sarkeizen's Journal: Why nine-times stupid is still stupid.

So far the only time I write in this thing is to use someone as an illustration of some particular brand of stupid. This latest entry for nine-times is no exception. I've spoken with this guy twice now and one rather interesting response is this funny reliance on promoting some kind of wierd belief as almost gospel. Now I totally see that this may just largely be smoke-blowing as s/he has no real response but since nine-times doesn't really give much in the way of clarification in their postings. I'm going to go with this as I see it.

In the first discussion where he appears to be promoting that generally your "gut bacteria" is as important (or perhaps more) than how much you eat/exercise in determining your weight.

you're so far from the common understanding of things that you may as well be denying the existence of the sun.

I find this quote interesting, not just because it's an appeal to popularity but it is also wildly assertive, the speaker seems to think they are speaking on behalf of 'science' and also likely wrong (I admit it's not exactly clear to me which of his/her many theses are being defended here).

Another quote from a discussion on cursive handwriting vs printing (by everyone else) and in nine-times's mind handwriting vs. typing.

These things aren't very much in need of further study because (I mean, yes, you can always study something further, but...) they've already been studied pretty extensively. You being ignorant on a subject doesn't mean that it needs more study.

Although this is reminiscent of an (equally wrong) quote from Albert Michelson to me it also seems to carry with it this weird "The research is done, just stop your questions now" kind of vibe.

Although there is much more stupid in his/her posts this is the particularly interesting one to me today. This weird kind of..."science worship" maybe? Anyway what I would think helpful to both nine-times and others is this comment on a journal article from John Cook's blog.

If I were to point out the obvious here. This 34% figure for JAMMA is for *medical* research. Which one would like to think is carried out with a significant interest in rigor when compared against say that "cursive handwriting is harder to read than Times-New Roman". Anyway the point here is that "nine-times" is espousing wisdom from the dark-ages. Today we can not simply be passive consumers of data. We need to question and think.