User talk:JzG/Archive 85
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re: bugger
[1] WP:CPUSH. 50.0.136.106 (talk) 08:13, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
We need a barnstar
...for making people snort their coffee, as at this.LeadSongDog come howl! 19:37, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
- Today I saw an article called "science based medicine" by "Dr" Nancy Malik. It is beyond parody. www.scoop.it/t/homoeopathy Guy (Help!) 20:09, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
- It does make one want to rise to the
challengebait, though. LeadSongDog come howl! 21:46, 3 April 2013 (UTC)- Tom Lehrer once said that he retired because a world in which Henry Kissinger is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is immune to satire. One feels the same way about a world in which the NIH spends $30 million on a fatally flawed study, conducted in part by convicted felons, of a biologically implausible and dangerous treatment ([2], [3]). MastCell Talk 22:45, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
- I always thought that was the academy's send up of Dr. Strangelove, but apparently I misunderstood the timeline. LeadSongDog come howl! 23:05, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
- Urban legend, I'm afraid, but what he did say was nearly as good: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize". But yes, TACT is breathtaking. NCCAM should be nuked from orbit - and might be, now that Harkin (R - Vitamin Shoppe) has retired. I wrote about it on RationalWiki before I lost patience with their asinine policy of enforcing the retention of unwanted talk page comments. Guy (Help!) 23:20, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
- And yet we do need to test things that should not work, if only to be sure that they don't:
(quoted in Tatjana Jevremovic's Nuclear Principles in Engineering (2005) p. 397)There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.
- Perhaps this is where the NCCAM has a real role to play, if they ever get 'round to it. LeadSongDog come howl! 03:08, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- But it's one thing to test implausible ideas in a particle accelerator or a Petri dish. It's quite another to test implausible ideas in human beings. When people sign up for a clinical trial and accept the associated risks, then we owe it to them to be able to explain why the tested intervention should work. And there are plenty of ideas in the preclinical or early-clinical stage that should work; $30 million applied to testing those ideas could do a lot of good for a lot of people. MastCell Talk 04:10, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- And in the case of homeopathy, like does not cure like, there is no vital energy, disease is not caused by miasms, potency does not increase with dilutions, the theories have never been proven, the practices violate well-established principles of physics and chemistry, and every observation to date is fully consistent with the null hypothesis. Under those circumstances it is perfectly reasonable to refuse to conduct any further tests until some plausible theoretical framework has been proposed. This is NCCAM's core failing IMO. They accept the "it worked for me" claims as prima facie evidence of something worth investigating even though we know that such claims are vulnerable to all kinds of errors. You have to start by asking: is there any credible reason to suspect this should work? In the case of TACT this is especially important because the treatment itself has significant known risks. Nobody has ever provided any reason to think it should work so why take that risk just because people with a vested interest demand it? Guy (Help!) 09:35, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- Where's the greater potential for harm? Allowing the continued and effectively unregulated promotion and use of an intervention with no valid evidence base is to my mind far worse than conducting a well-controlled trial of the same intervention, however implausible the mechanism. Where NCCAM has really fallen down (repeatedly) is in failing to require publication of all trial results. The same could however be said of the entire enterprise of conducting trials, most of which is outside their purview. The number of failed trials that go unreported is a much bigger problem than $30M. Have a look through http://ClinicalTrials.gov sometime you need a reason to feel depressed. FDAAA 801 was a start, but it still has loopholes that you could drive a cruise ship through if your intention was to bury a negative result. Why, for instance, should the funding source have any bearing on the requirement to disclose results? LeadSongDog come howl! 13:02, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- I think your first argument makes sense on the surface, but ignores an unfortunate reality. No matter what the outcome of TACT, I don't think it would affect the usage of chelation therapy, because the motivation to use it wasn't rational or scientifically grounded in the first place. In general, people who advocate chelation for heart disease are not really open to having their views changed by scientific evidence. If they were, they wouldn't be advocating chelation therapy in the first place. It's a waste of time and money to try to reason people out of a fundamentally irrational mindset, at least in my experience. MastCell Talk 18:02, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- True, but you still need something obvious that courts and lawmakers can understand without having to read between the lines or else the charlatans can still keep at it. The problem at NCCAM has been that its agenda has substantialy been controlled by the same people it should be putting out of business. That has to be fixed at a political level. LeadSongDog come howl! 21:23, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- NCCAM is a strange beast; it has sort of a split personality. There are a number of people in its leadership who think critically and scientifically about alternative medicine, and there are also a number of uncritical boosters who darken the good name of the NIH. If you throw massive sums of grant money into the mix, it's a recipe for chaos. To be clear, I'm not opposed to the idea of spending money to study alternative medicine; in fact, I'm sort of in favor of it. I'm just opposed to the idea of spending $30 million on a poorly designed, poorly executed clinical trial which exposes people to a risky intervention with zero scientific plausibility. MastCell Talk 22:06, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- True, but you still need something obvious that courts and lawmakers can understand without having to read between the lines or else the charlatans can still keep at it. The problem at NCCAM has been that its agenda has substantialy been controlled by the same people it should be putting out of business. That has to be fixed at a political level. LeadSongDog come howl! 21:23, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- You cannot prove a negative. Every negative trial is dismissed by proponents of whatever SCAM as flawed in some way, no trial ever undermines, in their view, the "it worked for me" element, they always continue to demand more trials until they get the answer they want. The only real solution is for politicians to man up and prosecute these quacks. In the UK we have the Cancer Act 1939 which makes it a specific offence to advertise to treat or cure cancer, it was passed in response to snake oil salesmen and other charlatans, it is virtually unenforced. I have reported clear and unambiguous breaches and no action