Michael Sharpe skewered by @JohntheJack on Twitter

https://twitter.com/user/status/985104305899307008

https://twitter.com/user/status/985208229213990912

https://twitter.com/user/status/985212451108151297

https://twitter.com/user/status/985224190717546497

https://twitter.com/user/status/985225416750370817

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/985225893378449408

https://twitter.com/user/status/985227642239668224

https://twitter.com/user/status/985236266886356993

https://twitter.com/user/status/985250468480913409

 

"[DT] Seeking money to promote a particular view point". No. Requesting funding to continue investigating a particular miscarriage of justice. Being paid fairly for honest work is wholly legitimate.

 

MS doesn't "respect propaganda" with the exception of the propaganda he knowingly and relentlessly generates, and uses the corrupt SMC to disseminate.
His very tweets are propaganda, who does he think he's fooling at this point?

 

One thing continues to baffle me about Michael Sharpe. He doesn't look anything like the dinosaur exhibit at my local science museum.

 

He seems to have shamelessly embraced this prejudiced view of the patients criticising PACE. I'm surprised he's so open about it.

edit: When patients criticise PACE we're expected to present arguments and engage with the evidence. If a patient tweeted liked Sharpe then they'd be condemned for ad hominem attacks.

edit2: This person expressed the above with the brevity required by twitter:

https://twitter.com/user/status/985235660209623043

 

Why would anyone issue a FOI request to a study like rituximub for example? They meticulously went stage by stage on their study then just admitted there was no positive outcome on conclusion unlike the BPS crowd who have financially gained with pseudoscience and propaganda for 3 decades.

Also can he show us a dubious biological study that has formed healthcare, treatment and disability benefit policy for the last 3 decades?

 

The only explanation I can come up with is he must have gotten confused, while standing in front of a mirror, and been addressing himself.

 

Himself I think.

 

This is really bizarre....I feel quite uncomfortable with it, why's he doing this, what's going on ....or has he lost it?

Bizarre.......

 

Possibly brinkmanship. Deliberately being obtuse and annoying to provoke reactions he can point at and say "There, I told you so!" Which is why the calm, measured but incisively truthful approach of @JohnTheJack and others is so good.

 

The PACE protocol agreed to abide by the Declaration of Helsinki. The Declaration is very clear about what is required to obtain INFORMED consent-and it was clear in 2005, when PACE started consenting patients. Researchers must declare "any possible conflicts of interests." That is a much more stringent requirement than "any conflicts of interest." Certainly insurance company ties as well as links to government health agencies constituted "any possible conflicts of interest." These were not declared. Therefore, the PACE team had no ethical permission to publish ANY of the data they collected. The studies should be retracted on those grounds alone. Since they didn't get INFORMED consent from ANY of their participants, they wasted five million pounds before doing anything at all.

 

Well no, there won't be any definitive bio studies because BPS narrative has hijacked our condition for the last 30 years or so. As Sharpe knows very well.

Except of course the Ritux one where the researchers have been rigorous and honest. They stated very clearly this was a non runner. No dodgy press releases, no redefining what recovery means etc, etc.

 

at one point i collected a list of fallacies in papers and lectures etc. before pace. i only looked at a few [such as the "one or many?" angels on heads of pins papers around 1999 or so and some common lectures].

for example, equivocation fallacy [using a word with one meaning in one place and then the same word with a misleadingly different meaning in another place in order to reach an unjustifiable conclusion] /within a single paragraph/, etc.

i gave up when i realized it was approaching the length of fallacy lists you can find on the web.

===

i also posted this essay to co-cure, which proposes counting fallacies:

===

WITCHCRAFT IS DENMARK'S MOST NEGLECTED EPIDEMIC: AN EMPIRICAL TEST OF
CLAIMS TO BEING SCIENTIFIC
__________________________________________


Intro
==========

For unknown reasons, claims to being scientific are rarely
tested. Sometimes academics are given a free pass.

In the case of academics who have power over lives and
consume public funds, it is worth questioning their claims
to being scientific.

Below I propose an experiment that can be performed at low
cost and quickly.


Orientation
==========

First, an anecdote to get you oriented.

On a personal level, I perform a basic common-sense test.

The following anecdote exists only to give you some
background for the proposal, which appears later in this
document. It is not the proposal itself.


My common-sense test
==========

My common-sense test is as follows.

Every time I run across the name of a journal, or anything
similar, I perform a substitution. I then ask which version
is more rational.


Examples
==========

For example, I read this:

"Journal of Psychosomatic Research, Volume 74, Issue 1,
January 2013"

As this:

"Journal of Witchcraft Research, Volume 74, Issue 1,
January 2013"

===

Likewise, this:

"Politicians on functional disorders: Something must be done now"

becomes this:

"Politicians on witchcraft: Something must be done now".


===

I then ask whether the former is more rational than the
latter.

For example, I ask whether there has ever been sufficient
justification for the assertion.

Again, this is just an anecdote to get you oriented.


Witchcraft in 1486
==========

I have read various witchcraft documents.[1] They are not
the same in every respect as today's documents, only in
overall character.

To the contrary, in my reading of witchcraft research in
1486, I have found that there are differences in the details
from today's researchers who deny and minimize the existence
or severity of diseases that many people have died from.

The differences that I have found so far are as follows.
The first has a strong influence on claims to being
scientific.


Differences between 1486 and 2014
==========

1) Today's researchers of that type use both a wider
variety and a larger number of logical fallacies,
biases, and unsound rhetorical tactics (including but
by no means limited to vagueness, ambiguity, and
equivocation) than the Inquisitors did in 1486.

