Текст книги "ГУЛаг Палестины"
Автор книги: Лев Гунин
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 69 (всего у книги 88 страниц)
outlined above constitutes a simple experiment which in many circumstances would be all
that is required to determine the effect of wine consumption on longevity.
Such an experiment has never been conducted
And so you can see from my outline of what an experiment would be like that such an
experiment could never have been conducted. We know this without doing a review of the
literature, without having read a single paper on wine consumption and health.
Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is impracticable. We know it
because, in the first place, it would be impossible to get experimental subjects to
comply with the particular wine-drinking regimen to which the experimenter had assigned
them. For example, many of the subjects who found themselves in the zero-glass
condition would refuse to pass the next 30 years without drinking a drop of wine. There
is no conceivable inducement within the power of the experimenter to offer that would
tempt these experimental subjects to become teetotallers for what could be the rest of
their lives. The same at the other end of the scale – most people requested to drink
large volumes of wine each day would refuse, and the experimenter would find that he had
no resources available to him by means of which he could win compliance.
And even if the experimenter were able to offer such vast sums of money to his subjects
that every last one of them agreed to comply with the required drinking regimen – and no
experimenter has such resources – then two things would happen: (1) the subjects would
cheat, as by many in the zero-glass group sneaking drinks whenever they could, and many
in the many-glass groups drinking less than was required of them; and (2) subjects who
found their drinking regimens uncomfortable would quit the experiment. Subjects
quitting the experiment constitutes a fatal blow to experimental validity because it
transforms groups that started out randomly constituted (and thus equivalent in every
conceivable respect) into groups that are naturally constituted (and which must be
assumed to be probably different in many conceivable respects) – a conclusion that I
will not pause to explain in detail.
Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment is unethical. And we know
that no such experiment has ever been conducted because it would be unethical to conduct
it, and would inevitably lead to the experimenter being sued. That is, it is unethical
in scientific research to transform people's lives in possibly harmful ways. Most
specifically, it is unethical to transform people's lives by inducing them to drink
substantial amounts of alcohol every day for several decades. The potential harm is
readily evident.
For example, drinking 10 glasses of wine per day, or even several glasses, will
predispose a person to accidents. A single experimental subject who consumed several
glasses of wine and then was incapacitated in an automobile accident would be all that
it would take to bring such research to a halt forever. The accident victim might
readily argue that the experiment requiring him to drink wine was responsible for his
accident, and that the experimenter – and the university at which he worked, and the
granting agency that funded his research – were liable for millions of dollars. In
anticipation of no more than the possibility of such a law suit, no granting agency
would fund such research, and no university or research institution would allow it to be
conducted under its roof.
Consuming substantial amounts of alcohol can not only cause accidents, but it can also
ruin health, destroy careers, distort personalities, break up marriages – for which
reason no experiment will ever require subjects to consume substantial amounts of
alcohol over extended periods of time. The possibility of harm, and thus of law suits,
can even be conceived at the low end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. That is, a
subject prohibited from drinking any alcohol might argue that this for him unnatural and
unaccustomed regimen changed his personality, undermined his career, and ruined his
marriage, and with this claim in hand, could readily find a lawyer willing to help him
sue for damages.
And if such an experiment had ever been conducted, it would
be invalid
Manipulating long-term alcohol consumption in an experiment would fail to meet the
double-blind requirement. And although we are certain that an experiment manipulating
alcohol consumption over an extended period has never been conducted, even if it were
conducted, it would nevertheless contain inescapable flaws which would stand in the way
of permitting cause-effect conclusions. For example, you may be aware that the best
experiments are ones that are "double-blind." A "blind" experiment is one in which the
subjects do not know what experimental condition they are in – they might not know, for
example, whether the pill they are swallowing contains a curative drug, or only a
placebo. In our alcohol experiment, they would not know whether the liquid they were
drinking was wine, or only some wine-colored and wine-flavored water that had been
sealed in wine bottles. Already, we see the impossibility of our wine experiment being
even so much as blind. Just about every subject in our wine experiment would
immediately realize what it was that he was drinking. Tinted water is clearly
distinguishable by its appearance and taste and effect from wine. A blind wine
experiment, then, is an utter impossibility. Most subjects would be able to quickly
infer approximately what experimental condition they had been placed into.
