Strange memecluster

A strong distrust of the medical establishment is why pointing out simple facts like "homeopathy has never been shown to work" may be insufficient to get a homepathy user to use medicine instead. There's motivated cognition going on – if you don't think medicine works, what are you gonna do when it turns out your alternative doesn't work either?! Just conclude there exists no substance that will help any health problem, and let God sort you out?

Basically if you care about a homeopathy user and want them to use medicine, it isn't a productive approach to say homeopathy doesn't work, because even if you convince them it doesn't work, they will still decline to use medicine because they feel they can't trust it.

This distrust is built on experience that hospitals seek to make money to the extent of only ever caring to treat superficial symptoms, and are actively interested in keeping people sick. Well—hopefully it's built on experience. It could be built on a huge pile of anecdotes that the user bought into because it fit into e.g. an anti-corporate world-view. This is one reason it's so important to understand that anecdotes are not experience or evidence, even if they feel similar!

This same reasoning also seems to fuel the Anti-vax group and probably others, and ultimately the poor souls in the overlap of all these groups seem to be trying to reinvent medicine from scratch with new-old interpretation frameworks like "Detox", which ret-cons all development in medicine since Hippocrates, pretending it didn't happen so you can re-do the research, how fun! That's easy to do when you don't know the history, which is why people should study history!

Question: why would the same logic behind distrusting the medical establishment not apply to their homeopathic doctor? Homeopathy is big business, just like health care, so are they any different wrt. profit motive? One difference is that health care is partly government-regulated, but that doesn't necessarily say anything since so many governments are corrupt.

The movement started with Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent paper. If only it mattered to them that it turned out to be fraudulent…

That the movement appears so unaffected by new facts makes me disinclined to listen to its perspective. Probably there's been a feedback loop: the reasonable anti-vaxxers already quit, so the ones still in have other reasons to stay than just truth.

Basically the stance that findings in social sciences can't be evaluated on the same standards as those in natural sciences. While in a trivial sense, this is TRUE, and it's good to point out that it's hard to get solid knowledge in social sciences, and therefore we shouldn't just sit on our hands and do nothing while waiting for the perfect knowledge, I'm worried this stance gets used to excuse the poor quality of any finding, and excuse not applying a scientific framework even when it could be. I suspect it gets abused as a form of Anti-epistemology, to guard Neo-Nazi and other belief systems (literally any belief system), and any bullshit will get accepted in prestigious journals if prestigious people pay lip service to the interpretivists "yeah the truth is unknowable so I can't say this is not science" because they don't want to harm their careers. Also concerned it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater: "science sometimes doesn't work, so let's ignore everything that historically successful scientists would have thought about our current method".

This is also named antipositivism, because it was born in the 60s at least partly as a counterreaction to logical positivism. May be good to point out that positivism itself has been dead since the 70s – the philosopher Quine effectively killed it with his 1951 paper. So it's anti-nothing in particular, because no one today holds that position, and the name is dishonest because you leverage someone's disreputability to elevate yourself. Instead of antipositivist, you could just as well call yourself anti-stupid. Free points for you!

Components used to prop up interpretivism:

• Critical theory
• Paul Feyerabend's ideas
• (maybe) Willard Van Orman Quine's ideas, esp. the stuff about indeterminacy of translation
• Some guy named Jurgen Habermas

This field seems to try to get at the general principles underlying "critical readings" of anything, using any framework, like reading texts from a psychoanalytic perspective, a feminist perspective, a Marxist perspective and so on.

[2022-01-18 Tue]: I tried to read a textbook on this topic and it was hard to understand what the point of it all was. That implies a high Bullshit quotient. Had the same experience attempting to read Foucault.

OK, one of the aims is to reveal and challenge power structures. "With origins in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors." (what does this mean?)

"ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation"

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

Martin Jay has said that the first generation of critical theory is best understood not as promoting a specific philosophical agenda or ideology, but as "a gadfly of other systems."

Critical theory has been criticized for not offering any clear road map to political action (praxis), often explicitly repudiating any solutions… A primary criticism of the theory is that it is anti-scientific, both for its lack of the use of the scientific method, and for its assertion that science is a tool used for oppression of marginalized groups of people.[28]

• China Study
• "Detox"