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posted by janrinok on Sunday January 01 2017, @11:50PM   Printer-friendly

The Verge just keeps putting out articles on Peter Thiel. Seems now like Thiel might be teaching a seminar at the Berkeley Institute:

Earlier this year, the Berkeley Institute, a private academic institution, listed a seminar on "Heterodox Science." The seminar was first scheduled to begin in November, then moved to January. On the Institute's website, the instructor of the Heterodox Science course has been described only as "Guest Instructor: Author & Founder of IMITATIO." The accompanying photo is of the back of a white man's head. IMITATIO has three founders; two are dead. The third is billionaire PayPal founder, Gawker litigator, ubiquitous venture capitalist, and contrarian Trump advisor, Peter Thiel.

IMITATIO is a website dedicated to the ideas of René Girard, and his theory of memetic desire.

The Verge continues:

What is Heterodox Science? "Heterodox" — coming from the Greek root words heteros, meaning "the other," and doxa, meaning "opinion" — refers to atypical beliefs or those beliefs which go against prevailing norms. In the modern political context, heterodoxy has been adopted by conservative groups concerned about what they view as a suffocating echo chamber in the liberal academy. The most prominent heterodox organization is the "Heterodox Academy," which describes itself as an "association of professors who have come together to express their support for increasing viewpoint diversity—particularly political diversity—in universities."

Interesting, heterodox is also the root for "heretic"! And it appears that some have gotten the ear of the president elect? But it may ultimately be that "heterodox science" is just like "alternative medicine" according to the old joke: "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that actually works? Medicine."


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 02 2017, @01:11AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday January 02 2017, @01:11AM (#448324) Journal

    Standard medicine is evidence-based medicine

    While I don't disagree, it's notable that evidence-based medicine [wikipedia.org] is a relatively new term, and the standard approaches only started to become widespread in the 1980s. Before that, despite the fact that there were plenty of studies done by doctors and medical researchers, the standards for such studies were all over the map. And a lot of clinical procedure was based more on anecdote, traditional practice, what your teacher told you in med school, etc., rather than stuff backed up by randomized controlled trials or double-blind studies.

    Frankly, there was quite a bit of push-back from the older generation in the mainstream medical field in the 1980s and 1990s to this new "evidence-based medicine" standard, since it insisted on rigorous statistical evaluation of data in studies -- and it ended up contradicting a lot of "well-known" standard ideas in the field.

    Unless you've really looked into it, most people don't realize how screwed up mainstream medicine was even into the mid-20th century, putting faith in traditional procedures and beliefs about "what worked" that had little scientific evidence supporting them. We're still living with the legacy of that stuff to some extent, which is one reason why there have been so many reversals in recommended clinical practice in the past couple decades. (Which, ironically, has led many people to question whether doctors actually know what they're talking about and then end up seeking out "alternative medicine" -- even though there's been this gradual revolution going on in medicine to actually ground it more firmly in science than before.)

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  • (Score: 2, Troll) by driverless on Monday January 02 2017, @01:20AM

    by driverless (4770) on Monday January 02 2017, @01:20AM (#448326)

    Absolutely. And I don't even want to go into the way clinical trials have been progressively hacked by both the companies providing testing services (e.g. sign up junkies who fake symptoms in order to be paid drug money) and big pharma ("There are no facts, there is no truth / Just data to be manipulated / I can get you any result you like / What's it worth to you?"). So when I mentioned evidence-based medicine I meant the theory, not necessarily the practice as it's evolved in recent years.