David Tuller: Trial By Error: The CFS/ME Research Collaborative Conference

[Barry]

I'd say yes--I got that overall sense in regards to all three questions. Not that it was stated so directly, but implicitly it felt that way.

That was the key point of interest for me. The sense you got of how things felt to you, which I think means a lot. Many thanks.

 

[rvallee]

If I look back to the conversations we were having about the CMRC just a year ago, you couldn’t believe how much could change in such a short space of time. I’m sceptical but it’s nice to have a bit of hope when that level of research money is being talked about for biomedical research funded by the UK.

I half expect a nasty twist at the end but it’s nice to think it might happen and that everyone’s time and effort (and personal sacrifices) to bring us to this point hasn’t been wasted.

I think it may be dawning on some people how big of an embarassment it will be in the (hopefully near) future to continue arguing for fairy tales. As long as they did not see the possibility of ever being proven wrong, there was little need to make a sincere effort. But the mounting evidence is starting to become so big it may collapse into nuclear pasta (I love that anti-gnocchi is an actual scientific term in physics, what a time to be alive).

There are plenty of diehards who have staked their careers on this, but most people, even hard skeptics, do not want to be on the wrong side of this debate when we have a breakthrough moment. There is no firm commitment yet, but the high degree of confidence in never being proven wrong has gone down several notches.

There will still be hell to pay for those who built this house of cards, but for those with no personal stake in the matter, it's looking more and more precarious to support magical thinking and STOP mats at the expense of genuine research.

The watershed moment is when formal apologies come. Not there yet and there will be some death throes trashing by those whose legacy will be a massive failure, but it's coming.

 

[TiredSam]

For a long time it was very frustrating that nobody, in a roomful of such bright people, thought to ask "Why, if that woman is so proudly standing up for science, has she got a big circle drawn around her feet?" So it's particularly satisfying to see her nose so thoroughly rubbed in it by @dave30th's article now, whilst those same bright people don't even raise an eyebrow. I can't help thinking they're rather an odd bunch though.