- hace 2 días
El periodista norteamericano especializado en ciencia Michael Specter disertó en una conferencia TED sobre el gran peligro que significan los diversos (y disparatados) movimientos anticientíficos. https://cnho.wordpress.com/2026/03/15/el-gran-peligro-del-pensamiento-anticientifico/
Categoría
🤖
TecnologíaTranscripción
00:00Here we have a machine, a big machine, a cool Tettish machine, and it's a time machine, and everyone in
00:05this room has to get into it, and you can go backwards, you can go forwards, you cannot stay where
00:10you are, and I wonder what you'd choose, because I've been asking my friends this question a lot lately, and
00:15they all want to go back, I don't know, they want to go back before there were automobiles or Twitter
00:19or American Idol, I don't know, I'm convinced that there's some sort of pull to nostalgia, to wishful thinking, and
00:27I understand that.
00:28I'm not part of that crowd, I have to say, I don't want to go back, and it's not because
00:32I'm adventurous, it's because possibilities on this planet, they don't go back, they go forward, so I want to get
00:38in the machine, and I want to go forward, this is the greatest time there's ever been on this planet,
00:43by any measure that you wish to choose, health, wealth, mobility, opportunity, declining rates of disease, there's never been a
00:51time like this, my great grandparents died, all of them, by the time they were 60,
00:56my grandparents pushed that number to 70, my parents are closing in on 80, so I, there better be a,
01:03there better be a 9 in the beginning of my death number,
01:07but it's not even about people like us, because this is a bigger deal than that, a kid born in
01:13New Delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world did 100 years ago,
01:18think about that, it's an incredible fact, and why is it true, smallpox, smallpox killed billions of people on this
01:25planet, it reshaped the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has,
01:29it's gone, it's vanished, we vanquished it, poof, in the rich world, diseases that threatened millions of us just a
01:38generation ago, no longer exist hardly, diphtheria, rubella, polio,
01:43does anyone even know what those things are, vaccines, modern medicine, our ability to feed billions of people, those are
01:51triumphs of the scientific method,
01:53and to my mind, the scientific method, trying stuff out, seeing if it works, changing it when it doesn't, is
02:00one of the great accomplishments of humanity,
02:02so that's the good news, unfortunately, that's all the good news, because there's some other problems, and they've been mentioned
02:09many times,
02:09and one of them is that, despite all our accomplishments, a billion people go to bed hungry in this world
02:15every day, that number's rising, and it's rising really rapidly, and it's disgraceful,
02:20and not only that, we've used our imagination to thoroughly trash this globe, potable water, arable land, rainforests, oil, gas,
02:29they're going away,
02:31and they're going away soon, and unless we innovate our way out of this mess, we're going away too, so
02:37the question is, can we do that, and I think we can,
02:40I think it's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of people without raping the land that
02:45they live on, I think we can power this world with energy that doesn't also destroy it,
02:49I really do believe that, and no, it ain't wishful thinking, but here's the thing that keeps me up at
02:55night,
02:55one of the things that keeps me up at night, we've never needed progress in science more than we need
03:01it right now, never,
03:02and we've also never been in a position to deploy it properly in the way that we can today, we're
03:07on the verge of amazing, amazing events in many fields,
03:10and yet, I actually think we'd have to go back hundreds, 300 years before the Enlightenment to find a time
03:17when we battled progress,
03:19when we fought about these things more vigorously on more fronts than we do now.
03:24People wrap themselves in their beliefs, and they do it so tightly that you can't set them free, not even
03:29the truth will set them free.
03:30And listen, everyone's entitled to their opinion. They're even entitled to their opinion about progress.
03:36But you know what you're not entitled to? You're not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you're not.
03:41And this took me a while to figure out. About a decade ago, I wrote a story about vaccines for
03:46the New Yorker,
03:46a little story, and I was amazed to find opposition, opposition to what is after all the most effective public
03:53health measure in human history.
03:55I don't know what to do. So I just did what I do. I wrote a story and I moved
03:59on. And soon after that, I wrote a story about genetically engineered food.
04:05Same thing, only bigger. People were going crazy. So I wrote a story about that, too. And I couldn't understand
04:12why people thought this was frankenfoods,
04:15why they thought moving molecules around in a specific rather than a haphazard way was trespassing on nature's ground.
04:23But you know, I do what I do. I wrote this story. I moved on. I mean, I'm a journalist.
04:27We type, we file, we go to dinner. It's fine.
