tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post4205399351323462894..comments2024-03-27T23:28:20.274-04:00Comments on Face to Face: Corona lessons from cholera: miasma theory vindicated over contagionism (mediated vs. person-to-person transmission)agnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-80574853921644918102021-10-06T14:23:07.214-04:002021-10-06T14:23:07.214-04:00Spergs' non-social brains prevent them from em...Spergs' non-social brains prevent them from empathizing (seeing or feeling from inside another person's mind), so they do not understand that scientific or other intellectual debates are between two historically contingent sides, in a certain time, place, and over a certain matter, with a crucial point of disagreement, while agreeing to other things, and with other details being incidental or orthogonal.<br /><br />Spergs try to evaluate a theory in isolation, from the here and now.<br /><br />"Copernicus thought the Earth's orbit around the sun was circular? Wow, that's a big yikes from me, fam, didn't he trust the experts and Fucking Love Science enough to know it was ackshually elliptical?"<br /><br />They can't see his perspective, i.e. against the geocentric camp of his day. In that actual debate, he was clearly vindicated and his rivals were discredited. Further refinement of details within his winning side of that original debate, does not alter the fact that the heliocentrists won and the geocentrists lost.<br /><br />Ditto for the debate between mediated vs. encounter-based models of the spread of cholera in 19th-C. Europe. The mediated camp was decisively proven correct, and the encounter-based side wrong, regardless of any future further refinements of which medium it was, did it smell foul or not, etc.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-31080428589824504012021-10-06T14:19:20.167-04:002021-10-06T14:19:20.167-04:00Spergs must also conclude that Galileo and Coperni...Spergs must also conclude that Galileo and Copernicus were wrong, and their heliocentric models discredited, because they thought Earth's orbit around the sun was circular rather than what it ackshually is, elliptical (discovered by Kepler).<br /><br />But Galileo and Copernicus were not debating their rivals over the shape of Earth's orbit around the sun -- their rivals denied that Earth orbited the sun at all! They said it was the sun going around Earth -- a bit more fundamental of a disagreement.<br /><br />The actual debate during their era was "sun around Earth" vs. "Earth around the sun". The Galileo and Copernicus camp were vindicated, and the geocentric camp discredited.<br /><br />The precise shape of Earth's orbit around the sun is a debate within the heliocentric side of the geo vs. heliocentric debate. You can't argue over that without first stipulating that Earth orbits the sun rather than vice versa.<br /><br />Equally, you can't debate which medium was the conveyor of cholera from one person to another at a distance, i.e. without encounters between them, unless you have already agreed that it is conveyed by a medium rather than person-to-person encounters.<br /><br />In the actual debate of their day, Snow was on the side of the miasmists because his model was of a contaminated medium, not encounters between a sick & healthy individual. He was not a contagionist, therefore he was a miasmist (only two mutually exclusive answers to that fundamental disagreement about the direct-ness of transmission).<br /><br />He only differed with the other anti-contagionists about which medium was responsible (water, not air).agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-18612206564863533582021-10-06T02:16:14.989-04:002021-10-06T02:16:14.989-04:00Reddit brain works by a kind of guilt by associati...Reddit brain works by a kind of guilt by association, then. If one piece is wrong, the every piece is wrong -- just look at what other pieces this one piece is attached to, in a non-decomposable whole.<br /><br />A normal, logical reasoning brain says, "Hold up, this piece may be wrong, but that other piece is right". And if the piece that's right is on the crucial matter in a debate, then who cares about the irrelevant piece that is wrong?<br /><br />Otherwise known as "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater," although in the miasma vs. contagion case, the miasmists got it almost entirely correct -- a foul-smelling medium conducted cholera from one person to another who had no encounters.<br /><br />Same goes for the non sequitur about plague masks. Even if those were a necessary consequence of the theory (they were not), they're only one consequence. What about the other consequences, like modern sanitation, including not only ventilation for indoor spaces but also the sewage system?<br /><br />Only a spergy numbnuts would wave away the public health importance of modern sanitation, just because the counterparts of those responsible for it would have worn plague masks in a separate pandemic during another century.<br /><br />Did contagionists solve the plague pandemics anyway? Of course not -- they would've argued for skin-to-skin contact between an infected and healthy person, when in reality it was transmitted by fleas. Isolate people from people all you want -- it won't stop the fleas from getting to them.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-71499010616719805252021-10-06T01:53:13.208-04:002021-10-06T01:53:13.208-04:00A central disorder of the spergy mind is its inabi...A central disorder of the spergy mind is its inability to discriminate. So they can't disentangle aspects that are central, crucial, core, from those that are peripheral, secondary, incidental, etc.<br /><br />That would require sorting them into different classes, and ordering them (from most to least crucial).<br /><br />Spergs cannot do this. The whole tangle comes as a bundle, and you either reject all of it or accept all of it.<br /><br />Logical reasoners do the opposite -- mentally or in writing, they draw up a flow chart of where there are disagreements in the debate, ordered by level of specificity. This homes in on what the debate is actually about -- the fundamental split, not finer details.<br /><br />Is cholera spread by natural or supernatural means?<br /><br />Is it spread from one person to the next directly, or is it borne via some medium?<br /><br />If borne, by what kind of medium (water, air, insect, etc.)? Or if directly, through what kind of contact (skin to skin, fecal to oral, breathing, etc.)?<br /><br />And so on and so forth.<br /><br />The contagionists and miasmists both agreed that the spread was natural, not supernatural. No relevant details there. And they did not agree that it was spread through a medium, so there are no relevant details further down the chart (i.e., the particular medium that miasmists believed was the culprit).