Comments for I Don't Get the Joke: My Year-End Tirade at http://www.randi.org/site , comment 1 to 64 out of 20 comments http://www.randi.org/site Wed, 22 May 2013 23:56:13 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-2439 That's what I said in the begining. Brights and Supers can work together. ;D - Ian Mason Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:49:56 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-2434 "Kuroyume, I don't believe that AA has a success rate - they do the old remember-the-hits-forget-the misses form of collecting "proof." AA members who quit drinking, even if they do it before they actually join AA, are counted by AA as AA success stories. People who fail to stop drinking and leave AA are accused of "not working the program" i.e. it's their fault, not AA's. People who keep going to meetings, yet still drink, are "experiencing relapse as part of their recovery process." People who quit without ever going to AA are "dry drunks" who are exactly as mean, miserable, unfaithful, violent, rude & criminal as a drunk could possibly be, but "only not drinking." @Trish Wrong on several counts. AA does not 'collect proof' in any way nor as an organisation does it do scientific studies on its results. That is because AA is not a scientific organisation, and is well aware of that. AA does not 'count' successes. The individual themselves claims success or failure (with a lot of leeway as to the definition of those words) People who quit without AA are not considered 'dry drunks'; a dry drunk generally is a person WITHIN AA who has a negative attitude. The general attitude toward those who quit without AA is positive, and I have been reprimanded for feeling that those who do not 'work the program' are less-than those who do. I now welcome news from any front where an addict has succeeded in changing themselves and their lives for the better. I have been affiliated with AA for 12 yrs, and I am an atheist. I do indeed ignore the god stuff, because I am one of those people for whom the 'program' worked. I would say it works in aprx. 30% of those who attempt, and this number is roughly equal to #s in research in addiction. No matter the technique, AA or other, people who have a problem with substance abuse manage to stay clean at a rate of 30 out of 100. I did a research paper once that included many scientific studies, and actually found that the numbers given were 20 - 40% of abstinence achieved. And while my post is not scientific, I am appalled at the nearly religious responses against AA. Yes, I've read the AA-as-cult papers, but I just don't see it. Within AA there are all types of responses to AA, and these are welcomed and tolerated positively. You have, as with any social group, true believers who can be dictatorial, but they are working out of their own prejudices and certainly not as representatives of AA. I've never experienced anything less than a feeling of tolerance for other ways of 'recovering' from such devastating behavior as one may experience when addicted. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, not everyone has critical reasoning skills with which to stop destructive behavior. AA fills a void here, and does so without acting as a for profit or with a hidden agenda. People in AA who attempt to use addiction as an excuse for bad behavior are set straight, on the theory that once you know better you can not cop a plea. Such folks are often not taken very seriously, often told to quit rationalising their past behavior. Obviously, the writers here have read of AA, and read quite a bit. But they are lacking in a few areas of the subject. - chaunceyworld Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:24:51 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1735 Trish, I would just like to say thank you for your input here. I don't know yet where I stand on this issue because, not being a person who has ever had a problem with alcohol or drugs and not having any friends or family with such a problem (yes, unusual isn't it!), I have never thought about it all that much except for having a rough knowledge of the prevailing "disease model". But you have given me much food for thought. BillyJoe - BillyJoe Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:48:09 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1732 Ian Mason, I would never say the answer to this problem is to tell one person to "pull yourself together." I think we need to examine the situation when claims without scientific support are allowed to have such a huge impact on individuals & society. A person who is, in current society, self-identifying as an addict didn't get to that point without the influence of others, past & present. The situation won't improve without concerted action to get to the truth of the situation. Maybe the addiction hypothesis sounds good to a lot of people because it parallels the sin/redemption storyline so popular with American Christians, especially with the emphasis on "forgiveness" as being necessary for the health/sanity of the "forgiver." Also, repetition of a message makes it more likely the hearer will believe it, whether there is evidence to support the claim or not. It’s possible the influence of people & the ideology, rather than the "substances" is affecting people's attitudes about alcohol, drugs, their lives & the people they interact with. When I was young & learning about alcohol, I was told never to drink when sad or angry, on the theory that alcohol magnifies whatever mood one is in when one starts drinking. At least this advice gave me a sense of control over my own behavior, and seems to have worked fairly well for the people I’ve known who subscribe to this practice. I am concerned that it might not be in people’s best interest to tell them they are damaged/diseased/less-functional