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Revision as of 20:51, 19 October 2011

your question at WP:NPOVN

Well, here's mine perspective (but I had seen this thread and I thought AndyTheGrump's answer was a good one so I didn't bother piling on). You say "Thus if I stepped on a rattlesnake, got bit and got sick from it i would be banned from advising others on Misplaced Pages to refrain from stepping on rattlesnakes." That's right. As much as you may not want Misplaced Pages to work that way, we need things to be verifiable in reliable sources.

In one way this avoids silly fights. Imagine a person who was bitten by a rattlesnake at the time their cancer was receding. They might go on an online mission to spread the good news that rattlesnake bites cure cancer. You might come into conflict with them, because you want to warn people of the dangers. But really, we are here to only represent what published sources say. It's a form of summarizing and reflecting "the literature". It's a form of scholarship, if it helps you. We don't engage in our own original research, but we grow thanks to others' work. I hope that helps. Jesanj (talk) 14:14, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Reply

Arydberg, I saw your message at Talk:Aspartame controversy. Because I think the discussion is increasingly off-topic, I will try to answer each of your queries as best I can in this space...

Scientizzle,

Thanks for the review of my sources. I would like to point out that it is to be expected that the industry will publish attempts to downplay any article which is critical of aspartame. Thus it is not surprising that reviews can be found that dispute allegations against aspartame. To be swayed by these reviews runs the risk of ignoring potential harm to public health. Once again if you are comfortable in doing this it is your choice. For me, given the choice between loosing a sweetener vs harming public health I would choose to protect public health. Do you think I am in error here? Here are some more sources that say aspartame causes a: Increased chance of stroke and here and weight gain The point I am trying to make is that the “aspartame controversy” exists in the research literature as well as in the fringe press. I think this should be reported. WP:MEDRS, “Do not reject a high-quality type of study due to personal objections to the study's inclusion criteria, references, funding sources, or conclusions.” Please be aware of the success the cigarette industry had in promoting the “safety” of smoking for decades before the truth got out. Also could you please tell me how does one go about finding reviews of an article?

Arydberg (talk) 13:52, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

• While industry publications, broadly speaking, do have a propensity for bias in favor of their product(s), to assume any given review is therefore unacceptably biased due to its authorship and/or funding is to commit the ecological fallacy. (See also, in contrast, White hat bias and PMID 19949416.) I personally take industry publications with a healthy dose of salt, but they cannot and should not be ignored. I should also note that the four reviews I noted in response to your prior comment (PMID 20078374, PMID 19778754, PMID 20308626, PMID 20060008) are all from academic labs (click on the four links and you can see the primary author affiliations). Please remember: the ability to imagine conspiratory forces that would explain away a given claim is not actually evidence against that claim nor of something underhanded.
• You are asserting that the argument is "a sweetener vs harming public health"; this is the precautionary principle twisted into a false dichotomy. Based on this faulty reasoning alone, yes, I do think you are in error here. It is simply not an honest assessment of the situation.
• There are some active disagreements in the relevant primary and secondary scientific literature. That is true. What is also true is that lay web sources (particularly & egregiously rense.com and other conspiracy sites) often at a minimum completely misunderstand the science they claim to present and some actively mislead and fabricate in order to support their positions. It's almost impossible to argue against those in a conspiracy theory mindset--any evidence countering the theorist's position is taken as part of the conspiracy--so I'll offer at least one sanguine piece of advice: conspiracy theorists have a piss-poor track record of uncovering any actual danger. Conspiracy theorists never said anything about the dangers of tobacco or climate change or laetrile or Vioxx; if aspartame is actually poisonous, it's the scientists that will find it.
• The links you provided are repeats from your previous comments and criticisms against their inclusion still stand. Do not ignore the parts of WP:MEDRS that are inconvenient for your particular motivations. Namely, in a field well-populated with research and with a demonstrable mainstream scientific opinion, scientific/medical information must be presented through secondary sources (reviews & meta-analyses) and "individual primary sources should not be cited or juxtaposed so as to 'debunk' or contradict the conclusions of reliable secondary sources".
• What is that demonstrable mainstream opinion? The overwhelming approval of aspartame by government regulatory agencies, health agencies and general lack of widespread concern in the scientific literature; aspartame is generally regarded as safe by relevant knowledgeable professionals. Therefore, per WP:WEIGHT/WP:FRINGE everything that should be presented on Aspartame controversy needs to properly reflect the divergence from this position as reflected in only the highest-quality sources. Those "divergences" must also be discussed in sources of a reputable nature in order to be "notable" enough for inclusion and for a properly balanced discussion.
• Finding secondary sources is not difficult, but properly evaluating and incorporating them can be tricky. I'm a scientist at a research institution with extensive access to journals indexed in PubMed, which is where one should search. PubMed is a decent high pass filter for some level of editorial respectability but a lot of crap still gets through; Google Scholar can be a wasteland of faked peer review and limited quality control. (However, GS does have the advantage of giving you easy links to other works citing one of your hits.) In PubMed, you can filter for reviews only, which is the simplest way of finding relevant secondary sources for Misplaced Pages. If you can't access a given journal article, local universities may be able to provide them for free or a nominal charge; many Misplaced Pages editors are willing to email .pdf copies, too.

All that said, it seems increasingly likely to me that you'll get topic banned from aspartame (etc.) again...my appraisal of your edits since the last topic ban ended is that you're too often on the wrong side of many Misplaced Pages policies & guidelines. Specifically, your edits are advocacy-based (Misplaced Pages is not for advocacy, or for revealing the "The Truth") and needlessly repetitious. You've made some strides in understanding WP:FRINGE/WP:UNDUE and WP:MEDRS, but it seems you're not presently willing to work within that framework...I'd prefer to be proven wrong. — Scientizzle 20:51, 19 October 2011 (UTC)