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andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2009-07-15 12:01 pm
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[personal profile] andrewducker 2009-07-15 04:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Would you be in favour of someone being invited to such a talk to argue for the use of homeopathic remedies because in their personal experience they aided effective thinking/learning?

Yes, provided that they were clear that they were talking purely about their own experience. I'd expect that anything that came out in the question and answer session to point out anything stupid they'd said, of course.

I _like_ the open and free exchange of ideas. Anyone who changes their life based on a single talk by someone who explicitly says they don't have any science behind their argument is going to be having more problems than we can solve here.

I'd much rather that physicists talked about how they learned, psychologists discussed strange rock formations they've seen, geologists mention the strange footprints they saw in the snow, and biologists mentioned the time they saw ball lightning.

Some of these things will be nonsense, some of them will be well known in other fields, and some of them will point out things that people had never thought of before. And that's great!

Companies hawking their products is a different matter, of course.

[identity profile] endless-psych.livejournal.com 2009-07-15 04:23 pm (UTC)(link)
Well strange rock formations is well within the domain of psychology and neuroscience as it is (it's all pattern recognition dontcha know - simulcrua (sp?)and such).

I'm all for the open exchange of ideas. My initial ire was perhaps misguided as the hedging seems to make it reasonable. So the anger about how I believed him to be presenting his idea was wrong.

I mean the problem with the argument as I was arguing against it is peoples tendencies not to employ critical thinking and condescend to their own preconceptions. You can sleepwalk into a whole lot of bad doing that.

Also nothing I have said discounts any of the above or precludes the free and open exchange of ideas. To do so implies a false dichotomy. I can quite happily disagree with people using their position to imply the veracity of an argument from their position of authority. Because that is wrong. This doesn't not make me against the free and open exchange of ideas.

I may be mistaken in this case but if it were a genuine abuse of position... Say people using Watsons (it wasn't Crick come to think of it was it?) authority, as one of discoverers of the double helix, to back up their racist ideas and claim that those damned blacks are congenitally and genetically inferior to humans... Then the implication that I am against the free and open exchange of ideas doesn't hold.
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