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[Reelya]

Adenovirus-36 and obesity: I'm calling this as an upcoming paradigm shift. I'd compare it to similar shifts. Usually they take 15-20 years from the initial discovery. Examples which comes to mind are (though there are probably more):

- the low-fat / low-carb thing. Remember the huge opposition to the Atkins Diet at the time and how they were prophesizing your guts would rot away and explode if you ate a diet like that. No such gut-explosions occurred despite a lot of people trying those diets and all the low-carb diets which are effectively descendents of Atkins. There is a huge history there, the whole low-fat thing through the 1970s to 2000s.

- The discovery that giving peanuts to babies prevents peanut allergies. The first reporting on this was about 15 years ago, it became standard advice a year ago in Australia. this goes against everything they'd been telling us for decades, so it wasn't an easy thing to overturn, and I've talked to people who still refuse to believe it for that reason.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/new-guidelines-say-give-babies-peanut-butter-and-forget-hypo-allergenic-formula-20190114-p50r7i.html

- The discovery that bacteria cause stomach ulcers. A huge vested interested against that being the case, not the least of which was all the pharma money selling treatments that didn't work
https://www.everydayhealth.com/h-pylori/history-what-we-dont-know/

Warren and Marshall’s theory about H. pylori’s function wasn’t immediately accepted in the medical community. 

At the time, most scientists didn’t believe that bacteria could live in the human stomach. Additionally, researchers thought lifestyle factors, like diet and stress, were to blame for ulcers rather than a bacterial infection.

Despite the convincing results, fellow colleagues were reluctant to recognize Warren and Marshall’s findings.

Note if it says you're paywalled, try clearing your cookies, or just open in a private window:
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/obesogenic-effects-of-adenovirus-36-the-latest-research-58b0e53af1df

“I“I remember giving a talk at a conference where I presented 15 different studies in which Ad-36 either caused or was correlated to fatness. At the end of it, a good friend said to me, ‘I just don’t believe it.’ He didn’t give a reason; he just didn’t believe it. People are really stuck on eating and exercise as the only contributors to fatness. But there is more to it,” says Richard Atkinson, M.D., emeritus professor of medicine and nutrition at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The evidence is in fact stacking up quite high at this point, from multiple directions, but there's a general push back: not from the basis of anyone actually having any data that contradicts the studies but because of that "i just don't believe it" stuff. This is what to me smells like a paradigm in the making.

Part of the reluctance to consider the idea may well be that if you view morbid obesity as being a moral failing it fits with a "just world fallacy" type of thinking. Fat people are fat because they lack control, and I'm not fact because I have control. The thought that you could be infected with a virus and that causes changes in your body which cause you to put on weight at the drop of the hat is a scary thought.

[Naturegirl1999]

I thought science was about following the data, not maintaining beliefs, that’s what religions fo

[Maximum Spin]

I thought science was about following the data, not maintaining beliefs, that’s what religions fo

Yes, but the main problem here is more the lack of understanding of the mechanism, leading people to conclude that the virus theory violates the law of conservation of mass.

[Reelya]

Also, this is specifically medical stuff. Stuff like theoretical physics is where you're going to find that rarefied pure debate type of science, but medical practice is a mix of scientific research, big egos, big money, pharma profits and doctors in everyday medical practice.

It's messy. If you come along and say every doctor's been doing the wrong thing for years and been giving bad advice and they didn't in fact have any rational basis for doing so, you're going to get a lot of hate, not some disinterested "oh and now we know thanks for enlightening us!"

Doctors can be sued for doing the wrong thing or lose their licenses: they have a vested interest in you not coming over and pointing out that everything they do is wrong. See the whole thing where surgeons were totally against the hand-washing thing mainly because admitting they needed to wash their hands would be admitting they'd murdered a lot of people through infection, so they kept going without washing hands to make a point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards. He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.

Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. He died 14 days later after being beaten by the guards

[Naturegirl1999]

Oh yes, and the one who fiscovered that a bacteria In the water in England was causing a disease, not miasma as was previously thought. It is unfortunate that they’d keep doing incorrect things rather than correct things

[scriver]

Science is still like religion, it's just a religion with very spirited theological debate

[feelotraveller]

And here I was thinking that the Big Bang "theory" and ever-expanding universe was all politics.

