I don’t have a lot of experience at making judgments about orders of magnitude, so you are probably right. But my estimate was based not only on the seeming untrustworthiness of the source, but also on an estimate of how likely it is that anything like what this guy is claiming is true. If you multiply together the probabilities that:
literally all medical complaints, from autism to backache, have the same cause, which is deficiency of micronutrients available in ordinary foods if eaten in sufficient quantities;
the extremely vigorous biological/medical sciences have been fundamentally totally off the mark for at least a century and that probably something like hundreds of thousands of seemingly well-verified scientific findings are wrong (how this could have happened, the guy doesn’t say); and that
of all people, this clown[1] was the person who figured it out …
… I’m really not sure you get something much more likely than 1 in 10 million.
fn1. just an excuse to link to my favorite of his many hilarious comments (posted 8 1⁄2 hours after his previous announcement of a “breakthrough”):
Sweet another break through, was able to unify eastern and western medicine.
What are you trying to find by taking the product of these probabilities? They are not independent, so I think you meant to use probabilities that are conditional upon each other. For example, to find the probability of their conjunction, we would need
%20=%20P(A)%20\times%20P(B%20\mid%20A)%20\times%20P(C\mid%20B%20\cap%20A)) instead. 10^-7 seems a bit low for this.
Yeah, as I said to jsalvatier, it may well be that my estimate was too confident, and of course you’re quite right that I should have explicitly used conditional probabilities. We’re still dealing with someone who we can label a crackpot with only a trivial chance of being wrong.
I don’t have a lot of experience at making judgments about orders of magnitude, so you are probably right. But my estimate was based not only on the seeming untrustworthiness of the source, but also on an estimate of how likely it is that anything like what this guy is claiming is true. If you multiply together the probabilities that:
literally all medical complaints, from autism to backache, have the same cause, which is deficiency of micronutrients available in ordinary foods if eaten in sufficient quantities;
the extremely vigorous biological/medical sciences have been fundamentally totally off the mark for at least a century and that probably something like hundreds of thousands of seemingly well-verified scientific findings are wrong (how this could have happened, the guy doesn’t say); and that
of all people, this clown[1] was the person who figured it out …
… I’m really not sure you get something much more likely than 1 in 10 million.
fn1. just an excuse to link to my favorite of his many hilarious comments (posted 8 1⁄2 hours after his previous announcement of a “breakthrough”):
Riiiiiiiiight.
What are you trying to find by taking the product of these probabilities? They are not independent, so I think you meant to use probabilities that are conditional upon each other. For example, to find the probability of their conjunction, we would need
%20=%20P(A)%20\times%20P(B%20\mid%20A)%20\times%20P(C\mid%20B%20\cap%20A))instead. 10^-7 seems a bit low for this.
That quote is great. :D
Yeah, as I said to jsalvatier, it may well be that my estimate was too confident, and of course you’re quite right that I should have explicitly used conditional probabilities. We’re still dealing with someone who we can label a crackpot with only a trivial chance of being wrong.