Industrial scale woo
I don't see any particular reason for having a different name for pseudoscience when it's carried out by science organisations. This is woo too.
By way of scale ...
But the latest documents demonstrate that the company had data hinting at Avandia’s extensive heart problems almost as soon as the drug was introduced in 1999, and sought intensively to keep those risks from becoming public. In one document, the company sought to quantify the lost sales that would result if Avandia’s cardiovascular safety risk “intensifies.” The cost: $600 million from 2002 to 2004 alone, the document stated.
That's roughly equal to the amount that the NHS would spend on woo over the next hundred years, at the 2005-8 rate of spending. In general, Stalin killed more people than Hitler because he was in power for longer; Hitler killed more people than Peter Tobin because he was in charge of an industrialised state. In general, what makes people and things dangerous is their capacity to do harm, not their intrinsic badness (I'm reminded of Noam Chomsky's Parable Of The Ants).
Why do you think this is pseudoscience rather than fraud and callousness? It doesn't seem to be the conduct of the trials that were the problem, but the decisions to lie about the data afterwards.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's fake science - it's the presentation of something as if it's the result of a valid scientific inquiry when it wasn't.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on this - I don't think there's any valid etymological reason not to call this behaviour "pseudoscience".
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think that it's worth distinguishing between pseudoscience perpetuated by alternative health practictioners, who tend to have left the education system with less than sterling science qualifications, and pseudoscience deliberately and cynically perpetuated by scientists (/ former scientists, now management) in large pharmaceutical companies.
The latter should do much more damage to the public's perception of science - in theory, at least.
Perhaps the answer is to call it pseudoscience AND fraud?
The answer should be jail. Seriously - whilst most corporate fraud is a borderline-irrelevant-unless-you're-a-shareholder version of the principal-agent problem, this sort of thing not only kills people directly, but also is absolute woo fuel.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's fake science - it's the presentation of something as if it's the result of a valid scientific inquiry when it wasn't.
ReplyDeleteIs it? The way I read it, it sounded like the reverse: concealing the correct (but unwelcome) results of a valid investigation, not publishing the incorrect results of an invalid one.
"Noam Chomsky's Parable Of The Ants"
ReplyDeleteGoogle's no help here. What's the Parable of the Ants?
Chomsky just notes in a few of his books that when he takes a stroll in his garden (I know, he doesn't seem like much of a gardener to me either), he doesn't do so with the intention of killing a hundred ants out of spite - it's just that he never considers the effect of his walk on the ants as being remotely relevant. And analogises this to the behaviour of imperial capitalism in the third world.
ReplyDeleteNatalie Merchant apparently used to walk around parks, so that she wouldn't kill any grass by walking on it.
ReplyDelete(Which you don't, of course.)
And the answer is jail, yes. I can give various rhetorical-socialist reasons why this doesn't happen, all of them probably true: but can anybody give any others?
ReplyDeleteThere's a set of answers associated with "regulation", which basically say that we can't afford to enforce the law against corporate crime fully and uniformly; that trying to do so would have perverse effects (John Braithwaite refers to the post of "Vice President in charge of going to jail"); and that gentle persuasion escalating to tax-like disincentives, and only subsequently escalating to your actual law enforcement, is actually more effective. There's an obvious "kettle logic" quality to this cluster of arguments.
ReplyDeleteCan I call Richard J from the vasty deep? I think this is actually his area of expertise.
Well if in advance of Richard's appearance I were to put it more simply: in acting as they have here, what offence have the company (or individuals therein) potentially committed?
ReplyDeletePrince Charles has correctly identified arguments against climate change as pseudoscience.
ReplyDeleteOne wonders how he came to be so familiar with the concept?
Can I call Richard J from the vasty deep? I think this is actually his area of expertise.
ReplyDeleteNot really, pure tax is more my line, but the only comment I can make from direct experience is the observation that the immediate reflex of any business on discovering malfeaseance among its employees is the coverup.
That said, though, I can think of several examples where tax is used to fulfill specific policy objectives; Brazillian sales taxes on services act as a significant disincentive to use non-Brazilian suppliers, the land fill tax in the UK combines the carrot and the stick in one go, etc.
I don't think you'd kill a hundred ants by taking a walk in your garden, even if you were a very heavy structural linguist in very hard shoes and your garden was absolutely overrun with ants. Maybe if your garden was also entirely paved with concrete.
ReplyDeleteSomeone should have reassured Noam about this. It obviously worried him.
You're mistaking a big pharma company for a scientific one.
ReplyDeleteejh - it depends how radical you're feeling. The article says The company did not post the results on its Web site or submit them to federal drug regulators, as is required in most cases by law., which suggests an open-and-shut case of failure to comply with legal requirements to publish test results (although I don't know what "in most cases" covers). The real story is that the company appears to be guilty of causing death through negligence, but in the current state of the law you'd have a hell of a job making that one stick in court.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what the rules are on who's responsible for a decision like that. I know that after the Henry Blodget affair they were sharpened up considerably in my industry - everything we publish now has a section in it where a named person declares themselves (oh all right, who am I kidding, declares himself) responsible for its content. But I don't think pharma has ever had a similar watershed moment.
ReplyDeletePresumably the actor who goes on the TV to pretend to be a doctor recommending the drug in question is the one who holds responsibility. Basic due diligence.
ReplyDelete