A "double-blind" experiment would be one in which neither the subject nor the
experimenter knew what experimental condition any particular subject was in. For
example, the experimenter hands the subject a capsule, but does not himself know until
the experiment is over whether that capsule contains a curative drug or only a placebo.
In our alcohol experiment, a double-blind experiment would involve the experimenter
monitoring the life and health of each subject, but only after the experiment was over
opening up the sealed envelope to find out how much alcohol that subject had been
consuming over the past 30 years. Utterly impossible as well.
The reason that the double-blind requirement is essential is that without it,
confounding factors appear that might be responsible for any observed longevity
effects. For example, subjects aware that they are in a large-alcohol-consumption group
would also tend to realize that such alcohol consumption might harm them, and so they
might attempt to compensate by taking vitamin pills, not smoking, upgrading their diets,
exercising, and so on. Or, they might start eating fats prior to drinking alcohol, in
order to coat their stomachs and slow the absorption of the alcohol. They might do a
large number of things. What is important is that the knowledge of one's experimental
treatment can lead to one or more changes in behavior, and that it is these unintended
changes, and not the wine consumption itself, that could affect longevity, either in one
direction or the other.
Or, here is a particularly plausible confounding that might appear. Imagine that the
experiment attempts to control wine drinking, and no more than that, and that subjects
do faithfully follow the wine regimen that is imposed on them. Nevertheless, the less
wine that they were allowed to drink, the more beer and hard alcohol they would probably
end up drinking, but which would make the initially equal groups unequal on beer and
hard-alcohol consumption. And so then it would be impossible to tell if differences in
longevity should be attributed to differences in wine consumption, or to differences in
beer consumption, or to differences in hard-alcohol consumption.
But while we may choose to pause and speculate as to what confounding variables may
appear, scientific method does not obligate us to do so. We know that confounding
variables are possible in non-double-blind experiments, and the number that we are able
to imagine is limited only by the time that we allocate to trying. If I cared to spend
a few hours thinking about it, I could write several pages of possibilities. If I chose
to spend a few months thinking about it, I could write a book of possibilities. I am
able to imagine confounding variables either improving health or impairing it at the low
end of the alcohol-consumption continuum, and as well either improving or impairing
health at the high end of the alcohol-consumption continuum. Scientific method does not
require us to know for certain what and how many confounding variables may appear to
destroy the validity of an experiment which is not double-blind; rather, scientific
method assures us that it is so likely that one or more confounding variables will make
their appearance in a non-double-blind experiment, that such an experiment must be
considered to be fatally defective, and that no cause-effect conclusion can ever be
drawn from it with confidence.
Thus, no valid experiment exists. In short, we can be sure that no experiment has ever
been conducted to ascertain the effect of long-term alcohol consumption on longevity,
and that if such an experiment had ever been conducted, the impossibility of its being
double-blind, or even blind, would render it inconclusive.
The French Paradox Research
Must Have Been Correlational
But if the data featured in your 60 Minutes broadcast was not experimental, then what
was it? It must, by default, have been correlational. That is, rather than subjects
being assigned randomly to groups and being required to drink a given volume of alcohol
each day, it must have been merely observed what volume of alcohol they chose to drink
each day.
Alcohol consumption would be measured by self-report. Well, it is not quite true that
the experimenter would observe what volume of alcohol his subjects drank daily. It
would be impractical to follow subjects around and actually see how much alcohol they
consumed in restaurants, in bars, in their homes. Much more likely is that every once
in a long while, the subjects would be mailed a questionnaire asking them to report how
much alcohol they had been drinking lately. The inability to measure alcohol
consumption directly is already a weakness – subjects might not remember accurately how
much they had been drinking, or they might experience some pressure to distort how much
they had been drinking either upward or downward. However, this is not at all the big
weakness that I want to bring out, so let us get to that without further delay.