THIS IS EMPIRICALLY TESTABLE and my proposal for
testing it is below.

This has a strong influence on claims to being
scientific because empiricism would lose its meaning if
its conclusions had insufficient possibility of truth
preservation (deductive soundness and validity) or
statistical inferential justification (inductive).

If any of today's researchers of that type passes this
test, then one obstacle to being considered scientific
has been removed, in comparison to witchcraft research.

2) The widespread enterprise of modern empirical science
(if we very roughly demarcate it by the publication of
Francis Bacon's /Novum Organum/ in 1620) would not
start for at least 134 years, so the Inquisitors of
1486 had more plausible precedent to construct
Occam-violating, logic-violating, and
empirical-observation-violating theories out of whole
cloth. (Although Occam himself was born much earlier.)

In other words, they had an excuse, but today's
researchers of that type do not.

3) There is more corporate and government support, and
less religious support, of the respective fields in
2014 compared to 1486.

I would be hard pressed to find other significant
differences.

Next is my proposal, which addresses each of the above
differences.


Proposal
==========

Difference 1
==========

My proposal is as follows.

Difference #1 is testable. What is required is to take
samples of reasoning from publications in 1486 and 2014 and
count the relative number of fallacies. Similarly for other
measurable quantities.

There are well-suited corpora online. There are also
excellent pre-made taxonomies of fallacies available for
coding purposes, and excellent related resources for
rhetorical practices that do not meet fallacy criteria.

I feel reasonably confident that graduate students in the
social sciences are familiar with adequate coding practices
and can perform this task with fairly reliable error bands,
controlling for translation artifacts, chunking artifacts,
and style artifacts to avoid too much bias.

===

If today's researchers of that type show up well against
witchcraft researchers in 1486, this would help to bolster
their claims to being scientific.

There are no human subjects in this test, as it only
exploits publically-available documents.


Difference 2
==========

As for difference #2, it has a moral consequence, but not a
strong consequence for claims to being scientific. A
document either is or is not scientific to a certain degree,
no matter what the age is.

By this argument, however, the resulting deaths were more
justifiable in 1486 than they currently are in 2014.[2]

I do not believe that they have been justifiable in either
age. Nor will a future perspective on 2014 soften the moral
culpability of today's researchers of that type.

However, on a relative scale, the deaths resulting from the
1486 publication are arguably less unjustifiable on grounds
related to claims to being scientific. In one sense at
least, they had more of an excuse.


Difference 3
==========

As for difference #3, this mainly affects claims to being
scientific indirectly, by tracing the influence of conflicts
of interest.

I recommend that this tracing be performed rigorously. The
lack of checks and balances in academia is causing suffering
and death. It is time that we address it.

However, my present proposal is to examine claims to being
scientific.


Perspective
==========

Witchcraft research is widely considered to have been
unscientific, and it does not require much justification to
state so in 2014. This is not an extraordinary claim, and
it does not require extraordinary evidence.

However, today's researchers of that type routinely call
themselves scientists. (The researchers of those days
called themselves similarly.)

By comparing today's output to witchcraft documents, we can
perform the most basic test of their claims to being
scientific.

===

And we do so empirically.


Conclusion
==========

Therefore, I propose testing difference #1.

This proposal might or might not be taken seriously, but it
is sincere. I believe that it should be implemented
immediately.

Samuel


NOTICE OF ENCOURAGEMENT OF COPYING
==========

Please copy.

As with everything that I deliberately post to Co-Cure, you
have my permission to reproduce this post. The Creative
Commons copyright notice on my blog has details.



Footnotes
_________

[1] History and oblivion:
[http://thekafkapandemic.blogspot.com/2012/05/leroy-and-next-age-of-mankind.html]

[2] FAQ:
[http://thekafkapandemic.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-faq-that-should-never-be-necessary.html]

 

Sharpe is a bit confused here isnt he? He should have blocked himself, he's the one shooting himself in the foot.

He just cant help himself can he, he will be calling Kim Jon Un a short fat man on Twitter at 3 o'clock in the morning soon.

 

That is a really good point. From this it is clear that the Declaration of Helsinki shifts the the burden of proof fairly and squarely onto the researchers, to not omit anything which might possibly be construed as a COI. The lead investigators are intelligent people, and cannot pretend to not understand what this means.

 

Exactly what I was thinking, he does seem to have lost it.

 

Holy cow, @Samuel, this is brilliant. I hope @dave30th has a chance to take look at it.

 

I agree, these people thrive on finding ways to paint us as bad, so lets not give them one and stay professional

He is defending a dying horse he believes in and has an emotional vested interest in. Even when its retracted he will probably still believe, he will just blame us for vexatiously ruining him because its "easier" then admitting his sins.

agreed

Its a desperate attempt to make us look one sided. In the end he is reduced to fighting a propaganda war because PACErs lost control of the scientific angle once their malfeasance became public knowledge.

He probably could but thats not the point, he can't defend PACE on the merits since there is none so now he can only try to convince the gullible and hope here are enough to keep science at bay.

I disagree, as mentioned i suspect its a desperate attempt to keep ME/CFS from being accepted universally as a biological disease

This would be a great reply to his tweets, though i forget twitter's character limit

I don't think so, his approach is very grounded in seeding doubt, denying malfeasance and painting himself as the victim of us vexatious people. All of his posts may be able to be characterized in these 3 paradigms.