= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Dustin comments on Get Curious - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (98)
Well, this article is pretty bad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
but it used to be even worse. First of all,
is hardly a hypothesis. A proper hypothesis would be "[specific mechanism] activates in presence of ionizing radiation and has such and such consequences". It would, incidentally, be easy to get rid of if it was wrong, or show correct if it was correct, and it'd be interesting even if the effect was too weak to beat the direct damage from radiation. I barely managed to get their proposed cause (some untapped powers of self repair mechanisms) into the definition of the hypothesis, 'cause the group that's watching article loved to just have a hypothesis that low doses of radiation are beneficial, whatever the mechanisms may be, they don't care, they just propose that effect is here. They don't care to propose that there's some self repair mechanism that activates by low doses of radiation, either, they want to propose that the effect is so strong there's actual benefit.
Also, note the complete absence of the references to radiation cure quacks of early 20th century - which fall under the definition here. And good luck adding those because there's some core group that's just removing 'em as "irrelevant". The link selection is honed to make it look like something new and advanced that could only have been thought of via some cool counter intuitive reasoning, rather than the first thing ever we thought of when we discovered radiation - ohh cool some poison, we don't sure how it works but it must be good in moderation - then it took about 60 years to finally discard this hypothesis and adopt LNT.
And of course, don't even dream of adding here the usual evolutionary counter argumentation to various allusions to some untapped powers of human body.
Note: radioactive remedies such as radon springs, radon caves, healing stones, etc. are a big business.
I doubt that selecting less than half a sentence from the lead paragraph of an article is a very careful approach to criticism.
This article actually looks pretty typical of Wikipedia articles on relatively obscure quackish biomedical ideas. It outlines what the "hypothesis" is, then makes clear that it is explicitly rejected by various people who have studied the matter. The subject doesn't have enough history or enough attention from skeptics to get the kind of treatment that, say, the article on homeopathy does.
There are two completely junk charts (no scale!) in the article. Yuck!
When read carefully, the article makes clear it's talking about an effect that even if it existed, would be very close to the noise threshold. It requires some statistical awareness — much more than the typical academic has, to say nothing of Wikipedians — to recognize that this is the same thing as saying "there's no reason to suspect an effect here."
The primary bias problem here isn't the article; it's that the subject matter is made of bias, at least as far as I can tell. There's only so many times an article can say "there are a few noisy experiments, but nobody who actually counts on radiation safety thinks this exists."
That said, there's one thing I was really surprised to find: the talk page doesn't seem to be full of supporters saying that their hypothesis is being persecuted by the mainstream and skeptics calling them a bunch of names. And that suggests to me that improvement shouldn't be too hard.
Is this really true? I'm not a part of academia in any sort of way, nor do I have any sort of math or statistical training beyond what's referred to as College Algebra, and I recognized immediately what the effect being close the noise threshold meant.
I'm just wondering if I just have a better intuitive grasp of statistics than your typical academic (and what exactly you mean by academic...all teachers? professors? english professors? stats majors?).
Of course, I read LessWrong and understand Bayes because of it, so maybe that's all it takes...
Yes. Most of the academy doesn't use math or have any feel for it. Being forced to take algebra when you truly do not give a damn about it results in people learning enough to pass the test and then forgetting it forever.
Academics are people who have jobs teaching/lecturing in tertiary education. In a US context the lowest you can go and still be an academic is teaching at a community college. Alternatively an academic is part of the community of scholars, people who actually care about knowledge as such rather than as a means to an end. Most of these people would not know statistics if it bit them on the ass. Remember, the world is insane.