Miracle Mineral Supplement

I don't think point and sputter posts like this are very useful.

The post clearly states that this is intended to be used as an example in other posts, to reduce the use of religion as an example.

I don't think point and sputter posts like this are very useful

This is intended to be used as an example in other posts. Our current go-to example is religion, which leads to point-and-laugh routines and isn't very, well, dramatic, is it?

I don't think point and sputter posts like this are very useful.

Well, it could have been a comment in the Open Thread. But I don't think it wouldn't belong on LW at all.

Whether you change beliefs in response to a new case will depend on the nature of the selection or sampling process . If you go through a history of quack medicine, you'd get lots of new case-studies but you might not change your beliefs about typical human epistemic performance at all.

Even if new cases are selected to be examples of human stupidity, they might still be roughly random within that class. So cases that are more extreme than one's expectation will shift your beliefs. But this might leave your beliefs about the frequency of incidence of human gullibility unchanged. (Maybe I come to think that believers in quack medicine are even more stupid than I previously thought, but not that such believers are any more common).

It's very hard to judge whether one's new information is selection-biased in some way. In areas like psychology and political science, it's not so hard to find academic papers that support either side on a debate. Even if you can't find that, it could be because of file-drawer effects or because of topic has not been investigated much by academics.

For both of you not familiar with xkcd, hover your mouse over the comic.

It is consumed diluted (I think the vendors suggest to mix it with lemon juice or so) and only few droplets a day, so it's not that bad as drinking industrial-strength bleach.

And it could actually work.

To me, EY's post is a couple of unfavorable case studies.

Case Study 1: Treat a substance as if it had a "curing/harming property" as an out of context absolute - out of context of treatment protocol, dosing protocol, or the particulars of a patient.

We see this all the time. Newspaper headline: "Substance X cures/does not cure disease Y." Of course, both could be true for different treatment protocols. For that matter, both could be true for the same treatment protocol but for different people.

Here's the place with directions for using this stuff: http://miracle-mineral-supplement.com/instructions-for-taking-mms/

Always use 5 drops of one of these food acids to each one drop of MMS, mix in a empty dry glass and wait at least 3 minutes, then add 1/3 to 2/3 glass of water or juice and drink.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement

When citric acid or other food acid is used to "activate" MMS as described in its instructions,[8] the mixture produces chlorine dioxide, a potent oxidizing agent used in water treatment and in bleaching.[9]

And at the Wikipedia Chlorine Dioxide page, they show how it is used in water treatment, and the conditions for which it is superior to the use of chlorine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_dioxide#Uses

Now, I don't know if the MMS protocol simulates a beneficial water treatment in dosing terms, but I'll bet a nickel that EY didn't either when he wrote this post.

Case Study 2: Confirmation bias on "the world is full of morons."

EY writes:

We can always use more case studies of insanity that aren't religion, right?

My brain is still not pessimistic enough about human stupidity.

If you're just looking for case studies of idiocy, and you habitually tell yourself that you're not pessimistic enough about human stupidity, are you likely to look for the sense in what people do or say?

To combat this, when I see something that looks stupid, I try to remind myself that "The other guy might not be a moron." In this case, it wasn't really that hard. I have a historical antipathy to Case Study 1 (ny own confirmation bias was at work), and the other comments provided hints and pointers to relevant information.

With these facts available from wikipedia, wouldn't it be reasonable to think that the MMS folks had actually worked out dosing based on their treatment protocol, so that it in fact did simulate a perfectly safe and beneficial water treatment method? If they're not morons, they can use wikipedia, they don't want to kill anyone, don't want to be sued, and would hope for some beneficial effect that helped sales.

I doubt that this cures whatever ails you, but very likely some guy just figured he could make money if he sold something, that when used as directed, amounted to home water treatment. If he was just a quack, there would have been a zillion and one things he could have thrown in water and sold - seems like a huge coincidence for him to happen upon something used in water treatment.

assuming symmetry and some relation to a linear component of your utility fuction, and so on...

Bleach will control (kill) most bacteria, but since cancer cells are very similar to your own cells, the prior is very low unless there is a specific reason to think that it will target one of those differences. For example, something that is just corrosive will probably affect the different cell types equally. Another thing is that since it's a charged molecule, it can't actually enter the cell on its own unless it rips apart the cell membrane, in which case that's probably the main mechanism of toxicity.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if it had been tested. The most likely outcome would be that it failed at an early step in the testing process (along with a large number of other chemicals), and nobody had any reason to publish it or think that anyone would ever actually decide that it might work.

Whether it kills cancer without killing the patient first has apparently not been tested.

Are you seriously suggesting someone should have given cancer patients bleach in case it turned out to cure them?

I agree with most of your comment but I wanted to single out one bit

and controlled studies could probably change most of these people's minds on it.

Given how many people still do homeopathy despite the controlled studies strongly showing it doesn't work, and similar issues with the vaccines-autism crowd, this seems overly optimistic.

