Posts by richard
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Russell -- Snow Leopard works well for me (and I can use some of the under the hood stuff too), but I noticed my desktop was chugging along at about 300% cpu usage this morning, and it was all due to Flash.
Which (magnified a million times) may be costing people money -- the Nehalem chips are very smart at turning bits of themselves off when the CPU is idled, and it would be a shame to have them wake up only to run some stupid flash animation in a browser window hidden in a corner of your screen.
Can't guess what it would cost across the world, but it could easily run into millions of dollars (and a good bit of CO_2 when it comes to that) over a year...
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Joe - she's not my precious Deb Webber. I was just wondering whether there had in fact been any behind the scenes discussions between her and the police team.
If I was a cop, and a psychic had an ACCURATE idea of where a body was, I would reach for my handcuffs -- anyone who has that information is far more likely to be know it because they put they body there, than because they somehow pulled the information out of the ether.
Someone at TVNZ should swing by their thumbs for this -- this woman is (at the very best) an entertainer, and inserting her into some poor family's tragedy is beyond repulsive.
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@ian
"cargo cult science" is a pretty cute little phrase itself...
You're right :-) But Feynman actually develops this idea at some length, and it is undoubtedly relevant to this discussion. It's worth a read.
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I haven't dismissed any entirely serious statistical arguments. I was quoting Sydney Brenner's famous phrase that describes the reaction to anything that contradicts a particular point of view.
You have -- I pointed out that if you do enough studies on acupuncture, you would EXPECT that some of those would confirm the validity of acupuncture with an apparently high degree of significance. even if acupuncture has no actual impact on healing and health. (E.g. if you do 1000 studies, it is likely 10 of them will look like positive results at the "3-sigma" level, even if no-one has made mistakes, or simply failed to control for hidden parameters that biased their results.)
Simply rattling off a medium-long list of papers is not enough -- even a sceptic (if they think about it) should expect that those papers would exist, given the number of studies that have been done.
If you really want to rebut this criticism, it would be much better to point to a handful of independent studies of the same effect that replicate each other, and make a serious effort to track down and eliminate variables the previous studies did not control for.
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@Dyan
Actually, Feynman would have been in his mid-20s (not his teens) when he wrote that to his first wife. He worked on the Manhattan project after he finished his PhD. He was young, but not THAT young.However, if you want to quote Feynman you should also see what he has to say about "cargo cult science" - especially before you use cute little phrases like "Occam's broom" to dismiss an entirely serious statistical argument.
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you know, there's a book to be written about stereotypes of the unchanging Orient and alternative medicine.
i mean, seriously, how does it make sense to say that tibetan medicine is even older that chinese medicine; these things change and i would be utterly astonished if there's any useful sense in which one can talk about the `age' of a medicinal tradition*
Even if age did count, the "western tradition" arguably starts with Hippocrates (born in 460BC -- let me see, just a little less than 2500 years ago). So it would be roughly a draw :-) And, if you want, you can cherry-pick Hippocrates for his treatments that sound modern while ignoring all the waffle about getting your humors out of whack...
[PS And yes, this is intended to be a little tongue in cheek]
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@peter
We only have Russell's subjective view on that benefit.
That's good enough for me. It's Russell's money, and it makes him feel better. However, I do not think this one piece of data should then be used to argue that people other than Russell should see an osteo.
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Russell, if this is to be meaningful Dyan would also have to be looking for studies which show no effect -- the mere existence of these studies proves very little other than that someone has mistreated some rats (especially given that they seem to be done with heinously small samples), since you WILL see apparent correlations if you do enough studies, just thanks to sample statistics.
So given that a number studies on acupuncture have been performed, I would be astonished if a list like Diane's could NOT be compiled.
I have better things to do with my time than perform a meta-analysis of these papers, however, but one swallow does not a summer make.
Wrt to your visits to the osteopath, I am not saying you are wasting your money since it clearly works for YOU -- but there is a huge leap between one piece of anecdata (no matter how good a story it makes) and actual evidence that osteopathy has any real substance to it.
