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No, my claim is literal. The role of the discipline 'psychology' has shifted over time away from what we now consider 'sociology' and towards an individualistic approach to mental health. The assumption didn't used to be that mental problems were profoundly unique to the individual, but now mainstream psychology does not take into account the sociological factors which affect mental health in all situations.
Some sources to elaborate the transformation of the discipline are historiologists & sociologists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Michel Foucault, but there are plenty of non-mainstream psychologists who still practice holistic psychology like Helene Shulman & Mary Watkins.
Poorly informed anything is a mind-killer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JroogX7zBek
Cheese is one of the very few commercial foods you'll be able to find live (fermentation) bacteria living in, but even then many cheeses won't because the producers save expense by pasteurizing instead of more closely monitoring cheeses to make sure they don't develop molds.
But, there are a few companies who do sell high-quality raw fermented foods, like Real Pickles up here in New England. You'll be able to find healthy bacteria on organic farm-bought produce as well; sauerkraut can be made easily by putting some sliced cabbage in a jar with salt, pounding it down, topping off the jar with water, and capping it for a week.
This is already sold. It's called humility, but you'll have to import it if you live in the US.
You're right, but note that most store-bought sourdough breads are barely sourdough at all; they're mostly just flavored but don't undergo the traditional fermentation process which takes too long for bread corporations more interested in moving stock. Roman legions actually survived largely off of long-fermented sourdough bread.
As a medical student who has been closely reviewing probiotic research, I would like everyone to know that research is extremely important.
Perhaps it will be the greatest breakthrough in medicine of the 21st century. This angle is one of the primary reasons that the 'calories in=calories out' theory doesn't function as a successful principle for people trying to lose weight and keep it off. I recommend looking into the GAPS diet for anyone suffering auto-immune problems, since auto-immune disorders are all primarily caused by dysregulation of the digestive system.
Some ideas on the yogurt study (also being an opportunity to explain some of the nuances):
there is an incredible breadth of biodiversity in the gut, and yogurt only typically contains one or two strains, in this case it looks like one.
gut bacteria number in the trillions, so a short-term regime of any probiotic food or supplement won't necessarily provide its benefits quickly. A significant amount of the benefit is also delivered in the chelating and detoxifying properties of healthy bacteria, which can over time remove harmful toxins built up in intestinal bile; a significant build-up may take years to fully flush though, and other health problems may still still inhibit it.
other things in the diet will impact bacterial growth just as much as the addition of yogurt. Foods high in sugar could very easily be inhibiting the multiplication of the yogurt's probiotic bacteria (after being ingested) by encouraging the growth of competing bacteria associated with negative health. Food eaten then also becomes the basis for the bacteria's food, so a poor quality diet could sabotage the probiotics.
the quality of the yogurt which the probiotic was added to will impact the growth of bacteria tremendously. The pasteurization process itself makes the yogurt less healthful and can create an environment less conducive to probiotic multiplication.
no distinction is made whether the stress can be considered 'justified' or not; it would be undesireable to be less stressful in a situation where stress is justified and helpful. The study also seems not to account for variance in difficulty of course load, since students may have signed up for classes with intuitive knowledge of the additional stress received through their usual gut bacteria.
there are also a variety of standard practices in preventing contamination, which I assume the group carried out
What is the mechanism by which Warren Buffet creates wealth by himself? If you're talking about investing, couldn't a good supercomputer hypothetically do the same job for free? Anyways, Buffet doesn't do all of his own investments: most capitalists don't. They engage in joint ventures and mutual funds. Their only "contribution" to these is being the owner of investment funds (an arbitrary title when removed from historical context). Buffet does contribute to society but not (through some divine justice) proportionate to the compensation he is allotted.
Consider if Warren Buffet's teachers had not taught him to do math and he hadn't had the opportunity to do anything he did. What if his local librarian wasn't able to help him find books on investment, if he hadn't happened upon mentors who could teach him business, if he had been born poor and had to work minimum wage from a young age. Now consider if there are other potential Warren Buffets who would thrive as much as him given the opportunity but actually DO experience such setbacks.
