Monday, September 8, 2008

How I love Ambiguous statements.

Over the past weekend I had the privilege of celebrating many simchas within our community. During one such event I got caught up in a conversation that I usually hate having. Yet, my interest was tweaked by a friend that was truly looking for advice in a ‘scientific’ category.
We started talking about organic foods and how the world has become so evil in the use of plastics everywhere and all these other EVIL things that are going on. This is where my attention usually gets exhausted and I find something else to occupy myself with, then to keep listening/ participating in such rubbish. Yet, again a phrase yanked me right back into this particular conversation. One person was stating to another that they know someone that eats exceptionally healthy, and unfortunately they were diagnosed with cancer…BUT because they ate so healthy and were so strong they were able to battle their cancer and thank g-d beat it. Now, I know this particular story (and the person whom the conversation was about). It is true that this person eats exceptionally well, and it is true that this person’s cancer is in remission. However the problem in this story is not the out come but the way the facts were presented.
The fact is this person had chemotherapy and that is why the cancer is in remission. Weather or not this person’s diet helped get them back on their feet faster or not is a point of contention, maybe, maybe not.
Then there was another blanket statement that went something on the grounds of “well, people that eat organic food are just healthier and are able to fight off infections and diseases better”. That’s when I decided that all glove were off and made a few blanket statements as well, really just to see the reaction I would draw from the crowd. Some statements went on the grounds of: “well most people that I’ve seen articles written about drank like fish smoked like it was their job and were really fat and lived to be 100 years old, so how do you explain that”? At which point some around said well that’s ridiculous, as to which I said “no more ridiculous than your ambiguous most people that eat blah blah blah are healthier”. How do you know what they ate, and how it affected them? Give me hard core statistics to prove anything organic is better than anything that isn’t? Give me numbers, theories or anything other than complete speculation and ambiguity. Apparently after that people were thinking way to hard to respond with anything other than, “well you know it’s just a topic to talk about”. I guess I always think that if someone is going to bring up points then the least they could do is prove that those points are accurate.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Well, you see, insisting on facts, that's where you went wrong. People tend to be confused by facts.

Critically Observant Jew said...
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