Posted: Jun 27, 2012 7:39 pm
Dudely wrote:It never fails to surprise me just how difficult it is for people to realize that sometimes things appear to work because random chance generates enough successes to justify it.
Don't forget the placebo effect, regression to the mean and various well-known mechanisms from social psychology etc. The situation is much more complicated than a Skinnerian pigeon, so I think you are not quite doing justice to the multifactorial origin and maintenance of a belief in quack 'medicine'.