Anyways, to assume that private investment is a social imperative is not friendly to reality. China right now has a totalitarian government which controls investments (including closely regulating foreign investment), and its economy has been exploding for decades as a result of infrastructure investment. There are plenty of models in-between China and the US which also function fine.
In the United States, we consistently overestimate the contribution of private industry in developing our infrastructure. Cars are only possible because of roads, telephones were only possible because of telephone wires, the internet & technology revolution were only possible because of massive Cold War defense department spending (the ARPANET was the prototype for the internet). It is not an exaggeration to say that the public has a far greater stake in private business than it realizes. In some cases, the privatization of public research can justifiably be seen as a transfer of wealth from taxpayers towards the fortunes of big business investors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
In regards to Hume's interesting contributions to the question, I stumbled across this video a while back which I think will be interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVZG0G-jnAM (don't let the title throw you off; there is content within it).
Wealth doesn't appear out of nowhere. The decreasing wages of professionals doesn't mean there's less wealth in the system, it means that wealth goes is distributed differently, mostly towards creating more Warren Buffets. The donation of a small sum of an accumulated fortune cannot create an impact equivalent to if that fortune in its entirety had been distributed in fairly paid labor. A charity by definition requires an additional, socially superfluous level of bureaucracy which is paid out of donations. The charities that billionaires tend to support also don't necessarily apply their spending in any semblance of efficiency, if they even affect good policy decisions with the impact they do have. Charities cannot achieve economies of scale, nor do they have a secular source of funding (their continued existence is dependent on appeasing potential donors, not on efficient performance). Teachers are not slaves.
You might not think the economic value was so low if you had children in school, were going to have children, were a child yourself, had significant health expenses, had a criminal record, were poor, or are going to get old eventually.
Economic value pays for the cultural value.
Hmm would an AI be superior or inferior if it were unable to not think Bayesianally?
Yudkowsky recently posted something interesting on this, let me see if I can find it...
This is a very interesting paper. Reminds me of HIGHLANDER for some reason... those guys lived for thousands of years and weren't even rich? They hadn't usurped control of vast econo-political empires? No hundred-generations-long family of bodyguards?
Will it be available on mac?
Crispy apple, anyone?
I find it really helps if you do the voices. Like pretend Yudkowsky sounds like Harry Potter from the movie and is having a conversation with Dumbledore (in the HPMOR universe, obviously).
...it all makes sense now.
The bleak grey world turns lucid at once!
Unfortunately, the impact of information is often too closely tied to the funding poured into its propagation. Look at the way American media networks are basically billboards for the rich
You're totally right. Art & Utopianism go together like a horse and carriage. This is an interesting blog on the subject:
http://nomadicutopianism.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/art-and-utopia/
This is the crux. You can't take a small amount of empirical data, skip sociology, postulate a hypothesis which you don't intend to test, and then generalize from it. I'm not gonna downvote this thread because I don't think stating this hypothesis is bad; I just think its presentation is sloppy. Lukeprog, please don't take this too harshly; I make similar mistakes all the time.
Reagan had Alzheimers throughout his second term, and if he didn't have clinical alzheimers during his first term, it's not difficult to demonstrate that a pre-Alzheimers condition isn't much better. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONNMiuWI4Fo&feature=related http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_01/027551.php
I would charge that the same 'institutionalization' which has neutered psychology has changed philosophy into a funding-chaser.
Psychology was invented as a means of studying society so that the social situation could be improved: Freud was a socialist. Because many disciplines have moved to institutions, they have less freedom to pursue research and less freedom to depart from the views of their institutions.
Also, because funding is dependent on people who have ulterior motives in what they choose to fund, it would be almost impossible for a school of psychology to develop which says, for instance "there's something seriously wrong with our society" because they would be hard-pressed to find research funding. That the general population surrenders so much initiative to scientists who are so strongly influenced by veiled politics is the true tragedy of our time.
