User:TimidGuy/rebuttals

Responses to evidence

Will

Will's aggregate evidence may be misleading. For example, if I were to aggregate just the diffs I present in my section documenting deletion of sourced material, it would look like this:

"Anti-TM editors use tag-teaming to remove secondary sources (independent, peer-reviewed research reviews) documenting the positive effects of TM: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13][14]"

Some diffs Will cites as evidence, such as the deletion of science material sourced to popular media, are supported by the guidelines, in this case MEDRS.

Regarding Will's evidence that I edited the TM article to accord with the official manual of style: as I pointed out when this was recently raised on the TM talk page, at the time I made those edits in 2007, it was to bring the article into accord with what WP:TRADEMARK said back then: "Avoid use of trademarks as a noun except where any other usage would be awkward."[15]

Doc James

In the diffs that Doc gives, I was adding material that was explicitly in the source in order to give balance and comply with NPOV.

Fladrif

Fladrif accuses me of tag team edit warring but I moved the AHRQ review addition to the Talk page for discussion. It's a 200-page report that we're still discussing how to accurately represent. The reason I moved it to the Talk page was that the addition was completely one-sided and because there are important issues associated with this report. It would have made sense to discuss these things before adding, but instead editors opposed to TM simply and immediately edit warred the highly skewed version back into the article.

He accuses me of legal threats. I have never made, and his diffs don't show, a legal threat. In 2006 over a period of two days, his diffs show, I discussed trademark issues with another editor and mentioned that I needed to get more understanding of this from campus legal counsel, since I didn't know that much about it. Ultimately I concluded that it wasn't something to be dealt with on wiki, as the discussion shows, and that if legal counsel felt there was a problem, they could send Wikipedia a letter. He had once told me that he did this in the past and that Wikipedia had promptly made the change requested. This was not a legal threat.

He accuses me of removing from the lead that Hendel v WPEC ruled that TM is a religion. He says that I acknowledged not even having read the decision. In fact, I had read the appellate court decision, which makes no mention of religion. And which makes clear that the only ruling in the case was a summary dismissal of a civil suit. If Fladrif were capable of dispassionate discussion, we could talk about how to represent the lower court judge's discussion of religion.

ScienceApologist

His evidence against me is incomprehensible. On the talk page of Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health I posted information about 6 reliable sources per MEDRS that could be used in the article. Why does he consider this to be evidence against me? These are compliant sources.

My Feb 2009 "deletion" of the AHRQ review

This is repeatedly being used against me. Copying here a response that I just made on the Workshop page:

Woonpton, in February of 2009 I moved the AHRQ review to the talk page for discussion when it was added by a drive-by editor. It is, as you know, a 200-page report with many different meta-anlayses. Some showed TM was about the same as health education, but four other comparisons found that TM had an effect. The review states in the abstract in the results section that TM lowers blood pressure. See page v. Why was it wrong to move a completely one-sided representation of this review to the talk page for discussion before putting it in the article? Why was it wrong to add the finding reported in the Results section of the abstract, if that's the one result that the abstract highlighted? I simply don't agree with Doc that the meta-anlayses of five studies using health education as a comparator should be the only result mentioned in the TM article. It makes no sense to completely exclude the results in the broad section V of the review, which is what Doc has insisted on, and to exclude the meta-anlaysis of TM and progressive muscle relaxation, as Doc did. And the authors themselves, in their JACM version, discuss whether the Jadad scale is an appropriate tool for assessing meditation RCTs. This is partly because Jadad requires double blinding, and it's not possible to double blind a study on meditation. The researcher and the teacher of Transcendental Meditation would have to somehow not know whether the subject was being taught Transcendental Meditation or health education, and the subject would have to somehow not be aware that he or she was practicing Transcendental Meditation rather than receiving health education. The authors of the review told me that they eventually became convinced that single blinding was sufficient, which is why they raised the scores of the studies in the published version of their review in JACM. I added the authors' comments regarding whether Jadad was an appropriate assessment of quality, and it was removed from the article. This was from the authors of the AHRQ review themselves. Why was that deleted from the article? It seems like NPOV would require it. I agree that the AHRQ meta-analyses are quite impressive. Keep in mind that the review only included research through 2005 and excluded pediatric research. And I defend my addition of the Orme-Johnson rebuttal. It was, after all, published in JACM alongside the AHRQ review. And you fault Kbob for having an incorrect heading because the section on the AHRQ review found no positive effects. The problem wasn't the heading. The problem was the one-sided reporting of the meta-analyses, which did indeed find positive effects. See the summaries on pages 148 and 187. I feel like you've misrepresented the situation. TimidGuy (talk) 20:16, 17 March 2010 (UTC)