04:33But these stories bothered me, and I couldn't figure out why, and eventually I did. And that's because of those
04:38fanatics that were driving me crazy
04:40weren't actually fanatics at all. They were thoughtful people, educated people, decent people. They were exactly like the people in
04:48this room.
04:48And it just disturbed me so much. But then I thought, you know, let's be honest. We're at a point
04:55in this world where we don't have the same relationship to progress that we used to.
04:59We talk about it ambivalently. We talk about it in ironic terms with little quotes around it. Progress.
05:06Okay, there are reasons for that, and I think we know what those reasons are. We've lost faith in institutions,
05:12in authority, and sometimes in science itself.
05:14And there's no reason we shouldn't have. You can just say a few names, and people will understand.
05:21Chernobyl, Bhopal, The Challenger, Vioxx, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Hanging Chads.
05:28I mean, you know, you can choose your list. There are questions and problems with the people we used to
05:35believe were always right.
05:36So, be skeptical. Ask questions. Demand proof. Demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted.
05:44But here's the thing. When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we're not that good at
05:49doing that.
05:50And the reason that I can say that is because we're now in an epidemic of fear like one that
05:55I've never seen and hope never to see again.
05:57About 12 years ago, there was a story published, a horrible story, that linked the epidemic of autism to the
06:04measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine shot.
06:08Very scary. Tons of studies were done to see if this was true. Tons of studies should have been done.
06:14It's a serious issue.
06:16The data came back. The data came back from the United States, from England, from Sweden, from Canada.
06:21And it was all the same. No correlation. No connection. None at all.
06:25It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Because we believe anecdotes. We believe what we see, what we think we see,
06:31what makes us feel real.
06:33We don't believe a bunch of documents from a government official giving us data. And I do understand that. I
06:39think we all do.
06:40But you know what? The result of that has been disastrous. Disastrous. Because here's a fact.
06:46The United States is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going
06:50down.
06:52That is disgraceful. And we should be ashamed of ourselves. It's horrible.
06:56And what kind of a thing happened that we could do that? Now, I understand it. I do understand it.
07:04Because anyone have measles here? Does one person in this audience ever see someone die of measles? Doesn't happen very
07:10much.
07:10Doesn't happen in this country at all. But it happened 160,000 times in the world last year.
07:15That's a lot of death of measles. 20 an hour. But since it didn't happen here, we can put it
07:21out of our minds.
07:22And people like Jenny McCarthy can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like Oprah and Larry
07:30King Live.
07:30And they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation.
07:35They don't understand that these things seem the same, but they're almost never the same.
07:40And it's something we need to learn. And we need to learn it really soon.
07:44This guy was a hero, Jonas Salk. He took one of the worst scourges of mankind away from us.
07:49No fear, no agony, polio, poof, gone. That guy in the middle, not so much.
07:55His name is Paul Offit. He just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a bunch of other people.
07:59It'll save the lives of 400, 500,000 kids in the developing world every year.
08:05Pretty good, right? Well, it's good, except that Paul goes around talking about vaccines and says how valuable they are.
08:10And the people ought to just stop the whining. And he actually says it that way.
08:14So Paul's a terrorist. When Paul speaks in a public hearing, he can't testify without armed guards.
08:21He gets called at home because people like to tell them that they remember where his kids go to school.
08:27And why? Because Paul made a vaccine. I don't need to say this, but vaccines are essential.
08:33You take them away, disease comes back. Horrible diseases. And that's happening.
08:38We have measles in this country now. And it's getting worse. And pretty soon, kids are going to die again.
08:43Because it's just a numbers game. And they're not just going to die of measles. What about polio? Let's have
08:47that. Why not?
08:48A college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said, you know, she thought I was a
08:52little strident.
08:53No one's ever said that before. She wasn't going to vaccinate her kid against polio. No way. Fine.
09:02Why? Because we don't have polio. And you know what? We didn't have polio in this country yesterday.
09:07Today, I don't know, maybe a guy got on a plane in Lagos this morning and he's flying to LAX
09:11right now. He's over Ohio.
09:13And he's going to land in a couple hours. He's going to rent a car. And he's going to come
09:16to Long Beach.
09:17And he's going to attend one of these fabulous TED dinners tonight.
09:20And he doesn't know that he's infected with a paralytic disease. And we don't either.
09:24Because that's the way the world works. That's the planet we live on. Don't pretend it isn't.
09:29Now, we love to wrap ourselves in lies. We love to do it. Everyone take their vitamins this morning?
09:35Echinacea, a little echinacea, a little antioxidant to get you going? I know you did, because half of Americans do
09:40every day.
