I've seen better.
I gave that answer up-thread. I think people interpreted it as a political post. (Personally, I had nothing to do with flagging that thread. I didn't even notice it until it was dead and the metadiscussion began.)
We told you it's not good for HN by flagging it. We're disagreeing with you, because we believe it doesn't belong here. Now you come here and presume we disagree with the contents of the article and suggest we are morally inferior, because we have unethical reasons for flagging the article. You're not just wrong once, but twice.
No, the article was auto-killed. The blogger is probably blacklisted for being racially insensitive or something. Yet here is an example of one of his posts that did well on HN and generated much interesting commentary: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280544
I just tried submitting another article from his blog and again it was [dead] by the time I was redirected to the 'new' page, i.e. a few milliseconds. Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686436
Wrong. The most rural and white states in the country voted more for Obama than Kerry. Look at Montana, the Dakotas, Vermont, etc.
The people of Appalachia voted for McCain for the same reason blacks voted so heavily for Obama. He is one of their own in a way that Kerry was not. McCain is beligerent two fisted Scots Irish. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/11/mccain-scots-irish-champi...
That's a really terrible rebuttal. I was struck by the fact that Sailer seems to think it's impossible to be both aggressive and "cultivated." In my experience, these two traits are almost uncorrelated.
Also, his argument (insinuation, really) that female consumer spending in the US was a driving force of the sub-prime crisis completely is completely tangential to Lewis's argument, which is about male financial workers. (To my mind, both arguments seem unlikely and rather sexist. I'd like to think Sailer is being ironic, but no, he's not.)
