Talk:Facilitated communication/Archive 1

message: A general comment to all: Please don't go back and intersperse your comments into somebody else's previously written comments - that quickly makes it very hard to figure out who has said what, and when. It gets very confusing! Just append your new comments at the bottom of the page - you can cut-and-paste a quote from somebody else to respond to, if necessary - just make sure it's clear to other readers who is saying what. This makes for a long page, I know, but from experience I can say that interspersing comments is a quick route to mass confusion.
QIM, I'm afraid you show the classic signs of somebody holding a non-mainstrain belief (in your case, that most autistics are hidden geniuses) who is determined to use wikipedia as a forum. Sorry, that's not what wikipedia is: it's not an advocacy center for particular beliefs. So I'm going to continue undoing many of your edits when they veer wildly from accepted beliefs supported by reasonable evidence. - DavidWBrooks 20:07, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: A note on wiki style commentary 

message: I've just reorganized the collection of external links, (minimally) refactoring away repetetive parenthetical comments.
It appears to me that there is a very large number of abstracts listed in the "Empirical evaluations" section, several clusters of which share the same author(s) and are separated in time by only a year.
Perhaps someone who's closer to the subject than this WikiGnome could attempt to evaluate the abstracts and pare it down some? -- IceKarma 06:05, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, this would be good.  I've got most of the articles in my files, and this is on my "to-do" list. - Jim Butler 19:16, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  External Links section: too many abstracts? 

message: I'm sorry, but I can't quite figure out what this latest edit means:
: In the remaining cases there was indeed genuine communication from the facilitated person, but the level of the facilitated communication was not above the level of the unfacilitated communications from the facilitated person.
It seems to say that the assisted communiciation was no better than unassisted communication - which means that the facilitation didn't work at all. Is that what it says? - DavidWBrooks 14:01, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Don't understand latest edit 

message: but, yes, that is exactly the outcome of the empirical research. Either the facilitator is cueing or the facilitated output is like the unfacilitated or even worse. Indeed there are some positive studies, but according to the reviews in peer-reviewed journals these studies have methodological flaws (for instance no proper guide against cueing, wrong statistics etc.).
Allmuth 22:57, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Can we reword it slightly then? Something like "In the remaining cases the level of communication was no higher with a facilitator than without one" perhaps? - DavidWBrooks 01:59, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  I am afraid 

message: Almuth wrote in the section above:  "Indeed there are some positive studies, but according to the reviews in peer-reviewed journals these studies have methodological flaws (for instance no proper guide against cueing, wrong statistics etc.)."  Sorry, but those studies whose results were intepreted as positive THEMSELVES appeared in peer-reviewed journals (as have comments expressing disagreement with the conclusions of critical reviewers, for that matter).  You can't have it both ways and claim that (a) the positive studies, just by virtue of appearing in a peer-reviewed journal, aren't necessarily valid, yet (b) the critical reviews appeared in peer-reviewed journals and therefore must be valid.  Debates and disagreement, as well as misstatements and misrepresentations (whether intentional or not), are common in peer-reviewed literature.  Scientists are people too, have their biases, and are capable of making mistakes.  
It's disingenuous to assert that the debate on FC is somehow already decided, especially since FC is a procedure and not a pill:  i.e., not everyone does FC the same way, and in many cases studies are "over-controlled", i.e. fail to replicate the conditions under which clinical success has been observed (such as familiar and properly-trained facilitators, practice in a familiar and comfortable setting, and accomodation for word-finding difficulty).  As Anne Donnellan and Martha Leary put it, one cannot go to a lake, make an attempt to catch fish, and then assert that one's failure to do so proves that there are no fish in the lake.  Furthermore, catching just one fish might be an anomaly (maybe it was dropped in the lake from a helicopter, or something), but after a few fish are caught one begins to realize that there are fish in the lake.  Then the debate shifts to what kind of fish, and how best to catch them.  In the case of FC, the hardline skeptics are refusing to acknowledge the existence of fish that others have caught, and refuse to consider that there might be other ways of catching fish than their own, despite the existence of a growing pile of fish by the side of the lake (not just the positive studies, but the growing number of FC users who are gaining the ability to type independently, and testifying that they were communicating all along -- hello?).
Thus, much of the debate is over the interpretation of data and not the data itself.  Studies showing facilitator cueing of the user, and those showing authorship, aren't inconsistent with each other.  They reflect different findings under different conditions with different populations.  The FC debate exemplifies the fact that human behavior isn't replicable and controllable in the same way that a physics experiment is.  - Jim Butler 07:01, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Regarding reviews that are critical of the positive studies

message: Happened along the article and made some edits-- prolly should have looked at this talk page, though, especially with such a controversial subject.  I'll make a few more later today or tomorrow, citing sources for Hale's book and some articles in MOUTH magazine for some of my assertions.  Anonymoustom 12:28, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's true that "just because a majority of scientists are skeptical about something, data supporting that thing don't exist" but it's also true that a wikipedia article should reflect the reality of the scientific position - it's here to tell people how things stand, not how we think they should stand or will stand once more work is done. The way things stand is that a vast majority of scientists believe FC has been shown by studies to not be a real phenomena. Calling the community "divided" is, IMHO, misleading to the casual reader: The scientific community is divided about string theory, divided about the details of punctuated equilibrium, perhaps divided about the effectiveness of chicken-pox vaccine - but it's not divided about this; the number who believe in FC is tiny, tiny, tiny compared to the whole. - DavidWBrooks 10:23, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sigh ... well, I've been involved in articles before where the true believers come in to spread their beliefs, and it's not worth the time to fight them. Have fun, guys - my experience is that you'll soon make this so lopsided that it will draw the attention of other folks and it will eventually get drawn back to reality. - DavidWBrooks 14:09, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  The article should and does say what most scientists think about FC, but it also should and does include a balanced presentation of known data about FC (like controlled studies and clinical outcomes).  Such data should be included whether or not they appear to be consistent with the present scientific consensus.  The fact that some FC users have gone on to become independent typists is a pretty major deal, as even you acknowledge.  Why you want to exclude that information from the introduction, or cast doubt upon it when it is in fact well-documented and referenced in the article, I have no idea.  The debate benefits from valid criticism, but that requires a certain knowledge base, e.g. reading and understanding controlled studies and other literature, and of course meeting some of the actual people whose lives we're talking about here.  I've noticed that a lot of people don't bother to do these things before forming and disseminating their opinions about FC.  Have you? - Jim Butler 04:52, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Edits by Anonymoustom