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A comment on Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?. Parent comment

Re:Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until p... by adolph on Monday July 19, 2021 @03:36PM (#27886469)
Affirming the consequent, sometimes called converse error, fallacy of the converse, or confusion of necessity and sufficiency, is a formal fallacy of taking a true conditional statement (e.g., "If the lamp were broken, then the room would be dark,") and invalidly inferring its converse ("The room is dark, so the lamp is broken,") even though the converse may not be true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent

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Re:Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until p... by AnimalMuppet on Monday July 19, 2021 @04:08PM (#27886758)
You are trying to take a very general statement and make it a statement only about one very specific subset. That does not mean that someone pointing out your logical flaws is falling into the converse fallacy.

It's like someone writes an article about drought in the west, and you're saying that they must really be talking about El Centro, California. Yes, it probably includes El Centro, but it's also talking about Phoenix, and LA, and Salt Lake City, because it's really talking about the west as a whole. Trying to make it be "about" El Centro is missing the point.

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Re:Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until p... by adolph on Monday July 19, 2021 @05:43PM (#27887594)
The article is about all of medical research. Vaccine development is part of medical research and is therefore included. I did not attempt to "make it a statement about one very specific subset." I pointed out that the article is similar to the kind of article seized upon by people who have vaccine hesitancy ideations.

Take your straw elsewhere.

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Re:Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until p... by AnimalMuppet on Monday July 19, 2021 @08:29PM (#27888865)
So, on an article that you admit is about all medical research, you asked:

> Is this some vaccine hesitancy in disguise from BMJ?

Why, in an article that's about all of medicine, do you ask about BMJ's stance on vaccines? Why not ask about their stance on chemotherapy? Why single out vaccines? And, in the current climate, are you talking about all vaccines, or are you really talking about vaccines for one particular disease?

That question you asked is your innuendo, not my strawman. Maybe you should take that somewhere else.

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Re:Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until p... by adolph on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @09:37AM (#27893528)
The timing and motivation of publishing something is a valid line of inquiry and not innuendo. Vaccine hesitancy is a salient topic of the day. A world leader accused a major social network of killing people by distributing misinformation [0]. Why would a publication choose this moment to editorialize about fraud in medical research? This wasn't a long running experiment from which new information was developed. Why publish now?

Maybe it has nothing to do with vaccines but rather maintaining the BMJ brand ahead of some new fraud they know will come to light, or a warning to researchers who might publish elsewhere. Why publish and why publish now?

0. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-biden-facebook-soc...

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