The decision of what disciplines belong to "science" or "humanitees", "art" or "engineering" is significantly a political decision. Indeed, it is a political question which disciplines exist in which organization and how they fit together.
Rationalist philosophers just need to call themselves "Psychologists of Quantitative Reasoning" in order to get funding. In the current political era, it is fashionable to claim 'objectivity' in one's profession despite frequently inquiring into non-empirical matters. This claim of objectivity often serves to hide one's personal biases which, if made explicit, might otherwise be useful in interpretation of research.
The drive to be unconcerned with the political implications of one's work is the ideal paradigm for economic exploitation of a class of highly-educated scientists by institutions and people who control how funding is utilized to enables, disables, or actualize research and engineering.
Fox News is a perfect example of brutally skewing scientific evidence towards political ends "How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory" http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525
(For those of you who would: instead of voting me down because you dislike these ideas, how about trying to engage with them?)
This happens frequently, and we don't see these questions resolved because the scientific method is far from bulletproof. Doubtless many of our modern ideas will be proven incorrect by the next generation; others will learn to make more accurate predictions using more advanced analysis; some paradigms will seem ludicrous in rhetrospect (as some models which were accepted only decades ago seem today). Just how frequently such an obvious problem happens, for the same reasons this case went unnoticed, it is very difficult to estimate.
Kinda speciesist, don'tcha think? People in the modern world in large part have learned to be illogical, but it isn't an inherent quality; in fact, some would argue that the current low level of rational capacity is very difficult to maintain. If people were inherently irrational, why can everyone learn mathematics, why can children sometimes disagree with their parents, and why was a prerequisite for degeneration into the current American political system that 7 corporations should own all major media outlets?
A more elegant explanation of the effectiveness of the diet would be that eating a calorically-dense food in the morning knocks your fat metabolism into gear.
I would like to take measurement of body temperatures while on the Shangri-La diet; I would expect body temperature to rise significantly from its nighttime low towards maximal resting temperaturen when olive oil was consumed (oil/fat being the most calorically dense macronutrient). Fat storage is very powerful, and very mysterious to doctors. If you're body doesn't feel comfortable losing weight, you will find it extremely difficult to do so and even more difficult to keep the weight off. The most important thing is to balance the body's nutrient needs and remove stressors that would cause of enhance weight gain. Any human could run for days on end if they were able to access this fat storage without other constraints (and the point of V02 training is to increase access to this energy).
The political definitions are confusing and many would consider some of the distinctions wrong, clearly Americanized. American liberals are to the right of European conservatives, USSR was a socialism just a different kind, etc., etc.....
Find a non-political way of describing political preferences or, better yet, break it up into a political compass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass (test on http://politicalcompass.org/ to chart your location.)
- Economic
- Social
Apatheism should also be added to the list of choices for religion.
The scary thing is when you can win the debate whichever side you choose, even though YOU can tell what the correct side is.
Also, since the other side being pure evil is a rare phenomenon, perhaps a better cultural understanding of psychopathy would help some people to understand that 98% of the people they debate will be just as sane as they are and thus to stay open.
(Napoleon didn't invade Russia because of cognitive bias. He'd already defeated Russia several times and "invaded" in 1912 with the object of forcing Russia to keep out of Poland and remain in the Continental System. Logistics killed Le Grand Armee.... Napoleon was actually above average height for his time period... the rumor that Napoleon was short is due to a perhaps-intentional failure to convert French measurement height units into British units of the same name, and so there's no basis for a "Napoleon Complex".)
A more interesting question would be "What cognitive biases through history have led us to think of Napoleon as a short person?"
Philosophy is analogous to masturbation, as science is to sexual love. How can you manage the latter if you've never learned how to use your most important organ by practicing the former?
Yudkowsky is indeed too "hard" on philosophy, even as he practices it himself.
Every doctor should be required to study The Art of War before being allowed to practice. Practicing medicine is not like balancing an equation. Medicine is not a game of perfect information, nor are its rules unchanging. Indeed, each person's health battles take place upon an idiosyncratic battlefield with various assortments of forces. The war of evolution, which has been raging for millennia, has developed in Homo Sapien what is likely one of the most highly adapted immune systems in the history of the planet. It is not surprising that doctors fail so often when they survey the battlefield and can think only to higher suspect mercenaries to fight proxy battles (drugs on secondary symptoms)...
