First the author is using a classic magicians trick. Distract the audience to get them so focused on one area that they miss seeing you actually performing the trick. Making it appear like magic. In this case he get people so focused on whether the product is beneficial in one very narrow area that he doesn’t even address whether the goji berry may be helpful in other areas.
This is like someone saying a drink won’t make a short person taller, while conveniently not saying the drink may give you more energy or improve your sleep or some other benefit.
I believe this individual is certainly within his rights to say or write what he wants. I have no problem with that.
First let me say this and I’m not necessarily trying to lump this friendly goji juice skeptic in with these people, however I just wanted to bring to light some additional insight about skeptics in general.
I just love (spoken sarcastically) people who love to criticize something with out offering any solution themselves. The recent election in the US was an excellent example of this. One political party from my perception could only belittle and point out all the so-called mistakes of the people making decisions (and there were many) without offering any real solutions themselves. Anyone of minimum competence can Monday Morning Quarterback and point out all the mistakes made the previous day.
Mistakes are typically of three types:
- First are those of unprepared-ness where a failure to properly prepare led to a poor decision.
- The Second type of mistake which is simply making a decision, based on the best information available at the time of the decision and it turns out to be the wrong decision based on the information intelligence.
A mistake in this area could be likened to being a special forces officer and your best available intelligence tells you a high prized subject will be at a certain safe house at a specific time. You then show up to capture the prize and due to some intelligence leak the suspect wasn’t at the site.
- The Third type of mistake occurs because of the human condition. How many people can be 100% effective 100% of the time. Think of the times you’ve been driving and you’ve had a momentary lapse in concentration and almost caused a wreck or changed a lane without looking.
The point is there will always be people willing to throw stones at those making the Second and Third types of mistakes above while failing to admit their own mistakes. I personally have no use for these stone throwers, as they add no value to the human condition.
Constructive criticism on the other hand can be quite valuable.
Let em say this about this goji juice skeptic. I do believe he believes he is being sincere in his skepticism.
However none of us including myself can ever be totally objective. We can only make judgements based on what we each have learned. We would have to walk in another set of shoes to accurately evaluate everything we looked at and that’s a lot of pairs of shoes we would have to wear to evaluate each new product we come across. So we evaluate them against our available database of information we have stored in our brain. The better we have prepared our database of information in our brain the more accurate our perception is likely to be.
However, in reading the skeptics article I can’t help but make some observations.
First the friendly skeptic is using the article on goji juice for his own purposes. I can’t say I blame him but let’s examine what he has done.
He has cleverly used the article on goji juice for gaining traffic to his website where he runs ads for which he is being compensated for – selling goji juice. The very product he is claiming to be skeptical about.
Also he is drawing traffic using this goji article and other articles for the purpose of selling his own products. Once again he has a right to do this.
But why is it some body writes an article about how they are skeptical about some product, but then they don’t do any research on their own, for example like they do on the popular show “Myth Busters?"
Why not go out and get 24 people have them try the product in question for 60 or 90 days and report the results. Well for one thing you could keep on using the article to pull people to your website to continue to make money off of being skeptical without ever having to prove whether or not the skepticism was justified..
In his article he states: “The hype for goji is way over the top.” And he produces some statement from some overzealous distributor to try to make his point.
In his article he seems to try to poke fun of the developer of Goj Juice.
The goji skeptic does on to say:
“Another website calls its version of goji ‘the most nutritionally dense nutritional source on the planet,’…"
Or although I think he meant to say “food source”. The point is does he have any evidence to dispute that the goji berry isn’t the most nutritionally dense food on the planet. And if it isn’t what is?
The article goes on to refer to various information like the following taken from the book - Goji - The Himalayan Health Secret.
The first type of Goji berry is called Lycium chinense, which grows mainly in Hebei province in China. The berries are typically small, orange to light red in color, and have many seeds. They are too sour to eat as is, so they added to foods. Lycium chinenseis sometimes referred to as Chinese wolfberry, matrimony vine, or Chinese boxthorn.
The second type and the more important type of true goji berry, the one that is said to have the best effect is known as Lycium barbarum.
This type grows in various regions of Asia such as Tibet and Inner Mongolia, but nowhere is the Lycium barbarum goji berry more revered than in Ningxia, situated along the Yellow River between the Yinchuan plain, the Helan mountains and the Maowusu desert in the western part of China.
We can say this or that about this or that. However, let’s examine the evidence about Original Goji Juice and what we know is fact.
October 2006 set every single sales record for Original Goji Juice and it doesn’t end there. There have been 12 consecutive quarters of record growth for Original Goji Juice.
This is for one reason – people love drinking the goji juice.
So let’s see we have a few skeptics and hundreds of thousands of people that love the product. Maybe the skeptics wouldn't be skeptical anymore if they tried the product.
