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Lumifer comments on A Medical Mystery: Thyroid Hormones, Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia - Less Wrong
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Ryan, thank you, I really appreciate your time, and that is exactly the sort of thing that someone needs to say to me. I have come to the conclusion that I must be trolling.
My idea, which I have arrived at quite independently by a long chain of dodgy inferences from a minor puzzle to do with my own illness, it now seems to me can be summed up as:
Almost all the remaining unexplained human ailments can be explained as disorders of the endocrine system.
This idea seems to have been first thought of in the 1940s, and independently deduced, observed, or inferred many times since. If true, it would have a great number of disturbing implications. If untrue but widely believed, it would cause a catastrophe.
Now I look for them, there are published books suggesting this, and an entire tradition of alternative medicine based on it. Which reports success. But then, they would say that, wouldn't they?
And yet no one except a few quacks believes it.
And so my mystery is now:
Where is the obvious refutation that means that it is false?
I apologise for wasting everyone's time. I am not being sarcastic.
I realise that my argument is 'You cannot prove me wrong, and therefore I must be right'
I realise just how bad that argument is.
I realise that I have blundered into a complicated subject that I am not in the least qualified to discuss.
I have already had to discard one simple obvious explanation for a complicated problem (they are almost always wrong). I do not like to believe in chocolate teapots.
I am asking for help in discarding another one.
What on earth is Less Wrong for, if it is not for this?
I do not imply that you must waste your time helping me. But I am damned sure that someone needs to say it plainly. It has fooled me. It is causing havoc. Why is it not true?
I think you're underestimating the complexity of human biology.
The condition of a human body is a function of a very large number of factors: internal and external, somatic and psychological, genetic and acquired, etc. etc. Moreover, these factors are interdependent and tend to form feedback loops.
The situations where you have one clear cause for a problem certainly exist (e.g. infections, type 1 diabetes, etc.). But there are also situations where there are multiple factors in play. It would be a mistake either to believe that a single one of these factors explains everything, or to believe that this single factor is irrelevant, that is, "false".
It is likely that some disorder of the hormonal system plays some role in some chronic illnesses for which we have no clear etiology. Can you fix those illnesses by tinkering with hormones? Maybe -- that's what medicine is trying to find out, with... various success so far.
tl;dr: It's complicated :-)
Of course it's complicated! I'm saying, there's serious grounds for suspicion here. And the problem, if it exists at all, is likely to be gigantic. So we need to pay attention even though it doesn't look very likely. A genuine Pascal's Wager. We aren't allowed to shrug our shoulders in response. Scope insensitivity is one of the sins.
All these funny diseases that look like mixtures of type 2 versions of well understood endocrine disorders. That I didn't know about until after I'd made up the idea. And a very simple hypothesis that explains them all and should be easy to refute. I predict low body temperature in every different group. Patterns of differently low body temperatures correlating with how much the disease looks like classical hypothyroidism.
I have a hypothesis formed by whatever dodgy method I like, and which has turned out to have been commonly suspected by many different people, all starting from different observations, which I am now using to explain and predict lots of other facts that didn't figure in the original making-it-up process.
Does the order in which I learned these facts matter? How should I adjust my conclusions to account, even given that I probably can't remember the precise order? I am going through periods of puzzlement, enlightenment, and then spectacular rewards of confirmation followed by terror at the implications.
And the competing explanations all turn out to be philosophically suspect.
This science business turns out to be quite hard. And we claim (and I believe us) that we are unnaturally good at this sort of thing. Where have I erred, Brothers in Bayes?
What do you know that I don't know? What conclusions (that are safe to draw in public) do you draw from my idea and do they turn out to be true? What are the odds and why? What is a yes worth. What is a no worth?
Are doctors actually trained to ignore these symptoms? Because they're everywhere? How common are these diseases?
Are the patterns of occurrence the same in every racial group? Are they different in different countries? Are there places where some mysterious cause is making itself particularly obvious?
How much confounding has this caused in all epidemiological data ever? That might be the biggest prize.
Should I take my thoughts to medical statisticians? Or can I actually get a better answer here?
That's still handwaving.
Let's invoke Popper and ask for specific, testable, falsifiable statements. What exactly do you claim and want to test? What outcomes will prove you wrong? I don't think the details of how you came to formulate your hypothesis matter.
Will they listen to you?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/nbm/thyroid_hormones_chronic_fatigue_and_fibromyalgia/
I hope so!
Actually we are. Changing the status quo is hard even if you are right.
I don't think mainling the original post to any medical statistician will get you anywhere. You would beforehand have to be clearer about your thesis and the evidence you have. It helps to cite the evidence.
A prediction is something that has a credence value especially if you see yourself as Bayesian. At the moment you don't state those.
Shouldn't be. If I can sharpen my argument to the point where I believe it myself, then I can take it to the ivory towers of the wise and they will listen. I know these people, and I trust them. They will do the right thing.
For the rest, see:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/nbm/thyroid_hormones_chronic_fatigue_and_fibromyalgia/
How much have you talked to people inside the system? From my conversations with stakeholders I have the impression that change is very hard.