09:41They take this stuff and they take alternative medicines. And it doesn't matter how often we find out that they're
09:48useless.
09:48The data says it all the time. They darken your urine. They almost never do more than that.
09:55It's okay. You want to pay $28 billion for dark urine? I'm totally with you. Dark urine. Dark.
10:05Why do we do that? Why do we do that? Well, I think I understand. We hate big pharma. We
10:10hate big government.
10:11We don't trust the man. And we shouldn't. Our health care system sucks. It's cruel to millions of people.
10:16It's absolutely astonishingly cold and soul deadening to those of us who can even afford it.
10:22So we run away from it. And where do we run? We leap into the arms of big placebo.
10:30That's fantastic. I love big placebo.
10:37But, you know, it's really a serious thing, because this stuff is crap. And we spend billions of dollars on
10:44it.
10:44And I have all sorts of little props here. None of it. Ginkgo, fraud. Echinacea, fraud.
10:51Akai, I don't even know what that is, but we're spending billions of dollars on it. It's fraud.
10:56And you know what? When I say this stuff, people scream at me and they say, what do you care?
10:59Let people do what they want to do. It makes them feel good. And you know what? You're wrong.
11:05Because I don't care if it's the secretary of HHS who's saying, hmm, I'm not going to take the evidence
11:12of my experts on the mammograms,
11:14or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient with coffee enemas.
11:19When you start down the road where belief in magic replace evidence and science,
11:24you end up in a place you don't want to be. You end up in Thabo Mbeki, South Africa.
11:28He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot, garlic, and lemon oil were much more effective
11:36than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS.
11:39Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease.
11:47Please, don't tell me there are no consequences to these things. There are. There always are.
11:52Now, the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically
11:59engineered food
12:00and the organic elite. It's an idiotic debate. It has to stop. It's a debate about words, about metaphors.
12:08It's ideology. It's not science. Every single thing we eat, every grain of rice, every sprig of parsley,
12:15every brussel sprout has been modified by man. You know, there weren't tangerines in the Garden of Eden.
12:20There wasn't any cantaloupe. There weren't Christmas trees. We made it all. We made it over the last 11,000
12:27years.
12:29And some of it worked and some of it didn't. We got rid of the stuff that didn't.
12:32Now we can do it in a more precise way. And there are risks. Absolutely.
12:36But we can put something like vitamin A into rice. And that stuff can help millions of people.
12:42Millions of people prolong their lives. You don't want to do that?
12:47I have to say I don't understand it. We object to genetically engineered food. Why do we do that?
12:54Well, the things I constantly hear are too many chemicals, pesticides, hormones, monoculture.
13:01We don't want giant fields of the same thing. It's wrong. We don't want companies patenting life.
13:07We don't want companies owning seeds. And you know what my response to all of that is?
13:10Yes, you're right. Let's fix it. It's true. We've got a huge food problem. But this isn't science.
13:17This has nothing to do with science. It's law. It's morality. It's patent stuff.
13:22You know, science isn't a company. It's not a country. It's not even an idea. It's a process.
13:28It's a process. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
13:33But the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid is really very deadening.
13:41And it's preventing millions of people from prospering. You know, in the next 50 years we're going to have to
13:48grow 70% more food than we do right now.
13:5170%. This is investment in Africa over the last 30 years. Disgraceful. Disgraceful.
13:57They need it and we're not giving it to them. And why? Genetically engineered food.
14:02We don't want to encourage people to eat that rotten stuff. Like cassava, for instance.
14:07Cassava is something that half a billion people eat. It's kind of like a potato. It's just a bunch of
14:11calories. It sucks.
14:13It doesn't have nutrients. It doesn't have protein. And scientists are engineering all of that into it right now.
14:19And then people would be able to eat it and they'd be able to not go blind. They wouldn't starve.
14:23And you know what? That would be nice. It wouldn't be Chez Panisse, but it would be nice.
14:30And all I can say about this is, why are we fighting it? Let's ask ourselves, why are we fighting
14:37it?
14:37Because we don't want to move genes around? This is about moving genes around. It's not about chemicals.
14:42It's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones. Our insistence on having bigger food, better food, singular food.
14:49This isn't about Rice Krispies. This is about keeping people alive.
14:53And it's about time we started to understand what that meant.
14:56Because you know something? If we don't, if we continue to act the way we're acting,
15:01we're guilty of something that I don't think we want to be guilty of. High-tech colonialism.
15:05There's no other way to describe what's going on here. It's selfish. It's ugly. It's beneath us.
15:12And we really have to stop it.
Comentarios