Serving the public interest by supporting honest, accomplished, independent minded and often heroic distinguished scientists and other original thinkers and critics of ruling ideas in their right to free speech, publication and funding, and defending them against the overwhelming group prejudice, leadership resistance and internal science politics of the paradigm wars of cancer, AIDS, evolution, global warming, cosmology, particle physics, macroeconomics, health and medicine, diet and nutrition.
Why HIV/AIDS rules the Times and the World
June 1st, 2011How a blatantly incorrect paradigm got to rule the world
The network utility of ideas is related to tribal markings, not truth
When the utility of truth approaches zero for all of us, don’t blame Larry
If anyone is still wondering what lack of logical acuteness, psychological bias, group emotion or other factor is at the root of this astonishing survival of a concept which amounts in so many ways to rank stupidity, and yet inhabits the minds of so many intelligent, informed and otherwise reliable people, let us offer yet one more way of accounting for the phenomenon.
It is this. In the realm of computer software, the rickety and patchwork monstrosity of the Windows OS rose to the top and roundly defeated the rival Mac OS, despite all the beauty, innovation, reliability and simplified design of the latter. That is, until Steve Jobs totally revamped the MacOS from the ground up, giving it a UNIX base and UNIX power. Nowadays the MacOS is regaining the ground it lost. But there is still a huge inherent advantage that the Windows OS still enjoys and which was the secret to its early success in the face of the superior system.
That advantage was what is called by computer experts “network utility” – simply the fact that as more people adopt the same OS, the more useful it becomes to each user. Windows achieved an early advantage over Apple in terms of the number of users, since it was more attractive to business, and its network utility rose steeply accordingly, eventually to a height that Apple could not match. Only the enormous advantages of the new Mac Unix based system turned the tide, combined with the introduction of the iPod which made Apple newly fashionable in style and reputation.
Similarly, in the HIV/AIDS world, the network utility of the HIV/AIDS paradigm achieved rapid dominance because its advantages in terms of ease of funding and institutional backing soon outdid any alternative, whether it made complete sense or not.
The belated attempts of highly accurate reviewers to turn the tide were soon completely ineffectual, and like steel balls rolling down a seesaw plank when the incline becomes steep, the numbers of believers soon overwhelmed the number of skeptics.
Soon HIV/AIDS became as globally dominant as Windows.
The network utility of truth in HIV/AIDS: zero
When everybody settled on HIV as the cause of AIDS, and funding poured in to expand research on this basis, the network utility rose to heights which the network utility of truth could not match. In fact, the network utility of truth dwindled in about a year to zero, where it has stayed ever since.
Thus Peter Duesberg, the leading mind in the field who used his scalpel-sharp intellect and literary flair to eviscerate this comically fatheaded claim, was as noted, ostracized to an almost lethal extent for his trouble, and those who support him experienced the same response on all levels.
Professionals journalists were cut off from NIH scientists if they raised the topic of Duesberg by order of Anthony Fauci, who wrote in a newsletter than he had ordained that any such initiative would simply prove to him that the science reporter in question was incompetent, which on a political level was surely true.
For the NIH stance was matched throughout the field by everybody from scientists to health workers to gay activists. One of the latter when he learned that this writer viewed Duesberg’s science as impeccable and his rejection of the HIV/AIDS paradigm as completely authoritative broke off the conversation and retreated to a distance of some fifteen feet, in a physical demonstration of the psychology involved.
Such statements mark you as a member of a different and hostile tribe, and if you are within the system you will be marked as a black sheep if not a pariah, beyond the pale of respectability. If you wish to remain an insider, you must keep your true opinion to yourself and risk voicing it to only a few trusted longtime colleagues.
In such an atmosphere truth has much the same effect as informing an attractive member of the opposite sex who is waving a placard at OccupyWallStreet that you work for the Federal Reserve.
Integrity will get you nowhere
However one analyzes the failings of individuals in this arena – whether one blames them for confirmation bias and other scientific failings, or imagines them influenced, consciously or not, by group psychology, money, fear or power, this one fact remains.
