I am delighted that you acknowledge the illogicality of this work, IVI, and although I am less trusting than you regarding the motivations, I hope that as you uncover more such examples you will also acknowledge that this particular logical flaw is just one example of a much wider pattern of fatally flawed work which is wrongly accepted as scientific fact - and that these failings within the scientific community are blighting hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives, and indeed are even costing many lives of those worst off and least able to cope with the situation they are placed in.
One can invoke motivations on the part of any researcher, but malign intent isn't usually necessary to explain failures of logic.
I agree, and as members will know, I go out of my way to attempt to explain harmful illogicality with reference to the context in which the individuals advancing it are operating, and to try to understand that context rather than simply bashing people whose logic is imperfect.
In the case of these researchers, however, their context appears to be so fundamentally flawed that I find it exceptionally difficult not to question their motivations. Their fundamental motivation, as revealed by their research output and by their context and funding, clearly appears to be to save money for the state and insurance companies that pay them handsomely to do so, by analysing the experience of people suffering from medically unexplained illnesses purely in terms of their psychological state and with the aim of minimising the benefits they may receive - and they can do this because these medically unexplained illnesses 'lack evidence'. Worse than this, though: they abuse their power by utilising the tools of scientific scepticism, control of state and private funding of medical research, and control of the press, in order to prevent these illnesses from having the opportunity to become medically explained, because to explain these illnesses would cost their employers a great deal of money (estimated at over a trillion dollars, in this case).
One may look at crass failures of logic such as this one and explain them away, one by one, and excuse the perpetrators with reference to their narrow context and lack of relevant knowledge, but only up to a point. It requires considerable sophistication to construct a justification and an understanding of their behaviour, but for most people the bottom line is simple: they get rich and build their careers by saving vast sums of money for powerful institutions at the expense of people in desperate situations of suffering who - this is no exaggeration - are struggling to survive in a situation of sickness where they are denied the basic safety nets afforded to the rest of society.
Highly intelligent and well-educated people may construct defences of such people, and may be able to hold back from assigning malign intent - and personally, I very much tend to do so: I think it's very likely that these people, in general, "know not what they do". But most people with a basic understanding of what is going on would simply see that these researchers become rich by increasing the suffering of the sick - enabling the denial of their benefits and preventing them from being healed by blocking attempts to understand or treat their illness - and the willingness of many patients to express anger and to ascribe malign intent to such researchers is perfectly understandable. And in the case of these researchers, the bottom line for me is that they simply have no excuse, because they have been told, repeatedly, what they are doing wrong, and they have been told that it is wrong, and told why, but they refuse to listen. They are morally culpable for that failure.
In this case the researchers have chosen a measure (the award of Incapacity Benefit and/or DLA) by which to categorise participants in a study - as the study doesn't explore the process of awarding benefit, nor is any reference given for authority of the validity of the measure, it's reasonable to consider that the authors are ignorant of the implications that adopting the measure had for their study.
By the same token it is also reasonable to consider that the authors are
not ignorant of the implications of adopting the measure, especially since this tale they are telling is
not new, and campaigners have highlighted this issue to them before. It is quite reasonable to consider that they may be well aware of what they are doing. The very
best one can say about them is that they are profoundly ignorant.
This is rather typical of studies that cross boundaries of expertise - in this case psychiatry and sociology, where the researchers, content with their expertise in one field, assume competence in another field without seeking critique from anyone appropriately qualified in that second field. Peer review fails because it is applied only to the primary content of the paper. And for the authors, confirmation bias inhibits any self criticism, obfuscating what are to anyone on the outside, rather obvious failings.
I am delighted that you highlight the profound flaws in the peer review process here, and the way in which the confirmation bias of recognising as authorities only those people who share one's own prejudices can produce such logical travesties as the one under consideration here.
I'm also delighted that your comments highlight how it is that specialists - however eminent - come to say exceptionally stupid things, and manage to get them published and used as the basis of state policy. I'm especially pleased by this because it also explains why it is important for ordinary people with wider knowledge and experience which is relevant to the matter in question, who can see through the stupidity of these eminent researchers, to have a say and to point out to them when they behave with such outrageous stupidity.
Since the fundamental problem you highlight is one of specialists producing grievously flawed and profoundly damaging work due to their complete ignorance of areas outside their specialist field, I hope you will understand from this example (a) how such people, however intelligent and well-educated, appear as complete idiots to anyone with a basic understanding of the areas they wander into blindly, (b) how profoundly damaging it is when psychologists are placed in control of the management of a debilitating physical disease whose mechanisms they do not understand, and (c) why patients, faced with the unquestioning acceptance of the work of such people by the medical establishment and the state, feel that their generalist knowledge puts them in a position to effectively critique the work of these alleged experts, even if those patients are not expert in that field.
We may not be professors of psychology, we may not be professors of virology, but some of us have generalist knowledge and decent logical faculties, and as such we feel qualified to highlight illogicality when we see it manifested - and as the very people severely affected by the work of these 'experts', we feel we have a right to comment on it, and should not be criticised for doing so. Indeed, organisations like the BMJ should
listen to us when we do so, and they should listen with respect, rather than bowing to the authority of supposed experts and denigrating us publicly for daring to comment.
