re science and methodology was homeopathy tradition in article lsu q innia saltillo cs utexas edu turpin cs utexas edu russell turpin writes i agree with everything that lee lady wrote in her previous post in this thread gee maybe i ve misjudged you russell anyone who agrees with something i say can t be all bad seriously i m not sure whether i misjudged you or not in one respect i still have a major problem though with your insistence that science is mainly about avoiding mistakes and i still disagree with your contention that nobody who doesn t use methods deemed scientific can possibly know what s true and what s not deleted material which i agree with back to lee lady these are not the rules according to many who post to sci med and sci psychology according to these posters if it s not supported by carefully designed controlled studies then it s not science these posters are making the mistake that i have previously criticized of adhering to a methodological recipe a carefully rules such as support the hypothesis by a carefully designed and controlled study are too narrow to apply to all investigation i think that the requirements for particular reasoning to be convincing depends greatly on the kinds of mistakes that have occurred in past reasoning about the same kinds of things to reuse the previous example we know that conclusions from uncontrolled observations of the treatment of chronic medical problems are notoriously problematic okay so let s see if we agree on this first of all there are degrees of certainty it might be appropriate for instance to demand carefully controlled trials before we accept as absolute scientific truth to the extent that there is any such thing the effectiveness of a certain treatment on the other hand highly favorable clinical experience even if uncontrolled can be adequate to justify a preliminary judgement that a treatment is useful this is often the best evidence we can hope for from investigators who do not have institutional or corporate support in this case it makes sense to tentatively treat claims as credible but to reserve final judgement until establishment scientists who are qualified and have the necessary resources can do more careful testing secondly it makes sense to be more tolerant in our standards of evidence for a pronounced effect than for one that is marginal i come to this dispute about what science is not only as a mathematician but as a veteran of many arguments in sci psychology and occasionally in sci med about nlp neurolinguistic programming much of the work done to date by nlpers can be better categorized as informal exploration than as careful scientific research for years now i have been trying to get scientific and clinical psychologists to just take a look at it to read a few of the books and watch some of the videotapes courtesy of your local university library not for the purpose of making a definitive judgement but simply to look at the nlp methodology especially the approach to eliciting information from subjects and look for ideas and hypotheses which might be of scientific interest and most especially to be aware of the questions nlp suggests which might be worthy of scientific investigation over and over again the response i get in sci pychology is if this hasn t been thoroughly validated by the accepted form of empirical research then it can t be of any interest to us to me the ultimate reducio ad absurdum of the extreme there ve got to be controlled studies position is an nlp technique called the fast phobia trauma cure simple phobias as opposed to agoraphobia may not be the world s most important psychological disorder but the nice thing about them is that it doesn t take a sophisticated instrument to diagnose them or tell when someone is cured of one the nlp phobia cure is a simple visualization which requires less than minutes nlpers claim that it can also be used to neutralize a traumatic memory and hence is useful in treating post traumatic stress syndrome it is essentially a variation on the classic desensitization process used by behavioral therapists a subject only needs to be taken through the technique once or in the case of ptsd once for each traumatic incident the process doesn t need to be repeated and the subject doesn t need to practice it over again at home now to me it seems pretty easy to test the effectiveness of this cure especially if as nlpers claim the success rate is extremely high take someone with a fear of heights as i used to have take them up to a balcony on the th floor and observe their response spend minutes to have them do the simple visualization send them back up to the balcony and see if things have changed check back with them in a few weeks to see if the cure seems to be lasting more long term follow up is certainly desirable but from a scientific point of view even a cure that lasts several weeks has significance in any case there are many known cases where the cure has lasted years to the best of my knowledge there is no known case where the cure has been reversed after holding for a few weeks my own cure incidentally was done with a slightly different nlp technique before i learned of the fast phobia trauma cure ten years later now i enjoy living on the th floor of my building and having a large balcony the folks over in sci psychology have a hundred and one excuses not to make this simple test they claim that only an elaborate outcome study will be satisfactory a study of the sort that nlp practitioners many of whom make a barely marginal living from their practice can ill afford to do most of them are also just plain not interested because the whole idea seems frivolous and since they re not part of the scientific establishment they have no tangible rewards to gain from scientific acceptance the fast phobia trauma cure is over ten years old now and the clinical psychology establishment is still saying we don t have any way of knowing that it s effective these academics themselves have the resources to do a study as elaborate as anyone could want of course but they say why should i prove your theory and the burden of proof is on the one making the claim one academic in sci psychology said that it would be completely unscientific for him to test the phobia cure since it hasn t been described in a scientific journal it s described in a number of books and i ve posted articles in sci psychology describing it in as much detail as i m capable of actually at least one fairly careful academic study has been done with favorable results but it s apparently not acceptable because it s a doctoral dissertation and not published in a refereed journal to me this sort of attitude does not advance science but hinders it this is the kind of thing i have in mind when i talk about doctrinnaire attitudes about science now maybe i have been unfair in imputing such attitudes to you russell if so i apologize in the arguments between behaviorists and cognitivists psychology seems less like a science than a collection of competing religious sects lady uhunix uhcc hawaii edu lady uhunix bitnet
