Exaggeration by a UN Agency? Say it Ain't So!

The BBQ Pit
21

[QUOTE=Terrifel]
Of course. But if you read what YOU have written in this thread, YOU suggested that government agencies cause problems, not solve them.
So I ask you again: what disease will the UN create now? Do you think they will use the same strategies of disease creation as the March of Dimes did to save their big fat jobs when that knuckle-headed underling Salk actually cured polio?
[/QUOTE]
God, you’re ignorant. First of all, Salk cured polio thanks to the efforts of private individuals, not government.

This critical step, which enabled Salk to develop a vaccine, was accomplished on a shoestring budget in a makeshift lab. Enders and colleagues initially had no protective apparatus, had no sterile hoods for working with viruses, and had to book glassware for experiments in advance since there wasn’t enough to go around. They made do by being creative: Weller purchased a $15,000 autoclave at auction for $25, and two craftsmen in the building built them some primitive equipment.Cite.

Government, meanwhile, wasn’t much help.

Samuel Broder, who succeeded DeVita in 1988 as the director of the National Cancer Institute, and who is currently the chief medical officer at Celera Genomics, believes that we require new breakthroughs in the lab – particularly in understanding the process of how cancer spreads – before we can be confident of great gains in treatment.

“I call it the iron-lung syndrome,” he told me. "If you had demanded that the N.I.H. solve the problem of polio not through independent, investigator-driven discovery research but by means of a centrally directed program, the odds are very strong that you would get the very best iron lungs in the world – portable iron lungs, transistorized iron lungs – but you wouldn’t get the vaccine that eradicated polio.Cite.

And second, your analogy is stupid. No one (including me) has said the UN has created a disease. The problem wasn’t AIDS; it was lying about the impact of AIDS in order to get more money. So the UN wouldn’t create a new disease, dumbass, it would create new lies about numbers. Jees Louis. Learn to fucking read.

22

[QUOTE=Liberal]

And second, your analogy is stupid. No one (including me) has said the UN has created a disease. The problem wasn’t AIDS; it was lying about the impact of AIDS in order to get more money. So the UN wouldn’t create a new disease, dumbass, it would create new lies about numbers. Jees Louis. Learn to fucking read.
[/QUOTE]

Um, no, you learn to fucking read. Could you point to where in the article it says that the UN lied about the impact of AIDS in order to get more money? For someone who enjoys logical problems as much as you, you sure are good at jumping to conclusions based on nothing but your imagination.

23

[QUOTE=athelas]
So of course, it is never correct to hold the UN to account for its dodgy accounting, no matter how egregious. After all, to do so would make one a “dickhead”.
[/QUOTE]
What a perspicacious reading of my words. And so few lines between which to do so! What a talent you are, good sir.

24

Oh, yeah? Well, when blue-helmeted thugs break down your door, take away your guns and drag your children off to Secular Humanist Camp, just don’t come crying to me!

25

[QUOTE=Eonwe]
Um, no, you learn to fucking read. Could you point to where in the article it says that the UN lied about the impact of AIDS in order to get more money? For someone who enjoys logical problems as much as you, you sure are good at jumping to conclusions based on nothing but your imagination.
[/QUOTE]
I haven’t said anything about the goddamn article. All I’ve talked about is the fucking OP. Let me spell that for you — O. P.

26

[QUOTE=Liberal]
I haven’t said anything about the goddamn article. All I’ve talked about is the fucking OP. Let me spell that for you — O. P.
[/QUOTE]
Okay; where in the fucking OP (how do you spell that again?) does it say that the U.N. lied? (Would you like me to put that question syllogistically?)

27

The part where it said the UN exaggerated the scope of the problem.

28

[QUOTE=Liberal]
God, you’re ignorant. First of all, Salk cured polio thanks to the efforts of private individuals, not government.

This critical step, which enabled Salk to develop a vaccine, was accomplished on a shoestring budget in a makeshift lab. Enders and colleagues initially had no protective apparatus, had no sterile hoods for working with viruses, and had to book glassware for experiments in advance since there wasn’t enough to go around. They made do by being creative: Weller purchased a $15,000 autoclave at auction for $25, and two craftsmen in the building built them some primitive equipment.Cite.

Government, meanwhile, wasn’t much help.

Samuel Broder, who succeeded DeVita in 1988 as the director of the National Cancer Institute, and who is currently the chief medical officer at Celera Genomics, believes that we require new breakthroughs in the lab – particularly in understanding the process of how cancer spreads – before we can be confident of great gains in treatment.

“I call it the iron-lung syndrome,” he told me. "If you had demanded that the N.I.H. solve the problem of polio not through independent, investigator-driven discovery research but by means of a centrally directed program, the odds are very strong that you would get the very best iron lungs in the world – portable iron lungs, transistorized iron lungs – but you wouldn’t get the vaccine that eradicated polio.Cite.

