Seriously? Take a look at NCCAM’s results. There’s an awful lot of “we found this concoction to be no better than placebo” and “that herb does not reduce the risk of cancer” there. From a Bayesian standpoint, NCCAM is doing the hard work of debunking: finding all the absences of evidence that are evidence of absence. Yes, they’re spending time debunking stuff that should never have been bunked in the first place; and no, they’re not immediately going around and shutting down the fraudulent herb-pushers — but there’s a long way between that and the blind credulity you seem to be suggesting.
I’m not suggesting that it has reached that level (Tom Harkin, the big congressional sponsor, has complained repeatedly about it not validating enough pseudoscience), and agree that it gets mostly negative results when it funds actual experiments. The troubling parts tend to be slips, or channeling money and prestige to the merchants of madness.
Seriously? Take a look at NCCAM’s results. There’s an awful lot of “we found this concoction to be no better than placebo” and “that herb does not reduce the risk of cancer” there. From a Bayesian standpoint, NCCAM is doing the hard work of debunking: finding all the absences of evidence that are evidence of absence. Yes, they’re spending time debunking stuff that should never have been bunked in the first place; and no, they’re not immediately going around and shutting down the fraudulent herb-pushers — but there’s a long way between that and the blind credulity you seem to be suggesting.
I’m not suggesting that it has reached that level (Tom Harkin, the big congressional sponsor, has complained repeatedly about it not validating enough pseudoscience), and agree that it gets mostly negative results when it funds actual experiments. The troubling parts tend to be slips, or channeling money and prestige to the merchants of madness.
That’s really interesting! It shows that an institute created by someone who wanted a specific answer can get a realistic distribution of results.