Believing and disbelieving

(This is a long post. HERE is a pdf for those who prefer to read it that way).

“How could anyone believe that?” is a natural question whenever someone believes what is contrary to the conventional wisdom, say, that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, or that Loch Ness monsters are real animals.

Since the role of unorthodox views in and out of science has been the focus of my academic interests for several decades, I had to think about that question in a variety of contexts. My conclusion long ago was that this is the wrong question, the very opposite of the right question, which is,

“How does anyone ever come to believe differently than others do?” (1)

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It’s a widespread illusion that we believe things because they’re true. It’s an illusion that we all tend to harbor about ourselves. Of course I believe what’s true! My beliefs aren’t wrong! It’s the others who are wrong.

However, we don’t acquire beliefs because they’re true, we acquire them through being taught that they’re true. For the first half-a-dozen or a dozen years of our lives, before we have begun to learn how to think truly for ourselves, as babies and children we almost always believe what parents and teachers tell us. Surely that has helped the species to survive. But no matter what the reason might be, there’s ample empirical evidence for it. For instance, many people during their whole lifetime stick to the religion that they imbibed almost with mother’s milk; those who reject that religion do so at earliest in adolescence.

That habit of believing parents and teachers tends to become ingrained. Society’s “experts”  — scientists and doctors, surrogate parents and teachers — tend to be believed as a matter of habit.

So how do some people ever come to believe other than what they’ve been taught and what the experts say?

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I was prompted to this train of thought by receiving yet again some comments intended for this blog and which were directed at minor details, from people whom I had asked, long ago, to cut through this underbrush and address the chief point at issue: “What is the proof that HIV causes AIDS?”

Whenever I’ve asked this of commentators like Fulano-etc.-de-Tal, or Chris Noble, or Snout, or others who want to argue incessantly about ancillary details, the exchange has come to an end. They’ve simply never addressed that central issue.

And it’s not only these camp followers. The same holds for the actual HIV/AIDS gurus, the Montagniers and Gallos and Faucis. Fauci threatens journalists who don’t toe the orthodox line. Gallo hangs up on Gary Null when asked for citations to the work that made him famous.

Why can’t these people cite the work on which their belief is supposedly based?

Finally it hit me: Because their belief wasn’t formed that way. They didn’t come to believe because of the evidence.
The Faucis and Gallos came to believe because they wanted to, because a virus-caused AIDS would be in their professional bailiwick, and they were more than happy to take an imperfect correlation as proof of causation.
The camp followers came to believe simply because they were happy to believe what the experts say and what “everyone else” believes. Who are they to question the authority of scientific experts and scientific institutions?

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To question “what everyone knows”, there has to be some decisive incentive or some serendipitous conjunction. I’ll illustrate that by describing how I came to believe some things that “everyone else” believes and some things that “everyone else” does not believe.

The first unorthodox opinion I acquired was that Loch Ness monsters are probably real living animals of some unidentified species. How did I come to that conclusion?
Serendipity set the stage. Reading has been my lifelong pleasure. I used to browse in the local library among books that had just been returned and not yet reshelved, assuming that these would be the most interesting ones. Around 1961, I picked from that pile a book titled Loch Ness Monster, by Tim Dinsdale. I recall my mental sneer, for I knew like everyone else that this was a mythical creature and a tangible tourist attraction invented by those canny Scots. But I thumbed the pages, and saw a set of glossy photos: claimed stills from a film! If these were genuine . . . . So I borrowed the book. Having read it, I couldn’t make up my mind. The author seemed genuine, but also very naïve. Yet his film had been developed by Kodak and pronounced genuine. Could it be that Nessies are real?
I was unable to find a satisfactory discussion in the scientific literature. So I read whatever other books and articles I could find about it. I also became a member of the Loch Ness Investigation, a group that was exploring at Loch Ness during the summers, and I followed their work via their newsletters — I couldn’t participate personally since I then lived in Australia.
A dozen years later, on sabbatical leave in England, I took a vacation trip to Loch Ness. More serendipity: there I encountered Dinsdale. Later I arranged lecture tours for him in the USA (where I had migrated in 1965). Coming to know Dinsdale, coming to trust his integrity, seeing a 35mm copy of his film umpteen times during his talks, brought conviction.
It had taken me 12-15 years of looking at all the available evidence before I felt convinced.

