I’m a know-it-all, so I already know what the truth is, and anything contrary is ignorance or outright lies.
As for Mother Jones, their inability to be concise is really annoying.
Maybe not once, but if you keep borrowing $1000 and paying back $999.90 it begins to add up to where we have a real problem.
That analogy incorporates my whole post.
Then your post is wrong. Because if I pay you 99.99 instead of 999.90, we have a problem NOW, not at some indeterminate point where you might need a few dimes.
You can say that, but the plain fact of the matter is that a person who says “the earth revolves around the sun” is both MUCH closer to the actual fact of the situation, and MUCH more likely to KNOW the actual fact of the situation–at least as compared to a person who says “the sun revolves around the earth”.
There is significant value in being “close, but slightly wrong” compared to “not even close”
“Don’t confuse me with the facts. I’ve got a closed mind.” Earl F. Landgrebe
To take this silly analogy to its absurd limit I guess we can say there is no chance of you paying me back just 99.99 since that means you would have to teleport in from ancient times. So I guess I will worry about that dime.
Let’s not confuse epistemology with metaphysics here.
Whether we know what exists beyond “I am” is quite different to whether anything beyond “I” actually does exist.
I’m tempted to go with the skeptical answer regarding “true knowledge”. I think that we are extremely limited in what we know, even in terms of things like, “Does this really taste apply because of some sense or because I’ve been conditioned to think green candy with apples on it will taste apply?”
Still, just for operational convenience, I think that there is in fact an external world and that the universe operates basically on the laws of physics as we understand them in our incomplete way.
I think sociological, political and psychological claims are much harder to understand because we have a far worse perspective and it’s hard to do research without violating people’s human rights. But we are improving.
Thanks for posting this…
[QUOTE=Isaac Asimov]
Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn’t. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That’s why the theory lasted so long.
…
To put it another way, on a flat surface, curvature is 0 per mile everywhere. On the earth’s spherical surface, curvature is 0.000126 per mile everywhere (or 8 inches per mile). On the earth’s oblate spheroidal surface, the curvature varies from 7.973 inches to the mile to 8.027 inches to the mile.
The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the earth as a sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the earth as flat.
Even the oblate-spheroidal notion of the earth is wrong, strictly speaking.
…
[/QUOTE]
It’s true, not everything is wrong to the same degree. But, even outdated theories can have their uses.
The earth is more nearly spherical than flat, more nearly oblate spheroid than sphere, more nearly slightly pear-shaped oblate spheroid, etc…
Yet… who here took a slightly pear-shaped oblate spheroid on their last cross country trip? Who took a flat map? The curvature being nearly zero, you can still go thousands of miles with a flat map and reach your destination. Still, flat is more wrong than sphere. I’m with Asimov, but I still use a map.
There is nothing whatsoever silly or absurd about the analogy. You made the claim that small errors and large errors were equally wrong (“Who cares about the degree of wrong? Both are erroneous conclusions”), and that the degree of wrong was irrelevant. The analogy proves that when you’re not trying to make a philosophical point, the difference between “barely wrong” and “incredibly wrong” is in fact both relevant and useful to examine.
Clearly you have never had back problems, sought help from a chiropractor, and then thought him a miracle worker. I have. If you were in my shoes you would not think that chiropractors are “bullshit”.
This response is really what this thread is about–it’s clear on some level, both from the article’s research and from general experience, that humans tend to not understand the difference between useful statistical data and anecdotal data that’s really only useful in aggregate when drawing a general conclusion. Furthermore, we have the tendency to greatly magnify the importance of data experienced personally by us or by our friends, while minimizing impersonally collected data about strangers.
Aeris, and I’m not asking this flippantly, how did you determine that it was chiropractors in general that cured your back problems? How did you determine the problem didn’t merely coincidentally subside on its own? How did you determine that your chiropractor is not a uniquely effective fluke? How did you determine the efficacy of chiropracty compared to other therapies? How does it change your opinion to know that a chiropractor made my mother’s back problems significantly worse, so that they could only be fully corrected by surgery?
the sun does not rotate around the earth, it rotates around me clearly.
And yes the vast majority of people are incapable of finding the truth because of their own emotional baggage. Can’t accept things that would disparage their family, culture, life-choices or vice versa, too primed by society to believe in Santa clause or the invisible hand ect.
