homeopathy
Article
homeopathy is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 23, 2021 and May 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “There are dozens of positive double-blind RCTs of homeopathy”; “hundreds of studies showing the same for homeopathy”; “High-profile controversies about homeopathy”. It most often appears alongside Alexandros Marinos, COVID, Dr. Bitterman.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: November 23, 2021
- Last seen: May 20, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- Alexandros Marinos (2 shared issues)
-
- COVID (2 shared issues)
-
- Dr. Bitterman (2 shared issues)
-
- Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz (2 shared issues)
-
- ivermectin (2 shared issues)
-
- ivermectin (2 shared issues)
-
- ivmmeta (2 shared issues)
-
- James Watson (2 shared issues)
-
- Japan (2 shared issues)
-
- Paxlovid (2 shared issues)
-
- Rzztmass (2 shared issues)
-
- 6 insurrectionists (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I think the main thing I want to cram into his head is how many pseudosciences that have to be false have really strong empirical literatures behind them. There are dozens of positive double-blind RCTs of homeopathy. I feel like I can explain what went wrong with these about a third of the time. The rest of the time, I’m as boggled as everyone else, and I just accept that the biggest studies by the most careful people usually don’t find effects, plus we should have a low prior on an effect since it’s crazy. This makes me pretty willing to shrug and say “Yeah, I have no idea what went wrong here, but a few big RCTs didn’t find an effect, plus I have a super-high prior for any new medical thing being false, so whatever, let’s move on”, which I admit is unvirtuous but I’m not sure how to avoid it.
I realize this looks bad - aren’t we supposed to use “replications” and “number of studies” as a proxy for truth? But this is why I point out that there are dozens of studies showing psychic phenomena are real, and hundreds of studies showing the same for homeopathy. I don’t think anyone has a great idea where to go from here (“larger and more professional studies” is a good guess, but people will understandably worry that just means the establishment wants to never have to admit it’s wrong and wants only establishment studies that it can bias to count). But “just do the same bad studies more and more times” sure isn’t the answer.
High-profile controversies about homeopathy and cold nuclear fusion in the 1980s.
The story told in Making Nature doesn’t stop there. There is a chapter on the 1980s that shows how deft the journal was at managing controversies over homeopathy and cold fusion, two events that reinforced its status as a guardian of “proper” science. Then, in the conclusion, Melinda Baldwin gets into the recent history of Nature, which involves a third important disruption of scientific publishing: the advent of the web.