> You're talking to a working scientist with a substantial amount of grant funding. Thank you for disclosing that you have a vested financial interest in this

> You're talking to a working scientist with a substantial amount of grant funding. Thank you for disclosing that you have a vested financial interest in this topic. FWIW, you are talking to someone who didn't need an exposé to realize that sugar was bad for me and made me feel bad. :-) > I don't know why you're taking a jaded, skeptical approach to science, but an idealistic one to your social graph. Your social graph is biased. It just is. Homophily and communities are things for a reason. I don't think that my approach is jaded, but skeptical yes. What's wrong with that? Yes, my social graph is biased. What's wrong with that? > While I think critical engagement with science is essential, "checking it against lived experience" is comparing your biased anecdotes to study results, and trying to draw a conclusion from that Yes, I expect that study results, if they want to be taken seriously, not be easily disproven by available anecdotes in my life. I remember the day - literally the day - in 2002 when a study - conducted at Johns Hopkins and published in Science - concluded that MDMA was a potential cause of Parkinson's disease. In the study, a drug purported to be MDMA, in a dose purported to be typical, was administered to 10 animals - baboons and squirrel monkeys - and two of them died as a result of the drug. I didn't need anything but personal anecdotes to tell me that something had gone horribly wrong in this study, since I had dozens of friends (and myself) who had taken MDMA and none of us knew anybody who had died. It was obvious to everyone from the very first day either that these animals had a very different sensitivity to MDMA or that a different drug or different dose had been administered. I recall that Myself, Rick Doblin, Tom Angell, and many others took to the SSDP mailing list immediately to point this out. However, it took another year for Johns Hopkins to sheepishly claim that a "labeling error" had caused the animals to be injected with methamphetamine and not MDMA. Of course the study was retracted on this basis, but not before it went through all the rigor and peer review that is required to pass the filters and both Johns Hopkins and Science. [0] That's the kind of bullshit that I'm talking about that masquerades as science and that personal anecdotes can easily and convincingly defeat, and the kind of thing I'm saying is required to verify with lived experience. > That, itself, is not science, and is absolutely the fuel behind things like the use of "As a mother..." in antivaccine discussions. This seems like an unmitigated cum hoc fallacy to me. The fact that I assert that lived experience is a meaningful mechanism to discover truth does not mean that I agree with every silly conclusion drawn by people who perhaps agree with me on this point. [0]: https://maps.org/research-archive/mdma/retraction/maps_response_100203.html https://maps.org/research-archive/mdma/retraction/maps_respo...