Speaking of the specific datum under discussion, the last time anyone was incredibly wrong was so long ago it is not worth considering. The other erroneous conclusion, that our planet orbits the Sun instead of a common center of mass is now, relatively speaking, extremely wrong, and it prevents people from understanding commonly reported scientific information.
Generally speaking, it takes no special effort to present the best available knowledge. I fail to understand why, given the ease of relating exact versus proximate information, anyone who knows would argue for the proximate information. In other words, if you are going to pay back $999.90, what’s so special about that dime that you need to hold onto it?
smiling bandit, I think I misunderstood your argument. You are correct, at least in the sense you’re talking about, and I apologize.
Let me preface my attempted answers to your questions by saying that I was not claiming that all chiropractors are miracle workers or even effective. I did not say “Chiropractors are good. Fact.”
It’s the same with anything else, there are good ones and there are bad ones. I was merely stating my experience. Obviously, your experience will shape your opinion which is what this thread is all about. I obviously have a bias about the situation because of my personal experience.
- When I go to the chiropractor regularly I feel better than when I don’t go to the chiropractor regularly.
2)It still persists and is only managed by going to the chiropractor.
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The same reasons I already stated.
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I’m not aware of any other methods of correction for the issue I was having other than chiropractors or surgery.
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As I stated before and is probably common sense, not all of one thing is good or bad. They are like any doctor, there are good ones who help you and bad ones who don’t know what they’re doing. At the practice I was going to there were several different chiropractors and I only liked two of them. I would graciously say, “I’m sorry but I prefer to see Dr. ThatGuy or Dr. OtherGuy instead.” And they all totally understood because lots of patients had a preference of doctor. So, to answer your last question, no it doesn’t change my opinion.
I highly disagree. Can you give an example of any “commonly reported scientific information” in which believing the earth revolves around the sun rather than a common barycenter very close to the center of the sun impacts understanding?
That dime, relatively speaking, is far larger than the error of the actual scenario. For the analogy to be accurate totally I’d somehow have to pay you on the close order of 999.999997--in other words, what's so special about the missing quantity is that I seem to have misplaced my supply of µ coins. The error is too small to care about in most circumstances.
There are certainly applications where that many significant digits matter. Basic scientific understanding is not generally one of them.
How is one to determine which are which? Does everything have an equal quantity of “good ones” and “bad ones”?
In other words, you are not making a decision based on the data available, you are making a decision based on a very limited subset of the data which is highly subjective.
Let’s put it another way: my high school retained the services of a chiropractor. He did things which made my back feel better after the minor injuries and strains of playing on the line in football. I can STILL look at the broad sweep of data that is out there, and conclude that “chiropractors are bullshit”, recognizing that my particular experience is anomalous.
I stated it in my first post. If you do not understand that a planet and its star orbit around a common center of mass then looking for the wobble in detecting extrasolar planets will not make sense. “The Earth orbits the Sun” is a great $999.90 phrase for children who would have trouble with an abstract concept like “barycenter”, but it is not a difficult thing to grasp for adults.
And Jesus Christ, you created the terms of the analogy, don’t try to argue that it’s actually a microcent or some crazy shit. That’s the kind of stuff that makes philosophy seem like so much garbage.
Ugh internet problems. I had a whole response typed and POOF! Gone!
This response will so not be as good as that one. Argh.
Anywho…
Are you assuming that all chiropractors are crap except for the one you saw, the one I saw, and the ones everyone in my family has seen? I’m not sure why you think that our personal experience is anomalous.
Please understand that I don’t mean to be disrespectful, I actually just don’t understand your thinking.
I’m not really assuming anything. I’m going based on study data, which (in aggregate) seems to indicate that chiropractic care has some small benefit and short-term improvements in the case of chronic spinal and neck pain, and is otherwise no more beneficial than any other treatment or placebo.
Our personal experiences, in toto, don’t sum up to the same amount of support for a theory as, for example, a survey of studies with 6070 total participants, which showed that “there is no clinically relevant difference between SMT and other interventions for reducing pain and improving function in patients with chronic low-back pain.”
There are any number of explanations for “why it works for one person” or even several people that don’t involve “the treatment methodology is effective”.