By bunderbunder
I hate being the guy to call fallacy,* but this reminds me of the Nirvana fallacy here.
You’re not comparing the level of scientific rigor in mainstream medicine to the level of scientific rigor in alternative medicine. You’re comparing it to the level of scientific rigor that we wish existed in a perfect world. Are you also willing to measure alternative medicine against the same standard so that they can be compared on an equal footing?
P-value fishing is hardly the exclusive province of mainstream medicine. And in the “funding their own studies” department the most notable difference between mainstream pharma and alt med is that the mainstream pharma companies are legally required to disclose this fact (and preregister their studies in order to discourage fishing, too), while in alt med it’s standard practice to use cute little financial engineering tricks to try and hide where the funding came from.
* But I don’t hate lying on occasion.
Read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741643
bunderbunder comments on "Regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work"
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