than others. Look what happened when recovered memory therapy became the rage. People who had no memory of abuse, but felt sad or at loose ends, were hypnotized &/or indoctrinated by therapists to believe they'd been severely harmed by events in early life that they couldn't undo, often becoming so upset & wrapped up in their survivor status that they were unable to continue working, suffered disruption in relationships with loved ones and sometimes even became suicidal. Later, evidence came out to demonstrate that the claims of the recovered memory movement had no factual basis. - Trish Sat, 10 Jan 2009 14:07:00 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1727 I think it’s an important note alcohol &/or drugs are neither necessary nor sufficient to cause &/or explain bad behavior. Some people use drugs, work jobs & never do anyone harm. Some use drugs & are jerks or criminals. Some do horrific things while never ingesting mind-altering drugs or alcohol. Some nice people never consume “substances". The addiction hypothesis is that people who use "substances" & behave badly are addicted [diseased]. The problem is that the claim is considered sufficient evidence of its truth. There is no reliable way for a disinterested party [like a scientist] to distinguish the addicted from everyone else – no infection or deformity, no rate of consumption, no reliable decline in functioning [I’d argue that the misbehavior part of the equation involves a lot of complex functioning – lying, sneaking, hiding]. We now know life stories are malleable, even more when the teller is under the influence of an ideology. People gripped by conversion experiences often make their pre-conversion story as lurid as possible so their conversion seem more impressive. And what is "treatment" or "rehab"? Essentially, it is to re-work one's life story in light of the claim "I'm an alcoholic.” That there are genes "associated" with overuse of alcohol is a correlation, which could be an artifact of things like people learning their drinking habits from their family members, with whom they share genes. As a skeptic I have to ask: Is there any way to falsify a diagnosis of addiction? If a person who has gone to meetings starts to think, "I'm not doing anything as bad as the stories I'm hearing" & says, "Maybe I'm not an alcoholic" the other members will accuse that person of being in denial. What evidence exists [or could exist] that would make an AA group say to a person, "You don't have alcoholism"? One might ask, where is the harm in convincing people to stop consuming something even if addiction isn’t real? What if those labeling themselves addicted include some undiagnosed bipolar people, some schizoaffective, some depressed & a couple of criminals using the disease claim to get over on the court & anyone they want to use? - Trish Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:55:47 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1725 People are different. Different people react to different things in different ways. Maybe my body produces endorphins as a response to alcohol. Yours doesn't. Cannabis makes me depressed, others love the stuff. There isn't a hard and fast rule because people vary so much. Alcohol/drugs are never an excuse, dut can be part of an explanation. Removing an intoxicant from one's lifestyle can make a world of difference. There may come better and more refined diagnoses and treatments in the futureb but for now total abstinence works for me. Wikipaedia mentions 10-12 genes involved in alcoholism. I'm not a scientist so I don't know how reliable that is. Have a look for yourself and see what you think of the research. I'm not hostile, it's just I've heard various forms of "pull yourself together" too many times, about alcohol, depression and OCD, my own unholy trinity. I can't do it alone. I need experienced help. Anthro zoon polis: we are social, we need each other to get by. Let the hermits and other professional anorectics sit on their poles and claim not to need others, but leave me my fellow men and women. - Ian Mason Sat, 10 Jan 2009 11:41:05 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1723 K, Fact: people who consume drugs, alcohol, food, & oxygen sometimes do things that upset their family, friends & even courts. Our society currently allows people to claim that they are "addicted" to things and that this makes the person less able to control their behavior. The vast majority of people who support the claim that addiction causes people to be unable to control themselves do so under the claims of the "disease theory." If you don't believe in the disease theory, and you cite the lighting up of pleasure centers in the brain, do you think addiction is normal operating of all brains? Or do you think that people who manage to not overuse drugs & alcohol don't have pleasure centers? I don't understand in what way "addiction" is real in your opinion, other than "people say they experience it, so it must be so." But people also claim to experience demonic possession, faith healing making them feel better, meeting clones aliens created with their germ cells etc., etc, and skeptics don't buy it just because they say so. When people consume drugs &/or alcohol, electric circuits light up & chemicals move around inside the brain. But even when people don't consume "substances" electrons & chemicals move inside the brain. Changes in electrical & chemical activity in the brain doesn't prove addiction is "real." I find it interesting that my former heavy use of tobacco doesn't give me any insight in your estimation. People can be “addicted” to sex (which isn’t even a chemical), but a 2 ½ pack a day cig habit (for the record: 10 years heavy smoking, quit for 20 years as of next month) doesn’t count? I suspect that it doesn’t count