What the hell, people.

[archmage_brian]

I am having an actual argument with someone on Facebook who is apparently a fan of homeopathic remedies. My saving grace here is that she seems to be sort of reasonable and is not completely crazy. She hasn't thrown out the "big pharma is keeping natural remedies down!" argument yet, which means that I can approach this as an opportunity to teach

Comments

[mothwentbad]

Deep breaths. Assume good faith. It can be hard. :-/

But you can do it. You know stuff. Don't whip out "Storm" by Tim Minchin just yet.

[archmage_brian]

Yep. Assuming good faith is always step one.

[mothwentbad]

Well, sometimes I can't be bothered. :-/

But... I'm thinking more of AFail trolls there, so that's another matter entirely.

[archmage_brian]

The AFail trolls have demonstrated that they are sophists who do not actually want to discuss real things. They want to make weird philosophical claims and argue semantics and shift goalposts so that nothing is ever answered, only discussed. Such are the methods of bad!philosophy.

I assumed good faith when they showed up and said things I thought were misguided. It was quickly demonstrated that good faith is not something philosophers consider to be important, because philosophers aren't interested in discussing solutions, only problems.

[admnaismith]

Dang. This was actually useful to me, because I had been told that homeopathy was something else, that it had to do with using very small amounts of actual medicine (sometimes small amounts of harmful materials, but only in the same way that certain vaccines and serums contain some of the same virus or venom that they cure).

It was described to me as a subset of pharmacology with no more flim flam than, you know, herbal remedies that have been known to work because the plants used were, in fact, medicinal.

This whole "like attracts like" thing? Sounds more like using the mental energy of "The Secret" to cure diabetes, or better yet, pray to Jesus to forgive the sins that caused you to get sick.