The unorthodox view that underwrites this blog is that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. How did I come by that belief in something that “everyone else” does not believe?
More serendipity. Having concluded in the early 1970s that Nessies were probably real, I became curious why there hadn’t been proper scientific investigations despite the huge amount of publicity over several decades. That led eventually to my change of academic field from chemistry to science studies, with special interest in heterodoxies. So I was always on the lookout for scientific anomalies and heresies to study. In the mid-1990s, I came across the book by Ellison and Duesberg, Why We Will Never Win the War on AIDS (interesting info about this here ; other Ellison-Duesberg articles here).
Just as with Dinsdale’s book, I couldn’t make up my mind. The arguments seemed sound, but I didn’t feel competent to judge the technicalities. So, again, I looked for other HIV/AIDS-dissenting books, and wrote reviews of a number of them. Around 2005, that led me to read Harvey Bialy’s scientific autobiography of Duesberg. For months thereafter, I periodically reminded myself that I wanted to check a citation Bialy had given, for an assertion that obviously couldn’t be true, namely, that positive HIV-tests in the mid-1980s among teenage potential military recruits from all across the United States had come equally among the girls as among the boys. The consequences of checking that reference are described in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory.
As with Nessie, it had taken me more than ten years of looking into the available evidence to become convinced of the correctness of something that “everyone else” does not believe.

So am I saying that I always sift evidence for a decade before making up my mind?
Of course not. I did that only on matters that were outside my professional expertise.

Studying chemistry, I didn’t question what the instructors and the textbooks had to say. I surely asked for explanations on some points, and might well have raised quibbles on details, but I didn’t question the periodic table or the theory of chemical bonding or the laws of thermodynamics or any other basic tenet.

That, I suggest, is quite typical. Those of us who go into research in a science don’t begin by questioning our field’s basic tenets. Furthermore, most of us never have occasion to question those tenets later on. Most scientific research is, in Kuhn’s words (2), puzzle-solving. In every field there are all sorts of little problems to be solved; not little in the sense of easy, but in the sense of not impinging on any basic theoretical issues. One can spend many lifetimes in chemical research without ever questioning the Second Law of thermodynamics, say, or quantum-mechanical calculations of electron energies, and so on and so forth.

So: Immunologists and virologists and pharmacologists and others who came to do research on HIV/AIDS from the mid-1980s onwards have been engaged in trying to solve all sorts of puzzles. They’ve had no reason to question the accepted view that HIV causes AIDS, because their work doesn’t raise that question in any obvious way; they’re working on very specialized, very detailed matters — designing new antiretroviral drugs, say; or trying to make sense of the infinite variety of “HIV” strains and permutations and recombinations; or looking for new strategies that might lead to a useful vaccine; and so on and so forth. Many tens of thousands of published articles illustrate that there are no end of mysterious puzzles about “HIV/AIDS” waiting to be solved.

The various people who became activist camp followers, like the non-scientist vigilantes among the AIDStruth gang, didn’t begin by trying to convince themselves, by looking into the primary evidence, that the mainstream view is correct: they simply believed it, jumped on the very visible bandwagon, took for granted that the conventional view promulgated by official scientific institutions is true.

It is perfectly natural, in other words, for scientists and non-scientists to believe without question that HIV causes AIDS even though they have never seen or looked for the proof.