<br /><br />Rather, they were stuck at the level of "direct vs. mediated transmission". Only details pertaining to that question are relevant in judging which of the two sides won the debate.<br /><br />Verdict: miasmists won.<br /><br />Reddit-brainers like to think they're the logical, rational type, but they're incapable of the most basic tasks of logical reasoning. That's why they can't figure out jackshit.<br /><br />Instead, since everything comes as a bundle when you can't discriminate, you either wholly swallow one side of a debate or another (or another, however many sides there are).<br /><br />This is the I Fucking Love Science mindset. "Just inject it straight into my veins". Etc etc etc.<br /><br />Don't question, study, discriminate, or structure anything. Just pretend that everything comes in non-decomposable wholes, and you're simply making consumer choices about which whole to swallow whole.<br /><br />It's similar to the tribalistic behavior of non-spergy people, where it's black-and-white, Team A vs. Team B, just tell me which tribe a signifier belongs to and I'll behave accordingly.<br /><br />It's just that socially inept spergs need a non-social frame to carry out the same black-and-white thoughtless herd behavior. It's not "the view held by my tribe," but "the view consensused upon by The Scientists (TM)"!agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-71225452852211624522021-10-06T01:31:26.907-04:002021-10-06T01:31:26.907-04:00That's your quota of one spergatarian Reddit-b...That's your quota of one spergatarian Reddit-brain comment, BTW. I allow one of these through each time you chime in so that readers understand I'm not just making up who the other side of the debate is, what they claim, and how they don't get things that are spelled out clearly (like how ID-ing causative agents is orthogonal to modeling the spread of such causative agents through a population).<br /><br />So don't bother responding anymore to this post.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-43057734467154966842021-10-06T01:21:57.440-04:002021-10-06T01:21:57.440-04:00Reddit brain on full display, including not readin...Reddit brain on full display, including not reading what you sperg out about in comments.<br /><br />Post already says "malaria" is Italian for "bad air".<br /><br />Miasma and germ theory are orthogonal -- former dealing with transmission of causative agents, latter dealing with identification of causative agents.<br /><br />Miasma theory led to modern sanitation, not just silly plague doctor stuff. This is uncontroversial -- but you're just a Reddit-brainer who can't even skim a Wikipedia page. You're supposed to say that the miasma proponents were "right for the wrong reasons" by pushing for and implementing modern sanitation measures.<br /><br />And not only for better ventilation -- COVID-19 alert -- but for keeping people away from sewage. Miasmists thought it was the gaseous part of sewage that was pathogenic, rather than the solid or liquid part of it -- but who cares? They did the right thing, and made people a lot healthier.<br /><br />Plague doctor masks did not make the situation worse. Net, huge positive.<br /><br />John Snow decisively proved the miasma theory, because there is no such thing as a theory in isolation. There's a debate between two sides. In the 19th C cholera debate, it was contagion or mediation. People were not transmitting cholera from one to the next directly. They transmitted it at a great distance, between people who didn't even encounter each other.<br /><br />What Snow did was clarify which material medium was mediating transmission -- not argue for contagion, which he proved was not at work.<br /><br />Also, his solution was not a real solution. You can shut off a single water pump, and tell its users to find another one. How do you scale that up to the whole of a city, let alone nation or continent, to end a pandemic? You can't.<br /><br />Only spergs think he ended cholera with This One Weird Trick of shutting of a single pump. They had to purify the contaminated medium, and separate outgoing vs. ingoing water supplies.<br /><br />Semmelweiss reference is irrelevant, since we're talking about transmission of causative agents, not identifying which family they belong to (toxin, pathogen, etc.).<br /><br />"Contagion" means "with" "touch", same root as "tangible". Synonymous with "contact". As in, not mediated by something else -- not an "X-borne" disease (water, air, insect, etc.). So no, most infectious diseases that we care about do not spread contagiously. Malaria, cholera, plague, et al. Only STDs for sure.<br /><br />Individuals leaving germs in many places is not contagion if the next person to pick them up never had an encounter with the original infected!<br /><br />Look how braindead you end up by committing to this Reddit-tier I Fucking Love Science shit. One person spreads a disease through "contagion" to another person, even though the two never come within a mile of each other during their whole lives!agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-9289865695786080242021-10-05T08:40:07.031-04:002021-10-05T08:40:07.031-04:00The word "malaria" literally meant "...The word "malaria" literally meant "bad air". And while it didn't spread directly person-to-person like and STD, isolating people from mosquitos (harder to do with the general population, more feasible with those already infected) does prevent spreading. The miasma theory resulted in things like plague doctors wearing masks with flowers in the nose to counteract bad smells. Germ theory explains why quarantines & border controls can block spread (malaria spreading without direct contact boosted miasma theory and caused people to reject such controls as superstitious & unscientific).<br /><br />John Snow was an enemy of the miasma theory. He didn't argue that cholera must spread person-to-person. Instead he shut off a water pump because he thought that was spreading it. He compared his theory to the known case of intestinal worms reproducing themselves in the intestine and inducing the evacuation of infectious material from there, while rejecting that it could be spread by the exhalations of sick people like fevers.<br /><br />The term "germ theory" didn't exist back then, nor during the time of Ignatz Semmelweiss. And the puerperal fever he tried to act against was not being spread by air or water or even mosquitos or fleas, but humans (specifically, the hands of doctors operating on corpses and then pregnant women).<br /><br />"Contagion" is how infected diseases spread, and this doesn't have to mean "person to person". There are lots of other species that can serve as reservoirs, but only if an infection spreads it to them. And a single infected individual can spread a pathogen from one place to another, even if every "medium" in that place had been perfectly clean before their arrival.TGGPhttps://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/noreply@blogger.com