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Psy-Kosh comments on The Irrationality Game - Less Wrong
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I was thinking homeopathy would essentially throw out much of what we think we know about chemistry. For the world to still look like it does even with the whole "you can dilute something to the point that there's hardly a molecule of the substance in question, but it can impose its energy signature onto the water molecules", etc, well... for that sort of thing to have a biological effect as far as being able to treat stuff, but not having any effect like throwing everything else about chemistry and bio out of whack would seem to be quite a stretch. Not to mention that, underneath all that, would probably require physics to work rather differently than the physics we know. And in noticeable ways rather than zillionth decimal place ways.
Possibly you're right, and it would be less of a stretch than flat-earth, but doesn't seem that way at least. Specifying the additional specific of a nasa conspiracy being the source of the flat earth being hidden may be sufficient additional complexity to drive it below homeopathy. But overall, I'd think of both as requiring similar order of magnitude improbabilities.
But can't homeopathy be represented as positing an additional chemical law- the presence of some spiritual energy signature which water can carry? I'm not exactly familiar with homeopathy but it seems like you could come up with a really kludgey theory that lets it work without you actually having to get rid of theories of chemical bonding, valence electrons and so on. It doesn't seem as easy to do that with the disk earth scenario.
It's worse than that. Water having a memory, spiritual or otherwise, of things it used to carry, would be downright simple compared to what homeopathy posits. Considering everything all the water on Earth has been through, you'd expect it to be full of memories of all sorts of stuff; not just the last homeopathic remedy you put in it. What homeopathy requires is that water has a memory of things that it has held, which has to be primed by a specific procedure, namely thumping the container of water against a leather pad stuffed with horse hair while the solute is still in it so the water will remember it. The process is called "succussion" and the inventor of homeopathy thought that it made his remedies stronger. Later advocates though, realized the implications of the "water has a memory" hypothesis, and so rationalized it as necessary.
Wow. I hadn't even heard of the very specific leather pad thing. (I've heard it has to be shaken in specific ways, but not that)
How is it that no matter how stupid I think it is, I keep hearing things that makes homeopathy even more stupid than I previously thought?
What Desertopa said.
But essentially whatever kludge you come up with would still have to have biochemical consequences or it wouldn't be able to work at all. (Or you make the kludge super extra complex, which then, again, crushes the probability). And once you have those effects, you need an excuse for why those effects don't show up elsewhere in chemistry, why we don't see such things otherwise.