andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2008-10-13 08:34 pm
andrewducker) wrote2008-10-13 08:34 pm
Feedback #1 - Thanks to the science people
I'm not going to reply to everyone on the last post, so a general "thanks" to everyone that replied. Lots of interesting stuff there.
One of the interesting things in the responses was the number of people who thought they should let me know that it wasn't a peer-reviewed paper in a renowned journal. Clearly, I knew that - it was someone's personal page, with their thoughts on it. If it had been a published paper I wouldn't have bothered asking you lot, I'd have had a look to see if it had been refuted.
Similarly, some people seemed to think that because it wasn't presented as Pure Science, but also had personal opinion, it couldn't have anything to it, an approach I find frankly baffling.
However, there were also plenty of good arguments against it, and while some of the ideas are interesting, I'm certainly not taking it at face value. Cheers to all of you!
One of the interesting things in the responses was the number of people who thought they should let me know that it wasn't a peer-reviewed paper in a renowned journal. Clearly, I knew that - it was someone's personal page, with their thoughts on it. If it had been a published paper I wouldn't have bothered asking you lot, I'd have had a look to see if it had been refuted.
Similarly, some people seemed to think that because it wasn't presented as Pure Science, but also had personal opinion, it couldn't have anything to it, an approach I find frankly baffling.
However, there were also plenty of good arguments against it, and while some of the ideas are interesting, I'm certainly not taking it at face value. Cheers to all of you!
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Why are you baffled by the science aspect? Let me ask you this - you are a health professional dealing directly with patient care. When you are legally liable for treatment, would you go on the strength of someones opinion or would you go on the results of scientific evidence?
Opinion (in relation to health care) is only crediable if it comes from an authoritive source, many people can not judge this simple basic principle.
There are heirarchies of evidence on which we judge the credibility of a study.
http://medicine.mercer.edu/files/fammed_clerk_evidencepyramid.pdf
There are variations of this model but they all run along the same principles. We generally only use case report upwards unless it is something with little literature. As your example has little literature it currently can not fully be dismissed and is in need of further investigation.
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No, I'm not.
I'm a person, interested in theories about the world. And therefore not going to dismiss something as nonsense just because it was someone's personal opinion.
And I know that peer review is flawed - that wasn't my point...
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Science can prove or disprove these kind of theories and personal opinions. This is valid no matter who you are.
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Wasn't your question whether or not the claims she was making had any validity? "I'm wondering if it's junk science, or it's something I should be paying attention to." Eh? What was your question then? That's nothing about "are personal opinions valid?" I feel like this is some sort of trick..
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My question was "Is this worth paying attention to." - the other person then said "There's personal opinion in with the sciency bits, therefore it's not a proper scientific paper, so it should be ignored."
As I hadn't thought it was a scientific paper, I couldn't actually see how that was a valid attack.
Something can be worth paying attention to, after all, even if it's not a scientific paper!
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I'd also say that citing Wikipedia doesn't make something _wrong_ - it might add to the unreliability, but Wikipedia is neither righter or wronger than anywhere else on the internet.
What I wanted was someone to either say "Yes, this links in with X and Y, and makes sense of Z" or "No, this contradicts well-known principle X, and they clearly didn't know about studies Y and Z, which tell a very different story."
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I said "I'm wondering if it's junk science, or it's something I should be paying attention to." - how could I have phrased that better to get my question across?
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Either one would tell me more than I already know.
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Heck - you mix science and personal opinion on your journal all the time!
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It's not that such anecdotal arguments are automatically wrong - they aren't. And it's not that people writing well outside their expertise can't come up with important new ways of conceptualising a field - they do. But it doesn't happen very often. And as I've no doubt you're aware from a casual glance at the Internet, there are an awful lot more people who think they have a rock-solid revolutionary new understanding of some issue than actually do. There really isn't enough time to wade through them all and debunk them step-by-step.
A big or unusual claim needs more in the way of evidence than a small run-of-the-mill one. If I claimed to have eaten quiche for lunch today, most people would take that on trust. If I claimed to have lived on nothing but air for a decade, most people would want some pretty damn compelling independent evidence (and would probably doubt it anyway). The claims in the article were pretty large and pretty unusual and there was only the sketchiest evidence presented.
As Sagan said (or something like it): they laughed at Galileo, they laughed Columbus, they laughed at the Wright brothers, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. And I don't think it's too much of a big or unusual claim to say that there are far more bozos than unappreciated geniuses on the web. (And I speak as a bozo.)
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