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Jimmy Wales To 'Holistic Healers': Prove Your Claims the Old-Fashioned Way
Barence (1228440) writes with this excerpt from PC Pro: "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has issued a sharp response to petitioners calling for his site to "allow for true scientific discourse" on holistic healing. The petition, currently running on the Change.org site, claims that much of the information on Wikipedia relating to holistic approaches to healing is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong". It has attracted almost 8,000 supporters at the time of publication. Wales's response to the petition, posted on the same page, is far from conciliatory: 'No, you have to be kidding me,' he writes. '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. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn't.'"
Mmmm... Tapas!
Well at least you can still use the internet to whine about the internet. So stand proud that the big bad sites haven't taken that away from you yet!
Anecdote, n.: An observation that supports the other guy's hypothesis.
>> claims that much of the information on Wikipedia relating to (whatever) is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong"
Er...no shit? Personally, I subscribe to this view: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
My favorite yogi taught me that it ain't over until it's over, and that it's deja vu all over again.
The placebo effect is well known in medicine.
By using common sense, Jimmy Wales is taking away placebos that were actually effective!
Hence, his actions are detrimental to medicine.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I see that Isaac Asimov had trouble with Unicode too, just like Slashdot.
All of the information on Wikipedia is "plagiarized" by design; it's not a place for original research it's an encyclopedia.[1]
1. ^aAnonymous Coward
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Wake up Wikipedia!!
So far, not one has been shown to do anything because it's all the placebo effect which has been demonstrated in numerous studies.
Talk about hoist by your own petard. The placebo effect has been proven to work, so if alternative medicines rely on it, then they are scientifically proven to work.
Given that the placebo effect exists, don't you think it would it make sense that we'd have a branch of medicine which attempted to trigger it, especially when all other interventions have failed?
That branch is called alternative medicine and by your own admission it works as well as a real placebo. If we had a proven medicine for all known diseases and conditions, there would be no need for this branch of medicine, but we don't.
God, nerds can be so dumb sometimes.
So the best argument in favor of your treatment is that it works as well as nothing, which is totally proven to work, sometimes?
No, it's just that, â, Issac Asimov really did, â, stammer and clear his throat a lot, âoe, when, â, he said this.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
An anecdote serves, at best, a rough start in forming a hypothesis. But an anecdote is utterly useless outside of that context.
My grandfather used anecdotal evidence every day, and he lived to be 95!
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
...and the supposedly 'smart' 'educated' people lose a cheap treatment method because they've got a stick up their assumptions.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
> and the anti-vaxxers that won't accept any level of evidence.
OMG What year is it? People are still talking about Vaxes in 2014? When was the last one even rolled out? Shit, I almost took one home from a scrap heap... 14 years ago.
My god let VMS die already.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Slashdot is not a reliable source.
I'll give you a few days to find a better source, or I'm going to revert.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.