mikedilger on Nostr: I am a skeptic and a rebel, but I am not skeptical of mainstream opinion in certain ...
I am a skeptic and a rebel, but I am not skeptical of mainstream opinion in certain cases. I hope this can be my final post on this topic. I'm not interested in arguing with people about why I believe what I believe.
The conditions that make a field of research credible to me are:
* There are a large number of people looking into the issue
* Those people are spread across the planet working in many different countries and cultures and languages
* Their funding sources are very diverse
* Their results publishing is very diverse
* They are nearly unanimous in their opinions, with very few dissenters
* There isn't a clear universal strong bias affecting them all
* I have personal experience interacting with some of them to verify much of the above
IMHO these apply to medical/nutrition research and to a lesser degree to climate change. Sure, you can point out sources of bias, or publication filtering, or funding problems, but when a fied is so large with such diversity, and the Chinese are getting the same results, then even large amounts of such corrupting influences won't IMHO tip the whole field into folly.
The conditions that make a field of research credible to me are:
* There are a large number of people looking into the issue
* Those people are spread across the planet working in many different countries and cultures and languages
* Their funding sources are very diverse
* Their results publishing is very diverse
* They are nearly unanimous in their opinions, with very few dissenters
* There isn't a clear universal strong bias affecting them all
* I have personal experience interacting with some of them to verify much of the above
IMHO these apply to medical/nutrition research and to a lesser degree to climate change. Sure, you can point out sources of bias, or publication filtering, or funding problems, but when a fied is so large with such diversity, and the Chinese are getting the same results, then even large amounts of such corrupting influences won't IMHO tip the whole field into folly.