We have already seen that random assignment guarantees pre-treatment equality on all
dimensions. I first recapitulate that in the case of the random assignment of subjects
to groups in an experiment, we were guaranteed that the subjects in each group would be
initially equivalent on every conceivable dimension. The larger the random groups, the
closer to being precisely equal on every conceivable dimension would they become. Thus,
in a properly designed and executed double-blind experiment, any differences that
subsequently arose between groups would have to be attributed to the different
treatments that the experiment had administered to them – for example, if some groups
lived longer than others, nothing else would be able to explain this except that some
groups had consumed a different volume of wine than others.
Natural assignment guarantees pre-treatment inequality on many dimensions. But in a
correlational study, subjects are not assigned to groups randomly, they assign
themselves to groups naturally. A subject who is in a no-wine group, for example, is
one who has himself decided that he does not drink wine. Thus, the groups are referred
to not as randomly constituted, but as naturally constituted, as if nature had come
along and assigned each subject to one of the groups. Now here comes the really
important part. It is that experience teaches us that naturally-constituted groups are
capable of differing from each other on every conceivable dimension, and are highly
likely to differ from each other substantially on a number of dimensions. In other
words, people who drink no wine are likely to differ from people who drink several
glasses of wine in many ways. Perhaps the non-drinkers will have more females, and the
drinkers will have more males – or perhaps the opposite. Perhaps the drinkers will be
older or younger. Perhaps the drinkers will be richer or poorer. Perhaps the drinkers
will tend to be single and the teetotallers tend to be married, or vice versa.
Differences may readily be discovered in height, in weight, in education. Differences
could quite plausibly be discovered in smoking, in drug use, in exposure to industrial
pollutants, in diet. People who drink will tend to live in different parts of the city
from people who don't drink. People who drink may watch more television, use microwave
ovens more, spend more time breathing automobile exhaust – or less. As people of
different ethnic backgrounds, or religions, or races drink different amounts, it follows
that people who drink different amounts will differ in ethnic background, in religion,
and in race.
One can speculate about thousands of ways in which drinkers could differ from
teetotallers, and if one actually examined two such groups, one would find a few
dimensions on which such extraneous differences were large, several dimensions on which
such extraneous differences were moderate, and a large number of dimensions on which
such extraneous differences were present but small. The hurdle that the correlational
researcher is never able to overleap is that given that he is unable to look for every
conceivable difference, he will never know all the ways in which his
naturally-constituted groups did indeed differ from each other.
Natural groups may eat different amounts of broccoli. And so then, no cause-effect
conclusion will ever be possible from a correlational study. If the moderate drinkers
happen to live longer, we will never be able to conclude that this is caused by their
moderate drinking, because it might be caused by how close they live to high-voltage
lines or how often they wash their hands or how far they drive to work or how much
toothpaste they swallow or how much they salt their food or how close they sit to their
televisions or how many pets they keep or whether they sleep with their windows open or
whether they finish their broccoli. In an experiment, random assignment of subjects to
groups guarantees equality on all such extraneous dimensions, and this makes
cause-effect conclusions possible. In a correlational study, natural assignment of
subjects to groups guarantees inequality on many such extraneous dimensions, and this
makes cause-effect conclusions impossible.
Correlation does not imply causality. Every textbook on statistics or research
methodology underlines this same caveat, captured in the expression "correlation does
not imply causality," which warns that from correlational data, it is impossible to tell
what caused what. Science has developed only a single method for determining what
caused what – and that method is the experiment. No experiment, no cause effect
conclusion – it's that simple. Given correlational data, furthermore, there is no way
of extracting cause-effect conclusions by more subtle or more advanced analyses – no way
of equating the groups statistically, no way of matching subjects to achieve
statistically the pre-treatment equality that is needed to arrive at cause-effect
conclusions. Advanced methods of analyzing correlational data do exist, and are used by
naive researchers, and to the layman may appear to be effective, but the reality is that
all are fatally flawed, all have been demonstrated in the literature to be ineffective
and to lead to inconclusive results. The bottom line is that there is no way to extract
cause-effect conclusions from correlational data.