We should think of our brain as a GrandMaster General, the spine her chain of command, every specialized organ a legion brimming with age-old veteran forces. Should we think the whole army, which have never yet succumb to defeat in millenia of evolution, could be defeated by average maladies? Should we assume that the General of millions of victories makes simple mistakes like misallocating resources (like making too much cholesterol)?
And when we've given the majestic human body its due respect, is it reasonable to expect people with 4 years of training, who are bombarded by biased solicitations and have to side-step personal biases, who primarily wield simple synthetic compounds and inelegant machinery... to have mastery over it?
The key thing to remember is: Correlation does not equal causation.
“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. ― Albert Einstein
If modern scientific methods could self-explain why they were wrong, they would be better scientific models. Moreover, scientific communities do not have access to perfect knowledge: any particular theory could have hundreds of supporting trials behind it if those trials weren't popular enough to be well-known (out of millions of experiments).
It's good to see skepticism in attributing everything to genetics...
Some legit anthropologists think pre-agricultural humans actually frequently lived into their 70s and 80s, contrary to popular assumptions
I would consider the possibility that changes in lifestyle and/or diet somewhere between 10,000 years ago and the present could have SERIOUSLY affected human health and social organization. Particular culprits I personally find likely are soil-nutrient depletion, the hyper-domestication and consolidation of monocropping corn & wheat, or confounding modern environmental factors introduced by not-fully-understood technologies.
Maybe decreasing infant mortality means more unhealthy babies are being born to become unhealthy adults
Douglas_Knight is essentially right. NancyLebovitz also makes a good point. The confounding factors are too complex to possibly deal with individually in the present, so we have to have massive experiments using the best available methods to establish correlation in present-day circumstances.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans die of medical malpractice every year. Anyone who holds medical science in such high regard that they can do-no-wrong has not studied its history. American medical practice especially, compared to European standards, is positively wretched to the average patient.
I would not assume that this man's breakthrough is real, but it is ludicrous to assume its falsity without any expertise to make such a judgement. Moreover, if his methods are reasonable and his results happen to be incorrect, it does NOT make him a "crackpot". Seriously, a scientist being wrong should be considered the norm: scietists are almost NEVER fully correct in their assertions. To call a scientist a "crackpot" is akin to calling a politician a "fascist": sure, there are a few milling about, but overwhelmingly it's just a cheap insult. Shame on yea who consider yourselves rationalists but use such emotionally-charged, biased terminology and make epistemology claims they have no qualifications to make.
...Additionally, there are the institutional criticisms to make of modern scientific practice. Of course, some "scientific" institutions are horribly corrupt, but even those which are run legitimately can fall victim to cognitive, publication, and funding biases. http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe.html (There's plenty more to look up. Privately-funded studies far more likely to net positive results; positive results are far more likely to be published; negative results are more likely to be redacted after publication...)
Your claim that poor people in rich countries suffer less from poverty is fallacious and insensitive. Statistical information shows that standard of living (and about every other imaginable method of judging well-being) is tied to relative wealth rather than absolute wealth.
If they don't have the nutritional basis for changing their bodies, they won't. Some people, mostly those suffering from chronic conditions, are actually low in cholesterol
The "extra-virgin" designation does make a difference, fyi. That's probably not what was throwing you off, but I'll leave this here for future Shangi-la researchers.
That's really neat. How is it that Tim Ferriss could have developed a more effective weightloss system than nutritional experts? If such a claim is indeed true, it would necessarily lead to questioning the basis of nutritional experimentation: is it even built upon a solid enough base to be useful?
