tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6606798.post8800651672003038780..comments2024-03-28T22:32:50.562+00:00Comments on Liberal England: Six of the Best 295Jonathan Calderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730157683743989696noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6606798.post-27208748323970593922012-11-16T10:31:56.253+00:002012-11-16T10:31:56.253+00:00There are some worthwhile sentences in the Thinkin...There are some worthwhile sentences in the Thinking Liberal post and you have quoted one. The problem is that far too much of what he has written is a demonstration of the fallibility of human "thinking".<br /><br />There are undoubtedly vast numbers of instances in everyday life where judgement and/or instinct (the embodied know-how gifted to us by inheritance and experience) are appropriate, but the more important the decision, the greater the scope of the policy question, the longer the timescale for making a judgement, then the more important it is to seek out evidence that excludes bad decisions and underpins good judgement.<br /><br />He decides to take homoeopathy as his key example, then chooses to characterise it by ignoring its defining characteristic (that "like cures like" and so - in some uttely mysterious way - a pill that cannot be distinguished from a sugar tablet or a bottle of water that cannot be distinguished from pure water will somehow restore a person's health) and flagging up aspects of how homeopaths (can) behave that are not unique to homeopathy. He has the fuzziest concept of what the placebo effect is, has decided to ignore the vast weight of rigorous evidence that homeopathy does not outperform placebo effects ...<br /><br />But then there's the point: this was more an exercise in rhetoric, in the internal party debate, an attempt to bat away the inky-fingered, geeky, prosaic types who persist in bringing forward inconvenient facts and restore primacy to people who rely on elegantly expressed preconceptions and traditional armchair theorising.Squirrel Nutkinnoreply@blogger.com