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lhsi writes:
A petition on Change.org was created: "Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia: Create and enforce new policies that allow for true scientific discourse about holistic approaches to healing."
Jimmy Wales
responded.
No, you have to be kidding me. Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful.
Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse". It isn't.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Sir Finkus on Tuesday March 25 2014, @02:17PM
I guess Jimmy Wales doesn't mince words. Kudos to him for being so frank and honest.
Alternative medicine is one of those things that really pisses me off. It's one thing for someone to say they can channel dead relatives, but it becomes much more dangerous when people make dubious medical claims. People die because of this crap.
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 1) by Buck Feta on Tuesday March 25 2014, @04:18PM
I've always wondered what percentage of "alternative medicine" providers know they are charlatans, and what percentage actually believe in it themselves. Furthermore, what causes this second group of people to exist?
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheloniousToady on Tuesday March 25 2014, @05:25PM
I've long held the theory that all successful charlatans must believe in what they do to some extent - otherwise they wouldn't be successful at it. In effect, they must engage in some sort of doublethink. In that regard, charlatans are distinct from con artists, who, by definition, do not believe in the snake oil they're selling.
The same sort of thing applies to politicians: you can't be truly successful at lying unless you believe your own lie. Or, as the old saying goes, "The key to acting is sincerity: if you can fake that, you've really got it made." In that regard, it's not so surprising that a B-movie actor, Ronald Reagan, turned out to be quite a successful politician. I think he was better at believing his own lies than just about anybody.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hatta on Tuesday March 25 2014, @08:52PM
I've long held the theory that all successful charlatans must believe in what they do to some extent - otherwise they wouldn't be successful at it. In effect, they must engage in some sort of doublethink. In that regard, charlatans are distinct from con artists, who, by definition, do not believe in the snake oil they're selling.
In the first sentence you assert that one must believe in what they're selling to be successful.
In the second sentence you assert that con-artists do not believe in what they are selling.
Are you arguing that all con-artists are unsuccessful?
(Score: 2) by TheloniousToady on Tuesday March 25 2014, @10:09PM
Good point. I retract the comment.
(Score: 1) by terryk30 on Tuesday March 25 2014, @06:39PM
As many as 2/3 True Believers? OK, maybe 1/3 1/3 with the other 1/3 just having slipped into the racket somehow, and just parroting things (for what little difference that makes).
As to what causes the True Believer group to exist, one thing that was usually apparent from even somewhat knowing a few of them (yes, I'm being anecdotal - the irony is not lost...) was that in their formal ed they had taken the bare minimum of STEM-like subjects; no surprise of course. To not give formal ed too much credit, let's just say this is correlated with having little appreciation for (a) the cumulative nature of scientific progress (vertical and interdisciplinary), (b) the confidence of a verified quantitative model, (c) the web of expert authority at all levels and how to evaluate it, (d) how human failures do not invalidate the whole enterprise, etc.
In short, they don't have an accurate idea of why we claim to know what we know scientifically. More relevantly, they hated chemistry and what little exposure to stats they had, and didn't "get" or retain even a layperson's overview of either. Now they're open to any set of claims with shoddy or gobbledegook arguments. In some cases, throw in some postmodern deconstructivist critique of "western" science from the 80's or 90's (again, with essentially no countervailing inquiry) and it all makes sense to them.