in your estimation just because I disagree with you, not because my experience isn’t valid. I don't know how you can "tell" anything about me, other than that I disagree with your position, and that I once smoked a lot of cigs every day. - Trish Sat, 10 Jan 2009 10:28:22 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1722 Ian Mason, I don't doubt your experience of yourself as someone for whom drinking is all-or-nothing. Your experience is your experience. I would point out that our experiences are heavily influenced by input from the people around us, the fiction, dramas, history, urban legends & "common knowledge" we consume. People are malleable and can be convinced that they've experienced things that never really happened, or to change their interpretation of events without realizing their interpretation or even the memory itself has changed. This is why scientific method & objective evidence are so important for getting at the actual facts as they are, as opposed to what we suppose they are or wish them to be. Right now our society is working very hard to convince us that addiction is an all-purpose explanation/justification for bad behavior and a reason to give another chance to people who habitually do loved ones, friends & society wrong, and that it is a manifestly physical process, and that it requires lifelong, active effort to prevent returning to antisocial behavior. But what if, like the 18th century physicians who considered fever as one disease, rather than a symptom of numerous conditions, we're lumping many behaviors under the label of "addiction” (alcoholism)? Billy Joe, good work in the skeptic-raising dept! - Trish Sat, 10 Jan 2009 10:26:23 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1710 Dopamine, endorphins, whatever: I "knew" physically I was an alcoholic long before the cognitive version. I knew I was an all-or-nothing drinker, as I then called it. The experience felt from the inside is addiction. The support of others with the same problem can be decisive, as peer group support can be in so many difficult situations, including being a skeptic in a superstitious world. Yes, it's great when our small ones say obvious truths. (sing)" The king is in the alltogether, the altogether....." - Ian Mason Sat, 10 Jan 2009 05:00:28 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1697 Trish, [quote]Billy Joe, It looks like I fell for an urban legend.[/quote] Well, you're not the only one: My son caught me out yesterday about the Great Wall of China being visible from space. Urban Legend. It's not even visible from Low Earth Orbit. I went for google to confirm this, but my son reprimanded me and asked me to just think about it for a moment. "Could it actually be true?" he asked, and then he explained "The GWC is thinner than the average house!". I feel very proud to have a such a sceptical son. :) - BillyJoe Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:02:55 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1688 Again, nowhere did I intimate that drug addiction or alcoholism are 'diseases'. Not once. You keep bringing that up. But to suggest that the only 'remedy' to someone's addiction is through incarceration or other legal processes is wrong in the worst way. People used to be 'incarcerated' (shoved off into sanitoriums) when, instead of trying to understand the causes and treat them in some way, we decided it was better to hide them away. Fact: People get addicted to things. The 'things' can be various such as addiction to food, medicine, drugs, alcohol, other people, adrenaline rushes, sex. Anything that stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain and causes it to emit dopamine to such an extent that in its absence the person desires the thing (withdrawal) could be considered an addiction. As I noted, yes, many people can stop their addictions by their own force of will or conscious effort. That isn't an answer though. Many people cannot stop and there should be some form of clinical methodology to help people in absence of that self-determination. You have definitely never been there. I can tell. - Kuroyume Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:19:36 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1687 Billy Joe, It looks like I fell for an urban legend. - Trish Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:08:16 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1686 P.S. I quit a 2 1/2 pack a day cigaret habit while living in the Bronx. I've also been pregnant. While I didn't decide to become pregnant, I did decide to have sex, and birth control is not perfect... - Trish Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:00:30 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1683 Sorry, K, I still disagree with you. I don't think, and never said I think that someone, "wakes up one day & decides to be an addict." I think there can be a long series of bad choices, starting with smaller, simpler ones like, "Maybe I'll skip class & get high today." I think there’s no one phenomenon, "alcoholism/addiction" but a variety of behaviors being lumped together under a single label. Sure there are people who overuse alcohol &/or drugs, & the overuse can be accompanied by bad behavior. I'm skeptical a disease process driving these events. Looking at disease theory in light of Occam's razor, it’s as likely that bad behavior, selfish choices, bad decisions, short sightedness, laziness, unwise spending, taking advantage of friends/family, & partying instead of going to work/school, could be behaviors not caused by any disease process, but by the same causes as any bad behavior. Bad behavior runs in families, too. Most MDs are suspicious when a patient announces they have X disease, but this is exactly how alcoholism/addiction is "diagnosed." Treatment basically