Americans who have grown up in at least moderate financial security have developed astounding rates of obesity. People who grew up in Nazi-occupied countries who were malnourished as children also developed astoundingly high obesity rates as adults. From the evidence I've seen, genetics is over-emphasized as the missing factor in almost every medical theory before enough is known to know better. While income correlates with obesity, it does not explain the physiological mechanism through which poorer people (relative wealth may seem to mean much more than absolute wealth, interestingly) have a much harder time staying healthy.
It seems much more plausible that both semi-adaptable epigenomic variation and multi-generational lifestyle adaptions play bigger roles in generating familial and social trends of obesity. The nutrition, gut health, and overall health of BOTH parents contributes to the making of a child, and the mother's health strongly affects it from then until birth, after which point colostrum and then breast milk will continue to play a direct parent-to-child role in the young one's development.
Though there is no conclusive research that I'm aware of, it is probable that children establish certain growth limitations based on signals about nutrient availability received directly from their parents during conception and then from the mother during pregnancy and breastfeeding (variances of conveyed gut flora could be the mechanism here). Then, lifestyle and its epigenomic effects as normalized during childhood continues to play probably the same-seeming role since parents will tend to feed their children the same things they eat.
Anthropologically, going back a mere few hundred years there were no cultures anywhere in the world suffering obesity epidemics, so it doesn't make sense to attribute variance too strongly to genetics. Historically, humans have survived healthfully on almost any combination of macronutrients while the main variant between healthy civilizations seems to have been micronutrients. Since studies generally don't account in any fashion for idiosyncratic in-utero environment or for epigenetic variations among individuals, it could turn out that a vast amount of nutritional research is entirely worthless. E.g. clinical studies of nutrition among populations could depend entirely on sociological factors about the last generation's diet than about the objective value of macro-nutrients (which, in my opinion, should never be claimed as the object of a study as if removed from the context of the foods they are a part of).
The father's health can play a role after conception as well since beneficial gut bacteria, in the least, can be transferred through saliva & sex. Additionally, since these gut bacteria build up multi-generationally, it could be that antibiotic treatment seriously impairs the functioning of newborns, especially if they don't have probiotic sources in their diet (the best of which is breastmilk from a biotics-rich mother!).
-med student
People who grew up in Nazi-occupied countries who were malnourished as children also developed astoundingly high obesity rates as adults. From the evidence I've seen, genetics is over-emphasized as the missing factor in almost every medical theory before enough is known to know better. While income correlates with obesity, it does not explain the physiological mechanism through which poorer people (relative wealth may seem to mean much more than absolute wealth, interestingly) have a much harder time staying healthy.
It seems much more plausible that both semi-adaptable epigenomic variation and multi-generational lifestyle adaptions play bigger roles in generating familial and social trends of obesity. The nutrition, gut health, and overall health of BOTH parents contributes to the making of a child, and the mother's health strongly affects it from then until birth, after which point colostrum and then breast milk will continue to play a direct parent-to-child role in the young one's development.
Though there is no conclusive research that I'm aware of, it is probable that children establish certain growth limitations based on signals about nutrient availability received directly from their parents during conception and then from the mother during pregnancy and breastfeeding (variances of conveyed gut flora could be the mechanism here). Then, lifestyle and its epigenomic effects as normalized during childhood continues to play probably the same-seeming role since parents will tend to feed their children the same things they eat.
Anthropologically, going back a mere few hundred years there were no cultures anywhere in the world suffering obesity epidemics, so it doesn't make sense to attribute variance too strongly to genetics. Historically, humans have survived healthfully on almost any combination of macronutrients while the main variant between healthy civilizations seems to have been micronutrients. Since studies generally don't account in any fashion for idiosyncratic in-utero environment or for epigenetic variations among individuals, it could turn out that a vast amount of nutritional research is entirely worthless. E.g. clinical studies of nutrition among populations could depend entirely on sociological factors about the last generation's diet than about the objective value of macro-nutrients (which, in my opinion, should never be claimed as the object of a study as if removed from the context of the foods they are a part of).
The father's health can play a role after conception as well since beneficial gut bacteria, in the least, can be transferred through saliva & sex. Additionally, since these gut bacteria build up multi-generationally, it could be that antibiotic treatment seriously impairs the functioning of newborns, especially if they don't have probiotic sources in their diet (the best of which is breastmilk from a biotics-rich mother!).
