prolonged computer use causes blindness maybe

So where does this leave me personally? I'm one of the world's really heavy computer users, and in fact I'm now on my seventh or eighth computer. I'm extremely short sighted and for large chunks of my life (in particular, the years in which I was working full time as a professional writer) I commonly put in well over eight hours a day at a computer screen.

So I've got reason to pause for thought - let's put it that way.

Actually, over the past year or so, I've actually asked a couple of ophthalmologists whether using computers could have negative consequences for my visual health, and I've received a firm "No." The accepted scientific fact is that computers are harmless.

Coincidentally - and this brings me to my point comments about what constitutes a scientific theory and what constitutes a scientific fact - just yesterday I was thinking about a "scientific fact" which was pretty much universally believed back when I was a kid, but which turned out to be completely wrong.

When I was growing up, it was generally believed that ulcers were caused by stress rather than by disease organisms, and the stereotype of an ulcer sufferer was a harassed higher-level executive working under an enormous amount of stress.

This was believed even though ulcers were more common amongst the poor (cleaning women, for example), and even though disease organisms turned up, from time to time, in stomach samples being examined by pathologists.

Back in the 1970s, when I first went to university, a visiting lecturer from Berkeley gave a series of lectures on the theory of knowledge. The burden of his message (which really made a big impression on me) is that when people's beliefs are challenged by contrary evidence, they do not reassess the beliefs. Rather, they find a way to rationalize away the contrary evidence.

So, back when I was growing up, the evidence that people in the lower classes have higher ulcer rates was rationalized away by comments such as "Well, maybe the lives of cleaning women are as stressful as those of high-level executives, only we don't realizes it.) (I actually saw something like this in print somewhere, many years ago.)

As for the disease organisms turning up in samples of human stomach, apparently the typical reaction was something like, "Damn! Another sample's gotten contaminated!"

Finally, some time back in perhaps the 1990s, an Australian doctor challenged the "caused by stress" model. He ran an experiment on himself which involved, if I remember correctly, drinking some extremely dirty water, and came down with ulcers as a result.

His results caused a reexamination of the evidence, and it was realized that, yes, the "caused by disease organism" model did explain the results rather better than the "caused by stress" model. In particular, it explained why Third World countries had much higher ulcer rates than the nations of the developed world.

And, in due course, if I remember correctly, medicines effective against the disease organisms in question were developed.

(I can't check any of this right now because I'm finishing this off on a wooden bench seat at the Keikyu line's Yokohama station, where I've got no Internet connection. Still, I'm reasonably confident of my facts.)

So maybe today's news is going to lead to the overthrow of another "scientific fact," and the discrediting of yet another scientific model.

And the interesting question, now, with regard to the possible link between computers and eye damage, is whether there will turn out to be any evidence, anecdotal or epidemiologal or otherwise, that was rationalized away because it did not fit with the accepted theory.

Certainly, regardless of what happens with the news about the computer-glaucoma link, I'm sure that in the next ten years or so we'll see at least one major "scientific fact" consigned to the trash heap of history.

In writing this, however, I'm not saying that I believe that scientific models are generally wrong. Rather, I believe that they are generally correct. And one really crass intellectual error that it's possible to make is to disbelieve a scientific model simply because you're ideologically opposed to it.

If memory serves, and if I remember my reading correctly, there are a couple of reasons why Hitler's Nazi Germany never developed an atom bomb. One of these reasons is that Nazi theorists disliked the notion that the atom could be split. So they promoted an "Aryan physics" in which the atom could not be split.

Of course it could be split, and already had been. And was again. To spectacular and catastrophic effect.

Anyway, I'll be interested in following the development of this story, which interests me more than the ongoing Fallujah fireworks show. (Great TV, if I had the time to watch it, but where's the plot logic?)

Well, that's it for today. Battery life is running low and the platform is getting cold, so it's time for me to catch another train and head for home.

Fact Checking

Checking 2004 November 18 Thursday.

A Google search for Australian doctor ulcers threw up a bunch of stuff, including the name of Dr. Barry Marshall, who apparently was the guy who proved that the Heliobacter pylori bacterium causes ulcers.

According to one web page, the discovery took place in 1983, when not just Dr. Marshall but other doctors who were his "associates" drank not "dirty water" (which is what I think I read a long time ago in a newspaper) but a culture of Heliobacter pylori.

However, another web page dates the discovery to 1982.

It seems, then, that the discovery that bacteria cause stomach ulcers took place back in the 1980s.

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