OK, you are right, of course. Although I must say my primary motivations do seem to be curiosity, fixing myself, and unreasoning rage on behalf of the scientific method. The whole ‘curing millions’ thing doesn’t really get me in the same way.
Which is lucky, because if I wasn’t protected by galloping scope insensitivity I’d go completely mad. I had a bit of the ‘total perspective vortex’ effect during my manic episode, and I never ever want to feel like that ever again. I kept reading the narrative of Vicky Rippere, and crying for that brave and clever young woman and for what was happening to her.
But it seems that the principal difficulty here is to convince myself to take the idea seriously enough to get political. And obviously you have the same trouble.
It is an obvious crank-trap. A hidden disease that can pretend to be lots of other diseases, that the standard tests don’t work for. Come on...
And so I am all Pascal’s Wager at the moment, and I keep thinking Atlantis, Pyramids, Atomism, Catholicism, Non-euclidean geometry, golden ratio, spiritualism, heliocentric theory, squaring the circle..… All obvious ideas that are hard to prove or refute and which drove men mad for hundreds of years.
The obvious strategy is to take this latest version of the madness to the sufferers’ groups, and unite them into one huge angry movement that will force medicine to refute the damned thing properly.
But I will cause vast harm doing that, and if I am wrong, which has to be the case, then no good will come of it. One’s first duty is to do better than Hitler.
And at the moment, I feel that it is the right strategy to hide behind the very ludicrousness of the idea. I am hypothesising what I am hypothesising. No lesser version can be true, that I can see. It has ghastly consequences. If that keeps incurious people away, good.
Don’t persuade your eminent friends to drop everything. That would be silly of them, and I would feel guilty. Get drunk with them, and say: “I was reading this loony on the internet, and I can’t see why he’s wrong, even though he thinks he’s wrong”.
And at the point where they say “But hang on, that would mean X, and we know X isn’t true”, then that’s the information I’m looking for.
I have eminent friends too, and they are laughing at me because I have had yet another crazy idea that I am obsessing about. And they are engaging, and they can’t take me down, but they do not take the idea seriously enough to have a real go.
I have the advantage of having had something which looks like CFS to close friends who should know, knowing that it’s a real thing and that it’s far too like hypothyroidism for comfort, and feeling it get rapidly better under the influence of NDT. I also know that it is very like manic-depression. That is a rare gift, not given to many, but I fear greeks.
OK, you are right, of course. Although I must say my primary motivations do seem to be curiosity, fixing myself, and unreasoning rage on behalf of the scientific method. The whole ‘curing millions’ thing doesn’t really get me in the same way.
Which is lucky, because if I wasn’t protected by galloping scope insensitivity I’d go completely mad. I had a bit of the ‘total perspective vortex’ effect during my manic episode, and I never ever want to feel like that ever again. I kept reading the narrative of Vicky Rippere, and crying for that brave and clever young woman and for what was happening to her.
But it seems that the principal difficulty here is to convince myself to take the idea seriously enough to get political. And obviously you have the same trouble.
It is an obvious crank-trap. A hidden disease that can pretend to be lots of other diseases, that the standard tests don’t work for. Come on...
And so I am all Pascal’s Wager at the moment, and I keep thinking Atlantis, Pyramids, Atomism, Catholicism, Non-euclidean geometry, golden ratio, spiritualism, heliocentric theory, squaring the circle..… All obvious ideas that are hard to prove or refute and which drove men mad for hundreds of years.
The obvious strategy is to take this latest version of the madness to the sufferers’ groups, and unite them into one huge angry movement that will force medicine to refute the damned thing properly.
But I will cause vast harm doing that, and if I am wrong, which has to be the case, then no good will come of it. One’s first duty is to do better than Hitler.
And at the moment, I feel that it is the right strategy to hide behind the very ludicrousness of the idea. I am hypothesising what I am hypothesising. No lesser version can be true, that I can see. It has ghastly consequences. If that keeps incurious people away, good.
Don’t persuade your eminent friends to drop everything. That would be silly of them, and I would feel guilty. Get drunk with them, and say: “I was reading this loony on the internet, and I can’t see why he’s wrong, even though he thinks he’s wrong”.
And at the point where they say “But hang on, that would mean X, and we know X isn’t true”, then that’s the information I’m looking for.
I have eminent friends too, and they are laughing at me because I have had yet another crazy idea that I am obsessing about. And they are engaging, and they can’t take me down, but they do not take the idea seriously enough to have a real go.
I have the advantage of having had something which looks like CFS to close friends who should know, knowing that it’s a real thing and that it’s far too like hypothyroidism for comfort, and feeling it get rapidly better under the influence of NDT. I also know that it is very like manic-depression. That is a rare gift, not given to many, but I fear greeks.
Thank you for you time and for your wisdom.