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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] anecdotal evidence

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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Mark Nagel <activism98201@verizon.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] anecdotal evidence
  • Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:52:41 -0500 (CDT)

I'll second Dr. Michael's statement/comment.

We should not be overly constrained (waiting for science to catch up) though.
This is a point that I had tried to make before (which I didn't do very
well). Just because something hasn't been vetted by science (keep in mind
that there's good science and bad science) doesn't mean that it's not
resulting in what is being claimed. NOTE: I may regret opening up this can
of worms by allowing crackpots to exploit it, but we should treat things like
our [U.S.] legal system in that we should presume that there's merit until
proven otherwise (rather than not yet proven- as in, innocent unil proven
guilty; allow nine guilty men to go free in order to not incarcerate one man).

It's pretty safe to say that folks realize that much of what we do today was
in practice before scientific vetting. And folks should also know that there
are practices occuring today that haven't been vetted by science, yet such
practices provide actual repeatable results: an isolated tribe may do
something for which science and the outside world know nothing about; to the
outside world hearing of such an activity/activities is annecdotal, but to
the tribes-people they're perfectly repeatable.

The bottom line is that if we really want to SHARE information (in any
wide-spread way) then we should expect to apply scientific vetting before
doing so.


-Mark Nagel
Everett, WA


=====================
From: Soilsecrets@aol.com

Good Science almost always starts with anecdotal evidence from an
observation. The trick to good science is to design the methodology of the
study in order to isolate what actually gave the benefit or results. Dr.
Michael





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