-med student
My experience is years of frustration with my health, being overweight, low energy all the time, and it turns out that the lyme disease I had been treated for back in high school had survived and continued to plague me beyond my immune system's capacity to completely eradicate. It returned periodically for years, and only during periods of extremely low stress when I was out of school was I able to live comfortably at all. What tipped me off to getting treatment was comparing my physical abilities during high school as an athlete to my abilities up to this point in which I can barely engage in anaerobic exercise.
Newer research has revealed that certain chronic conditions seem much more common than is thought. It could be that a relatively large portion of the population is suffering from certain conditions which don't exhibit severe enough symptoms to be diagnosed with anything or that symptoms are ignored by harmful social paradigms, e.g. someone with a mitochonodrial disorder is labelled as "lazy" despite inability to properly metabolize energy.
Lyme Disease is one disease which could be extremely prevalent but be underdiagnosed because of the difficulty in which it is diagnosed and the lack of reliable tests. There are plenty of other candidates as well. If one has any persevering health problems, it bears that one should try to objectively judge one's physical& mental abilities for the possibility of physiological abnormalities.
And if this sort of evidence can be overlooked/ignored for large clinical trials, what other sorts of partially or totally valid alternative treatments might be receiving similar improper treatment?
I am not assuming you're wrong klfwip, but I would like some examples of times that ideology was the cause of mass warfare. It seems to me that ideology is usually just the justification for actions intended to produce material results.
I don't think sociohistorical scholars can really believe that fascism would have risen without the threat of communism pushing the corporate class to pour massive amounts of money into fascist parties.
The crusades wouldn't have happened without the Pope trying to expand his influence and gain wealth for the church through control of religious sites and artifacts
Nobody would care about the dumb question of corporate personhood if corporations hadn't poured billions of dollars directly and indirectly into using the litigation of Citizens United to increase their own influence
Zarathustra running through the streets of their underground city screaming: "WHERE IS THE SKY?"
Awesome comment. Shame you seem to have so few other posts on Less Wrong
They break earth in the middle of a cottonfield?
I find it disingenuous to entangle serious materially-based political concerns with abstract irrelevant political concerns. Whereas the blues and greens obviously shouldn't (and in real life, probably wouldn't) care what color an alien sky is, there are serious political disputes often tied to such abstract concerns regarding civil liberties, regarding the application of the law or the non-application of the law, regarding the right of the wealthy to victimize the poor, etc..
When people get caught up in complicated political institutions that propound dogmatic beliefs, those institutions were rarely or never founded to be dogmatic by accident. Cynics use theological justifications for their material (occasionally psychological) considerations:
Christianity was used to justify the class structure (serfdom & lordship) of feudalism
Social Darwinism was used to justify colonialism, then eugenics
American nationalism is used to justify unlimited wars and crackdowns on civil rights
Muslim 'terrorists' use Islam to justify what they see as the only plausible method of defending their country from imperialism (the mass of their goals isn't to spread 'terror' but actually to regain political control of their own countries)
The point is that while fighting the justification may not be in itself a relevant concern, influencing the material concern that spawned the theological justification to begin with is often very important. Are corporations people? --Nobody really gives a fuck about the abstract question because everyone knows they aren't (83% of the American population).
The trouble is that the question of corporate personhood is merely an excuse to shift more power into the hands of corporations. While debating whether corporations are people is a waste of time, it is not a waste of time to fight the material reality of corporate personhood which means having even less democratic elections in the US than we already have.
You might also say that the blue-green feud is analogous to the debate about the existence of a God or gods having created the universe (if there were an impermeable or near-impermeable layer of obsidian between the cave-dwellers and the surface making discovery of the truth practically impossible). The question only becomes relevant when the blue and green leaders are trying to become president of their underground community: the green candidate is backed by the Green-Dye-Makers' Guild and the blue candidate is backed by the Blue-Dye-Makers' Guild, and convincing voters either way will bring in either Guild innumerably more customers. (The same critique, of course, is applicable as each is rallying war forces.)
