In hindsight I think I’m repeating a lot of the points made here, but maybe with more of an emphasis on how “not” to discredit a bad idea rather than on ideas competing on “equal” grounds.
Alternative medicine proponents (as far as I’ve seen) nearly universally make amazingly strong claims that their methods should be embraced with near-zero theoretical nor statistical backup. If they just said “the standard model misses a lot of individual variance, and this thing has the following risk/benefit likelihoods”, I’d listen more.
Yes, but generally speaking I think these kind of people are selected exactly because the “the standard model misses a lot of individual variance, and this thing has the following risk/benefit likelihoods” kind of people are treated with equally inadequate standards.
To take one example here, on the “gluten” debate one can detect 3 camps:
1. Standard position (should only be cut in the case of celiac disease)
2. Nuanced alternative (celiac disease is not clearly defined, we should look at various antibodiy levels after a gluten challenge + various HLA genes and recommend a gluten-free diet if we notice values 0.5std above the mean… or something like that)
3. Gluten is bad and literally the source of the primordial decline of man, nobody should eat it.
Arguably, position 2 is probably too extreme and there’s still lacking evidence for it, but given that a significant amount of the population seems to do better without gluten, you either decide to cut position to some epistemtic slack and merge it into the mainstream (or at least propose it as an option, much like a orthopedist might suggest yoga as an alternative to standard physiotherapy), or you get people flocking to 3. Since 2 and 3 are seen as equally bad, and 3 is simpler plus is packed with an explanation as to why the establishment rejects it (the establishment are blind and/or evil)
Finally, this often comes up on topics where one or more participants isn’t motivated to seek the truth. If you’re arguing for entertainment, rather than putting work into understanding things, all bets are off. And if you’re trying to explore the truth, but your partners are just enjoying the attention, you’re likely to find yourself frustrated. Probably best to find new partners for that part of your investigation.
Easy to say, but hard to detect. It’s easy to detect in e.g. politics, but maybe not so much in a more rigorous subject where the isolated demands for rigor being thrown against the divergent position might be very similar to those “common knowledge” is held up to.
In hindsight I think I’m repeating a lot of the points made here, but maybe with more of an emphasis on how “not” to discredit a bad idea rather than on ideas competing on “equal” grounds.
Yes, but generally speaking I think these kind of people are selected exactly because the “the standard model misses a lot of individual variance, and this thing has the following risk/benefit likelihoods” kind of people are treated with equally inadequate standards.
To take one example here, on the “gluten” debate one can detect 3 camps:
1. Standard position (should only be cut in the case of celiac disease)
2. Nuanced alternative (celiac disease is not clearly defined, we should look at various antibodiy levels after a gluten challenge + various HLA genes and recommend a gluten-free diet if we notice values 0.5std above the mean… or something like that)
3. Gluten is bad and literally the source of the primordial decline of man, nobody should eat it.
Arguably, position 2 is probably too extreme and there’s still lacking evidence for it, but given that a significant amount of the population seems to do better without gluten, you either decide to cut position to some epistemtic slack and merge it into the mainstream (or at least propose it as an option, much like a orthopedist might suggest yoga as an alternative to standard physiotherapy), or you get people flocking to 3. Since 2 and 3 are seen as equally bad, and 3 is simpler plus is packed with an explanation as to why the establishment rejects it (the establishment are blind and/or evil)
Easy to say, but hard to detect. It’s easy to detect in e.g. politics, but maybe not so much in a more rigorous subject where the isolated demands for rigor being thrown against the divergent position might be very similar to those “common knowledge” is held up to.