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.
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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).
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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.
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Replying to @MarkHoofnagle @gorskon and
What if the n = thousands, each and every one dismissed as an anecdote and a coincidence? How about denialism? See brides in the bath case: http://www.jpands.org/vol10no3/miller.pdf …
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Yeah your crank journal is evidence of nothing and the article is frankly conspiratorial. Not interested in the QAnon of medicine.
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Replying to @MarkHoofnagle @gorskon and
Did you read the article, or do you just automatically dismiss and demean anything without AMA imprimatur?
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Yes. I even included the specific criticism of it’s conspiratorial regard of grant funding tucked away at the end as well as absurd notions that we should use legal notions of proof in medicine. Don’t compare your rag to JAMA.The next closest journal is “Medical Hypotheses.”
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I read it too. It's a truly risible article, and I say that as someone who's not a big fan of the AMA.
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