You might remember me writing about the Intention Experiment in the past. The Intention Experiment hopes to harness the power of positive thinking to influence events. In one memorable example, they tried to influence the structure of water through the collected brainpower of a large collection of gullible numpties. Despite the experiment having a design likely to massively increase the chance of getting a false positive result, nothing astonishing happened.
Gimpy has now made my day by posting this story about homeopaths concerned that the British parliament's Science and Technology Committee will conclude that there is no evidence in favour of homeopathy. Instead of marshalling the evidence and trying to make a scientific case, the homeopaths are trying an intention experiment to influence the committee in favour of homeopathy.
There's just nothing to add to this: it's shear barking mad lunacy, and you have to think that maybe these people are their own worst enemies.
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2 comments:
It is quite amusing, but are we perhaps guilty of over-generalising a bit? We tend to write about "the homeopaths" as if they are a homogeneous mass, and therefore there's a danger of somehow interpreting this as the response of an entire community, rather than (perhaps) one or two folk with somewhat curious ideas...
To an extent that's probably a fair point. But another consideration is that there is little in the way of criticism of these ideas from what you might call "mainstream" homeopaths (one exception being George Vithoulkas).
I guess the problem is that there's about as much evidence for "intention" having any effect whatsoever as there is for homeopathy. It's then difficult for the mainstream to simply dismiss it as nonsense, as it's not really any less nonsensical than the claims made by the mainstream. If you see what I mean.
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