Consensus is the enemy of science. Particularly a fake consensus, What about the consensus on Ptolemy, or spontaneous generation, or bad air as the cause of malaria, etc.
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What’s next? “They laughed at Galileo too”?
3 replies 2 retweets 25 likes -
Replying to @Takethatdoctors @jorient and
David Gorski, MD, PhD Retweeted David Gorski, MD, PhD
David Gorski, MD, PhD added,
David Gorski, MD, PhDVerified account @gorskonSilly doctor. Boiled down to its essence, what is a scientific theory but the current best consensus about a specific natural phenomenon (e.g., the theory of evolution, germ theory, the theory of relativity, etc.)? 1/ https://twitter.com/jorient/status/1107035447601954816 …Show this thread1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes -
Replying to @gorskon @Takethatdoctors and
Science is based on observations. One observation can destroy a beautiful theory. Real scientists try to disprove their theories, not to silence criticism of them.
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Scientific revolutions don’t function by overturning previous theories but by greatly expanding on them. Relativity doesn’t disprove Newton’s laws of motion, it expands on them to high speed and density. If your theory is overturned by a single observation, it was a hypothesis.
2 replies 1 retweet 17 likes -
Replying to @MarkHoofnagle @jorient and
More specifically general relativity expanded and generalized Newton’s law of gravitation and special relativity generalized Newton’s laws of motion for high speed. We still use Newton’s theories 99% if the time because we aren’t working at relativistic speeds or in black holes.
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Replying to @MarkHoofnagle @jorient and
While medical reversal is more frequent than that of physics, the previous observations are still true, but may represent outliers, or regress to the mean. Hence the need for replication. Short of fraud, the data remain true, but our understanding of them expands.
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Replying to @MarkHoofnagle @jorient and
Now how in the hell *one observation* would reverse a mature medical theory, which we know are highly dependent on replication, is beyond me and reflects ignorance about how the medical literature functions and appropriate skepticism of new results (as Ioannidis’ emphasizes).
1 reply 1 retweet 12 likes -
Replying to @MarkHoofnagle @jorient and
An actual skeptical physician, hearing of a single observation that contradicted a mature finding, replicated, eg for vaccines, in billions of people and thousands of papers, would tell you the far more likely probability is your n=1 observation is garbage.
2 replies 1 retweet 15 likes -
Replying to @MarkHoofnagle @jorient and
By way of an example, someone could come across your loony, antivax, HIV/AIDS denying crank postings and observe, understandably, “Christ, doctors are really stupid.” We would say them, “no, that’s an outlier, sample more” and the next 999 would reassure them of the opposite.
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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