What is not natural is to question that, and the relatively small number of individuals who became HIV/AIDS dissidents, AIDS Rethinkers, HIV Skeptics, did so because of idiosyncratic and specific reasons. Women like Christine Maggiore, Noreen Martin, Maria Papagiannidou, Karri Stokely, and others had the strongest personal reasons to wonder about what they were being told: since they had not put themselves at risk in the way “HIV” is supposedly acquired, and since they were finding the “side” effects of antiretroviral drugs intolerable, the incentive was strong to think for themselves and look at the evidence for themselves.
Many gay men have had similar reason to question the mainstream view, and some unknown but undoubtedly large number of gay men are living in a perpetual mental and emotional turmoil: on one hand much empirical evidence of what the antiretroviral drugs have done to their friends, on the other hand their own doctors expressing with apparent confidence the mainstream view. So only a visible minority of gay men have yet recognized the failings of HIV/AIDS theory.
One of the first to do so, John Lauritsen, was brought to question the mainstream view for the idiosyncratic personal reason that, as a survey research analyst, he could see that the CDC’s classification scheme was invalid.
Among scientists, Peter Duesberg recognized some of the errors of HIV/AIDS theory because he understood so much about retroviruses and because he had not himself been caught up in the feverish chase for an infectious cause of AIDS. Robert Root-Bernstein, too, with expertise in immunology , could recognize clearly from outside the HIV/AIDS-research establishment the fallacy of taking immunedeficiency as some new phenomenon. Other biologists, too, who were not involved in HIV/AIDS work, could see things wrong with HIV/AIDS theory: Charles A. Thomas, Jr., Harvey Bialy, Walter Gilbert, Kary Mullis, Harry Rubin, Gordon Stewart, Richard Strohman, and many others who have put their names to the letter asking for a reconsideration.

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To summarize:

Mainstream researchers rarely if ever question the basis for the contemporary beliefs in their field. It’s not unique to HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS researchers and camp followers never cite the publications that are supposed to prove that HIV causes AIDS for the reason that they never looked for such proof, they simply took it for granted on the say-so of the press-conference announcement and subsequent “mainstream consensus”.

The people who did look for such proof, and realized that it doesn’t exist, were:
—  journalists covering “HIV/AIDS” stories (among those who wrote books about it are Jad Adams, Elinor Burkett, John Crewdson, Celia Farber, Neville Hodgkinson, Evan Lambrou, Michael Leitner, Joan Shenton);
—  directly affected, said-to-be-HIV-positive people, largely gay men and also women like those mentioned above;
—  individuals for a variety of individual reasons, as illustrated above for John Lauritsen and myself;
—  scientists in closely related fields who were not working directly on HIV/AIDS.

That last point is pertinent to the refrain from defenders of HIV/AIDS orthodoxy that highly qualified scientists like Duesberg or Mullis are not equipped to comment because they have never themselves done any research on HIV or AIDS. But that’s precisely why they were able to see that this HIV/AIDS Emperor has no clothes — scientists working directly on the many puzzles generated by this wrong theory have no incentive, no inclination, no reason to question the hypothesis; indeed, the psychological mechanism of cognitive dissonance makes it highly unlikely that scientists with careers vested in HIV/AIDS orthodoxy will be able to recognize the evidence against their belief.
More generally, this is the reason why the history of science contains so many cases of breakthroughs being made by outsiders to a particular specialty: coming to it afresh, they are not blinded by the insider dogmas.

So there is nothing unique about the fact that the failings of HIV/AIDS theory have been discerned by outsiders and not by insiders, and that the insiders are not even familiar with the supposed proofs underlying their belief. Nor is it unique that the dogma has many camp followers who never bothered to look for the supposed proofs of the mainstream belief. What is unique to HIV/AIDS theory is the enormous damage it has caused, by making ill or actually killing hundreds of thousands (at least). The annals of modern medicine have no precedent for this, which is another reason why thoughtless supporters of HIV/AIDS orthodoxy may feel comfortable with it despite never having sought evidence for it.

So here’s the question to put to everyone who insists that HIV causes AIDS:

HOW  DID  YOU  COME  TO  BELIEVE  THAT?
WHAT  CONVINCED  YOU?

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Cited:
(1) Henry H. Bauer, Beyond Velikovsky: The History of a Public Controversy, University of Illinois Press, 1984; chapter 11, “Motives for believing”.
(2) Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed., enlarged; 1st ed. 1962)

Anonymous comments

Please note what my page “Re COMMENTS” says:

“Giving a fake e-mail address makes it less likely that your comment will be accepted.”