You overlooked that the causal direction might be reversed. In the case of The French
Paradox finding, I can readily see a plausible alternative interpretation as to how the
observed data could have arisen. The data do seem to show that as drinking declines
from a high to a moderate level, longevity increases. This accords with the notion that
alcohol is toxic, and that its effects are deleterious. What constitutes The French
Paradox, however, is that when one goes even farther along the drinking continuum from
moderate drinking all the way down to no drinking at all, instead of longevity
increasing still higher, the opposite happens – longevity shrinks.
What distinguishes the scientifically-trained mind from that of the layman in this case
is that the layman thinks of a single interpretation, and seizing on that as the only
one possible, stops thinking. That is, the layman thinks "Drinking not at all is
unhealthy, therefore I can improve my health by drinking." The scientifically-trained
mind, in contrast, recognizes that in correlational data a large number of
interpretations is possible, acknowledges the first interpretation that springs to mind
as one among the many that are possible, and keeps looking, and keeps finding, a number
of alternative interpretations, and ultimately acknowledges the impossibility of
choosing among them.
As illustrated in my own case. Specifically, I happen to find myself in a
naturally-constituted zero-alcohol group. That is, I drink not at all, or very close to
not at all. There is a reason for this, and that is that the effects of alcohol upon me
are toxic. Mainly, I get splitting headaches, even from the ingestion of small amounts
of alcohol, particularly if the alcohol comes in the form of wine. I take this to mean
that my constitution is weak, that I am unable to process alcohol efficiently, that I am
unable to detoxify my body of alcohol the way that others can, that my body chemistry is
not up to par. In other words, I am unwell, and as a result I do not drink.
Please mark well what I have just done – I have reversed the cause-effect conclusion
that you had come to. You concluded that not drinking causes deteriorated health, but
what I am proposing to you at the moment is that deteriorated health can cause not
drinking. The insight that I offer you is that when we observe a correlation, we don't
know what caused what, and one of the possibilities to be considered is that the causal
direction may be the opposite of our first impression, that a situation in which we
first conjectured that A causes B may prove upon more thoughtful examination to be a
situation in which B really causes A. In short, it may be the case that people who are
destined not to live as long as others tend to find themselves unable to drink alcohol.
That's all that the French Paradox may have discovered, and that's not a very good
reason for anybody to follow your recommendation to go out and start drinking.
Common sense alone invalidates The French Paradox conclusion. In other contexts, a
correlation being misinterpreted to mean that drinking promotes either health or
longevity will be obviously laughable. For example, a researcher who observes that
hospitalized patients don't drink will not conclude that teetotalling causes
hospitalization. Or, a researcher who visits death row and discovers that the inmates
don't drink and do have short life expectancies will not conclude that teetotalling
shortens life. In such examples, anyone with a modicum of common sense instantly
recognizes that a correlation between zero wine intake and either poor health or short
life does not mean that zero wine intake causes either poor health or short life. All
that is required to recognize the invalidity of your conclusion in The French Paradox is
to apply this same common sense to an only slightly more subtle case.
Are there not other studies? Undoubtedly there exist in the literature a large number of
studies that have some less direct bearing on the question that we are discussing, and
many of these studies will be genuine experiments which do permit cause effect
conclusions. I am thinking in particular of experiments that may demonstrate that
ingredients found either in grapes or in wine have a certain physiological effect. With
respect to such other studies, I make the following observations: (1) Your chief
conclusion was based not on such experiments, but on one or more correlational studies.