The utility of believing in the paradigm HIV=AIDS is geometrically larger than challenging it in almost every situation, whether lab, conference. career interview or publishing a paper. On the one hand, the audience is global. On the other, a handful of insightful people, admirable in character and intent, hoping to promote truth, and save the lemmings from rushing to their doom.
None of the latter holdouts are employed by the New York Times. Whom, if you were Larry Altman, their chief reporter and adviser on HIV/AIDS, would you choose to throw your lot in with?
Qualified outsiders and maverick insiders are very often right about the need to replace received wisdom in science and society. This site exists to back the best of them in their uphill assault on the massively entrenched edifice of resistance to and prejudice against reviewing, let alone revising, ruling ideas. 
The overriding purpose is to combat group think and the political and social propaganda of government agencies and other large social systems, public and corporate, which induce conformist group think and unthinking social compliance, somewtimes with blatant error, by comparing current established beliefs and claims in science and elsewhere with the scholarly professional and research literature, and especially to defend the values of science and good scientists in the paradigm wars of HIV/AIDS, cancer, evolution, global warming, nutrition, particle physics, economics, religious belief and any other disputes over replacing doubtful ideas against conformity, prejudice, subjectivity and self-interest, standing up for free speech and publication against the tendency of the authorities to repress revolutionary ideas, and mining corrective truths buried in the professional journals and commonly overlooked by harried hacks. 
This is my battle with John Maddox [editor of Nature] and with people who are actually fabricating the data [Ascher et al in Nature, March 11, 1993]. They claim to have such a group that had not used any drugs. When I analyzed the data, it turned out that there was not a single person in their paper that was drug-free. I submitted a critique to Maddox, but his response was, I could no longer respond. I was censored. – Peter Duesberg (left), interview with Bob Guccione, Spin magazine, September, 1993.
Herd instinct, hindsight bias, homophobia, hubris, human error, hypocrisy, haste, Inattention blindness, iatrogenic ignorance, ideology, indoctrination, illogic, instigating panic, institutional affiliation, intimidation, irrationality, insanity,
Job seeking, job retention, just world prejudice, Kowtowing to seniority and power, Lack of controls, labeling, laziness, lickspittle press instincts, loyalty to superiors, lying, lynch mob mentality, Maintaining parents, wives, mistresses and offspring, masochism, media stenography, mental inertia, mentor allegiance, misdirection, misunderstanding, Naivete, narcissism, Nobel hunting, normalcy bias, Obedience, obeisance, officiousness, opportunism, overclaiming, operant conditioning, Panic, priming, publication bias, paradigm protection, patron pandering, peer pressure, perks, preconceptions, presentation bias, privileges, prizes, piety, politicking, political pressures, popularity, power seeking, pseudoscience, prejudice, preserving face, prevarication, pride, protectionism, Ptolemaic rationalizing, public relations, PubMed illiteracy, pusillanimity, psychopathy, Racism, rage, rationalization, religion, religious instinct, respectability, reputation enhancing, resistance to change, rivalry, ruthless ambition, Ringelmann social loafing, representativeness heuristic, Sadism, selective reporting, scheming for advancement, self-deception, self-interest, self-justification, self-preservation, self-promotion, scientific illiteracy, shame, sloth, slow wittedness, smug orthodoxy, social ambition, sociopathy, social belonging, status seeking, sheer stupidity, sunk cost fallacy, straw man fallacy, subjective validation, self serving, self validating bias, situation psychology, Terrorizing, Texas sharpshooter fallacy, thievery, timidity, toadying, trickery, tribalism, ‘truthiness’,
Unthinking acquiescence, unchecked error copying, uninformed certainty, underresearch, unconscious misperception, Vanity, venality, veneration, virus hunting, Witch hunting, wishful thinking, worship of authority, Youthful naivete, and Zeal in the service of the establishment and the status quo.
All pages are intended to be best displayed in VERY LARGE FONT in Safari or Firefox (PC or Mac), or Google Chrome (PC), and may be wrongly displayed by Internet Explorer which may not distinguish between boldface and normal text.