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by dpark
4169 days ago
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A modern-day analogue to this would be the "back is best" campaign for putting infants to sleep on their backs as a way to reduce SIDS. The evidence is overwhelming that putting infants to sleep on their backs (vs stomachs or sides) reduces the rate of SIDS significantly. We have no idea why, but that doesn't really matter. It's hard to understand how a scientist could be arrogant enough to dismiss legitimate evidence simply because the underlying mechanism isn't understood. |
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There are often lots of confounding factors - in the SIDS case, much of the decrease in SIDS rate can be attributed to changes in factors (continuing the decrease from before the "back to sleep" campaign, generally safer sleep areas, changes in cause-of-death coding, etc.) https://naturaltothecore.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/revisiting...
When you don't have the correct theory or mechanism, it's easy to do the wrong thing - like when the British navy thought acidity prevented scurvy and shifted from using lemon juice to more-acidic lime juice processed with copper tubing that destroyed the vitamin C... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy
Rather than just following a statistical anomaly, you need to devise and perform tests that will invalidate your theory, as was done with the other theories (e.g., the priest bell in the article). This is perilous when people's lives or global economies are at stake, and so anomaly hunting and cargo cult science can persist in high-stakes, difficult to test environments.