From: SantaRPG | #030
I don't really have the facts to argue with your post at the moment so I'll just drop out of this debate. Again, I'm not trying to defend homeopathy here, just general open mindedness when it comes to things we don't or can't understand.
I think newbie is saying that the wide variance in results to some degree does indicate that we understand, because if homeopathy had any sort of an effect in either direction, the statistical noise in the results would be muffled by the effect of the treatment.
For instance, like, you can just take it as a number, where if you end on a positive number you recover, and on a negative you don't. So say a person getting a treatment starts at 0, and gets a random number added to it ranging from -10 to +10 which factors in the person's natural defenses, the environment, and other crap that we're not explicitly measuring. Then you add a number for the treatment you give to determine how effective it is. If the treatment's value is 0 (no effect) as would be for a placebo, you're still going to have a final value between -10 and +10 which is a bunch of people getting better and a bunch of people not. If the treatment's value is 8, then the range is -2 to +18 which means 90% of possible final values will get better, which is strong evidence that it works.
Actually I'm not sure that helped anything. The core thing there is that we'd see conclusive results if it was effective, not "sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't," which is in fact evidence that it's not doing anything notable rather than a lack of evidence.
I actually had this on in the background, expecting to have something to say. Then it turns out I didn't pay attention to it and the only thing I got out of it was a lot of agnostics were mislabeling themselves as atheists.
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