(2) An experiment in which subjects ingest an ingredient of grapes or of wine may
witness a certain effect, even while actually eating grapes or drinking wine produce a
different or an opposite effect. This could happen because in whole grapes or in real
wine, the ingredient with the beneficial effect could be offset by some other ingredient
which has a harmful effect, as by pesticides or nitrates that might be found in wine, or by the alcohol itself in wine. Unless an experiment actually has subjects drinking
wine, no conclusions concerning drinking wine are possible. (3) An experiment
demonstrating a physiological effect of something ingested is likely to be of short
duration, and is not likely to measure the effect on longevity. However, demonstrating
a physiological effect that appears to be beneficial (say a heightened level of HDL, as
mentioned by Kim Marcus above) is not the same as demonstrating increased longevity,
since the relation between the observed effect and longevity is speculative.
In short, the only research that can prove that prolonged drinking of three to five
glasses of wine per day can extend life is the non-feasible experiment that we have
already discussed above in which subjects are required to drink different amounts of
wine over an extended period of time, and the effects on longevity noted.
The Harm That You May Have Done.
What the above reasoning leads us to, then, is that you were without justification for
promoting the conclusion that you did – that drinking three to five glasses of wine each
day extends life. Quite possibly, your conclusion had the effect of increasing the
consumption of alcoholic beverages, particularly wine, and possibly, the effects of this
increased consumption have been uniformly bad.
These may be among the damaging effects of your advice. The level of alcohol
consumption that you advocate slows reaction times and interferes with coordination and
impairs judgment, and therefore invites accidents. Certainly no airline pilot would be
permitted to consume a fraction of your recommended daily intake and still be allowed to
fly, and certainly every driver should recognize that he is putting himself at risk
drinking as much as you advocate. We recognize the damage that your advice may have
inflicted when we take into account that except for infants and the aging, accidents are
the leading cause of death.
The level of alcohol consumption that you advocate interferes with, or makes quite
impossible, difficult mental work. Thus, a university student who follows your advice
and has a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner is finished for the day – he might
as well head out to a pub after that, because he will find his calculus homework quite
incomprehensible. A chemistry professor who follows your advice and has a couple of
glasses of wine with his lunch will find himself making mistakes as he tries to lay out
the electron configuration of aluminum for his class – he had better find some simpler
topic to treat in that lecture if he doesn't want to embarrass himself in front of his
students. A lawyer arguing a complex case who follows your advice and has a couple of
glasses of wine with his lunch will find himself losing the thread of his argument in
court – he had better let his junior take over that afternoon if he wants to maintain
his reputation.
The level of alcohol consumption that you advocate may damage health. The level of
alcohol consumption that you advocate possibly saps energy and depletes motivation,
possibly leads to more time spent in small talk and in television viewing, and less in
productive work and creative effort. Undoubtedly, the level of alcohol consumption that
you advocate promotes outright alcoholism. Yours has been a call based on
pseudo-science to abandon sobriety and embrace intoxication – hardly a direction that
American culture needs to be pushed in.
The French Paradox and The Ugly Face of Freedom were equally flawed. And to return to
the comparison of your 23Oct94 broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom to your 5Nov95
broadcast The French Paradox, I do see a striking parallel. In both cases, you didn't
know what you were talking about, but stepped forward and talked anyway. Given that you
had not studied the subjects to which you addressed yourself, given that you had not
thought about them, given that you were capable of nothing better than passing along the
most superficial, man-in-the-street, off-the-top-of-my-head conclusions, the truly
remarkable thing is that you would have the arrogance to think yourself worthy of
standing up in front of tens of millions of people and telling them what was your
opinion. Yet that is what you did, and in each case, you got it wrong. Your many
conclusions in these two broadcasts ranged from totally opposite to the truth to totally
unsupported by the evidence. The Ugly Face of Freedom for which you will always be
remembered in the Ukrainian community was wrong and destructive. The French Paradox
which judging from its Internet prominence appears to be your best-remembered broadcast
among your total audience – was also wrong, and also destructive.