And second, your analogy is stupid. No one (including me) has said the UN has created a disease. The problem wasn’t AIDS; it was lying about the impact of AIDS in order to get more money. So the UN wouldn’t create a new disease, dumbass, it would create new lies about numbers. Jees Louis. Learn to fucking read.
[/QUOTE]

Let me get this straight, the US goverment didn´t give support to the developers of the polio vaccine, then some years later the WHO launches a world wide program to erradicate polio and succeeds almost completely but it`s hindered by lack of founds and regions in conflict.
WTF does the first have to do with the second and why this casts the UN in a bad light?

This is a kind of logic I can`t process.

29

This is where I lose the thread of thought, here. There are shades of meaning and nuance that can evade the meagre parsing skills of a country boy like myself. Let me see if I got this: the quote in the OP says the UN “overestimated”. This goes into friend Libs rhetorical machinery and comes out “exaggerated”. Which is true, but not wholly true.

If I honestly believe that my car gets 35 miles to the gallon, because when I multiply 8 times 6 I get 42, then I am “overestimating”. If I sell that car to my brother-in-law, telling him “35mph” because I believe it, that’s also “overestimating”. It only gets to be “exaggeration” if I know it only gets about 24.

Exaggeration requires intent and agency, whereas overestimation can be innocent dumfuk. I think thats a pretty important distinction between two very similar, but very different, descriptions.

Now, if I really believed that I was instructing friend Lib with information outside his plenum of knowledge, I might get a small but mean jolt to my starving ego. But I don’t. I think he probably knows exactly what those nuances are, and chose with calm deliberation.

30

If I might inject some sense into this argument: most of the countries with huge AIDS epidemics are also the countries that have very few resources to test the population for HIV infection. Typically, they concentrate resources on testing pregnant women who come into hospitals. Thus, in many countries, the estimates of HIV spread is based on a very small demographic and can largely be considered informed guesswork. This isn’t a criticism - with little information to work on, you take what you can get and try and apply the best models you can.

Given that many, if not most, of the people working on the global AIDS epidemic have been agitating for years for funding to test more people, its pretty unfair to blame them if low testing rates cause them to mis-estimate their numbers.

mischievous

31

[QUOTE=Liberal]
God, you’re ignorant. First of all, Salk cured polio thanks to the efforts of private individuals, not government.

This critical step, which enabled Salk to develop a vaccine, was accomplished on a shoestring budget in a makeshift lab. Enders and colleagues initially had no protective apparatus, had no sterile hoods for working with viruses, and had to book glassware for experiments in advance since there wasn’t enough to go around. They made do by being creative: Weller purchased a $15,000 autoclave at auction for $25, and two craftsmen in the building built them some primitive equipment.Cite.
[/quote]
Oh please, cure my ignorance won’t you? First, could you kindly explain where that quoted passage shows that polio was cured because of private individuals and not the government? Was their lab government funded or privately funded? And what does it have to do with the lies that the March of Dimes people (presumably, in your imagination) told to save their jobs after Salk killed the disease their charity was parasitizing?

Ah, your quoted passage about an imaginary strategy to treat polio clearly demonstrates the inefficacy of government agencies. That is an even better cite than your other one. The polio cite had some tangential connection to Salk, but this one invokes an entire parallel universe of hypothetical possibilities! What, indeed, would have happened if the NIH solved the problem of polio with iron lungs? It’s a fascinating question. Of course, in OUR universe they used Salk’s vaccine. But still, your point is well taken… in the Twilight Zone!

I’m doing the best I can. Your arguments are so overwhelming. So AIDS was not the problem after all? That is interesting. So now that these lies have been unearthed, I guess you believe that AIDS isn’t a problem anymore? Out of curiosity, do you think smallpox was ever a problem, or was that government-sponsored eradication program merely a front for something EVEN MORE NEFARIOUS?

Speaking of learning to read, I hope you don’t mind me using my telepathic powers to read your mind and speak for you, just as you’ve been speaking for the researchers at the UN AIDS agency, and indeed any government agency-funded researchers anywhere. You may be interested to know that, just as you imagine that AIDS is a vast government conspiracy,* there are also people who believe that privately owned pharmaceutical companies conspire to suppress cures for diseases, because sick people are more profitable. You might consider incorporating that into your own grand unified theory, if you haven’t already.

*with my psychic gifts I can plainly see that you do think this, so you needn’t deny it.

32

[QUOTE=Eonwe]

. . . you’re clearly implying that scientists are capable of being corrupted by money and/or power,
[/quote]

Yes, scientists are human like everyone else.