[voliol]

I imagine doctors (of the medical kind) can be extra obstinate as admitting a wrongdoing in science is normally a matter of pride, but for them it is as much a matter of guilt. Few people would like to admit another’s death being due to personal failure; I imagine similar guilt is what caused Semmelweiss to break down.

And well, then there’s the money-makers and quacks (mostly in pharma?) in addition to that.

[methylatedspirit]

This is sorta a continuation of when I said that replacing the boot HDD in PCs with an SSD usually solves the problem of an unbearably slow PC. Also, I should probably start a blog or a new thread, but a) I can't be assed to, and b) I don't see myself updating it often or regularly enough for it to really work.

The thing with getting a new SSD as a boot drive is that you can guarantee that a system booting off of it will at least have acceptable performance, even if you buy the cheapest one. HDDs promise no such thing. Were you to go for the cheapest HDD available, you'd almost certainly end up with a system that would be bottlenecked so badly, that even pairing it with an overclocked i9 running at 7.7 GHz being cooled with liquid nitrogen would make a sloth think it's slow. And as for finding a HDD the speed of an SSD... good luck. They stopped making high speed (high speed as in the platter itself span at, like, 10000 RPM instead of 5400 RPM) HDDs a long time ago once people caught on to the fact that SSDs are just better in this role.

Personally, I have seen an Alienware laptop with an i7 and a GTX 980M being brought to its fucking knees by a slow hard drive. It was like it was begging for death every time I tried to run anything. When I had it replaced with my old SSD, it suddenly turned into the fastest laptop in the workplace it was in.

Just get an SSD for a boot drive. Any SSD is better than a HDD when you're putting your OS on it. If upgrading an old system, just make sure that the PC you're planning to put an SSD into actually has the option to replace the existing storage device; I've seen (on Youtube) laptops that have their storage soldered straight to the motherboard.

[Reelya]

Well the thing about storage on the motherboard is that it's getting more common for them to just throw an NVMe socket on the laptop's motherboard somewhere rather than need an extra SATA bay.

For my latest laptop, which was fairly cheap at $350 brand new, it was very sluggish, 1 TB HDD. When I started looking into SSDs, I found out about the NVMe standard. So I decided to open it up and sure enough, there was an NVMe plug right on the motherboard. I then ordered got a 120 GB NVMe drive and successfully installed that as the C drive.

If you get one with eMMc you're probably screwed, but if they bothered to put a SATA hard-drive in there more likely than not they had room for NVMe too.

[methylatedspirit]

A word on terminology: M.2 is a physical form factor and connector specification. NVMe is the interfacing standard that was made for M.2 drives, since NVMe drives run at speeds far faster than what SATA supports. For backwards compatibility (or alternately, just to confuse people), the M.2 spec supports good old SATA. It's entirely possible to get an M.2 drive that runs only at SATA speeds instead of NVMe. All NVMe drives are M.2, but not all M.2 drives use NVMe.

[methylatedspirit]

I think it's possible to measure how scared a company is of its competition by how many times it mentions its competitor(s) relative to the number of times it mentions itself. Case in point: the Intel Tiger Lake announcement. I'll just pull a chart from a Gamers Nexus video:



Compare this with Nvidia, just one day ago from that announcement:



Intel's practically begging for its life at this point. Nvidia's event inspired confidence, it inspired a feeling of wonder and a "woah, the future truly is here!" kind of feeling. Intel's, I haven't watched it myself, but from how it's been summarized to me, it's basically Intel going "We'Re bEtTeR ThAn AmD, LoOk aT uS". They may as well have renamed it to "AMD sucks, here's why", except it's phrased in the most defensive, insecure way possible.

[dragdeler]

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[Rolan7]

I used to justify all the hours I spent fidgeting as becoming more aware of my body and how exactly it functions.
I'm surprised the generation growing up with phones at 5 years old can even walk without texting.
Just boomer thoughts~

(I remain surprisingly okay and in touch with my body outside a single superficial aspect.  I like to think that we've been through some shit together, and formed a lasting bond.)

[Naturegirl1999]

Your body is the thing housing your brain, which in turn is the maker of your mind, a collection of thoughts that perceives itself, at least that’s what I think a mind is. Anyways, my question is why are you talking about your body like it’s not part of you?