Hormesis might be relevant here. I don't see a compelling reason to believe these people are not being helped in some cases.

I see no reason to expect hormesis to be relevant. Typically, hormesis is about really low doses, sometimes to the point where accidental contamination is a confound: for example, in radiation hormesis, I've read of measures like using ancient marble or lead as shielding because they will have less residual radiation than other materials. If the bleach hormetic doses are that small, then all they're doing is poisoning themselves by going way beyond hormetic doses...

The stuff is more dangerous than just causing mild digestive discomfort. It can kill people. Yes, giving people a random person might also destroy the cancer in some people. From an ethical perspective we can't give people random poisons to see whether their cancer gets better.

Another angle on this is that it isn't about humans in general, it's about some of the most gullible humans.

This seems to imply that there is something fundamentally different about these humans compared to other humans. I'm not convinced this is the case. I would be rather surprised if you couldn't make the average human drink bleach by exposing them to specifically tailored situations/information.

Tolkien's Sindarin (and, IIRC, Welsh) have two plurals, one for more than one and another for everything in a class. I am very envious. My ideal language would have a bunch of plurals-- the two from Sindarin, plus "a noticeable minority" and "the vast majority". I might even split "everything in a class" into "all we have seen" and "all by nature".

Why do you need grammatical inflection when you can just use quantifiers (“several sheep”, “all sheep”, “many sheep”, “most sheep”)?

I am constructing an artificial language (just for fun; also it isn't going to be finished any soon) with three grammatical numbers: singular, plural (can be any number, zero and one included) and class plural for everything in the class. I have invented this independently of Tolkien not for practical reasons, but just for sake of elegance, as it better suits my desire to have the grammar work in part like set algebra.

Having grammar rules that enforce expressing the number more precisely than we are used to (e.g. different grammatical numbers for one vs. two vs. more than two but few vs. noticeable minority vs. majority vs. all) has disadvantages when the speaker doesn't know the number or just wishes to describe a general situation where more than one number is applicable. Similar problems we face when our grammars enforce gender expression when using some pronouns (if we aren't Finns or Turks or Chinese or...). People try to find a way around, either by using more complex expressions ("he or she") or by attempts to update the grammar / vocabulary ("ey"). I am not sure whether I'd wish to have the same problem with grammatical number.

As for Welsh, a peculiarity with plurals I know about is that some nouns, usually denoting animals, have the basic (shorter) form denoting plural and the singular is derived by a suffix (e.g. adar/aderyn for birds/bird, pysgod/pysgodyn for fish, plant/plentyn for children/child - children are apparently sort of animals too). I haven't heard/read about different types of plural though.

True. They're pretty similar chemicals, though.

He saw it in a Facebook thread, the person who recommended it was probably not his friend but to be honest that surprised me too.The only reason I've even heard before of this is Facebook as well but it was a rant against MMS by an 'Objectivist'.

technically

That sounds like a strawman to me... Has anyone actually proposed that as a technical definition of “cure”? If I had to come up with one, I'd use “die after more QALYs than you would have without the treatment”.

According to Wikipedia, the first person involved just wrote a book. As for how it got into the market, the people who manufacture and sell it make a point of not putting any actual "medical" claims in writing and call it a "water purifier" or something. I mean, if you want to buy and sell concentrated sulfuric acid, it's perfectly legal to do so.

People sometimes seem to use a model that says that potency is a scalar quantity. If you have a powerful illness, you need a powerful medicine to defeat it. Weak medicine has little side effects; powerful medicine has big side effects. So if something has big side effects, that means you know it is powerful medicine!

People use a similar model for computer security: Installing antivirus, a firewall, or other security features gives your computer some number of security points. Like armor class in D&D, the more security points you have, the harder it is for an attacker or malware to hurt you. If you install a lot of security stuff, it will make you really safe ... and you can safely go do dangerous things like installing software that fell off the back of a truck, or browsing spammy porn sites with IE6.

The problem in both cases is an ignorance of how the attacks work, and thus how the defenses have to work, too. An arbitrary chemical that has heavy "side effects" is not thereby a potent remedy for infections, cancer, wounds, and other diverse afflictions. Malware and attackers use specific exploits and tricks; in order to make your computer safe from a specific attack, security software has to block particular things.

And unlike in classic D&D, putting on a helmet doesn't make it any harder to run you through with a lance.

Ah, a video. Of course you can trust anything you see in a video edited by a partisan, right? It's not like it's a bunch of snippets put together out of context with a misleading voice over or anything.

http://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/2013/05/fake-and-unethical-trial-video-claims-miracle-mineral-solution-cures-malaria/

This is a good example of the Illusion of transparency (leading to a nerdy signaling failure).

We weren't there, we don't know why your experience was relevant. You can use an in-joke to signal alliance with other people who get the joke, and exclude people who don't; but when everybody who's listening doesn't get it, you're creating a mighty small circle of allies.