I agree that popular quotes can be used irrationally—a shield to hide behind instead of questioning what is actually best. However, sometimes they are simply good advice in some situations and bad advice in others. Can you not think of a class of scenarios in which Lincoln’s advice is good advice?
pianoforte611
Karma: 1,252
Strongly second the advice to have him go to a psychiatrist or neurologist. The type of seizure you are thinking of is a grand mal seizure which is not the only kind. This sounds like a very typical partial seizure to me.
I agree very much that this is a thing that happens, but I don’t think it needs to a named fallacy. There is even a standard nomenclature—failure of theory of mind (its more general but it works).
I skimmed two of your papers. I’m honestly shocked that you’re the same person. They were both precise, carefully argued and with none of the pseudo-rigor or tunnel vision that I’ve found in your other writing. I apologize for misjudging you.
Unfortunately, I’m not interested in debating the specifics of this argument, and I never claimed to be an expert on ISIS. However I maintain that you are going beyond your scope of expertise when you claim to know what “ISIS would love to see”.
I think can finally state what is it about many of your arguments makes me go “sigh, here we go again”. (And I suspect a lot of people, given that your political posts tend to be negatively received by a lot of people).
Your arguments take a general form that is something like the following. State that A could have beneficial effects B, C and D. Dismiss any suggestions that A could have negative effects E, F and G. Insistently state that since A could have beneficial effects B, C and D, then the expected utility of A is positive—throw some made up numbers and probabilities to justify said expected positive utility of A, so therefore we should do A.*
This is incredibly annoying. It is even more annoying because, (and I’m sorry to be blunt), you’re way out of your depth on most of the things you write. You don’t know how ISIS works (not that I think that the average person should spend time figuring out how ISIS’s ideology works), you don’t know how politics works, and your model of rationality is out of touch with how human knowledge is actually furthered.
*Also ignore suggestions that A could have a net negative effect on B, C and D via other casual pathways. See here to see what I’m talking about:
http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what-they-do/
The medical establishment has already lost interest in doing anything about CFS
It seems I somewhat misunderstood your argument and misjudged you; I tentatively pegged you as a pig’s thyroid evangel feigning humility. I apologize. I also apologize because I am not the opponent you are looking for.
Since I apparently didn’t stress this enough, I will conclude by saying again that without interventional data, you have nothing. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, if it disagrees with experiment then its wrong. Repeating your hypothesis again and again, doesn’t help your case, it hurts your credibility. Unfortunately this is all I have to offer that I think is worth offering at this point.
This seems like the entire problem. How to convince people to do the expensive experiments needed to explore the obvious hypothesis, without already knowing the answers?
Get an MD, prescribe pig’s thyroid if you really believe it such a fantastic treatment. If the evidence is clear, start a clinical trial. Admittedly, I don’t know if you can do that in the the nationalized UK health system, if you’re in private practice in the US I believe you have enough leeway to do that. You’ll be under very heavy scrutiny though, and there may be insurance issues but I don’t understand them well.
As to what you’re missing? It’s really simple—you have an interesting hypothesis and not much else. And you have almost no quality data to back it up. Without that, there is nothing there to criticize. Your single case of pig’s thyroid working is the most interesting evidence to me, however, personally I would bet on FM and the other somatoform disorders having heterogeneous causes (they aren’t the same disease in every person). For example:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/761364_3
I’d be surprised if pig’s thyroid cured a mitochondrial myopathy.
Also, the reason why expert’ aren’t taking you seriously, is that you kind of sound like a crank. A very intelligent crank admittedly, but a crank nonetheless. It’s not that you have lots of facts wrong, it’s more subtle than that, and I’m afraid it’s hard to explain. Statements like this
It seems that one is either forced to accept (CFS/FMS/Hypothyroidism are extremely similar diseases which are nevertheless differently caused), or to believe that blood hormone levels can be normal in the presence of Hypothyroidism.
slightly exaggerated reaction Erm what? No they aren’t extremely similar, and that’s not even logically correct, rejecting 2.1 doesn’t entail accepting 2.2 at all. And why is diseases having similar presentation a grand revelation? Do you know anything about the rest of medicine? Differential diagnoses based on a clinical picture are the rule not the exception.
I’m sorry if that’s sounds harsh, but I’m trying to convey the attitude that someone who is in the field might have towards you. You don’t quite speak the language. To use an analogy—you know the words but you have funny accent.
I honestly want to know—what do you expect him, or someone here to do? Say you’re right? Figure out a way to fund a clinical trial of FM patients treating them with T3 or pig’s thyroid? (I admit I didn’t read all of your posts from beginning to end, you said that such trials were already done? If that’s the case are they good quality? If this is such miracle treatment then were the results not clear?)
If you want to convince anyone, then you need interventional data, not hypothesizing. In other words, you have to pony up, or convince someone to pony up and fund said research.
Yes he said it could be plausible but would require more work to form better thoughts on.
It’s both. I think the distinction can be reasonably clean—science aims at understanding via explicitly modeling the process (not necessarily mathematically but often) and then testing the model. The process of building the LHC was engineering, the experiments themselves are part of science.
Alright full disclosure—if you had just said “You should probably have included a “show me the answers” option”, I would had agreed and moved on. But instead your tone of ~Bah, everything is ruined!~ I found quite jarring*, especially since I had already gained some useful and surprising information off of despite its limitations. This isn’t a particularly scientific poll for many reasons, I don’t know how to tease apart strategies that are popular with strategies that lead to long term success which is what the qualifier was for—if I figure out a way to do this some day, I’ll be more careful in its implementation.
*I’m not sure why, this LessWrong after all.
I was going to redo the poll a few hours after I made it, but I didn’t think this was a big deal. Just choose I’m not in a relationship or other—neither is an interesting field anyway.
Not exactly, see my response to OrphanWilde.
I agree vehemently and should have probably used a different phrasing. What I was really getting at is that in most anecdotes that I’ve heard—one person is significantly more enthusiastic to start off with (and I don’t think this is necessarily a problem).
If you are in a relationship lasting greater than 2 years that you consider successful, how did you meet your SO? [pollid:1100]
I’d love to see the results of a large survey on how successfuly married people found their partner. Is the “love finds you” meme based in anything real? The most common anecdote that I’ve heard is of the form “I really wanted this person and I pursued them persistently until they settled for me”.
Thanks!
Paywall
I don’t understand why you would want this. It doesn’t take exactly X times as much effort to provide X times as much productivity, but its a way better approximation than a log scale. Is the goal to discourage commerce, and promote self sufficiency?