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I am not responsible for David McCraneys book title, Naomi :) So i do not think I can be accused of implying that people are dumb. as in lacking in intelligence, when it comes to evaluating claims about science etc. I have not claimed that in this thread, and I am pretty sure I did not claim any such thing in the other thread either- that certainly was not my intent - but I do think that a significant proportion of the general public are ill-equipped by virtue of receiving a poor scientific education. Educationally speaking, it is my understanding that this is changing, that science is being better promoted and better taught in schools, which is a very good thing.
But the central point of the article is the value of the scientific method and how important it has been to our expanded knowledge base and our technological society. Personally, I do not think its importance can be understated.
Fred makes a very good point re the "democracy of the dead". We do it this way because we have always done it this way, etc. Researchers have often claimed that the scientific method establishes this method of thinking; A kind of tyranical by consensus; that ideas that fall outside this consensus are contemptuously dismissed out of hand. A classic example of this sort of thinking can be seen in any number of the press releases from the college of homeopathy, for example, who claim that homeopathy is not testable by the scientific method, that the mechanism of its effect falls outside what can be demonstrated by the gold standard of clinical trials, a randomised double blind placebo-controlled trial.
Now, it may be true that the mechanism might indeed be beyond conventional thinking. But they err in thinking that therefore the scientific method is either inappropriate or incapable of gauging its claims of efficacy. The real world effect of such treatments of phenomena can be tested for, along with controls for confounding effects.
If a treatment, such as homeopathy, or a practice, such as dowsing, or a communication channel, such as a ouija board, has a real world effect, then this effect can be tested, by controlling for confounding factors and ruling out observer expectancy bias etc. We have remarked upon this before, in fact. When discussing dowsing, the implication of many of those claiming anecdotal evidence for dowsing was that it worked 100% of the time. How then can we square that claim with what the controlled evidence actually shows, which is that it is no better than random chance?
And if, in all the numerous trials of such treatments ( thousands of trials of homeopathy over hundreds of years) and phenomena there is no demonstrable effect beyond what we would expect from random chance. then why continue to assert that there is any objective truth to the treatment / phenomena at all?