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

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Hmm - for me, it's a question of weight of claim and weight of evidence. The central claims are ... somewhat beyond what conventional scientists studying autism spectrum disorders generally think. For me to think it's worth looking in to further, I'd want to see some pretty conclusive evidence that'd been fairly solidly tested. Hence the serious journal article standard.

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.)

[andrewducker]

I totally agree with everything you say there - which is why I asked the question, to see if anyone knew anything more about this area, as my friends list has people on it who do know a lot about nuemrous areas of science...