has been taken. The quacks bleat about "choice" as if it is somehow evil to disabuse people of the illusion that coffee enemas cure cancer. They are scum. And the icing on the cake is when some bullshit artist decides that the reason you reported his quackery is that he's black. I have had a live blood analysis quack report me to the police for racial harassment. He has five adjudications against him by the Advertising Standards Authority, he is on their noncompliant advertisers list 'twice, once in person and once for his company, he's been featured on You and Yours as a quack, but no, it's because I is black, apparently. Tosser. Guy (Help!) 21:35, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- I think your first argument makes sense on the surface, but ignores an unfortunate reality. No matter what the outcome of TACT, I don't think it would affect the usage of chelation therapy, because the motivation to use it wasn't rational or scientifically grounded in the first place. In general, people who advocate chelation for heart disease are not really open to having their views changed by scientific evidence. If they were, they wouldn't be advocating chelation therapy in the first place. It's a waste of time and money to try to reason people out of a fundamentally irrational mindset, at least in my experience. MastCell Talk 18:02, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- Where's the greater potential for harm? Allowing the continued and effectively unregulated promotion and use of an intervention with no valid evidence base is to my mind far worse than conducting a well-controlled trial of the same intervention, however implausible the mechanism. Where NCCAM has really fallen down (repeatedly) is in failing to require publication of all trial results. The same could however be said of the entire enterprise of conducting trials, most of which is outside their purview. The number of failed trials that go unreported is a much bigger problem than $30M. Have a look through http://ClinicalTrials.gov sometime you need a reason to feel depressed. FDAAA 801 was a start, but it still has loopholes that you could drive a cruise ship through if your intention was to bury a negative result. Why, for instance, should the funding source have any bearing on the requirement to disclose results? LeadSongDog come howl! 13:02, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- And in the case of homeopathy, like does not cure like, there is no vital energy, disease is not caused by miasms, potency does not increase with dilutions, the theories have never been proven, the practices violate well-established principles of physics and chemistry, and every observation to date is fully consistent with the null hypothesis. Under those circumstances it is perfectly reasonable to refuse to conduct any further tests until some plausible theoretical framework has been proposed. This is NCCAM's core failing IMO. They accept the "it worked for me" claims as prima facie evidence of something worth investigating even though we know that such claims are vulnerable to all kinds of errors. You have to start by asking: is there any credible reason to suspect this should work? In the case of TACT this is especially important because the treatment itself has significant known risks. Nobody has ever provided any reason to think it should work so why take that risk just because people with a vested interest demand it? Guy (Help!) 09:35, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- But it's one thing to test implausible ideas in a particle accelerator or a Petri dish. It's quite another to test implausible ideas in human beings. When people sign up for a clinical trial and accept the associated risks, then we owe it to them to be able to explain why the tested intervention should work. And there are plenty of ideas in the preclinical or early-clinical stage that should work; $30 million applied to testing those ideas could do a lot of good for a lot of people. MastCell Talk 04:10, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
- And yet we do need to test things that should not work, if only to be sure that they don't:
- Tom Lehrer once said that he retired because a world in which Henry Kissinger is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is immune to satire. One feels the same way about a world in which the NIH spends $30 million on a fatally flawed study, conducted in part by convicted felons, of a biologically implausible and dangerous treatment ([2], [3]). MastCell Talk 22:45, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
- It does make one want to rise to the
Well, that wasn't quite the orifice through which I snorted my coffee, but if they're sure it works for them... ;-) LeadSongDog come howl! 04:48, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
Your DYK nomination of Tom Gleave
Hi, regarding your DYK nomination of Tom Gleave I just wanted to mention that according to DYK rules, every paragraph should have at least one inline reference. Whoever reviews the article will point this out, so I figured I'd tell you so you could get started on it.... MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 02:48, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
The Tom Gleave is currently unreferenced except the lede paragraph. --George Ho (talk) 06:25, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
- False. The references are simply not presented inline. Guy (Help!) 09:05, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
- I wonder if you can remedy that issue yourself. --George Ho (talk) 05:30, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
- Probably, but I don't have a lot of time for box-ticking edits. I mistakenly thought that someone as interesting as Gleave would be worth talking about on the basis of his interest as a subject, I had forgotten that the main point of DYK is a competition and that most entries are trivia. Guy (Help!) 07:48, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
- I wonder if you can remedy that issue yourself. --George Ho (talk) 05:30, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
Rollback and autopatrolled rights
I've never cared much about these rights but thought it might be helpful to have them. Do you typically grant these rights and if so, would you mind granting them to me, please? If you have any questions you'd like to ask beforehand, I'd be more than happy to answer them. OlYeller21Talktome 23:34, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
- You now have them. Drop me a note when your RFA is ready, your lack of sysop bit is inexplicable. Guy (Help!) 23:32, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
- Haha, thanks. I've considered an RfA and have a few admins whom have already offered their support. I've been putting it off for a while now. Maybe it's time for me to reconsider. OlYeller21Talktome 15:47, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
Recent edits on "not even wrong"
Hi! Just wanted to mention that I'd reverted part of your recent edit on the Not Even Wrong article -- you had (I suspect inadvertantly) changed some text that was directly quoted from a cited primary source, into something different from the actual text of the source. In this case it particularly matters because (as far as I can tell) there is no primary source for the longer "It is not only not right..." version of the quote, and that particular source certainly is not one; it only contains the "It is not even wrong" part, and interestingly only contains it in English. Anyway, feel free to delete the comment when you've read it; I just wanted to let you know. Thanks! 50.0.150.25 (talk) 04:43, 19 April 2013 (UTC)