Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 23:56:07 -0800 (PST) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Newest Pentium bug (fatal) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971111232432.1502A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <199711120638.XAA02274@rocky.mt.sri.com>
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On Tue, 11 Nov 1997, Nate Williams wrote: > > > > > Umm, the people who got better weren't praying, they were being prayed > > > > > for, and by people whom they had no contact with. > > > > > > > > Which proves, simply, that truly bogus results are possible even in > > > > well designed experiments. > > > > > > Actually, your statement proves that closed minds exists, even by people > > > who claim to be 'scientific' and 'open-minded'. Then again, maybe you > > > don't consider yourself open-minded, so I may be jumping to conclusions. > > > > That's not nice, Nate. > > Neither is throwing out the results of something just because you don't > want to believe in them. It's called having a closed mind. I would like to agree with the judgment here that I have a closed mind on this issue--or something very close to it, like 99.99%. I think most adults arrive at some stable world view that constitutes a set of hypotheses about how the world works. And my view of how the world works is such that I am inclined to doubt, with close to 100% certainty, that the health of one group of people improved more than another group because some other people prayed for them. Now, if they knew others were praying for them--or if those caring for them knew it--that's different. Then they have different beliefs about their own prospects. What people believe and their own confidence in their futures affects outcomes; that there are psychological effects on physical health is really not in dispute, although how this works isn't necessarily known. But this is apparently not the claim of the studies, but rather that the praying helped even though neither the patients nor the care-givers knew about it. I would conclude there's something wrong with these studies, whether it's selection bias, that they're not really "double-blind" studies, in the intepretation of results, or whatever. It would be very, very difficult to convince me otherwise. It would be sufficiently difficult that I would find it hard to justify spending time evaluating such studies to determine their validity. In this sense my mind is closed (or very close to it) on hypotheses of this type, because they are inconsistent with my view of how the world works, that is, my view of reality. Thus most of us reject out of hand certain kinds of hypotheses, and in that sense have closed minds. I am aware that scientific breakthroughs are made by people who reject the world views characteristic of their times. There's also a lot of good science done within the standard world view of the times. There are also, as you point out, a lot of studies done that are never repeated and may not be valid but are nevertheless accepted, perhaps because they are based on assumptions about how the world works that are widely shared. You see, I have trouble with prayer as a causative phenomenon. I have trouble with the idea of a higher being or beings who can be manipulated by people praying. I have trouble with a god who would let one group of people languish in pain and illness because other people were not praying for them. I have trouble with auras, with influences or forces transmitted by people willing something, whether it be the health of others (or an evil spell case upon them) or the roll of dice. That's just my world view. Annelise
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