France's Bogdanoff Twins Die Days Apart(bbc.co.uk) |
France's Bogdanoff Twins Die Days Apart(bbc.co.uk) |
(If you post a link, a little context helps others to see if it is something they might like to read.)
[All french geeks now in their 40s took that show right in their face] #love
Also I am trying to understand their relevance / importance in the grand scheme. Why is this getting traction?
I don't think that is true at all for "geeks" that witnessed first-hand[1] their manipulative and deceptive attempts at defending their PhDs and scientific papers in early 2000's. After that they doubled down on the intelligent design bullshit, used any opportunity to promote their books (fair enough), while attacking the few journalists that actually tried to expose the fraud.
They should have sticked to sci-fi, but even in their early days they couldn't help but try to vulgarize proper science, even though they weren't really qualified. Good intentions don't make up for peddling pseudoscience, plagiarism, and the constant smoke and mirrors. And it seems they were also facing some pretty serious legal issues in their personal life.
[1] https://forum.hardware.fr/hfr/Discussions/Sciences/topikunik...
To my children they are just a fascinating case of botched cosmetic surgery
That's just my social bubble, no idea about the wider public.
Their books are generally intended to popularize the scientific work of real researchers. They are well written. Their public appearances on TV are not without humor and self-mockery. They have deserved the sympathy of many french people.
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanoff/
If this summary is correct, they seem to have deserved their PhD in the sense that they managed to bluff their way through it. A bit like getting the gold medal for a marathon as a consolation price when you've managed to do just 10 metres of it (on a unicycle, for reasons unclear to anyone observing).
It was utter nonsense, and a quick read of any page in any of the papers supporting their PhD thesis from someone with working knowledge of the area will show it to be word salads.
Others linked to John Baez's analysis of the case, which stands correct 20 years later.
I always think that there must be a component of drug addiction in people that undergoes so much extreme transformations, and still go back for more. Maybe Painkillers applied in those surgeries have something to do with that. Is a trap for rich people affected from personal insecurities
What the data suggests is that in aggregate we're largely moving death around. From who to whom is the question.
That's not the old cohort that typically dies from Covid anymore.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/indiana/indiana-life-insuran...
Their friends said they were convinced their healthy lifestyle would protect them and they were admitted to hospital in mid-December."
Imagine being over 70 thinking you aren't at risk.
It's really a shame.
I do (just the one thankfully, whose 'intuition' tells them that it will be quite alright, despite having frequent contacts with other people), and it's really not great knowing that there is very real risk of seeing them on the ICU at some point.
"die of Covid"
"the brothers had not been vaccinated against Covid-19."
"Their friends said they were convinced their healthy lifestyle would protect them"
"Asked why they had chosen not to have the Covid vaccines if they were not themselves anti-vaxxers, Luc Ferry said on Monday: "Like Igor, Grichka wasn't antivax, he was just antivax for himself. "They were both athletic, with not an inch of fat, and they thought the vaccine was more dangerous than the virus.""
https://www.lamontagne.fr/paris-75000/actualites/covid-19-qu...
From 31 may to 14 november 2021 a total of 2854 unvaccinated people died of COVID19 in France and 2179 died while having at least one shot of vaccine.
About 77% of the population has at least one shot in France.
Charlatans and pseudoscience are like moths to a flame. :(
I was too young but I'm still not convinced their TV show didn't raise a few eyebrows back then too, since they didn't hesitate to invite crackpots and talk about stuff like telekinesis.
It seems like they were actually antivax but did not want the social stigma associated with the term. "I'm not antivax but however yadda yadda"
It reminds me of the classical "Racism is pretty fun because it does not exists, just ask around you'll see nobody is"
In the U. S., it would have been a sentence ripped right out of the jackass playbook: “I’m not a racist, but…”, <says blatantly racist statement>.
One of my friends says he is not vegetarian or vegan, he just doesn't eat meat and tells everyone they should not eat meat.
In more general terms, outside of covid for a moment, do you think so? If you have been vaccinated for X, Y, and Z, but think the risks of vaccinating for R out weigh the benefits, does that make you antivax?
Being "fit" certainly helps your immune system. But as we see here, it doesn't make you invincible.
Conversely, if there's someone for whom medical consensus agrees is legitimately better off without vaccines (e.g: due to some immune system condition), then I wouldn't call them antivax.
“Now look, I’m not racist but the dry air this winter has done a number on my sinuses”
In their peer group they have many very unhealthy people and seen a lot of friends die. Some died from botched unnecessary medical interventions or were causalities of medical bureaucracy or malpractice. Some have also been screwed over significantly by government authorities at different points in their lives. This leads to hesitancy and skepticism for new treatments, and authorities.
That is to say, they need to be convinced that the health authorities promoting vaccines now are different from the ones that promoted treatments that killed their peers. They need to be convinced that the same government authorities promoting or requiring vaccines are now more trustworthy than when they fucked them over in the past.
This isn't necessarily a good reason with respect to the vaccine, but I hope it helps you relate
If you do not properly hospitalize serious Covid patients, you get more Covid death... If you properly treat them, you postpone the treatment of other sicknesses and increase death count in another population.
Then you keep an excess mortality that just moves around.
So something caused more people to die than usual. What is it? (rhetorical question not asking directly).
Universities don't hand out PhDs to just anyone who can spare a few years writing non-sensical papers for free.
Try to get into a half-decent MSc program, let alone doctoral school, without the relevant undergrad degree. If you aren't TV famous, good luck with that.
> Not every student who graduates will become a world-renowned researcher.
Nobody claims the opposite. But that doesn't imply that PhD grads who don't become top researchers have just spent 3-6 years of their life writing non-sensical papers. Many PhD students drop out if they reach a dead-end, even though they were perfectly qualified otherwise. If you can't produce research that gets cited, you're a net negative to the lab and its staff, any supervisor that has skin in the game won't just let you go on for years.
> a researcher who is so far above the rest of the world
Except it's not just one professor but literally everyone who tried to engage with them in a reasonable discussion. Hell, I was an undergrad student at the time, and one of my calculus TAs was part of these people trying to make sense of their claims (there was no shortage of online forums where the brothers would try to defend themselves). Not a world-class researcher or even someone who made an academic career, just a competent PhD student in quantum groups.
The CNRS has written a 30+ page report that explains why their work is completely devoid of anything of scientific value, and for the few parts that make sense, not even at the standards of an MSc thesis. Do you think the typical CNRS researchers have enough spare time to read two PhD theses, multiple papers and write a comprehensive report, for fun?
And that's not even the worst part. If they had been acting in good faith, they wouldn't have sued several newspapers and regularly misquoted/mistranslated renowned physicists.
They were fraudsters, and just paid the ultimate price of their lack of scientific integrity.
Most vaccine deaths seem to be among 20 somethings
There's no evidence you have for this assertion that for children the vaccine is more dangerous than the illness. Neither are particularly dangerous at all for young children, but the disease has been linked to deaths in children.
Subsequently better evidence became available, and it was decided to extend vaccination to under-18s.
Perhaps whatshisface is merely recalling six-month-old official advice?
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccinat...