Psychology Today blog - The Dark Side of Social Media Activism in Science, 2019, S. Camarata

Does anyone have any real sense of whether those who don't have a stake in ME and /or PACE are likely to open the comments section and read?

Honestly, I doubt it. The site used to just display the comments inline at the end of each article, and it took me more time than I care to admit to find where they'd hidden them. I can't imagine that anyone who isn't already highly motivated to comment on ME/PACE articles will bother to find the button and look.

I wonder if they changed the design to cut down on toxic comments from the peanut gallery - the comments section across the whole site has been a trash fire for years.
 
Well, this came out of nowhere, a few hours ago:



This guy.

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

Quite a few people have stepped in to, ahem, discuss this with him. So far, no response. There was one person who seemed to want to step in to challenge anyone's questioning of Pinker's apparently uncritical view on the article, but he seems to have gone away.

Perhaps S4ME ought to send him an e-mail? Or some other communication more likely to enlighten than tweeted on-liners?
 
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Well, this came out of nowhere, a few hours ago:



This guy.

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

[...] an analysis for this article found that several well-known academic psychologists do paid speeches and consultancy work and don’t declare them in their research papers. Many editors and psychologists say that this is fine and is standard behaviour. They argue that this kind of income should not count as a COI and that psychology should not be held to the norms of medical science. “Speaking fees and consultancies would not be obvious conflicts of interest, unlike, say, evaluating a drug produced by a company in which one holds stock, since there would not seem to be incentives aligned with making one claim versus another,” says Steven Pinker, a well-known author and psychologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who can also be booked for speaking engagements.

from: Tom Chivers, Does psychology have a conflict-of-interest problem?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02041-5
 
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Well, this came out of nowhere, a few hours ago:



This guy.

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

Quite a few people have stepped in to, ahem, discuss this with him. So far, no response. There was one person who seemed to want to step in to challenge anyone's questioning of Pinker's apparently uncritical view on the article, but he seems to have gone away.


The problem is the quantity of replies seems to prove the point to those people who are unable or unwilling to look at the details.
 
Well, this came out of nowhere, a few hours ago:



This guy.

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

Quite a few people have stepped in to, ahem, discuss this with him. So far, no response. There was one person who seemed to want to step in to challenge anyone's questioning of Pinker's apparently uncritical view on the article, but he seems to have gone away.

Is the old boy network working overtime?
Pinker was in uk recently ( he did appear on a TV panel show and was not particularly impressive)

For a specialist in language nuances should really be better understood.
 
I think.one of the most compelling pieces of advocacy was @Emsho ' s testimony at the Scottish parliament, particularly the part when she describes GET ( walking in and wheelchair out and being considered recovered)

If someone has the technical skills to snip the video to this part as a reply to Pinker it would succinctly capture all that is wrong with this treatment approach and the research upon which it is based.
 
The problem is the quantity of replies seems to prove the point to those people who are unable or unwilling to look at the details.
I agree. I'm afraid that linking to biomedical studies or TED talks will only reinforce the view that we hold a "sacred theory & get outraged & aggressive when a finding seems inconsistent with it."

EDIT: IMHO, all ME/CFS patients organizations are responsible for this mistake being repeated over and over. Overemphasizing the importance of biomedical research into ME/CFS isn't helping us, rather the contrary. If all those responding on twitter would have linked to the reanalysis by Wilshere et al., Pinker might have taken the time to read it, or some of his twitters followers would have. Now, we look like an angry mob.
 
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It’s a pity for Camarata that Sharpe’s latest article in the Observer didn’t come out before he wrote his article.

Perhaps it is as a result of it.

Or perhaps they tossed a coin to see whose piece went out first after a highly intellectual group chat on skype with Fink and some others who still think the ship has landed safely in the harbour.

I am counting them all on the fingers of one hand and I've still got two fingers spare.
 
I agree. I'm afraid that linking to biomedical studies or TED talks will only reinforce the view that we hold a "sacred theory & get outraged & aggressive when a finding seems inconsistent with it."

EDIT: IMHO, all ME/CFS patients organizations are responsible for this mistake being repeated over and over. Overemphasizing the importance of biomedical research into ME/CFS isn't helping us, rather the contrary. If all those responding on twitter would have linked to the reanalysis by Wilshere et al., Pinker might have taken the time to read it, or some of his twitters followers would have. Now, we look like an angry mob.

There is a problem of patients believing all sorts of ideas about their illness. Not because of a mental illness but because they don't realize that not everything that they're reading is true. It is not so easy to distinguish what is true from what is false.
 
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