James Randi Speaks Homeopathy Week 2010

Recorded 4:12/2010

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• james randi
• homeopathy
• homeopathy awareness week
• jref

[murdocha]

@RebornHammer "A witty saying proves nothing." -Voltaire

[murdocha]

@RebornHammer But if you are dismissing peer review, you've got to have an alternative. "It works for me" is not an alternative. The scientists working on the Opera neutrino anomaly found data that doesn't fit the model. They published it and invited other scientists to examine their processes and procedures to try to determine if the data is correct. That's what science is, a collaboration. It doesn't mean all scientists agree.

[murdocha]

@RebornHammer Wow, I think this whole subjective thing is warping the discussion, you certainly have your own reality going. I never said humans were perfect. If we were, we wouldn't need peer review. I could tell you a coin was fair, but if you flipped it once, a subjective account could say "this only lands on heads". Only after successive trials could you say it was fair or not. That is what science does. And you clearly do not understand that.

[murdocha]

@RebornHammer Wow, you are firmly rooted in the subjective aren't you? That's great for personal experience and I'm all for that. There's a time and place for it, though. While heroin might really work to relieve my pain, that doesn't make it a safe and effective medicine for everyone.

[RebornHammer]

@murdocha "Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses." -Martin Gardner

[RebornHammer]

@murdocha unfortunately I don't know of an alternative. But I would suggest that being so rigid does not help us to find the truth. Saying only peer review and nothing else may get in the way of the truth.

[RebornHammer]

@murdocha when you say stuff like this "they still have no effect on whether homeopathy works (and it doesn't)." you make it sound like something is absolute. And that implies that humans are perfect. Instead you could say "I personally don't think homeopathy works because of the scientific studies that I know of, but I could be wrong because humans are not perfect, and neither is science, because science is done by imperfect humans"

[RebornHammer]

@murdocha The way you say that sounds like you worship science. TO ME. Like science explains everything. If it's not science then what good is it. If you saw a leprechaun why should I care for you to prove it's not real. Maybe it is. If it really bothered me to listen to you talk about your leprechaun I would stop listening and walk away. I would not argue for hours and hours about it because science says it's not real. It's your leprechaun and it's very important to you.

[murdocha]

@RebornHammer Let me put this another way. To take the point to the extreme, if I told you there was an invisible golden Leprechaun riding a unicorn on my lawn, there would be no way for you to disprove it. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't, but it's not a testable assertion. It's not science.

[murdocha]

@RebornHammer Where do you come up with this stuff? You're making so many strawmen it looks like a scarecrow convention. Please indicate where I stated that humans are perfect. We're not, that's why we use the scientific method, to control for things like bias and subjectivity. That's also what peer review is for.

If something cannot be measured, that just means we can't measure it. Does it mean it's not there? Maybe. How would we be able to tell? It's like Russel's Teapot.