Slashdot Mirror
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claims that much of the information on Wikipedia relating to holistic approaches to healing is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong".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!
Once it's been proven to work?
Medicine.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Despite all of Wales' attempts to raise funds for Wikipedia, this is (by far) the best one.
Good response from Wales.
There are a lot of dumb motherfuckers out there, stay vigilant in making sure they don't put dumb things on Wikipedia.
âoeAnti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'â
â Isaac Asimov
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
The wiki and the internet in general is by nature susceptible to plagarism , misinformation and the etc. The balancing factor is the presence of a relatively few knowledgeable individuals who keep check on malicious activity. Any open forum is and will be susceptible to manipulation for and by vested interests.
>> claims that much of the information on Wikipedia relating to (whatever) is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong"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...
All of the information on Wikipedia is "plagiarized" by design; it's not a place for original research it's an encyclopedia.
Most of the information on Wikipedia is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong."
[citation needed]
Even worse, most of it is plagiarized, drawing eyes away from the books, smaller sites and other sources that produced it.
Evidently, you do not understand what "plagiarism" means.
I always take what I find on Wikipedia with a grain of salt.
But mr. Wales attempt to raise the bar is welcome, it's just not very easy to do it. As long as Wikipedia is as open in its nature as it is now, it will always remain something of a rogue place for opinions vs real scientific facts.
Wikipedia has also been accused with moderators treating it like it was their private domain, and the older more established moderators reign superior over the wannabees, so much so - I've given up any attempt to add anything to the site, as it's usually futile, even if peer reviewed and fully documented (no, not talking about oogey boogey science with crystal healing and all that jazz), but down to earth - time proven, document-able peer reviewed facts.
I think the entire Wikipedia needs to be reviewed, cleaned up and get a better moderation system
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
On the other hand, you have the realm of vitamins and other alternative treatments which may not necessarily be shown to be effective in FDA-approved studies, but seem to offer genuine anecdotal evidence to their benefits. .
Internet science at its best!
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Most of the information on Wikipedia is "biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong."
Based on.. what? Your comment seems biased and misleading and could possibly be just plain wrong. Is your comment just based on your personal impression? Have you actually gone through and examined most of all the content available on Wikipedia? No? Well, gee.
Even worse, most of it is plagiarized, drawing eyes away from the books, smaller sites and other sources that produced it.
And yet, while doing that it makes it much more easier to find both the sources and relevant information. If Wikipedia didn't exist finding all that information would be a major hassle, especially considering a lot of the sources mentioned are behind various paywalls, only available in physical forms or whatnot.
"genuine anecdotal evidence"
I'm not quite sure you understand the meaning of "genuine" here. Or "evidence"...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Anecdotes are useful as a startig poiny if you're looking for some new phenomenon. That's all, nothing more.
If the effects are real, you can discern them through repeatable tests.
The vast majority of alternative claims have been disproven, shown to have no effect.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
Dear AC, people really believe things. Really. They have values.
The holistic "healers" really believe that they have science on their side, or that they are being scientific. It is just like Ken Ham, and Lord Monckton.
That is what makes the situation sad. Not everything is about money.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
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.
On a Swedish now defunct website for political discussion there used to hang out a Crazy radical feminist woman who had a Universal Theory of science.
In her opinion, it was impossible to say what is science and what is not and as such nobody has the power to say that something is scientific and something else isn't. To her, everything is scientific and the people who disagree are proponents of "scientism".
This tied in with the radical feminist angle because she also argued that science as it currently exists has been overtaken by men and now serves only male and masculine purposes such as technology and weapons. She elaborates that male science is destructive because it picks things apart to understand how they work and it creates destructive inventions.
She says that female science, by contrast, does not pick anything apart. Instead it would look at things and examine them as a whole, and come to answers using hermeneutic analysis. (hint: it means you sit around and talk about it for a long time)
Her ultimate point is that she believes it is not right to call something non-scientific simply because it cannot be empirically tested.
She also got into weird and ultimately bizarre postmodernist arguments such as if someone believed a partcular treatment actually helped them, then the treatment was effective. She was strongly pro-homeopathy, crystal healing and whatever.
(she also drove everyone insane by writing in 50 word sentences)
The charlatans are taking the argument to the wrong place, on purpose. Wales comment is spot-on. Get your results published in scientific journals and they will be noted in Wikipedia. Regardless of your opinion about the management of Wikipedia, it is trying to be an encyclopedia, of sorts. As such, it is NOT the place where scientific discourse takes place. That is elsewhere. Once the scientific discourse happens and the scientists come up with some settled science, THEN the encyclopedia will summarize it.
An anecdote serves, at best, a rough start in forming a hypothesis. But an anecdote is utterly useless outside of that context.
Decentralized information is extremely hard to access quickly. Wikipedia not only makes it incredibly easy to get a 20,000 ft view of just about any topic, but they cite a lot of their sources so that if you want the deep down on the topic you can access the sources for more info.
And the claim that Wikipedia "controls" anything except for their little piece of the playground is absurd. You're free to start an alternative wiki-- there are already zillions-- just dont think you're entitled to be popular.
Wake up Wikipedia!!
Considering the quality of the articles being used to debunk some of those techniques, I think they're well within their rights to point out the hypocracy of the situation. Just beause people don't believe in holistic healing, doesn't mean that the standards should be lower.
Yes, there is a burden of proof on the holistic healers to prove their case, but that doesn't make it OK to misrepresent and generaly put up information that's known to be inaccurate as a method of debunking it. Debunking should be done on the basis of science, not on the basis of misleading, out of date or incorrect information. Give them the best platform you can and let them fail on their own lack of merit. Doing anything else just reinforces the notion that there's a conspiracy against them.
So what you're saying is ... "Citation Needed" ?
Asteroid strike, nuclear war, conventional war for that matter, rampant disease, runaway GMO's, global warming, etc.. these are not what will destroy the human race. Willful ignorance is what will, along with it's partners, superstition and religion. More and more it seems people are rejecting the last thousand years or so of progress and turning back to these things. The Human race is in danger of falling in a new Dark Age if this keeps up.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Err, do you know how many books Ken Ham sold, and how much $$ the stupid creationist museum raised and how much it is still sponsored by the state?
And being crappy evidence is enough reason to dismiss in the realm of medicine, since there are dangers inherent to the field.
You haven't been paying attention to the scope of medical research recently have you? While there are some useful studies, much of medical science recently has been about either overdosing rats on something to 'prove' that it's dangerous, or data mining through previous records of patient information to try to assert universal truths from the 4 subjects that fit whatever detail is relevant. The biggest source of actual testing is done by pharmaceutical companies trying to prove that their new random chemical is not significantly more dangerous than a placebo and also makes an actual difference to patients.
Nutritional science is a really strong example of this kind of bad study techniques. In my lifetime I've seen every type of meat (mammal, fish, bird, invertebrate, etc.) and about half of commonly eaten plants cycle between 'healthy', 'will kill you', 'not as bad as we thought', 'surprisingly beneficial', and 'overhyped.' I've seen the same cycle with alcohol and caffeine as well. At this point, I can only believe that 'nutritional science' is guided by efforts to manipulate food purchasing behavior more than any actual evidence.
"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." - Wales
Personally, my father is a professor researching the effectiveness of 'alternative medicine', specifically massage & chiropractic techniques for back pain versus pain killers. His research has shown it's effective for back pain, but it's still called alternative medicine right now. What it won't do is cure cancer. And this petition is for 'energy work', which I find very unlikely to be any more successful than a placebo.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
It seems like the happy medium would be...
...raking in wads of cash from gullible suckers.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What does this mean in this case?
I suspect it means is that alternative medicine proponents want to strip [citation needed] from statements of fact in AM-related articles and strip contradictory statements and refutations from AM-related articles so they read as more statements of truth than as unproven, questionable or in doubt.
I haven't read any AM articles, but given the wide variety of information in Wikipedia, it would seem unlikely they're just outright removing AM articles. I mean, the point of WP isn't that everything in it is verifiably true, but there is information about things even if the things themselves are false.
Wikipedia DOES already have topics like Energy Medicine, from which I excerpt:
So it's not like this stuff is taboo on Wikipedia. But the snake-oil salesman don't want wikipedia to say the truth about it. Think what a huge disservice wikipedia would be doing to people who might turn to it for information if wikipedia didn't stick to its guns.
That doesn't demonstrate that it's all about the money. Some preachers know that they're selling BS, others actually believe their derp. I think Ham is an emotional thinker, and actually believes the nonsense he spouts.
I think there are two problems, the first being the press does not understand science - and hence run stories about wine being great for you without the understanding that the chemical mentioned is present in such minute quantities as to be irrelevant.
The second issue is that a lot of the public (and hence the press) does not differentiate between proper research and published books or perceived authorities (fuck you Dr Oz and Dr Phil) espousing bullshit.
In summary - one part snake oil, one part losing nuance.
He seems to have "believed" a lot of things where it's convenient and then suddenly not believed them when it's looked like he may get into trouble. Take his backflip on his cure of AIDS for example.
When he's not running an "angle" he's for hire. If the "Arthur Daly" character in fiction had been as ridiculous as Monckton is in reality the writers would have been asked to tone it done and make it more believable.
To be fair, most information is biased, misleading, out of date, or just plain wrong. this is not an online only issue, and certainly not a new issue.
"Everything you know is wrong."
That's a pretty good first approximation for just about everybody.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Research clearly indicates that fake therapies can trigger the body to heal itself. In acupuncture studies, sham needling often has very high efficacy, some times higher than needling the proper points, and sometimes similar or higher efficacy than traditional medicine. It does this with far less side-effects. If it works better with less harm, it should be used - even if we don't understand it.
Medicine is a practice. There are many things modern medicine does not understand. Physicians often follow a treatment path without understanding the underlying mechanisms of the disease (e.g. autoimmune disorders) or treat to simply alleviate symptoms. Someday we may have the body figured out but that day is a not today.
The Placebo effect is probably one of the more powerful tools available.
From the NY Times:
In the study, published in the May 4 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, German researchers divided 302 migraine sufferers into three groups. The patients were told that one group would receive acupuncture "similar to the acupuncture treatment used in China," and that the second would receive a type of acupuncture that did not follow the Chinese principles but "has been associated with positive outcomes in clinical studies."
The patients did not know which group they were assigned to. A third group was put on a waiting list and received treatment later.
Although the patients in the second group were unaware of it, they received a faked version of acupuncture.
The treatments went on for 12 weeks, and success was defined as having 50 percent fewer days with headaches in the weeks after the end of treatment.
By this measure, real acupuncture succeeded with 51 percent of the patients, and the sham procedure succeeded with 53 percent, a statistically insignificant difference. Only 15 percent of the waiting list group attained the 50 percent reduction in headache days.
The effectiveness of both the sham and the real acupuncture, the authors write, is about the same as treatment with drugs and has fewer side effects. The results, they conclude, "may be due to nonspecific physiological effects of needling, to a powerful placebo effect, or to a combination of both."
In this study, however, docs told patients they were getting placebos. Eighty patients with irritable bowel syndrome were instructed to take two sugar pills daily. The bottle even had "placebo" printed on it. After three weeks, 60 percent of the placebo group reported relief from symptoms, compared to 35 percent who’d received no treatment at all.
Yes it can. Why do you think medical drugs to treat 'real' diseases need to be tested against it? Placebo does not equal background noise, it is an effect above the background noise.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Wikipedia is good for well-researched information. Information about pharmaceutical drugs, neuroscience, exercise, biology, physics, mathematics, animals, cosmology, etc. is usually pretty straight. Information about religion, spirituality, and so on is usually also well-researched.
When you get into practical alternative theory--not just spirituality systems, but applications of alternative medicine, spiritual healing, and so on--you start to get into the weird stuff. Wikipedia tries to distance itself from un-scientific claims: they'll tell you that meditation has been shown to induce calm and give people control over their blood pressure (biofeedback has been shown in controlled studies to allow for control over heart rate and blood pressure), but provide a cultural context for claims about having visions of the future or pulling energy from the spiritual realm or whatever.
The problem comes when it's hard to separate out pseudoscience from real science. Dietary supplements and alternative medical procedures get elbow-deep in this: acupuncture does not, as far as we have ascertained, do anything by balancing Xi; but some studies have shown that acupuncture is effective for treating certain minor nervous conditions or whatnot. Other studies debunk this. Explanation may lie in placebo effect. And so on. Now what? Never mind when you have things like whether or not a certain vitamin or concentrated extract of a given root does anything--milk thistle extract is actually used to treat liver damage, and Valerian acts like benzos, but will walnuts prevent cancer? We change our minds on the walnut thing every other week.
Awareness is useful. Knowing that some people believe meditation can increase physical stamina, for example, can be useful: when there's nothing else left, you may as well sit down and start chanting to yourself. I mean if you're trapped under a collapsed building, why the hell not? Rescue's going to come either way (or not), and maybe you'll slow your metabolism and last a few more hours, or at least amuse yourself. On the other hand, it's probably good to know that this mushroom that people think has special healing properties is viciously poisonous, so you shouldn't try eating it.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
People always tell me wikipedia is not reliable because anyone can edit it. I'm like... so you'd rather a Web site anyone can pay $8 for and put whatever they want on it?
They seem to not like the statistic that Britannica and Encarta have more factual errors per article than Wikipedia.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Quoth Wales:
It is noteworthy that Wales is not arguing for excluding pseudoscience from Wikipedia on the basis of Wikipedia's own guidelines. According to Wikipedia itself, status as pseudoscience is not a criterion for exclusion from Wikipedia. Rather,the criterion for acceptance is NPOV. Wikipedia's guidelines permit dishonest, fictitious and untruthful content so long as it is NPOV.
Because the rules of Wikipedia would allow the inclusion pseudoscience this is a "gotcha" for Wales, revealing a fundamental limit in Wikipedia: With NPOV, the contents of Wikipedia can never be more veridical than is the social consensus. A purportedly objective guideline which immediately reduces to subjective value judgments, NPOV is a ruse; What constitutes "Significant views," or "reliable sources on a topic" is in the eye of the beholder. Or, as Wales would have it in this case, whatever he says they are.
Wikipedia was an unexpected success because the popular expectation, a priori, was that if you just let anyone edit an encyclopedia then predominantly non-experts would contribute falsehoods. A posteriori, after Wikipedia had actually worked, the reasoning about why it had was that it was unexpectedly accurate because, well, experts are really not so good at getting stuff right anyway, and maybe spontaneous social organization really does work better than structured regulation and those dead Austrian economists and their crazy Libertarian fan club might actually have been right about something.
Though perhaps the secret to Wikipedia's success is not really that open encyclopedias are unexpectedly accurate, but rather that accuracy is not, as had been assumed, paramount. Rather, it is the appearance of accuracy which is essential for success. NPOV is a codification of a strategy for creating the popular appearance of accuracy without achieving genuine accuracy. Wikipedia is winning the encyclopedia contest by gaming the system. It matched the same flawed criterion function for accuracy as used by its customers, the test of asking: "is this what respectable people believe?" So now Wales has the problem that, according to the very rules of Wikipedia which have been the recipe for its success, it must permit pseudoscientific content which is popularly believed. This explains why Wales can shoot that down only outside of Wikipedia's own guidelines.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The placebo effect doesn't cure anyone of anything.
It may allow them to feel better. The strength and length of the 'feeling better' will be determined by a lot of factors.
It SEEMS, based on research, that when you have a problem your brain keeps alerting you with an increased awareness of a pain. Once you have done 'something' the brain ignores the pain for a little while.
That was a very small nutshell. There are some interesting neurological papers and blogs on the topic.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Medicine is the SCIENCE of healing. When alternative "medicine" scientifically demonstrates its efficacy and safety, it is just called . . . . medicine, no scare quotation marks needed.
There is a reason that the FDA has such a stringent approval process for drugs, medical procedures, and devices. It is because doing good science is hard. Alternative "medicine", while it is practiced by people of all political persuasions, has become to the left what young earth creationism and climate change denial has become to the right. Now we are seeing outbreaks of infectious diseases in the United States that were once largely eradicated by vaccination programs.
Thank you Wikipedia for keeping the charlatans honest.
I disagree. Placebo effects do cure people. Just because a symptom is subjective does not mean it is not real.
If I have a subjective symptom like pain, take some placebo pills, placebo acupuncture, et cetera, and I feel better, then to some degree I have "cured" the pain. People will often dismiss it as saying, "it's all in your head", but so is all pain and many subjective symptoms. Many legitimate pain relievers work on your brain.
The whole reason the FDA demands to test medicine designed to treat subjective symptoms against placebos is not because placebos do not work; it is because most honest to goodness medical treatments carry some risk, and if they cannot demonstrate much greater efficacy than placebos, they are exposing patients to increased risk without any increased benefit. If doctors could just give someone an IV drip, tell them it was morphine, and have them experience a placebo effect as strong as a real morphine drip, there would be no need for actual morphine.
But it is important not to dismiss patients' subjective symptoms as unreal or "all in their head". Regardless of the objective evidence, the subjective symptoms are real.
> 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"
. Just beause people don't believe in holistic healing, doesn't mean that the standards should be lower.
Yes, there is a burden of proof on the holistic healers to prove their case, but that doesn't make it OK to misrepresent and generaly put up information that's known to be inaccurate as a method of debunking it
This! This is why there were intelligent people on both sides of the evolution "debate" for so long, until the talk.origins FAQ matured (now there's really no excuse). So much BS and known false crap was taught in high school science classes and would turn up in casual searches back when the internet was young, that it was quite easy for someone from a religious background to assume that "evil-ution" was some big scam.
It's only because of the many people on talk.origins who respected the other side as intelligent people, and listened to their arguments that real debunking of the creationist position happened. It turned out that what many people had been taught about evolution (and still are!) was in fact wrong, and they were right to be skeptical of evolution based on what they had been taught. Once some intelligent, adult debate happened back on the place we don't speak of (unsurprisingly, it took a while), people realized that what they really needed to debunk was "bad high school-taught evolution myths", and 99% of skeptics would be convinced by explaining the actual science. (You wouldn't believe some of the BS taught in schools in the US South, apparently sincerely, as the science of evolution.)
For Holistic Nonsense there's a different problem. I don't know what it is, but you can bet there's some equally non-obvious fundamental misunderstandings at work here, and the only way to convince believers in that BS is to understand why they believe it, and address the root of that belief in places like Wikipedia. Calling them stupid won't convince anyone.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There are things that Science will NEVER understand because they are outside its domain i.e. What happened "before" the "Big Bang."
Who says science can't reach beyond the Big Bang?
Scientists have (yet) to (re)discover the 6 fundamental forces, white holes, the bi-nature of time
Probably because you just made them up.
Proof of this will come in 2024 when your POV (point of view) will be turned upside down. See my .sig for details
Interesting use of the word "details," there.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
My god let VMS die already.
What is the problem with VMs? I use one all the time when I browse some areas of the internet that I don't want to appear in the history of my main browser.
lucm, indeed.
The real "Placebo effect" is me clicking on the dislike button in Pandora.
lucm, indeed.
Slashdot is not a reliable source.
I'll give you a few days to find a better source, or I'm going to revert.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Some here have posted that it's incumbent upon the alternative folks to prove their cases. While in a perfect world, that may be the case, but some of this crap has already found its way into hospitals, and insurance plans. So, we're already paying for it.
Quick example... My wife recently had elective surgery, and spent two days in one of the best hospitals in Virginia. One of the nurses came by, and offered to do something she called "healing touch". My wife initially declined, but once told there would be no charge, she accepted. She later told me that she accepted it only as a nice gesture, and while it felt nice, she didn't believe it did anything, but might have a placebo effect for some. My own mother-in-law (a former nurse), when told about this, said she believed in it...sigh.
Just another day in Paradise
The USA does not have a functional health service for all it's people. As a result a large number of desperate people clutch at the weak straws of holistic medicine because medicine that worked is priced beyond their reach. Holistic medicine is usually made of very low cost components, has zero efficacy, and is often dangerous to the user either as a direct toxic procedure or because it diverts a person from effective meds. That said, incurable illnesses kill you no matter what you do.
The USA has an effective medical system for those who can pay for it, via cash or insurance. The touted claim that hospitals will provide services for those who cannot pay as helper of last resort is true in a narrow sense that you will be given palliative aid as you die after the tests and early work to diagnose and perhaps to save you were blocked by your economic situation. Even the so-called Obama reforms are a poor start, but they are a start, and they might in time reach a system as good as the French, German, Canadian, or even the Cuban system, as measured by age at death stats. I figure better health care makes you live longer, so longevity assesses systems. The USA has many different populations, white, black, fat and skinny, Jewish, Christian, men and women, etc. etc., and all have their own longevity tables. Some are quite bad, like poor black and South. Rich northern educated Jewish white men do better.
But overlaying this is the undeniable fact that universal health care raises the longevity chart of every group, not just saying the USA = best, the USA is the most costly, which means Americans are the most cheated group on earth by their medical services, because all the others get more bang for their buck - or Kroner or whatever.