I don’t know why this post is being downvoted, but in any case I have a better idea: use it as a rationality exercise to figure out whether he is a crackpot without acquiring any additional biological/medical knowledge or consulting any biological/medical experts. I bet you can convince yourself to a near-certainty (my feeling is something like a 10^-7 chance of being wrong) that he is a crackpot using only information already available to you and some good heuristics.
From these kinds of heuristics and some simple observations, the guy is too obviously a crackpot to even be worth asking an expert about.
I’ll point out just a couple of things:
On a superficial level (which often provides great Bayesian evidence!), the guy can barely type—his posts are littered with weird typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, and incoherent sentences.
He gives no account of why medical science has failed to figure out this stuff.
He emphasizes how exceptionally simple all his discoveries are, that biology boils down to just a few fundamental principles—that the same basic idea will “cure” literally all common diseases. Again, just think of how much seemingly settled biological science would have to be wrong for that to be possible.
the guy can barely type—his posts are littered with weird typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, and incoherent sentences.
It’s such a common cluster of traits (and failure mode among people on the internet and homeless people I’ve met), it might be a particular mental state. Hasn’t everyone had that feeling once that they suddenly understand everything and it’s All Connected? It’s a particular manic state, perhaps. When I find myself in it, I know not to trust anything I’m thinking but I write it down anyway just in case. Sometimes it’s OK and there are insights.
It’s such a common cluster of traits (and failure mode among people on the internet and homeless people I’ve met), it might be a particular mental state. Hasn’t everyone had that feeling once that they suddenly understand everything and it’s All Connected?
Here’s a MetaFilter thread discussing how manic states can lead to this kind of feeling. It’s pretty anecdotal though. Some actual research to what’s going on with stereotypical crackpots would be interesting.
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.
There are currently 6 billion people on earth. In their lifetimes (presuming the singularity doesn’t extend that to infinity), I expect there will be significantly less than 600 fundamental theory changes to our systems. Sure, entirely new fields like computers and genetics have occurred in the last ~80ish years, but those occurred within the framework of existing theory. Few and far between are the refutations like Phlogiston, Impetus, or Spontaneous generation. The prior probability for anyone to overturn an established branch of science is therefore already much less than 1 in 10 million.
If our prior probability is already at 1 in 10 million, additional facts like him having no training in an area and incoherent sentences push it to being even less likely.
The relevant number to use in the calculation you’re making isn’t the 6 billion people inhabiting the world, but the people that actually claim to have made such a stunning breakthrough: since that’s what instigates us to want to evaluate the claim in the first place, the fact that he made it.
In short not:
P(X made a stunning breakthrough|X is an alive human being)
but rather:
P(X made a stunning breakthrough|X claims to have made a stunning breakthrough)
As a rough guess I’d say 1⁄100 (or atleast 1/1000) may be far closer in regards to prior probabilities than 1⁄10,000,000.
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. ― Albert Einstein
If modern scientific methods could self-explain why they were wrong, they would be better scientific models. Moreover, scientific communities do not have access to perfect knowledge: any particular theory could have hundreds of supporting trials behind it if those trials weren’t popular enough to be well-known (out of millions of experiments).
I don’t know why this post is being downvoted, but in any case I have a better idea: use it as a rationality exercise to figure out whether he is a crackpot without acquiring any additional biological/medical knowledge or consulting any biological/medical experts. I bet you can convince yourself to a near-certainty (my feeling is something like a 10^-7 chance of being wrong) that he is a crackpot using only information already available to you and some good heuristics.
Of course you may wish to consult John Baez’s Crackpot Index, which is funny and insightful. But the best heuristics I can suggest are the three points of Sean Carroll’s Alternative Science Respectability Checklist:
See also Scott Aaronson’s extremely good Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong, which makes the point that you can usually confer crackpot status on the basis of superficial characteristics alone, and his Eight Signs A Claimed P≠NP Proof Is Wrong, which is some sense a specific instantiation of Carroll’s three points (especially the first two).
From these kinds of heuristics and some simple observations, the guy is too obviously a crackpot to even be worth asking an expert about.
I’ll point out just a couple of things:
On a superficial level (which often provides great Bayesian evidence!), the guy can barely type—his posts are littered with weird typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, and incoherent sentences.
He gives no account of why medical science has failed to figure out this stuff.
He emphasizes how exceptionally simple all his discoveries are, that biology boils down to just a few fundamental principles—that the same basic idea will “cure” literally all common diseases. Again, just think of how much seemingly settled biological science would have to be wrong for that to be possible.
It’s such a common cluster of traits (and failure mode among people on the internet and homeless people I’ve met), it might be a particular mental state. Hasn’t everyone had that feeling once that they suddenly understand everything and it’s All Connected? It’s a particular manic state, perhaps. When I find myself in it, I know not to trust anything I’m thinking but I write it down anyway just in case. Sometimes it’s OK and there are insights.
Here’s a MetaFilter thread discussing how manic states can lead to this kind of feeling. It’s pretty anecdotal though. Some actual research to what’s going on with stereotypical crackpots would be interesting.
Psychoceramics? … oh.
1e-7 seems too strong. That’s 1 in 10 million.
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.
Actually, raw order of magnitude it might not be.
There are currently 6 billion people on earth. In their lifetimes (presuming the singularity doesn’t extend that to infinity), I expect there will be significantly less than 600 fundamental theory changes to our systems. Sure, entirely new fields like computers and genetics have occurred in the last ~80ish years, but those occurred within the framework of existing theory. Few and far between are the refutations like Phlogiston, Impetus, or Spontaneous generation. The prior probability for anyone to overturn an established branch of science is therefore already much less than 1 in 10 million.
If our prior probability is already at 1 in 10 million, additional facts like him having no training in an area and incoherent sentences push it to being even less likely.
The relevant number to use in the calculation you’re making isn’t the 6 billion people inhabiting the world, but the people that actually claim to have made such a stunning breakthrough: since that’s what instigates us to want to evaluate the claim in the first place, the fact that he made it.
In short not:
P(X made a stunning breakthrough|X is an alive human being)
but rather:
P(X made a stunning breakthrough|X claims to have made a stunning breakthrough)
As a rough guess I’d say 1⁄100 (or atleast 1/1000) may be far closer in regards to prior probabilities than 1⁄10,000,000.
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. ― Albert Einstein
If modern scientific methods could self-explain why they were wrong, they would be better scientific models. Moreover, scientific communities do not have access to perfect knowledge: any particular theory could have hundreds of supporting trials behind it if those trials weren’t popular enough to be well-known (out of millions of experiments).
OK, that’s a good point.