Just a quick word to some commentators here: what made you think this article had anything to do with sociology ?

Dave Holmes is not a sociologist. His PhD is in Nurse sciences, whatever that means. His paper is not recognized as a sociological publication. Postmodernists and poststrucuralists like our Dear Holmes here are cultists and Holmes himself is sticking Foucault’s ideas on everything he touches.

Hardly science work. His intentions are unclear as a professor and researcher at the University of Ottawa. His career as a writer is more likely to be the object of his focus that understanding and explaining the social world.

www.sentex.net/~nexus23/naa_vic.html

Here the ‘hard science’ end of psychology (behaviourists and physiologists) made normative judgements about autistics that clearly defined them as ‘abnormal’. Flowing from this ‘judgement’ treatment programmes were put forward to ‘fix’ autistics.

However the autistics themselves had very little input into treatment programs for autistics. >>>>>>(Dr Glenn wrote The classification of evidence as given by the Cochrane group has been based on a hierarchy of knowledge and which until recently rated personal experience at the bottom of the list of knowledge production )

jef.raskincenter.org/main/published/NursingTheoryForSite.html

Presumably, when the authors of this paper go to a grocery store, and they pick up an item priced at £2 and an item priced at £3, and the clerk rings up a total of £7, they understand that the idea that 2+3 = 5 is dangerously normative, while the clerk’s belief that 2+3 = 7 is a deviant form of knowledge, and suppressing it would be an act of arithmetic microfascism. So they happily pay the £7.

No?

Didn’t think so.

Oh, I’ve seen plenty of stuff that’s made me wonder how it got published. Mainly the method is so flawed that any results are meaningless.

But at least it appears to be an honest attempt at ‘real’ work, rather than fancy wordplay….

“archie cochrane didnt just fight for the international brigade, he dropped out of medical school to go and fight for them. what a hero. and then he was a prisoner of the nazis for 4 years.”

The girlfriend’s grandad fought for the IB (and is still alive and kicking at 93) he was at a reunion recently in London and a journo from a tabloid interviewed him, she didn’t have a fucking clue about the civil war or the IB – it made me pretty angry to think she couldn’t even be arsed to google for some background before going to interview a group of heros, of which very few are still around.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair

But it’s really, really funny

No need to rack too hard – just open an equally minor-league journal in any discipline and you’ll reap rich rewards, I’m sure. It’s patently absurd, but just not as funny – except for those hilarious equations I found the other day…

cochrane fought real fascism and totalitarian violence, and he was cool with it: in his autobiography he explains that he was only caught by the germans in the mediterranean because he “couldn’t swim to egypt”. what a geezer!

I’m racking my brains to think of any ‘proper’ science I have come across that is as patently abusrd as the above drivel.

I still wonder what happend to the authors to turn them over to the dark-side of PoMo.I mean when he was training as a nurse, did he see the microfacism of EBM at work and think about how he could challange it? Or is it the realisation that one can, in principle, earn a decent wage (and have a very snazzy website) out of writing fashionable nonsence. That process would be worthy of sociological study……….

PS the fact that Cochrane fought for the IB is just about the best thing I have heard this week…..

‘In the spirit of enquiry, though, I would be delighted to be referred to any lucid and READABLE (note) science studies text that would prove me wrong.’

I think the book by Miller and Gregory that was mentioned above is a good starter as an introductory textbook – it was my own introduction to science studies after I came to the field with no prior knowledge apart from a physics degree and lots of skepticism.

Currently my favourite science studies book is ‘Defenders of the Truth’ by Ullica Segerstrale (2000), which is for some reason marketed as popular science by Oxford Uni press, but is in fact a proper sociological study about the sociobiology controversy. You know, E.O. Wilson, Lewontin, Gould, Dawkins and all that. Provided that you agree with her argument of course, I think this is a prime example of where an understanding of the social background of science is really important. Even the notoriously hard-to-please Matt Ridley gave it a good review.

On the other hand I find Latour completely indigestible, I’m afraid to say, j. Though I suspect that I don’t really understand what he’s trying to say.

But it’s the combination of such simple foolishness with the spectacular grandiosity of the project that gives this paper its true comedy value. The inappropriate deployment of a one tailed t-test in a small study doesn’t compare on my own – entirely arbistrary – comedy paper rating scale.

(i) state the obvious in ludicrously coded language to make it sounds profound

(ii) talk a load of meaningless waffle, especially when they try to insist that what they do is something that the actual scientists should know/think a lot about.

So my evidence is anecdotal, but based on a quarter of a century of working in science… during which time the number of science studies people has increased enormously, as have their claims about their own importance as “interpreters” of the scientific process or “the nature of scientific evidence”.

Personally I don’t think their work has offered any useful insight into how actual SCIENCE should be done. It has, however, given plenty of ammunition to legions of bad science types who use these arid pseudo-sociological wankings about “the hegemony of evidence-based paradigms” to discredit scientific consensus and therefore claim spurious standing for their own nonsense, whether HIV-in-AIDS-denying, anti-animal experimentation, anti-vax, thimerosal-scare touting, bogus herbal cure-promoting or whatever.

In the spirit of enquiry, though, I would be delighted to be referred to any lucid and READABLE (note) science studies text that would prove me wrong.

PS Science EDUCATION, incidentally, parallels this scenatio in many ways. It is typical to have whole departments full of “specialists in science education”, going on and on about how children should be taught science, none of whom has ever DONE any science beyond a first degree. The flight from science subjects at A level in the UK tells you all you need to know about the success of this approach.