Trial By Error: Some Thoughts About an Upcoming Article

http://www.virology.ws/2019/01/31/trial-by-error-some-thoughts-about-an-upcoming-article/

 

Is it Reuters by any chance?

 

fall out from Crawley investigation ?

 

Interesting.
Are they a bothsiderism practicing publication?
Even if they are they usually work to appease the bullies and thats not you.
Also if they publish lies or slander you it may be worth speaking to their editors about a public correction or apology.

What i hate about these kinds of situations is the power imbalance, the powerful can often use the media to spite the less powerful.
But if they do attempt to slam you lets hope we can come up with an angle to fight it and turn it against them.

 

My 'Liking' Andy's post wasn't a real like "like'.

I'm sorry to hear that they may now be coming after DT in a personal character assassination kind of way. Although given the cold damp corner they've put themselves in one might find it inevitable.

 

I hope that the writer of the anticipated article will disclose his pay for the piece.

I do like a pre-emptive attack.

 

This doesn't sound good.

I may have got the impression that there may have been a change since Establishment people realised Cochrane were considering withdrawal of the Larun review, and I wonder if that led to a sense that they really needed to crush this to avoid embarrassment.

This led to me being less than enthused about the new investigation into Crawley's work. The UK often seems to use investigations as a way of downplaying problems.

So many important and influential people are connected to one another and have shared interests that it's not surprising they'll try to stick together and avoid the substance debate about the matters that are actually affecting patients' lives.

A lot of concern about powerless people who've been mistreated posting stupid and offensive things on social media.. rather less concern about powerful and influential people using polite intimidation to get what they want in private.

Probably worth being aware that the writer of the piece could be looking on the forum for any quotes that can be taken out of context and used to make patients look bad.

 

Ignore it where possible, it's just a distraction. Keep writing!

They love this kind of controversy, not the other kind about outcome switching and failure to control for placebo effects. So keep writing about the latter.

PS: you're going to have to write some response to the accusations, but other than that, just keep going.

 

Indeed, perhaps this thread should be made members only?

 

Another thing that pisses me off is how UK journalists can hugely over-hype the importance of whoever is sending stupid and offensive messages, acting as if these are the people who have helped draw attention to the problems with research like Wessely's, White's, Larun's, etc, then other patients get the blame and stigma related to this. We're not encouraging the people who do it! We're not the ones pretending that sending rude or abusive messages is an effective way to challenge poor quality research!

 

Indeed. It seems that the potentially most offensive messages are kept secret. if they were not, we could denounce them.

 

If that kind of tone is taken it would certainly 'out' their motivation as that would be a bad faith strategy in reporting. Admittedly a strategy that seems to not carry any negative consequences any more.

And the horrifying thing about when people take on doing such dirty work is that it has a very much wider impact on society than the subject and substance of the topic being written up. If one person or a few does/do it it can be absorbed into a well generally functioning society when it becomes common place then the people doing it will suffer the same fate of living under a dysfunctional social environment.

 

@dave30th Stoke up that fund raising machine as it appears your just getting started!

 

Obviously we do not yet know the publication involved or any content, however, if the articles goes ahead as the journalist's questions to @dave30th seem to suggest, would it be worth starting to develop a response strategy?

Hopefully such an article will be another self inflicted shot in the foot by the BPS cult, but we need to be able to rapidly point other journalists to accurate and balanced information sources.

 

Have just reread it...…. Running rampant?..... Us?..... Shome mishtake, shurely, as Lord Gnome would have said.

 

To be honest @dave30th I'm very surprised they haven't done this sooner. 'Playing the man and not the ball' is pretty much their default approach to criticism, so they were always going to try and discredit you sooner or later. It's a pretty high risk strategy though, especially given your academic and journalistic credentials and record - this could very easily end up just drawing greater attention to the substance of your criticisms. Fingers crossed...

As @NelliePledge said though, they wouldn't be doing this if you weren't making progress. It's kind of a compliment - probably the only one Sharpe Wessely, Crawley et al will ever pay you - so I hope you take it as an encouragement to keep going.