consists of rewriting one's life story to conform to a version of "I used (substance) to hide my unhappiness, it took over my life, I hit bottom & AA/NA saved me." Elizabeth Loftus' work shows how easy it is to get people to believe things happened to them that never did - and in her work, the people implanting the false event didn't even believe it. Consider how powerful this effect when a group who all believe the claim work on a person over a period of time, and Hollywood movie stories, public service announcements & books & articles support the claim. Just because lots of people say "everybody knows X exists", just because people declare it with ALL CAPS, doesn't make a hypothesis correct. The evidence that alcoholism/addiction are a disease is underwhelming - no birth defect, no infectious agent, no malformation, is consistently found in people who claim to be alcoholics/addicts & not in people who don't. The amounts of "substances" that are now claimed to be enough to qualify as "addicted" have been routinely consumed by humans who don't do their consuming in the context of antisocial, selfish or dumb behavior. The evidence that people only quit in the context of group confessions & meetings is contradicted by the fact that 80% of the people in the US who quit using alcohol or drugs do so on their own, while AA's "success" rate, according to their most recent Triennial Survey (1997) is about 5%, or worse than chance. - Trish Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:58:07 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1640 Trish, I strongly and forcibly disagree with everything you said above. People don't wake up one day and say to themselves, "Hey, I want to become addicted to ... !" How about people who become addicted to their prescription medications (unknowns like Elvis Presley and Rush Limbaugh come to mind)? How about peer pressure and availability? Believe it or not, there are places where drugs are so accessible (like some inner-city down-trodden neighborhoods), it is actually more difficult to avoid it then to find it. Again, unlike you most likely, I HAVE BEEN THERE (with capitals maybe it will sink in?). I know all about drug and alcohol addiction from being there myself 25+ years ago and seeing my friends and family members there as well. I can make a long pharmecopeia list of drugs that I've done if you'd like. All it takes is that chance opportunity to 'just try this'. People don't go up to acquaintences or friends at parties and attempt to give them their first drink saying, "Try this, you'll be an alcoholic in no time." Are we in the same world here? People experiment. People cave to peer pressure wanting to belong. People don't know what they're getting into. It is not always a very conscious, or conscientious, motive that brings people to addiction. Once you're physically and psychologically addicted, it is damned hard to quit. Maybe you should try it once and get back to me. :P Why do teens get pregnant often? It isn't that they decided to do so (in most cases). Raging hormones, lack of knowledge, spur of the moment. Humans are, to say the least, not excellently rational beings. We have desires, hormones, pheromones, irrational thoughts, ignorances, adrenaline, animal instincts that all compete against being so. - Kuroyume Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:02:33 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1634 [quote]A law was passed by the 84th United States Congress (P.L. 84-140) and approved by the President on July 30, 1956. President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a joint resolution declaring In God We Trust the national motto of the United States.[1][/quote] As a matter of interest (or not), Australia has no official motto (though it used to be "Advance Australia")and does not mention god on its currency. However, parliament begins with a prayer and the PM holds a bible and uses the words "so help me god" as he is sworn in. - BillyJoe Thu, 08 Jan 2009 10:30:37 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1631 Trish, [quote]...sneaks the phrase "in god we trust" onto coins [done in 1863 by a Denver mint employee without authority][/quote]According to an article in Wikipedia, "In God we trust" first appeared on the one cent coin in 186[b]4[/b] and the decision to do so came from [b]official[/b] sources: [quote]Congress passed the Coinage Act (1864) on April 22, 1864. This legislation changed the composition of the one-cent coin and authorized the minting of the two-cent coin. The Mint Director was directed to develop the designs for these coins for final approval of the Secretary. In God We Trust first appeared on the 1864 two-cent coin.[/quote] BJ - BillyJoe Thu, 08 Jan 2009 10:11:24 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1628 Sorry, K, I disagree. I think what is currently called "addiction" in our society is a collection of voluntary behaviors. First off, alcohol & drugs don't crawl down people's throats - especially with illegal drugs, it requires guile to acquire the goods. When people are unhappy with the "alcoholism" or "addiction" of their relatives it's possible that what they are really angry about is the lying, stealing, not working, skipping school, being unproductive, cheating on lovers/spouses, & general obnoxiousness. The "alcoholic/addict" claims "it wasn't me, it was the alcohol/drugs" which opens the door for people who are fed-up-to-here with the person to forgive & let them have time to "heal." The fact that our society as a whole & the criminal justice system in particular are now buying this sin-and-redemption narrative, and that Hollywood promulgates the narrative, makes it possible for impressionable humans to conform their behavior to the disease model and claim that their "substance of choice" is controlling