Scientists Reverse Brain Damage in Drowned Toddler?

And this is not a matter of belief : if someone states that he is a scientist, it is not possible to be religious. Simply because these two postures are not compatible. You can be one of the other but not both.

That's of course a bit black/white to say, most arguments don't hold if you push them to their extremes like that. I said it because I believe (your) arguments like "saying that a person's credibility decides the truth value of the statement requires a causal relationship" are similarly black/white.

So yes, in a way the disagreement hinges on a very strict interpretation of the word "fact" versus a less strict interpretation.

It's also to save time in evaluating claims like these. If you've spent any amount of time arguing about pseudoscientific topics (or considered pseudoscience by some), you must have found that yes you can in theory evaluate all[0] (dubious or not) claims in logical, scientific, falsifiable manner. But at some point, especially in pseudoscientific-ish topics, there will be such a great number of claims[1] that you'll find yourself spending most of the time refuting spurious claims rather than actually getting any further.

At that point, you'll never get to the strict definition of the word "fact" (at least, about the particular claim that is the topic of interest), because the claims just keep piling on faster than you can evaluate them. Allowing for a bit less strict definition, allows you to prune the evaluations greatly, and at least allows you to get somewhere.

Now, that struggle doesn't seem to take place in this thread on HN, but according to user "dumbneurologist" it has taken place before elsewhere. And you're still taking that person's word on a matter of (merely claimed) reputation as well.

So yes, there is something to say for taking someone's reputation into account. But it's a pragmatic reason. If you had all the time in the world to dig into everything as deep as you want, you wouldn't strictly need to. But since we do not live in this perfect world, we can and probably should shortcut to the more interesting points of debate by including reputation.

That's the best I can argue this, I think :) It's still a choice, however. You can still choose to only accept strict facts (including "I don't know" when more specific strict facts are unavailable).

[0] ok, not all of them

[1] part of the definition of pseudoscience, where you keep adjusting or special-casing gaps in your hypothesis when it doesn't fit the data, almost necessitates this

You're right but the condition you mention doesn't apply here. This discussion is relevant to claims about therapies for reversing brain damage in people that (nearly) drowned. 'Just figuring it out' seems pretty difficult.

It's perfectly reasonable to discuss the credibility of people and there's no reason why that can't be conducive to discussion.

> ... is not a logical argument. Correctness or incorrectness of the statement is being willfully ignored in this case.

This is a little confusing and doesn't seem to match very closely to this specific subject. But whether or not dismissing someone's claim is a logical argument is just begging the question – why are you assuming that it's right or fair or proper for every claim or argument to be refuted logically? Are you literally demanding that everyone either (a) refute an argument logically; or (b) refrain from commenting at all?

Bad papers often have facially bad bookkeeping. Things like tiny sample sizes, no blinding, insignificant p-values held up as definitive, unlabeled graphs, conclusions that merely repeat the abstract... red flags that can be caught in a minute or two by anyone who knows how to interpret an academic paper, not necessarily a domain expert in the field.

Rather, people go to great pains to explain and rationalize away their lack of interest, rather than investing that same or less amount of time in actually looking at the paper (and probably learning something as a result - even if that "something" is better bullshit-detection skills)

It's reasonable to "discuss", sure, so long as all parties involved understand that the discussion is something unrelated to the thing being put forward. But that is usually not the case. Instead, those meta arguments are used to dance around pointing at any kind of concrete issues.

>Are you literally demanding that everyone either (a) refute an argument logically; or (b) refrain from commenting at all?

In a perfect world? Yes. "Authority" arguments are only one step removed from the bottom of the hierarchy [1] because they don't even attempt to touch on the central point. A serious, healthy discussion should never go any lower than the top three tiers, and discussion as a whole would be better for it if people strived to do that rather than reaching for the easy dismissal.

"This is crap because the author's conclusion has a sample size of one" is completely reasonable and logical. "This is crap because of the author's credentials" may or may not be true (unsubstantiated conclusion! red flags going off!), but at that point, you've ceased talking about "this" and started talking about the author. Hence, fallacious ad hominem. Diversion. Excuses. Whatever word you'd use to describe willful avoidance of the central point.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_D...

We're not discussing the study but logic, so that's really not germane.

> It's also to save time in evaluating claims like these.

You can save far more time by ignoring them.