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ChristianKl 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?
90% of prospective drugs fail to produce positive clinical effects. That's even through theoretically they should work. The refutation comes with the clinical trial. That's usually how it goes.
Absolutely. The only good evidence is randomized controlled trial. But what can we deduce using the bad evidence? Remember Amanda Knox. We showed she must be innocent by thinking. And everyone laughed at us for believing it. As if it was some sort of cult badge.
Drug trials are incredibly expensive. There's a lot of money involved in reasoning about the likelihood that the drug will work before it's put to trial. At the same time those people still often put their chips on drugs that turn out not to work.
That means that in many cases there's not an obvious refutation to be found that a drug doesn't work if you don't actually run a trial.
Who do you think laughed at us? As far as I understand the US media in general thought Know to be innocent and most people don't care about the LW opinion on Amanda Knox.
I was reading RationalWiki about Less Wrong, to find out anything I should know about us, and they were in hilarious form about how the innocence of Amanda Knox was a compulsory belief.
So I thought "Oh, I didn't realise we believed that.". I'm British, and as you'd expect since the victim was British, the British press thought Amanda Knox was some sort of sexy cartwheeling antichristette. And went and read the article in question, which said: "Think about this as if it were a problem in probability." So I did, for a couple of hours, and it was obvious that she was innocent.
So for a while I went around telling everyone that she was innocent, and they reacted how you'd expect when a middle aged man gets interested in the innocence of a pretty youngster.
And then it turned out she was, and they all think I'm a witch now.
And that is the first and only time I have seen this purported method work on something real. It works on made-up theoretical problems, Bob's your uncle. And philosophically it's nice.
But here we have a chance to find out something really important, or discredit something harmful. And then I'll know. Both things.
Sometimes the answer is "You have no evidence". (Or at least no good evidence.)
Of course, if you have no evidence that an accused criminal is guilty, you should assume they are innocent. But if you have no evidence in some medical theory, you shouldn't be assuming the medical theory is true.
I hope I'm not assuming it. I certainly don't believe it.