You see the the big win for osteo, but if Jimmie really did get better on his own, you could easily now be singing the praises of some other theraputic technique that you just happened to try "that day".
(I would guess that parents with a kid having as hard a time as yours would "try" at least one thing every day -- might be osteo, might be the gp, might be a naturopath, might be not eating pizza before nursing him, you name it -- but you are always trying SOMETHING. So in this scenario you are almost certain to have "tried" some active strategy just before he improved -- and it is all too easy to then assume that what you DID and what happened are connected, since you would always have been doing SOMETHING.)
On the other hand, if we found a 100 people in a similar situation to you before you had your first "osteo experience" and half of them saw the same dramatic change we would be on to something.
(And sorry again for making intellectual hay out of your personal example)
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@TracyMac,
One more thing (I should think about editing before I start reading the rest of the site). Plenty of the scientific method was invented by such dodgy types as alchemists and homeopaths (the quaint notion of trying a remedy on someone suffering from a syndrome, waiting to see if it improved and then prescribing the "proven" remedy to others with the same syndrome? Homeopaths).
Actually homeopaths started by dosing HEALTHY people with potions, seeing what it did to them, and then prescribing highly diluted versions of those potions to cure the same symptoms in sick people. But you are right that there was experimentation and observation involved.
What they did not do was pay any attention to the discovery of atoms which tells you that you can dilute something indefinitely, but eventually get to the point where NOTHING of the original substance is left. (Never mind that the whole "like cures like" thing and the virtues of dilution were simply invented).
The difference between real science and homeopathy is not that real science does not get things wrong, but that homeopathy it is not prepared to make fundamental changes to its approach in response to data. (e.g. at the level of moving from a geocentric to a heliocentric solar system). Homeopathy may fiddle with things at the edges, but it does not have the nerve for the sort of ruthlessness that makes genuine science so effective, and is thus stuck somewhere in the mid-19th century.
(And it is worth remembering that "professional" homeopathy is making far stronger claims than it can cure a few sick people -- for its underlying theoretical mechanisms to be valid it needs to somehow repeal the atomic structure of matter and quantum mechanics. So it had better offer up some pretty impressive proof.)
Implying that science has essentially been a seamless development via logic and immediate proof is completely disingenuous. Hell, the Big Bang theory wasn't proven till the 1960s.
Which is the point really. The big bang came as a huge suprise to many physicists (Einstein included) -- but the real scientists involved adapted to the facts, and moved on.
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@ george
Bumblebees cannot fly—or so physical models are said to have shown. That the insects routinely become airborne demonstrates the shortcomings of some theoretical accounts of the world.But one of the strengths of the scientific method is that, when presented with evidence that discredits their theories, scientists are forced to concede that their models are wrong and endeavour to learn from the failure. In science, observation always trumps theory, no matter how elegant the theory might be.
I have always found that "bumblebee cannot fly" cliche a trifle lame (and certainly not worthy of the Economist), but your post prompted me to dig up the origin of the story:
http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~ben/zetie1.htm
However, I think your anecdote actually proves the opposite point from the one your were trying to make, namely:
I'm not inclined to get into an argument with Peter Ashby, but I find it immensely frustrating when people argue that theory trumps observation, or that scientific theories invalidate what has been observed.
The issue here is that when naturopaths, chiropractors and the rest of them are actually observed systematically, they cannot (with a few trivial exceptions, relative to the strength of the claims the practitioners of these disciplines make) be shown to have any value beyond that of a placebo.
Consequently, the people to whom this applies would seem to be advocates of "alternative" medicine rather than its mainstream practitioners.
More generally, I think that one of the huge and almost entirely unsung successes of science (compared to, say, putting people on the moon or inventing the internet, not to mention curing smallpox) is the development of organized statistical methods and experimental protocols that allow us to sift data for causative relationships in an organized fashion. This is an incredibly powerful tool and it should stand as one of the towering achievements of our civilization, but it gets precious little attention, or respect.