SilverbladeTE
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Jarod, Alaex
hehe!
*imagines Wessely as the Japanese commander*
hehe!
*imagines Wessely as the Japanese commander*
Welcome to Phoenix Rising!
Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of, and finding treatments for, complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
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Tactics like this work all the time, to the total befudlement of rationalists. I believe in reason as a tool but unreason rules more than reason. It shouldn't be that way in an ideal world, but we are not living in an ideal world.
Advertising, spin, pursuasion (other than rational debate, but even then emotive issues come into play) and scams all use emotional pursuasion. So do people in everyday life. We are not rational animals. We are animals who can use reason as a tool, and a powerful tool at that, but its not the universal mode of thinking. Almost everyone can engage in some amount of rational thinking, and with training can do this much better. Any professional, including scientists, should be (but are not always) taught to reason effectively within their discipline. Most people are however never taught to reason. Its a major failing of education systems everywhere. This has not very much to do with intelligence, though aspects of intelligence do permit better use of reason.
So you are saying we should resort to the same type of tactics that the scammers. politicians use? This is exactly what I am talking about. We can't stoop to this level without expecting some backlash!!
I'm not sure how the rest of your post relates to what I wrote.
Barb C.:>)
So you are saying we should resort to the same type of tactics that the scammers. politicians use? This is exactly what I am talking about. We can't stoop to this level without expecting some backlash!!
I'm not sure how the rest of your post relates to what I wrote.
Barb C.:>)
I don't think he is doing that at all. He's showing how difficult it is for ME patients, even when they do use rationality to explain the problems, which is a hell of a lot more than some of you seem to think, towards audiences who are not taught to be rational anyway, which is most human beings. And how difficult it is for ME patients, as any other human being, to be rational all the time. And let's face it: irrationality has pretty much ruled the roost when it comes to how ME patients are treated.
Am I right Alex?
As for backlash itself, so what? Our situation could be worse, but not by a huge amount. There is always backlash in emotional rhetoric. Politicians use it all the time and yet sometimes it fails. Its a risk, not a certainty.
Most of my post has a simple point. Expecting everyone in the world to act rationally, all the time, is irrational.
It is indeed a something of a "slope" but we who suffer from ME are surprisingly capable of both reason and best directed things of the emotion. Now there's a thing to extra confound the psyches.
It's a slippery slope and sometimes we need to tread lightly.
Barb C.:>)
There are numerous slippery slopes here. There are always risks. Not engaging is the big issue for us though, we have so few who engage for a whole lot of good reasons. Emotions help us engage, and help us cope, though one slippery slope is we might get too carried away and crash. Emotions shouldn't dominate reason, but reason is useless without emotion. Why bother being rational at all? Its emotion that gives us the motivation to do things. Its emotion that motivates others to do things
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
The tone of how this is done is important, and I suspect at least some of the disagreement with my proposal is due to the worry the tone of the campaign will get out of step with rationality. This is not an unfounded concern, but its also not inevitable.
The reason is that for 20 years a very small group of people have targeted me and many of my colleagues because of our work on chronic fatigue syndrome. This has involved their making a series of allegations portraying all of us as guilty of a vast range of nefarious conduct, and who are part of a spider’s wet of conspiracies, all designed to do down, denigrate and demean those with this illness.
So far, we rarely answer these allegations. To do so gives them more credit than they deserve. The impact of this constant drip of allegation, distortion, innuendo and guilt by association has been minimal within medicine and science, unless one includes scientists who have been dissuaded from getting involved as a result. Most people immediately spot all this stuff for what it is. And all of us have better things to do with our time than respond to it, especially given that the material runs to dozens and dozens of different pieces, many of them 400 hundred pages long, and nearly all of it coming from the same handful of people.
So why break the habits of a life-time? The problem is that many people do not have ready access to the real evidence (by which I mean what myself and my colleagues have actually written, not what these people say we have written). So I have decided to address just a few of these unpleasant allegations, for the benefit of those who wish to know the truth. For those interest in a more forensic dissection of how quotes from one of our papers can be manipulated and distorted see the following discussion on the Bad Science forum.
Unfortunately Jarod, if you read Firestorms post #3, then you'll see he's making rather a good case. In fairness SW is getting to cherry pick the allegations made against him that he wants to and can refute, never the less, many of those listed in Firestorms entry are the ones most often quoted on this and other sites.
I tried unsuccesfully when I first joined Phoenix to have people supply the evidence for such claims, not because I knew they were untrue but because I had mails from SW claiming they were untrue, I was actually offering his accusers a way to prove the man was the devious liar they hold him to be.
Suffice to say that moderation was somewhat more lax back then and I eventually succumed to a torrent of abuse and even at one point a suggestion that I was actually SW posting under a psuedonym.
I caution even yet about just accepting accusations on face value simply because they've been repeated so often that you would assume you want them to be true, why, because the truth gets lost in all the lies and we loose the argument by default.
We have an image problem, and we don't seem able to help ourselves but keep that image alive.
Had we always stuck to that which was true and that which could be proved there wouldn't be a thread regarding SW's recent award, take just the accusation that he threw a child into a pool, I was once told on this site that it was a documented fact, I've never seen the document all I've seen are claims that such a document exist, SW says in Firestorms thread that it doesn't, that it can't possibly. So, if you were a panellist, and you heard that a top professional in his field suffered that kind of allegation among others and there were no better examples wouldn't you be tempted to give him your vote for most courageous clinician?
As to death threats, while not directly made I've seen them defended on this forum, when you get people who think they're justified openly posting then it's not hard for those seeing such postings to beleive SW's claims that such threats have been made. See where it all leads, it leads to us beeing seen as the bad guys, and the Psych's being seen as the rational poorly understood professional, pushing ahead in trying to help us despite our objections.
Like I said, we've got an image problem.
But the fuller picture emerging from reading these comments of Wessely in context is that he is saying even more dodgy things than originally assumed.
Instead of believing patients are bad and taking things out of context just because Ben Goldacre and his buddies say so - I think it's more productive to explain how the full context is even more worrying, to all these hypothetical panellists allegedly swayed by this victim status Wessely is cultivating.