their lives. Perhaps they do feel something outside them is affecting their behavior, but they are identifying the wrong phenomena - perhaps it's the story they conform to, rather than the substance, that is the outside factor influencing them. - Trish Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:53:35 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1620 I don't go for the 'disease theory' at all either and didn't promote or mention it. There is a possible medical component in genetics but that isn't a disease - it would be a propensity or disorder at most. When I mentioned success rate (at all), it was mostly to show that some people gobble this crap hook, line, and sinker. Look at, gulp, Gary Busey! One mania replaced by another. This isn't about fundamental resolution of addictions. It is simply transference of a fundamental problem without resolution or adequate care. Some may be correct in diagnosing this practice as 'treating the symptoms' rather than 'treating the cause' which sometimes occurs even in clinical medicine. The problem with 'treatment instead of jail' is that the organizations that are considered 'acceptable' are almost all religious-based with no real track record (because of the former part of their credentials). I find it appalling that no clinically approved therapies are offered in most cases but instead we get credulous therapies based upon unproven methodologies based upon tenuous ideologies. Replacing addictive behavior with religion is a thinly vailed shroud to brow-beat someone into disisting in destructive behavior. Yes, it is a complex issue. Humans are complex in their ideosynchracies and we don't know a whole lot about them because the answer has always been proferred by idiots (religious, pseudo-scientists, shaman, quacks). Methamphetamine addiction recovery (including relapse) is less than 10% (hard to pin down good statistics). I can understand that having been there to some extent myself. This is about several factors (at least). Susceptibility to addictiion, brain chemistry alteration, environmental circumstances. You cannot treat an addiction as a failing of someone's so-called 'spirit'. Nor can you brow-beat everyone into submission to quell addictions. Addiction is about propensity, circumstances, and decisions. Realizing the propensity, alleviating the circumstances (this is mainly a socio-economic issue), and providing individuals with outlets, information, and education are all ways to begin to stem such addictive behaviors. I hate to be gushy and all that but this isn't something that can be solved with a pill (yet, anyway). We need to look at the systemic reasons for the perpetuation of such behaviors and reduce their influence. - Kuroyume Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:15:05 +0100 http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/363-i-dont-get-the-joke-my-year-end-tirade.html#comment-1617 The disease theory was revived in 1934 by AA founder Bill Wilson, who had absolutely no science or medical background, and whose wife was sick of his decades of not working, sponging money out of her purse & spending his days drinking - and Bill's answer to this "real physical disease like diabetes or cancer" [AA Big Book] was a religious program based on the Oxford Group's program of public confessions designed to be entertaining recruitment tools [OG kicked Wilson out because they wanted to concentrate on recruiting rich, influential people, not Bill's alcoholics]. I'm concerned about the disease theory of alcoholism/addiction as a skeptic, because of the lack of science in the claims for disease & treatments. And I'm extremely concerned as a citizen, with the new popularity of "mental health parity" laws that require health insurance to pay for drug & alcohol treatment at the level they pay for physical diseases. Physical diseases are usually only treated after there is evidence of a physical problem - symptoms, signs, lab tests, deformities - and the success of treatments is measured by evidence as well. If alcohol/drug treatment were at all scientific, wouldn't people who go into rehab be tested to see if/how much their functioning is compromised, and be tested before release to see if functioning has improved. Since the only "diagnosis" of alcoholism [addiction] is someone going to a meeting and saying "I'm an alcoholic" and there's no objective measure of malfunctioning or of the success of treatment, AND rehab can cost anywhere from free [local AA meetings] to $25,000 a month for posh celeb retreats, the disease theory of alcoholism/addiction might be the straw that breaks our federal/state/local budgets as people just keep cycling in & out of rehab every time they piss off all their relatives, or face jail or need a place to stay [that health insurance can pay for]. My other concern, as a citizen, is the idea of treatment instead of jail. It is a function of society to motivate people to be civil & responsible, and we might need to do drastic things, like using prisons to keep dangerous people from killing innocent citizens, or punish people for harm to others. And while drugs are illegal to buy & possess without prescriptions, it is still the right of a citizen to disagree with the logic under which the government bans drugs, to see that there is not as much evidence of danger as the government would like us to believe, and even to use drugs when travelling in countries where those drugs are permitted. Forcing citizens into drug treatment seems to this citizen to be an attempt to force people to believe & spout ideology, and seems to me similar to the Soviet Union's use of psychiatric hospitals to house & try to change ideology of dissidents. Sorry this is so long, but it's a complex issue. - Trish Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:40:28 +0100