Re: (Tears) Fads and Fallacies by Martin Gardner

In article <87mspcylsy.fsf@enoch.nodomain.nowhere>,
Mike Spencer  <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote:

>
Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> writes:
>

On Sun, 28 Apr 2024 14:10:39 -0600, John Savard
<quadibloc@servername.invalid> wrote:
 

On 28 Apr 2024 17:29:06 GMT, ted@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan
<tednolan>) wrote:
>

Is GS a fallacy?  Certainly it seems to have been a fad, but also
to still be around in a less high-profile manner and accepted as
providing some useful insights.

>
In my advanced years, I think I see that there's a recurring pattern.
>
A very bright person makes some accurate observations, draws some
inferences from them.  The inferences tend to be of mixed quality,
some good, some off the wall, the  latter possibly derived from
beliefs that the bright person may unconsciously regard as axiomatic
-- inferences nevertheless deserving of scrutiny.
>
Then numerous people, perhaps including the original bright person,
exfoliate an extensive, sometimes putatively universal, often complex
system of further inferences, hypotheses and, eventually dogmata which
become a whole school of increasingly questionable beliefs and
doctrine.
>
The original bright person and h{is,er} original observations are
tarred with the contradictions of the questionable beliefs and
doctrine and are relegated to the scrapheap of respectable thinking.
>
Lesson: Don't allow your credible insights to exfoliate into anything
that purports to be a universal theory of everything -- neither
metaphysics, physics, cognition, society nor language.  And don't get
on board the train and bask in the adulation when/if others to do
that.
>

Among the fallacies examined in Gardner's book is _chiropractic_. As
he notes, though, lots of chiropractors do useful things that help
patients, but when that discipline originated, it included notions
like curing, say, tuberculosis by addressing subluxations of the
vertebrae.

>
I've recently been shocked to discover how many educated, apparently
adequately intelligent people subscribe to homeopathy and use its
"remedies".
>

Gardner speculated that in its early days, homeopathy's great
benefit to patients was that heavily diluted anything is less
likely to kill people than some of the accepted cures being
used in olden days. Today, however, the adherents are just idiots.
--
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