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Skeptic

  • 3 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2020

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  • That last example is extremely bad and reeks of bad faith argument.

    And there you go, someone found it out real quick - it was actually a bad faith argument, all the way from the beginning.

    Calling an argument bad faith or good faith is unscientific. In fact, it is what church used to do to science before science became popular.

    This is why I did not respond to that guy. It touched his nerve, when I declared traditional Indian medicine as unscientific.

    I didn’t actually go to your links and didn’t know till now that you are targeting Indian medicine. The form of your argument itself is a fallacy called appeal to authority and it hardly matters what you are targetting or what you feel about it.

    He then decided to create a loaded comment, and if it wasn’t already evident, their comment is fallacious - it deviates from the topic I had originally intended to discuss - by directing the blame on modern science being controlled by scary “illuminati” and “weeping angels” in corporate suit and boot.

    Lol. Your words, your emotions. Not mine.

    Too bad his BigPharma scare tactics don’t work in the Indian context, and also makes him look like a QAnon weirdo to the western folks over here. Mechanisms of ayurveda, unani, siddha and homeopathy fail in front of modern science with simple theories like the atomic model theory, or Avogadro constant. But hey, his favorite party bought the Ministry of Ayush in India, why would he let a ‘brown sepoy’ like me insult the supreme leader?

    Now that you are the one spouting conspiracy theories close to your heart, you are legitimately the one using scare tactics.

    According to his logic, an uneducated charlatan in saffron robe, who looks like a “pious” guru has the utmost right to insult dying doctors and sell cow urine (I am not making this up, his company “Patanjali” sells it for real). And his Coronil kit - which I’ve previously mentioned in the post, has destroyed the livers of many of the unfortunate ones due to heavy metal poisoning, who could not afford to buy the vaccine - and now, their financial burden has increased tenfolds. Yet, there’s no accountability. This scammer earns crores of rupees, fooling the citizens of not just India, but also Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and also hippies from the west - USA, UK, Germany, you probably know how much the reach is. Vulnerable people consume pseudo-science garbage prepared by shady gurus and godmen.

    Patanjali is not my company, nor do I follow Baba Ramdev or consumed his coronil kit. But I can assure you, damages done by them are dwarfs compared to … well, have you read about what Johnson & Johnson did to infants?

    And why does it matter that I’ve made this post? Because a board-certified doctor established in California is promoting pseudoscience - and mind you, none of the universities in the US or Europe recognize any traditional snake-oil medicine degree, maybe except for homeopathy. How is he not held liable for fooling people on the other side of the world?

    See, appeal to authority again.
    And somehow you believe that I am making bad (faith) arguments.


  • Economics has been there as an academic subject since centuries, but it wasn’t classified as a science till around one generation ago. The same goes for other social sciences. In fact, social sciences used to be known as social studies.

    Scientific method isn’t the criteria of determining what is science even in core sciences as of today. Take the field of medicine, for example. It filters out all knowledge and research which is not done by qualified doctors. Who becomes a medical doctor is very tightly controlled by institutions, and doctors are heavily disincentivized to speak against the given lines.

    So much so, the research in medical field has been reduced to statistics of administration of pharma drugs to humans. In medicine, one no longer tests whether consumption of say, an apple, will have any impact on a patient. Testing apples, and finding them beneficial will not only not be publishedas research, it is considered “pseudo-science” by many.


  • I’d be happy to be corrected, but there is no clear definition of what constitutes science, short of blindly following authority of some institution prone to funding politics.

    In medicine, funding is known to be ultimately controlled by big corporates, making “established science” murkier than, say, the science of standardization of units.

    EDIT : last line, grammar