Actually, raw order of magnitude it might not be.
There are currently 6 billion people on earth. In their lifetimes (presuming the singularity doesn't extend that to infinity), I expect there will be significantly less than 600 fundamental theory changes to our systems. Sure, entirely new fields like computers and genetics have occurred in the last ~80ish years, but those occurred within the framework of existing theory. Few and far between are the refutations like Phlogiston, Impetus, or Spontaneous generation. The prior probability for anyone to overturn an established branch of science is therefore already much less than 1 in 10 million.
If our prior probability is already at 1 in 10 million, additional facts like him having no training in an area and incoherent sentences push it to being even less likely.
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. ― Albert Einstein
If modern scientific methods could self-explain why they were wrong, they would be better scientific models. Moreover, scientific communities do not have access to perfect knowledge: any particular theory could have hundreds of supporting trials behind it if those trials weren't popular enough to be well-known (out of millions of experiments).
In a different forum I frequent ( The Ornery American ), a regular member there (LetterRip) has recently been making an extraordinary claim - a new theory of medicine he has devised that relates and can contribute in the cure of several neurological-related conditions.
I understand that the prior probabilities for him being a crank are much much higher than him being a new Louis Pasteur. Still I was wondering if there is anyone here with sufficient medical/medicinal knowledge that they can easily determine if there's something obviously ludicrous in LetterRip's theory, or even the opposite: if indeed there's something there that makes sense and is worth investigating.
Here are some of the relevant threads he began:
- where he requests contacts
- where he publishes portion of his theory as a Kindle book
- where he announces more "breakthroughs" and insights and offers to cure or at least alleviate simple ailments
Once again: I understand it's highly unlikely there's anything in his theory; still, I felt a cost-benefit analysis justified my making this post here.
So... anyone with enough understanding of biology/medicine to evaluate these claims of his?