I want to take a look at the epistemics of this post, or rather, whether this post should have been written at all.
In 95% of cases someone tearing down the orthodoxy of a well established field is a crank. In another 4% of cases they raise some important points, but are largely wrong. In 1% of cases they are right and the orthodoxy has to be rewritten from scratch.
Now these 1% of cases are extremely important! It’s understandable why the rationalist community, which has a healthy skepticism of orthodoxy would be interested in finding them. And this is probably a good thing.
But you have to have the expertise with which to do so. If you do not have an extremely solid grasp of cancer research, and you highlight a book like this, 95% of the time you are highlighting a crank, and that doesn’t do anyone any good. From what I can make out from this post (and correct me if I’m wrong) you do not have any such expertise.
Now there are people on LessWrong who do have the necessary expertise, and I would value it if they were to either spend 10 seconds looking at the synopsis and saying “total nonsense, not even worth investigating” Vs “I’ll delve into that when I get the time”. But for anyone who doesn’t have the expertise, your best bet is just to go with the orthodoxy. There’s an infinite amount of bullshit to get through before you find the truth, and a book review of probable bullshit doesn’t actually help anyone.
Now it can be very frustrating to hear “you can’t have an opinion on this because you’re not an expert”, and it sounds very similar to credentialism.
But it’s not. If you’d demonstrated a mastery of the material, and came up with a convincing description of current evidence for the DNA theory and why you believe it’s incorrect, evidence which is not pulled straight out of the book you’re reviewing, I wouldn’t care what your credentials are.
But you seem to have missed really obvious consequences of the fungi theory, like, “wouldn’t it be infectious then”, and all the stuff in J Bostock’s excellent comment. At that point it seems like you’ve read a book by a probable crank, haven’t even thought through the basic counterarguments, and are spreading it around despite it containing some potentially pretty dangerous advice like “don’t do chemotherapy”. This is not the sort of content I find valuable on LessWrong, so I heavily downvoted.
I replied to J Bostock. To address the “wouldn’t it be infectious”, that mental model has the assumption of being able to actually detect transmission. That type of thinking seems inherited from acute infectious models rather than chronic disease modelling. In the chronic pathogenic model, progression of disease can be slower and causal attribution can be unassigned. To understand this point, see link below re: latency in cryptococcus neoformans, where the fungi can go dormant in white blood cells for years or decades.
I would consider this one of the most central points to clarify, yet the OP doesn’t discuss it at all, and your response to it being pointed out was 3 sentences, despite there being ample research on the topic which points strongly in the opposite direction.
Where did I say that?
I never said you said it, I said the book contains such advice:
Lintern suggests that chemotherapy is generally a bad idea.
I want to take a look at the epistemics of this post, or rather, whether this post should have been written at all.
In 95% of cases someone tearing down the orthodoxy of a well established field is a crank. In another 4% of cases they raise some important points, but are largely wrong. In 1% of cases they are right and the orthodoxy has to be rewritten from scratch.
Now these 1% of cases are extremely important! It’s understandable why the rationalist community, which has a healthy skepticism of orthodoxy would be interested in finding them. And this is probably a good thing.
But you have to have the expertise with which to do so. If you do not have an extremely solid grasp of cancer research, and you highlight a book like this, 95% of the time you are highlighting a crank, and that doesn’t do anyone any good. From what I can make out from this post (and correct me if I’m wrong) you do not have any such expertise.
Now there are people on LessWrong who do have the necessary expertise, and I would value it if they were to either spend 10 seconds looking at the synopsis and saying “total nonsense, not even worth investigating” Vs “I’ll delve into that when I get the time”. But for anyone who doesn’t have the expertise, your best bet is just to go with the orthodoxy. There’s an infinite amount of bullshit to get through before you find the truth, and a book review of probable bullshit doesn’t actually help anyone.
Now it can be very frustrating to hear “you can’t have an opinion on this because you’re not an expert”, and it sounds very similar to credentialism.
But it’s not. If you’d demonstrated a mastery of the material, and came up with a convincing description of current evidence for the DNA theory and why you believe it’s incorrect, evidence which is not pulled straight out of the book you’re reviewing, I wouldn’t care what your credentials are.
But you seem to have missed really obvious consequences of the fungi theory, like, “wouldn’t it be infectious then”, and all the stuff in J Bostock’s excellent comment. At that point it seems like you’ve read a book by a probable crank, haven’t even thought through the basic counterarguments, and are spreading it around despite it containing some potentially pretty dangerous advice like “don’t do chemotherapy”. This is not the sort of content I find valuable on LessWrong, so I heavily downvoted.
I replied to J Bostock. To address the “wouldn’t it be infectious”, that mental model has the assumption of being able to actually detect transmission. That type of thinking seems inherited from acute infectious models rather than chronic disease modelling. In the chronic pathogenic model, progression of disease can be slower and causal attribution can be unassigned. To understand this point, see link below re: latency in cryptococcus neoformans, where the fungi can go dormant in white blood cells for years or decades.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7324190/
For what it’s worth I found OP extremely valuable.
I very much did not miss that.
Where did I say that?
I would consider this one of the most central points to clarify, yet the OP doesn’t discuss it at all, and your response to it being pointed out was 3 sentences, despite there being ample research on the topic which points strongly in the opposite direction.
I never said you said it, I said the book contains such advice: