Homeopathy to the battle.

Frederick Troteville said:
What people should try to understand is that anything which contradicts materialism and scientism simply CANNOT be correct. It is simply not possibly. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a poor deluded fool.
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If you're trying to say it's magic, fine. I don't care. The problem isn't that nobody can figure how homoeopathy works, it's that nobody can actually show that homeopathy has any effect at all.

This one is a perfectly straightforward problem. Homoeopaths make a definite claim about a definite effect on the real world. Nothing mystical or religious about it, apparently. They say that if you are treated by a homoepath you have a better chance of recovering than if you didn't take a homoeopathic remedy. And they say that healthy people given a homoeopathic remedy will demonstrate very recognisable "proving" symptoms.

Where's the difficulty? These are testable claims. We're not claiming that the effect can't be there because there's no possible mechanism of action, we're merely observing that nobody has yet managed to prove that there's an effect in the first place.

Frederick, if you think differently, there's a perfectly good shot at the million dollars for you. And the best of luck.

And once you win it, all the physicists and chemists on the face of the globe are going to be in a cut-throat race to find out how you did it, because the one that finds out will be in line for a Nobel Prize. Right now, though, there's rather less interest in this than there is in cold fusion, because there's even less evidence that there's anything in homoeopathy worth investigating.

Rolfe.
 
Frederick Troteville said:


Indeed you don't. But using skeptic "logic" you should do.
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No actually we shouldn't. As it has already been pointed out there isn't room for all those people in the television. Also most of us have both personal and theoretical knowledge of cameras, and thus knows how they work. Besides we could easily set up a several different double blind test that would tell us that the television showed something recorded on a video-camera. Do I really need to spell it out for you?
 
Frederick Troteville said:


What people should try to understand is that anything which contradicts materialism and scientism simply CANNOT be correct. It is simply not possibly. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a poor deluded fool.
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No, if something works, then it can be shown to work, and if it doesn't work, then it just doesn't work. If you refuse to show how it works, and no one but "true believers" can seem to get it to work, then it probably doesn't work.
 
Kerberos said:

No actually we shouldn't. As it has already been pointed out there isn't room for all those people in the television. Also most of us have both personal and theoretical knowledge of cameras, and thus knows how they work. Besides we could easily set up a several different double blind test that would tell us that the television showed something recorded on a video-camera. Do I really need to spell it out for you?
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It's just an example of the way that skeptics tend to think. Namely they tend to think in narrowly defined boxes. When presented with some putative phenomenon incommensurate with prevailing ideas about how the world operates, they will then inevitably reject the putative phenomenon rather than question the established ideas. As a rule of thumb this might well be a good idea. But if we have some alleged phenomenon which is very widely reported (not limited to some particular place or time), and which is quite common, then it is prudent to question such established ideas.

Also bear in mind that scientific theories about the world are inevitably overthrown. Therefore by induction one might suppose that our current theories will also eventually be overthrown. But skeptics treat current scientific theories as sacrosanct. Therefore their rationality is highly questionable.
 
Using big words doesn't turn your appeal to popularity and ignorance less fallicious. What "narrows" a skeptic's mind is the requirement of evidence for the claims of the believers. Homeopathy has yet to be shown effective. This has nothing to do with the "skeptic mind", but all to do with reality.

You can try to use fancy semantics and try to confuse us, or you can prove us wrong by showing us a homeopathic remedy that works. The JREF has one-million dollars for you if you do.
 
Frederick Troteville said:

It's just an example of the way that skeptics tend to think. Namely they tend to think in narrowly defined boxes.
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No it would be an example if any skeptics did say that, but we don’t, so it isn’t. Arguing against positions your “opponents” haven’t taken is calling attacking a straw man.
Frederick Troteville said:
When presented with some putative phenomenon incommensurate with prevailing ideas about how the world operates, they will then inevitably reject the putative phenomenon rather than question the established ideas. As a rule of thumb this might well be a good idea. But if we have some alleged phenomenon which is very widely reported (not limited to some particular place or time), and which is quite common, then it is prudent to question such established ideas.
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Witchcraft was reported frequently during the dark ages, while it isn’t reported anymore it was probably around for longer than homeopathy has been. Coming to think of it what John Edwards and Sylvia Brown does might qualify as witchcraft too, at least if it’s real. Does that mean that those people burned by the Spanish Inquisition were witches after all? Anecdotical “evidence” isn’t grounds for reversing well-established natural laws. Especially not in cases, such as homeopathy, were scientific evidence should be readily available, if the phenomenon was real.
Frederick Troteville said:

Also bear in mind that scientific theories about the world are inevitably overthrown. Therefore by induction one might suppose that our current theories will also eventually be overthrown. But skeptics treat current scientific theories as sacrosanct. Therefore their rationality is highly questionable.
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I’m totally open to the possibility that some natural laws we believe in today could be shown to be erroneous. However the fact that the currently known natural laws haven’t been proven false yet, indicates that any holes in them are most likely to be found under extreme circumstances. In any case while I think it’s very likely that some natural laws are flawed in some way it would require a lot of evidence to convince me, and more importantly the scientific community that any specific law was flawed in a specific way.
 
Frederick Troteville said:
It's just an example of the way that skeptics tend to think. Namely they tend to think in narrowly defined boxes. .
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Not in my experience. Most people who think in narrow boxes are convinced by shoddy evidence to believe in fantastic things.
The "There's no evidence against it" argument can cram a lot of nutty ideas into a narrow box.
o o o
o o o
o o o
On the other hand, most skeptics could probably solve this problem:
Connect the nine dots above using three straight lines, each connected to the end of another.
 
Frederick Troteville said:
When presented with some putative phenomenon incommensurate with prevailing ideas about how the world operates, they will then inevitably reject the putative phenomenon rather than question the established ideas.
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Show us the phenomenon, Frederick!

You wouldn't care to read the post I wrote above? The reason we're not impressed by homoeopathy isn't that we think it's impossible, it's that we observe that there is in fact no effect there.

If homoeopathy actually happened, if they could produce any evidence at all for the effects they claim, scientists would be all over them to figure what's going on.

There's only so long you can go on observing that the alleged effect doesn't seem to be manifesting before you conclude that there's nothing there.

So instead of criticising other people's thought processes, how about either going out and demonstrating the effect you seem to think we're ignoring, or (a bit easier, I suspect), go read the literature and figure why nobody in the basic sciences is terribly excited about all this.

Rolfe.
 
Frederick said:
It's just an example of the way that skeptics tend to think. Namely they tend to think in narrowly defined boxes. When presented with some putative phenomenon incommensurate with prevailing ideas about how the world operates, they will then inevitably reject the putative phenomenon rather than question the established ideas. As a rule of thumb this might well be a good idea. But if we have some alleged phenomenon which is very widely reported (not limited to some particular place or time), and which is quite common, then it is prudent to question such established ideas.
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But we do! Take alien abduction. There are supposedly millions of cases. We ask: Why the hell do millions of people think they are being abducted by aliens? The established ideas must be wrong!

Which established ideas? The one that says aliens aren't visiting the Earth? Or the one that says people can't have stunningly realistic memories of dreams and delusions?

Asking questions doesn't mean that your favorite answer is the correct one.

~~ Paul
 
Frederick Troteville said:
Also bear in mind that scientific theories about the world are inevitably overthrown. Therefore by induction one might suppose that our current theories will also eventually be overthrown.
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Of course. But why is homeopathy still not a part of "regular" science? It's been around for over 200 years and someone is yet to prove it works at all. Any day now?

And let's think about this: if the "law of infinitesimals" (the smaller the dose, the more powerful the effect) is true, then why not give a patient nothing at all and thus achieve infinite effect?
 
Jeff Corey said:

Not in my experience. Most people who think in narrow boxes are convinced by shoddy evidence to believe in fantastic things.
The "There's no evidence against it" argument can cram a lot of nutty ideas into a narrow box.
o o o
o o o
o o o
On the other hand, most skeptics could probably solve this problem:
Connect the nine dots above using three straight lines, each connected to the end of another.
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That would be FOUR straight lines, Jeff.
 
We're way off topic, I suspect, but hey...
wayrad said:
He didn't say they were connected directly. ;)
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Originally posted by Jeff Corey Connect the nine dots above using three straight lines, each connected to the end of another.
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OK, there's some assumptions operating, but you can also get into a LOT of semantic overflow if you try to "fill in the blanks" here to be absolutely precise.

Anyway, I can do it with one "line" if the word "straight" is left out...
 
xouper said:
Three is correct. I can do it in three. And so can you if you think farther outside the box.
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Indeed! And I did start to think of possible 3-line solutions beyond the normal "puzzler" solution of 4 lines, and I think I have a basis for at least one solution already. But I need to work on it in my head a bit to be sure I'm right.

But I think Jeff's point is really that he is trying to illustrate the necessity of out-of-the-box thinking in the situation described above.
 
I found the solution on the internet and I must say I would have never thought of it :(
 
Just to remind people that I did not of course say I believe in homoeopathy. I kinda agree with the feelings of skeptics in this regard. But I can make no definitive judgement as I simply lack the appropriate knowledge. My observations were directed towards any phenomena seemingly at odds with current scientific understanding.
 
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