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from the character-assassination-for-dummies dept.
Argumentum ad hominem, a well-known fallacy that involves attacking the character or motive of the person making the argument rather than arguing their claims on their merits, is frequently encountered, and despite being fallacious, it is disturbingly effective. A new study in PLOS One (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192025) sheds some further light on just how effective the various types of ad hominem attacks are in the context of scientific claims. An article from Psypost reports on the findings:
Ad hominem arguments — attacking a person to disprove his or her claims — is considered a logical fallacy. But a new study published in PLOS One suggests that some ad hominem attacks can effectively erode people's trust in scientific claims.
The research found that attacking the motives of scientists undermines the belief in a scientific claim just as much as attacking the science itself.
[...] "One key finding is that if members of the general public are aware of a conflict of interest connected to a scientific finding, then this will seriously undermine their faith in that finding," Barnes told PsyPost. "What the study does is allow us to quantitatively compare the amount of attitude change based on knowledge of conflict of interest to the amount of attitude change based on knowledge of outright research fraud and misconduct (such as faking the data)."
"What we see is that knowledge of conflict of interest is just as powerful as knowledge of research fraud."
Further commentary on the study by Orac at Respectful Insolence.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 16 2018, @07:13PM (1 child)
So, by your own admission, there's zero objective research backing up the claim that herbs are better than pharmaceuticals. The people originating those kinds of claims are almost universally doing so to sell herbal supplements that aren't even what they say they are [nbcnews.com]. And when you ask the herbal believers out there, they cite anecdotes like you just did, and tend to claim giant conspiracies by the pharmaceutical industry for why herbs aren't accepted by doctors as a substitute for prescription drugs.
So now you might be saying "But what about my friends?" But there's a clear answer for that: If your friends are taking supplements they believe have St John's wort in them (even though they don't), and they also believe St John's wort is an effective treatment for their condition (even though it might not be), then when they feel better it's at least as likely to be the result of the placebo effect than a result of the supplements.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 16 2018, @10:47PM
I won't step up and be an "herb believer," the results of herbal treatment seem too spotty and un-reproducible to me - though I do attribute serious merit to pro-biotics like kefir and yogurt in some circumstances, and some of the more potent cultivated herbs (like MJ) do seem to deliver consistently reliable benefits/effects.
I will relate a clear tendency I have observed in "science based medicine" to dismiss, belittle, deride, and otherwise demean some practical and effective treatments which have no beneficial aspect for the doctors or their institutions. Case in point: the ketogenic diet, known since the times of ancient Greece, just about as effective a treatment of epilepsy as anything else we have today, full of drawbacks and difficulties - but... for the millions of people around the world with intractable epilepsy, patients who have tried 4 or more "main line" medications and gotten no significant reduction of seizures, the ketogenic diet has about a 33% chance of controlling their seizures - and yet, many epileptologists will do their best to dissuade their patients from even trying the ketogenic diet before other, more radical treatments like brain surgery with known serious loss of function - not risk, but more like certainty in many cases. Now, this particular situation is turning a corner due to extremely new technology like MRI guided fiber optic delivered laser-thermal ablation, which dramatically reduces the occurrence of loss of function in both epileptic focus ablation and ablation of previously described "inoperable" brain cancers... but, the same kind of thing repeats throughout the field of medicine: simple things that can make a huge positive impact are dismissed in favor of lucrative procedures that can often be worse for the patient when considering the reward/risk of both approaches.
Is it a "no true Scotsman" fallacy to say that because many M.D.s are greedy uncaring bastards, that all medical advice is driven by profit over patient welfare? Yes, I think that would be a fallacy, until you change the all to most.
🌻🌻 [google.com]