A word concerning self-help. If you yourself subscribe to the prescription of drinking
three to five glasses of wine each day, then I would recommend that you attempt to break
yourself of the habit, and substitute for the many hours of inebriation thus avoided
some sober study. Had you substituted for many hours of inebriation the sober reading
of history, you might have spared yourself the fiasco of The Ugly Face of Freedom. Had
you substituted for many hours of inebriation the sober study of scientific method, you
might have spared yourself the fiasco of The French Paradox. Perhaps you have no more
than to look at these two pratfalls in your own career to see how damaging is the effect
of making a habit of indulging in alcohol.
Disclosure would be a step toward restoring professional credibility. As enthusiasm for
your French Paradox broadcasts seems to have its source in the wine industry, and as
your integrity has been brought into question on the matter of The Ugly Face of Freedom,
I wonder if your professional standing would not be enhanced by your assuring 60 Minutes
viewers that you have received no benefits from the wine industry in gratitude for the
increased sales that your French Paradox broadcasts have brought it. The absence of
such an assurance will invite some 60 Minutes viewers to construe your French Paradox
broadcasts more as infomercials than as investigative reporting.
Lubomyr Prytulak
cc: Ed Bradley, Jeffrey Fager, Don Hewitt, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, Lesley Stahl, Mike
Wallace.
HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE SAFER 1553 hits since 26Apr99
Morley Safer Letter 8 26Apr99 One out of 40 escaped shooting
It looks very much, Mr. Safer, as if on your 60 Minutes broadcast of 23Oct94, The Ugly
Face of Freedom, your chief witness testifying to Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis
was himself a war criminal of substantial proportions, a former Gestapo agent with the
blood of many on his hands, perhaps much of it Jewish blood.
April 26, 1999
Morley Safer
60 Minutes, CBS Television
51 W 52nd Street
New York, NY
USA 10019
Morley Safer:
I bring to your attention the following excerpt from an article by L. A. Ruvinsky
published in the Ukrainian Historical Journal in 1985:
After the end of the Second World War, the former head of the Lviv
Gestapo, P. Krause, replying to a question put by the writer V. P.
Bieliaev, testified: "If on our side, in the Gestapo, there had not
worked several agents from among the Zionists, we would never have been
able to capture and destroy such a large number of Jews, who were
living under false documents and assumed names." For example, in July
1941, Zionist Simon Wiesenthal, together with 39 other representatives
of the Lviv intelligentsia, found himself in prison. Somehow, as a
result of a "mysterious confluence of circumstances" all the arrested
except for himself were shot, and he was freed. It is not surprising
that after this, this Zionist provocateur became a regular Nazi agent.
Polish journalists have established this as an indisputable fact. That
is why the Hitlerites did not throw Wiesenthal into prison, which he
frequently confirms, but rather sent him there to organize subsequent
provocations. Evidently he was not lying when he said that he passed
through 5 Nazi prisons and 12 prison camps. In any case, it is not
difficult to imagine how many innocent victims are on the conscience of
this impenitent Zionist provocateur. It is such loathsome services for
the Fascist killers that were performed in the Yanivsky concentration
camp, in which people of various nationalities found themselves
Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews.
L. A. Ruvinsky, The criminal conspiracy of Zionists and Fascists on the
eve of, and during the years of, the Second World War, Ukrainian
Historical Journal, 1985, No. 9, pp. 99-109, p. 105, translated from
the Ukrainian by Lubomyr Prytulak.
The above statement, by itself, is certainly insufficient to establish that Simon
Wiesenthal passed the war years as a Gestapo agent. However, it is even by itself
sufficient to lead an investigative journalist to ask Mr. Wiesenthal certain questions:
(1) Was Simon Wiesenthal in fact arrested along with 39 other members of the Lviv
intelligentsia?
(2) Was Simon Wiesenthal the only one of the 40 who avoided execution?
(3) Did Simon Wiesenthal pass through 5 Nazi prisons and 12 prison camps?