Re: putting quackery to the test
On Aug 9, 2006, at 10:24 PM, ravi wrote:
Doug, this is getting tiresome for me, and perhaps for you too. The title of the article you forwarded was: “No Alternative”.
Authors don’t write their own headlines - editors do, and they often
follow the cardinal rule of journalism, simplify & exaggerate.
Just the first paragraph with terms like “objective” and “We are now learning” [what happens to these claims] provides enough room for dispute.
Not that much, in my view. When things are subject to
experimentation, we learn stuff.
But another point: Doug, I think (and correct me) you do indeed heap dismissive ridicule on such alternatives. Hence your use of “hippie” which you, I think, consider a bad word, etc. No?
Yeah, I don’t use hippie as a term of endearment, but I was also
simplifying & exaggerating. As I’ve said many times, I don’t doubt
that there are many valuable things in the “alternative”
armamentarium, but they have to be evaluated by independent testing.
Quacks like Gary Null - who’s hardly marginal in the alterna-world -
rely largely on self-validating testimony by practitioners.
Doug