Talk:MetaMed

Categories
I put this in Category:Medicine, not Category:Alternative medicine - they weren't really doing alt-med, they were trying to do real medicine with scientific justification, but with a galloping case of Dunning-Kruger. Other defensible cats welcomed - David Gerard (talk) 12:03, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I would actually consider this a form of alternative medicine. Targeting the worried well, misquoting studies, promising the world, using a 'novel method' (One Simple Trick) that's basically Dunning-Kruger, operating outside of the normal medical establishment, et cetera. At the very least, this is pseudoscience. And the medicinal variant of pseudoscience is altmed. Further, having altmed as the 2nd nav would help communicate much about why the article should be read, to the vast majority of people who haven't even heard of LessWrong. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 14:56, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Yeah, the box is useful. I've put both cats on - apparently their research reports were okay, just stupidly expensive for what you got - David Gerard (talk) 19:04, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Great stuff as always, David! Reverend Black Percy (talk) 09:23, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Quality of service?
The article seems to contain no actual information on whether their reports were accurate or useful. Mporter (talk) 03:02, 12 June 2017 (UTC)


 * The users from within the LW subculture seemed to like them, and I don't recall anyone flagging anything actually wrong as such in them - just that a 3-page report cost $5000. Unfortunately, the example reports on their website never made it into web.archive.org.
 * Searching the web for MetaMed mostly brings up (a) early press coverage (b) chitchat on LessWrong before they died (c) chitchat on Tumblr after they died (I started this article using a lot of my posts from those threads). But if you know any more material, that'd be super-helpful, and particularly their example reports - David Gerard (talk) 07:38, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
 * This one is interesting though - David Gerard (talk) 13:41, 13 June 2017 (UTC)
 * So I'm an anonymous source that isn't providing something to verify my legitimacy but the answer is complicated to give because of medical privacy laws but here is the short of it. Most people, which was like ~80%, reported being dissatisfied and if I remember in general data was accurate but reports mostly ranged from revealing things that everyone already knows, including suggestions of cutting edge science that patients had no shot of using, and for the most part would have had me demanding my $5,000 with the threat of revealing the laughable .PDF received to the masses. They did get lucky and help some man who was part of a radio interview and maybe had a second nifty find but ultimately all I can safely say is some reports are comically worthless. Bambi Woods (talk) 05:33, 19 June 2018 (UTC)