Sometimes a comment cries out for modification — there was such a case today. Then I try to send an e-mail asking about that. When my query is returned with “Addressee unknown”, I don’t post the original comment.

Commentators don’t need to sign with their real name, and they don’t even need to reveal their identity to me, but they do need to furnish a genuine e-address.

Impersonation is a crime, even on the Internet

“Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau today announced the arrest of a 49-year-old man for creating multiple aliases to engage in a campaign of impersonation and harassment . . . . The defendant, RAPHAEL HAIM GOLB, was arrested on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. . . . [perpetrated] in order to influence and affect debate . . . and in order to harass . . .  scholars who disagree with his viewpoint. GOLB used computers at New York University (NYU) in an attempt to mask his true identity when conducting this Internet scheme. . . .
GOLB is charged with Identity Theft in the Second Degree, a class E felony, which is punishable by up to 1⅓ to 4 years in prison; Identity Theft in the Third Degree, Criminal Impersonation in the Second Degree, Forgery in the Third Degree and Aggravated Harassment in the Second Degree, all class A misdemeanors, which are each punishable by up to 1 year in prison”
(News Release, New York County District Attorney, 5 March 2009).

The disputed issues concern the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the legal and other circumstances make the case of some interest to AIDS Rethinkers and HIV Skeptics, who have become quite familiar with harassment and impersonation practiced by HIV/AIDS groupies and vigilantes.

Golb apparently began his campaign in reaction to a museum exhibit featuring work by Robert Cargill. Cargill had set Google Alerts to track material about the Dead Sea Scrolls and noticed suspiciously similar comments coming from an apparent variety of sources. His 2-year investigation, which included tracking IP addresses, is described on the website, “Who is Charles Gadda?”

“Prosecutors said Mr. Golb opened an e-mail account in the name of Lawrence H. Schiffman, the New York University professor who disagreed with Mr. Golb’s father. He sent messages in Professor Schiffman’s name to various people . . ., fabricating an admission by Professor Schiffman that he had plagiarized some of Professor Golb’s work . . . . Raphael Golb also set up blogs under various names that accused Dr. Schiffman of plagiarism . . . . ‘It’s very easy to open an account using any name you want on the Internet. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But when you start using another person’s true identity for some purpose, you’re crossing the line into a possible identity theft crime or impersonation crime’. . . . ‘We debated the theories,’ Dr. Schiffman said . . . , referring to Mr. Golb’s father. ‘I thought that’s what scholarship is about. You don’t have to impersonate me’” (“Identity-theft arrest in dispute over Dead Sea Scrolls”).

“’I can’t believe this would happen,’ . . . [Schiffman] said. ‘We are supposed to be doing scholarly interchange’” (“U. of C. scholar’s son charged with identity theft, harassment”)

“Schiffman issued a statement after Golb’s arrest: ‘. . . . Reasoned intellectual discourse relies on integrity. When an individual, in seeking to advance a particular view, engages in impersonation and falsehood, he or she undermines the precepts of higher inquiry’” (“The arrest of Raphael Golb”).

“’I don’t know what caused the transition from the proper intellectual discourse,’ Prof. Schiffman said . . . . ‘Usually these things happen because someone hates their ex-wife. But this? Who would do this?’ . . . . ‘It’s the nature of academic life that you have scholars in disagreement. They tend to debate in academic publications such as books and peer-reviewed journal articles, and sometimes at academic conferences,’ Prof. Levitt Kohn said” (“Curse of the scrolls”)

Why the underhanded roundabout rigmarole?
“Mr. Schiffman said that if Raphael Golb had knocked on his office door saying, ‘I think my father’s right, and I think you’re wrong, and is it OK if I come to some conference and bring the reasons why?’, he would have had no objection. ‘The guy could have been a big friend of ours. That’s what’s so stupid about all this’” (Steve Kolowich, “The fall of an academic cyberbully”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 March 2009, A1, 8-11).

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Raphael Golb is a lawyer, not an academic. But some academics, too, behave just like that: attempting anonymity, attempting character assassination, being anything but honest, open, straightforward.

