Professor David Colquhoun that is. See: Daily Wail
I agree completely.
I've said elsewhere on here that I can see the benefit of a homeopathic consultation for some people as it's more like a psychotherapy session than a visit to the doctor - useful if you're down in the dumps but there's nothing really wrong with you.
Universities offering degrees in such practises though is highly irresponsible. The big problem as I see it is that they're giving the likes of homeopathy perceived authenticity that it does not warrant.
Does having a degree in quackery make the practitioner less of a quack? One could argue that it could make them worse.
I guess it's an inevitable response by universities that are running like commercial enterprises. :(
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The Mail carrying an article decrying homoeopathy...
They'll be flying pigs next!! :)
The beeb are carrying it as their science lead story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6476289.stm
Love this quote:
If she has to resort to that sort of argument then frankly I feel a bit sorry for her. It reeks of desperation.Foundation chief executive Kim Lavely added: "The enormous demand from the public for complementary treatments means that we need more research into why and how patients are benefiting.
"Scientists should want to explore this rather than make sweeping, absolutist generalisations arising from deeply held prejudice as David Colquhoun does in this article."
Yeah, but how about this one:Originally Posted by tkingdoll
How it works? >:(For a medicine to be used in conventional medicine, it must go through scientific trials where its effectiveness has to be proven
But these techniques often fail to show how complementary medicine works
Actually, I like this one, from the comments on the Wail story;Is this considered somehow remarkable in a homoeopath?I am studying a BSc course in Homeopathy. I have a triple digit IQ.
A 3-digit IQ: 026
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Ahhh - the "My IQ is xxx therefore it's right" argument. Isn't that a vague argument to authority?
Yeah, this one seems to be popular with woos. I think there is one in the "Baby with the face of Jesus" comments thread in the Mail -- someone saying "I know Jesus exists and my IQ is 130" or something. F**king retard.
It had better mean something - I too am studying homeopathy and have a triple digit IQ. :D
Not that that means diddly when it comes to anything, it just means I can do IQ tests well...
Being intelligent is no guarantee of being right all the time - clever people can be as dumb as anyone else.
By the same token, I would say all of us on here have 3-digit IQs (many above 130 I would say) and we say that homeopathy is bunk. So it must be then!
It's simply an appeal to (inappropriate) authority - the quoted authority being the persons themselves.
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Given that IQ is considered a measure of being good at IQ tests, as Veeb says, what is a reliable measure of intelligence? There are clearly differences in capability between one person and the next, so if IQ isn't the best way to measure that, then what is? Or isn't there anything.
I guess I haven't defined 'intelligence' yet, so the question is hard to answer.
IQ tests try to put a scalar quantity, in the form of a single number, on something that is far more complex in reality.
Intelligence is not quantifiable in the way that height or weight is.
Of course intelligent people tend to do well in IQ tests (by definition) and the reason I quoted the value of 130 is that it's 2 standard deviations away from average - so really smart people will probably score over 130 on IQ tests.
The main reason that I don't pay much attention to IQ scores though, is that mine's 63. :(
And I cheated!!
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The problem with IQ tests is that whatever they measure, and whether it's useful or not, it is not what they actually claim to measure. The whole point of the theory behind IQ is that it never changes, but it is very easy to learn how to take IQ tests and get better at them. There is no doubt that intelligent people will tend to do better at them, but they are not even close to being the meaningful, objective measure that they claim.
Another problem is that the questions are always ambiguous. For example, one type of question consists of a group of words, usually four, and you have to pick an odd one out. As one I've just made up, which is the odd one out from these words :
1) Blue
2) Green
3) Brown
4) Boxes
Every single word has at least one way in which it is the odd one out. The question does not measure intelligence or IQ or anything useful. All it measures is how good you are at guessing which answer the test wants. No matter how clever you are, you have a 1/4 chance of getting it right. If you have taken this sort of test before you are likely to know which answer they want, but that just shows that it cannot possibly be IQ it is measuring, since you should not be able to learn to do better.
In this example, the answer expected would probably be 4), because it is not a colour, and most people will probably choose this. However, if you think about it more there are many different possible answers. 1) has four letters, 2) start with a "G", 3) only has one vowel, and many more. There are even the trivial answers that 1) is the first, 2) is second, etc. These might seem like picky answers that are obviously, not the ones wanted, but the fact is that they are technically correct. The question simply asks which is the odd one out, it says nothing about the reason, and so the only really correct answer is "all of them". This actually means that more intelligent people could to do worse because they actually think about the question rather than just jumping for the obvious answer. The only way to do well on an IQ test is to know what sort of answer is wanted, intelligence hardly comes in to it.
And of course, it all depends on how you define "intelligence". IQ tests try to measure some kind of mix of logic, language skills and spatial perception. This seems sort of OK, but is in no way the only possible definition, and in many situations probably isn't the most useful. Personally I don't see how spatial perception is intelligence (which is a shame, because I always do well at that) but I would say that simple arithmetic and algebra is, which isn't tested at all. And there are numerous ways in which things obviously not related to intelligence can affect the results. A dyslexic will have trouble with the word questions, a colour-blind person will have trouble with the shape questions since they usually involve colour as well.
When it comes down to it, all "I have xxx IQ" means is "I am stupid enough to believe that having xxx as an IQ score actually means something". There was a discussion on the JREF boards about this. The conclusion was basically that IQ tests can be useful to classify people as "normal", "sub-normal" or "above normal" and that is it. Either you are stupid, a genius or somewhere in between, and an IQ test can't tell you any more than that, and will usually have difficulty telling the difference between "normal" and "genius" anyway.
I have done a bit of digging and got an answer of sorts to my question. IQ tests measure abstract intelligence, and there are other measures of different aspects of intelligence such as emotional intelligence and practical intelligence. There are 5 in total but I don't know what the other two are without googling for them :D
Apparently IQ does not correlate with professional success but emotional intelligence does.
Correction: IQ tests claim to measure abstract intelligence.
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