Furthermore, if it never did become a debate concerned with material reality, then people can think whatever they want. As long as they accept that since blue is our best guess, the only responsible thing is to base our social models on the idea that the sky is indeed blue until proven otherwise. Because in real life, the truth of these things is never as obvious as the sky-color example, it is perfectly admissible to allow minority opinions.
This sounds like a 'bacteria colony' analysis of humanity. It seems to me that by defining the hypothetical situation so narrowly, it is turned into a de-facto trigonometric equation, a graph function dependent only on the variable quantity of resources available.
It only sounds like a reasonable conclusion because of the ridiculous assumption that creating more people is a moral imperative, when in reality if people enjoyed a high standard of living they would choose when to reproduce in part as a function of deciding not to lower their own standard of living. Are we to understand instead that societal resources would be devoted to coercive baby-making towards fulfilling an abstract ideal of morality?!
Unborn babies are not immoral, so why should born babies be moral?
More important than coming up with a correct grand narrative, is coming up with a world conception that allows a high degree of functionality and adaptability. I doubt if the strongest rationalist has the correct ideas about everything or would have time in her lifetime to reason all the things most important to her.
Taking principles, tempered by material results, as goals instead of using pure technical reasoning skills, can be very useful in uncertain circumstances.
For example: you are in a classroom debating whether the development of Irani nuclear weapons will stabilize or destabilize the Middle East. There is no means of empirically testing your hypothesis, but your reasoning should still be based upon sound principles.
In principle, people who have special knowledge in things are better equipped to make judgments about those things: you might notice that you don't know a lot about the history of the Middle East, like how Israel made itself a state by kicking the Palestinians off their land or the history of western imperialism in Iran. So you read a bunch of media sources on current events.
Then, again in principle, you might look at the motivations different people have for claiming different things about world events. Though it's not a situation-specific methodology, the principles are useful in any situation to providing you the right background from which to rationally make and refute claims.
After striving to exhaust your principle-informed objectives, temper your reasoning by material reality. You should ideally argue in a manner that allows everyone to have the most fulfilling dialogue. Socrates would never tell people the answers to problems; instead he would always be questioning. Even if you can reason the way around people, it's important to take into account how they will react to your methods.
By maintaining good principles, abstracting lessons from other situations, and letting reality guide you, you should be able to hone your reasoning skills upwards.
It's rationalization instead of a rational argument because postulating that people can sometimes be irrational (e.g.: believing traditional medicine to be magical) isn't an argument for them making that choice over another. By the exact same argument, you could posit the opposite and it would seem correct: e.g. that people choose non-alternative medicine because they perceive it to be magic.
It's practically axiomatic to say that people sometimes (even often) act irrationally, but you've defined one side as rational and the other as irrational, from what I can tell based solely upon your (unconvincing) arguments that 1. drug companies have broadly tested and dismissed traditional medicines and 2. that alternative medicines don't work in general. If this isn't what you meant, please elaborate.
My point about questioning your ontology was in pointing out that you seem to define "alternative treatments" as ineffective without using any data to back up your claims. If you define alternative treatments as ineffective without there being a meaningful ontological distinction unifying them, you're not making any argument at all but only arguing a tautology. I would argue that this false distinction is rooted in corporate marketing practices intended to guise economic bias behind a word-veil (not that you are doing it on purpose), just like the two American political parties try to define themselves as the correct choice despite there being little identifiable ontological difference between them.
Id est, corporations define things they like as medicine and other things as "alternative treatments", but the distinction between them is based upon concepts of economic ownership and maneuvering of the market instead of useful empirical evidence.
Excuse me, I didn't mean to say that this A-B-C argument was your argument. (I've corrected the single word in the original post which made it sound like that). I was making a statement about the only argument against alternative treatments which was developed enough to identify in this thread.
In regards to what you were arguing, I answered above by requesting some real data for your broad claims about pharmaceutical companies doing extensive research on traditional remedies.