Just like Golb, all that the HIV/AIDS groupies and vigilantes would have to do to make their case and demolish their opposition is to cite the published articles that prove HIV to be the cause of AIDS.
Instead of spending countless time in attacking persons and spewing vitriol and making fools of themselves and disgracing their professions, all that the HIV/AIDS groupies and vigilantes would have to do is just cite the articles that prove HIV as the cause of AIDS.
Just cite the articles, and all we AIDS Rethinkers and HIV Skeptics will stop being such annoying thorns in your sides and hair.

So why are those articles not cited?
Because they don’t exist.
The people who should most know are the co-discoverers of “HIV”.
Montagnier, for his part, has consistently denied knowledge of such publications, and has consistently gone further to say that HIV alone does not cause AIDS, that it requires co-factors and a pre-weakened immune system. Indeed, more than 15 years ago, articles from his laboratory showed that “HIV” in the presence of antibiotics does not kill T-cells whereas in absence of antibiotics “it” does, proving that some bacterial type of agent in “HIV” “isolates” is the killer.
Gallo, for his part, has consistently refused to answer requests for the pertinent citations, most recently on the Gary Null radio program, where he offered the consensus of official organizations as proof. Testifying in the Parenzee case, he had even claimed that purification of “HIV” ”isolates” was unnecessary.
All the researchers and groupies who took up “HIV/AIDS” after the Gallo-Montagnier “discovery” have simply taken the matter on faith. They can’t cite the pertinent proofs because they never looked for them. They can’t engage in rational discourse now because of cognitive dissonance: They cannot admit to themselves that they accepted on faith, and built their careers on, a mistaken view that was without proof when they adopted the belief as their own without first looking into its merits.

Statistics….

Here’s an illustration of how to lie with statistics. Have the media disseminate estimates as though they were facts:

“Few sexually active teens in US get HIV test — CDC
Thu Jun 25, 2009 3:08pm EDT
CHICAGO, June 25 (Reuters) – Nearly half the HIV-positive U.S. adolescents and young adults are unaware of their infection, and less than a quarter of sexually active high school students are tested for the virus, U.S. health officials said on Thursday.”
— Unnamed “officials”, easily confused with “experts”
— “Nearly” half giving a spurious sense of exact knowledge
— Giving a number for something that cannot be measured

“Only 22 percent of sexually active high school students are tested for human immunodeficiency virus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an analysis using data from a 2007 survey of students in grades 9-12 (ages 14-18).”
— “Sexually active” is self-reported, of course
— So is being tested, since that’s confidential

“people aged 12 to 24 represented 4.4 percent of the estimated 1.1 million people in the United States infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Yet they represented 10 percent of the estimated 232,700 people living with the virus without knowing it.”
— It cannot be known how many are “infected” without knowing it.
— CDC models for the “epidemic” have been shown to be invalid in a number of respects, see The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory.
— Note the misleading precision of “232,700”; so much more impressive than being honest and saying “about 230,000”. Even were the models valid, they couldn’t be more precise than that.

“HIV testing was more common among students who had ever been taught in school about AIDS or HIV infection than among those who had not”
— Hurrah for successful propaganda.

Promises, promises…. “Possible cure for ‘HIV’”

One of the worst aspects of the media coverage of “science” is the explicit aim of bringing the latest and most exciting “news” from the realms of science. To disseminate what has just been announced by some scientist or laboratory or institution of science or medicine is to collaborate in an exercise in self-serving spin which, all too often, arouses totally unwarranted hopes.

An infamous and notorious instance was the “discovery” of “the” gene that “causes” breast cancer. Untold numbers of women will have expected genuine deliverance from having to worry about contracting breast cancer, only to be thoroughly disappointed; and some number of women continue to undergo “prophylactic” removal of the mammaries if they are told that they have that gene. The unwarranted hope and subsequent disappointment has been well described by Elisa Segrave (“Still living in hope”, Sunday Times [UK)], 9 July 1995, section 7, p. 5 — review of Kevin Davies & Michael White, Breakthrough: The Quest to Isolate the Gene for Hereditary Breast Cancer, Macmillan).

