Just One More Thing

Okay, Tater Lady is ridiculous. She's an inane dipshit on cursory analysis, medium analysis, and deep-tissue scanning with a goddamned tricorder.

Potatoes are not magic. They are starch. They are delicious fried, baked, or mashed. They can be a part of every single meal.

They are the roots of a plant related to the deadly nightshade plant.

Which, incidentally, is why that green fry you occasionally get at McDonald's tastes so nasty. It has a higher level of toxic nightshade chemicals called glycoalkaloids. Don't worry; the green fry won't kill you. It's just enough of the glycoalkaloids to taste like shit.

Yes, your honor, I am a piece of shit.

Anyway, if potatoes could cure the common cold, Big Pharma would have isolated the active compounds, slapped them in a pill, and patented that shit decades ago. Martin Shkreli would be raising the price of potato-based meds by 2500% and then smirking like a prick when he got called out on it.

So Tater Lady is laughable.

But why is she laughable?

Turns out that, even in our short history, we already wrote about this syndrome.

Debbie Vigan (boy, what a sucky last name if she eats meat) knows enough to think she's smart but not enough to actually not be a dipshit when it comes to science. Let's have another look at what she said, shall we?

now (sic) before people mention 'oxidation' i left the other parts of the potato on the counter to see the difference and...

You're still a dumbass, though.

Good for you, Ms. Vigan! And we mean that unironically. You are making an attempt to do a scientific experiment instead of just looking for results that seem to confirm your claim. You made some test taters and some control taters and compared the results at the end of a predetermined experimental period. That ain't nothing.

You may be making that attempt more to say "SEE I TOLD YOU" to naysayers than to test your claim, but you know what? An attempt was made.

You have taken your first step into a larger world!

The problem is that your experiment hardcore sucks. Like, it proves absolutely nothing. And not just because it's a single trail on a single person with a single set of potatoes. That definitely doesn't help, but it's not the terminal flaw in your methodology. Just one of the many other ones. Like the fact that it isn't blinded at all.

No, the real issue here is that your comparison is completely useless. You think foot spuds cure sickness? You can't just compare the toe taters to slices laid out in the air. That ain't gonna show nothin'. No, good woman, you have to put some potatoes in the socks of someone who isn't fucking sick.

Then, and only then, will your comparison even begin to be meaningful. Oh, the experiment still has all the other problems we mentioned above, but at least it won't be comparing apples and oranges and deciding that bananas cure cancer. If both sets of potatoes turn brown/black (and, spoiler alert, they almost certainly will), then oops, sorry, imagine the "boop boop ba boooooo" from The Price is Right and try again, cause chances are your "cure" is bullshit.

But, given the myriad other issues with your experimental design, it still won't prove shit. Cause a single anecdote, no matter how compelling it may seem, is not a scientific dataset, and in the grand scheme it is completely useless.

When you're looking for medicine, anecdotes can pretty much always be relegated to the Bullshit Bin.