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ChristianKl comments on A Medical Mystery: Thyroid Hormones, Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia - Less Wrong
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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.