In general usage, “science” has the connotation of reliable. If you want to convince people, you don’t say, “It’s been proven”, you say, “It’s been scientifically proven”. If you want to demolish someone’s claim, you can’t be more emphatic than to say, “That’s not scientific”, or perhaps, “That’s not science, that’s pseudoscience”.

Nothing new in science is reliable. Nothing that’s “news” in science is reliable. Real science isn’t news.

The fact of the matter is that reliable “science” doesn’t emerge fully formed from some experiment or statistical survey. There’s all the difference in the world between science now being done, “frontier” science, and the stuff — “textbook science” —  that’s been winnowed away from much chaff through running long gauntlets of being tested and critiqued.

So it strikes me as criminally irresponsible when the media propagate wild and wishful speculation by researchers who are anxious for the spotlight in order to impress their sponsors and potential funders, as when it has to do with a “possible cure for HIV”:

“Treatment of HIV ’sanctuary’ cells creates path for possible cure: researchers (Amy Minsky, Canwest News Service 21 June 2009)
Scientists have found a new way to fight — and possibly eradicate — HIV, according to a study released Sunday by a team of Canadian and American researchers.”

No doubt in order to emphasize how truly scientific and reliable this news is, that “news” item includes an impressive photograph; whose content and credit line mark it as a “stock” photo having nothing to do specifically with the text of the article or the claim reported in it.

Treatment of HIV ’sanctuary’ cells creates path for possible  cure: researchers
Photograph by: Guang Niu, Getty Images

“’For 15 years we haven’t had a clue,’ said Dr. Rafick-Pierre Sekaly. ‘But now, we do’.”
What could sound more worthy of trust? Or more likely to arouse hope among “HIV-positive” people who believe the HIV/AIDS story?

“The new ‘weapon’ will combine antiretroviral therapy, which is the current treatment for HIV/AIDS, with a new one the researchers are calling an intelligent targeted chemotherapy.”
Wow! “Intelligent” targeting, no less! At last the jackpot has been sprung!

“A study will begin in September to test the validity of these results. If targeted chemotherapy successfully eliminates HIV, researchers say the feasibility of the treatment will be determined over the next two to three years, with medication becoming available a few years after that.”
So it’s going to another half-a-dozen years? So what, a real cure is worth waiting for, and we can hang on until then with the drugs which, after all, so we’re told, are getting better all the time  and easier to tolerate.

Of course, there are some caveats that excited readers might miss or not fully appreciate:
“the new treatment’s success will be contingent on a patient’s positive response to antiretroviral therapy. . . . Some HIV-positive patients do not respond to antiretroviral therapy. For those patients, zapping the cell will not likely yield any significant results.”
And even when they do “respond” — i.e., when the meaningless viral-load test purports to show “control” of “the virus” — the side effects of the antiretroviral drugs hardly make this a promise of the sort of cure that ill people look for, namely, a return to genuinely trouble-free health.

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ScienceDaily, “Your source for the latest research news”, seemingly presents itself as the place to get reliable information. It covers the same story in the same way:
“Approach For Possibly Eradicating HIV Infection Discovered”
and makes it seem properly trustworthy by mentioning that the relevant “discovery” is appearing in Nature Medicine online and later in the print journal.
No doubt the researchers see nothing wrong in releasing this “news” because of their care to point out that “this is a preliminary finding”; but that caveat loses its import under the weight of the immediately following “we are hopeful that this research discovery will guide us in eradicating HIV infection in the body”.

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Voice of America did not hesitate to tell the world:
“HIV Hiding Places Found”, by Joe DeCapua —
“There’s been a breakthrough in AIDS research”.
Great! A breakthrough! That’s what we’ve all been waiting for, for about 3 decades now.

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I commented in an earlier post on a similarly misguided arousing of hopes for an anti-“HIV” gene-therapy based on the claimed immunity conferred by the CCR5Δ32 gene, even though the actual geographic distributions of “HIV” and of CCR5Δ32 fail to support the notion that it confers immunity.  That trial is still going ahead, of course.