Feedback #1 - Thanks to the science people

[andrewducker]

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!

Comments

[robhu.livejournal.com]

My point was not to make you aware that it's not peer reviewed (which is obvious), but rather to imply that for those of us who lack the background to properly analyse complex scientific claims we can be led on a merry jig by anyone who does write an article like the one you linked to. It might be true, or it might not - really you need a sufficiently well trained person to have a look at it (which is what you asked for), but even then it seems a bit pointless as the best they could say is no this is BS.

[andrewducker]

They could say "Yes, I know about this, it ties in with X and Y, which are well accepted, and they've combined it in an interesting way." or they could say "No, they've quoted Z, which has been debunked.".

Either one would tell me more than I already know.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Oh OK. I assumed at the end of it you might want to have the article influence your life in some (more tangible) way.

[andrewducker]

Oh goodness me no - I'm fascinated by autism and brain development, and was thinking this might connect a few things, was all.