As I said in another post:

To which another poster replied:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9029398&postcount=752

See above.

33

The older I get, the more it seems to me that a greatly disproportionate percentage of “honest mistakes” seem to favor the person or organization that made the “honest mistake.”

34

[QUOTE=Liberal]
God, you’re ignorant.
[/quote]

Ahem. Having posted the above response, and after reviewing the thread a few times without success, I am now willing to concede that I may have been entirely whooshed, because I no longer have any idea what Liberal has been meaning to say. Perhaps I do need to learn to read after all. Therefore I would greatly value an explanation of the earlier exchange:

  1. Liberal argues that a UN agency has NO incentive to exaggerate the scope of the problem it was established to solve-- “None.” – while simultaneously stating that no government agency has any incentive to solve such a problem.
  1. Liberal implies (??) that such an agency has a vested interest in creating problems if the original one is solved.

The topic is AIDS claims. If (1.) UN AIDS has not exaggerated their claims, and (2.) they have a vested interest in creating problems-- then it follows that they would seek to create a new problem when AIDS is no longer perceived as such. They could “create” a new problem either by exaggerating claims, or by spreading disease. But if (1.) UN AIDS has no incentive to exaggerate claims, then the only alternative is to spread disease.

Am I leaving anything out here? Or am I just high on bad cranberry sauce? What the crap is missing from this analysis? I gotta admit, I hate to have my reading skills impugned. But if the gist of Liberal’s initial post wasn’t “the UN AIDS agency promotes disease,” then I hereby confess that I don’t understand it at all.

35

[QUOTE=Terrifel]

Am I leaving anything out here? Or am I just high on bad cranberry sauce? What the crap is missing from this analysis? I gotta admit, I hate to have my reading skills impugned. But if the gist of Liberal’s initial post wasn’t “the UN AIDS agency promotes disease,” then I hereby confess that I don’t understand it at all.
[/QUOTE]

He was saying they have no incentive to succeed in eradicating, which is different from “they seek to promote.” Equally wrong, of course, but different.

36

[QUOTE=brazil84]
The older I get, the more it seems to me that a greatly disproportionate percentage of “honest mistakes” seem to favor the person or organization that made the “honest mistake.”
[/QUOTE]
I think that’s probably because if an “honest mistake” doesn’t benefit a person or organization, no one doubts that it was honest.

If the UN had announced that their previous AIDS estimates were too low, would you be Pitting them for that as well? * "How could this happen? What possible incentive could a UN agency have to underreport the scope of the problem it is charged to study? :rolleyes: "*

Another possibility is that you’re simply getting more paranoid as you age.

37

[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
He was saying they have no incentive to succeed in eradicating, which is different from “they seek to promote.” Equally wrong, of course, but different.
[/QUOTE]
Okay, but then what was the deal about creating new problems when the old ones are solved? Who is the “I” who has the fat office and fat job and knuckle-headed underlings and all that? There is definitely a reference to creating problems, not just exploiting extant ones.

38

[QUOTE=Terrifel]
Okay, but then what was the deal about creating new problems when the old ones are solved? Who is the “I” who has the fat office and fat job and knuckle-headed underlings and all that? There is definitely a reference to creating problems, not just exploiting extant ones.
[/QUOTE]

Ah, true. I missed that part. Yep, he does seem to be saying that the UN will create problems if the old ones get solved.

39

[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
Ah, true. I missed that part. Yep, he does seem to be saying that the UN will create problems if the old ones get solved.
[/QUOTE]
The only other possibility I could think of, just now, is that in some bizarre manner that part was supposed to be understood as ENTIRELY HYPOTHETICAL. As in: “If I want to keep my problem-solving job, and someone solves that problem, I’d better create a new problem. Of course, such a course of action is impossible, so I mention it purely for rhetorical purposes.” Sort of like somebody saying: “If anyone’s caught outside in this rainstorm, they’d better learn how to grow gills.”

This interpretation seems like kind of a stretch. On the other hand, given the earlier argument citing polio treatment on Parallel Earth, I suppose anything’s possible.

40

[QUOTE=Liberal]
The part where it said the UN exaggerated the scope of the problem.
[/QUOTE]
Has anyone demonstrated that this was a deliberate exaggeration, as opposed to a simple overestimation? Because I think I missed that. I can see where the OP assumed it, but it seems to have gone surprisingly unjustified. Oh no, wait; not “surprisingly” - that other thing.

Perhaps you would find it an absolute doddle to go data-gathering across rural areas of respectively the most populous and poorest continents on Earth in the face of stiff cultural resistance and an unwillingness to admit to the problem. But both you and the OP seem content to completely ignore the practicalities of conducting such a worldwide survey and leap straight to accusations of nefarious intent.