Incorporating ethnopedological knowledge in soil quality assessment. Participatory soil quality assessment and sustainable land management

This phenomenon reaches its pinnacle in alternative therapists БЂ“ or scaremongers БЂ“ who unquestioningly champion anecdotal data, whilst meticulously examining every large, carefully conducted study on the same subject for any small chink that would permit them to dismiss it entirely. This, once again, is why it is so important that we have clear strategies available to us to appraise evidence, regardless of its conclusions, and this is the major strength of science. In a systematic review of the scientific literature, investigators will sometimes mark the quality of the БЂmethodsБЂ™ section of a study blindly БЂ“ that is, without looking at the БЂresultsБЂ™ section БЂ“ so that it cannot bias their appraisal. Similarly, in medical research there is a hierarchy of evidence: a well performed trial is more significant than survey data in most contexts, and so on. So we can add to our list of new insights about the flaws in intuition: Our assessment of the quality of new evidence is biased by our previous beliefs ...»