i chuckled.
Wikipedia is also acting at the other end of the spectrum. People routinely remove adds that reference peer reviewed journals if it disagrees with their view of the world. There are groups of people monitoring articles and removing anything that might not âagreeâ with their view of a disease, treatment, etc. If you question why they removed your peer edited link, another person from the same group will agree with the removal and not address why peer reviewed articles are not allowed. Dispute resolution via peer review is useless for the same reason - the âpeersâ are the same crew of people.
If anyone thinks Wikipedia isnât already full of âwooâ, they are seriously deluding themselves.
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Iâm willing to bet that 100% of the people who have posted anti-woo positions in this thread, as well as the person writing the original article, have absolutely no familiarity with the subject, and with the research thatâs been done in the field. But theyâve all âheardâ that itâs BS, and thatâs all they need to know to form an opinion. And that goes for Jimmy Wales, too. But thatâs the nature of the internet, isnât it: letting the uninformed have their say.
For those of you who still think, instead of just pretending to do so, this:
http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm
So what woo bullshit are you a marketer of, then? Only answer if you want us to rail on your stupid unscientific crap.
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The funny thing is, Iâm actually serious.
Au contraire, itâs working pretty well. How else is a crowd-sourced encyclopedia supposed to be moderated?
âNeutralâ has not come to mean âconsensusâ.
Who are these âanti-autistic hate groupsâ? Are they claiming that autism isnât a thing or are they attacking McCarthy-style bullshit about its supposed causes?
I just read over 3 of those studiesâ methodologies. They were all meta reviews. All three of those applied very small P-Values (in the range of P<0.0001 or so) to their data. This, at first glance seems to bolster their conclusion. Except that the size of the error grows in proportion to the declining P-values. The effect size seems impressive, but when you use such small P-values, in conjunction with only a handful of trial subjects, all youâre doing is opening yourself up to researcher degrees of freedom, and systemic bias.
These studies that are cited are nothing short of fishing expeditions and cherry picking. With the small numbers of subjects, and the effect sizes ranging from miniscule to modest, the best that can be said are that the results are inconclusive in hand-picked scenarios with poorly applied statistical methods.
[mod edit: removed insult]
[self edit: thanks, it was an unnecessary way to end the post]
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In my experience people who say " woo " are not worth the time to listen too. What is woo? it s not a scientific term, it doesn t mean anything. Is it even a real word? Pseudo science at least makes sense, as developed by the Vienna Circle long ago ( though their work could probably be easily picked apart now). It seems that by writing âwooâ you are suddenly allowed to drag anything that you personally don t believe in into a special atomic disintegration unit (as seen in Supermanâs Fortress of Solitude) called ânot scienceâ. The slippery slope here, and how easily it can turn into witchhunting, is pretty obvious. The magical word âwooâ is a spell that permanently excuses the closed mind.
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Iâd rather exercise my skeptical, critically thinking mind, than keep it so open my brain falls out.
Closed-mindedness and skepticism arenât the same thing, and skepticism is not the opposite of open-mindedness. A skeptic can dismiss woo safely when the woo is simply a re-packaged version of something thatâs been debunked a million times already.
If we entertain every last claim asserted to us without the critical thinking ability to recognize bullshit weâve already seen before, weâd never get anything done.
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Pseudo-science is a misnomer because woo is in no way science.
Provable, repeatable results are the only way to be labelled science not woo. Anyone espousing belief in remedies that arenât provable or repeatable have, by definition, a closed mind that says âI donât care if this has been actively disproven, I just know itâs trueâ.
Expect more ridicule for your stupid position and learn to deal with it.
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maybe they should start woo-kipedia where people can post all the bullshit they want.
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Groups like Autism Speaks. And whoever else pushes and enforces the dehumanizing language there.
I love Bill Nye, but he could learn something from Jimmy Wales.
(BTW, donât EFTs get turned into NEWTs?)
Not to be confused with Wookieepedia.
(Then again, that âuse the forceâ stuff isnât far off of a lot of alternative energy healingâŚ)
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I wish them well. They should contact Jimmy Wales once theyâve succeeded.
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Reductico-Ad-Quantum
If you have to use the word âQuantumâ as part of your argument. Than you are probably wrong, and probably donât understand quantum phenomena.
You might as well invoke, vibrations, frequencies, and crystals while you are at it.
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You source is Dean Radin? And you think we are selectively ignoring evidence?
Physician energy heal thyself!
From Dean Radinâs wiki page:
âChris French criticized Radin for his selective historical overview of parapsychology and ignoring evidence of fraud.â
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Unless you have an actual suggestion on how it could be improved, being angry at its current iteration does no good. Herding people is an amazingly difficult thing to do, especially when youâre dealing with such vast numbers.
My comment about neutrality was getting at the idea that the definition of words matter. Some people may claim that consensus is a neutral viewpoint, but those people should pick up a dictionary. Youâre tarring an entire site as hateful or unfair when youâre actually just annoyed at the people who make edits to autism and trans pages. I understand your frustration, but you surely must realise that those two subjects are particularly thorny and attract trollies on all sides.
Re: Autism Speaks they do seem to do some questionable stuff but considering their Wikipedia page has a pretty good section on their controversies, and itâs not like they escape criticism or scrutiny. Theyâve also raised millions of dollars for research which canât possibly be a negative, can it? Autism Speaks - Wikipedia
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Prescribing placebos in situations where they do good can certainly be a part of good medicine. There are certainly ethical issues about prescribing them for conditions where more effective treatments exist, or where a placebo can cause active harm, or for charging ludicrous amounts of money for them, or for undermining medicine or science in general in the process, or for subverting local lawsâŚ
Even if youâre practicing good medicine by prescribing a placebo in a case where it is the best choice, there are still a number of ethical issues to consider. Thereâs actually a number of doctors who do prescribe placebos, and a number who are concerned about how widespread the practice is and how itâs undermining patient trust when done poorly.
