geekoid's comments are usually quite good; insightful and frequently accompanied with evidence & sources.
It looks like geekoid just misread the comment that he/she is replying to. Happens to the best of us.

The people who say that are just making up excuses to dismiss the conclusions of scientific research.
In that way they're no different than Creationists who claim that Evolution is "just some secular hoax to fool the faithful".

... And they don't even consistently apply their "government money" argument: You never hear them make those sorts of complaints about the results from the LHC (that costed about ~$9billion split across many nations).

What's wrong with funding for programs that teach girls how to code? Do you read what you write before you press submit?

I read the headline and knew right then that somebody would find a way to turn this good news into something to complain about.

Replying to undo accidental mod.

... because we are also told "the cure for bad speech is more speech".
When a troll posts misinformation (especially those long debunked arguments) I think the people who reply are not attempting to convince the troll (trolls can't be convinced):
They're trying to persuade the reasonable readers with facts and better information.

Agreed.
Here's what happens to me occasionally when doing a "fetch quest" in a video game: I can't find the last item needed to complete the quest. I got all the others, but the last one is hidden away somewhere and I can't move the game forward a single inch until I find that very last one.
So I ask myself "What rooms haven't I been in?", "What doors haven't I opened?", "What box/crate/container haven't I looked in?" etc.
... and off I go exhaustively searching for that very. last. one.

I would hate to have to go searching through hundreds of mundane "template rooms" & closets that contain nothing of interest.

Your gleeful fantasy of oppressing the supporters of gun control is sickening to anyone with a functional moral compass.

She should just call herself a vaccine "skeptic".
Suddenly her reputation will go from anti-science loon, to hero of "free-thinkers" (aka conspiracy nutjobs) for challenging the scientific consensus about vaccines!

It totally makes sense that the placebo effect would work on people that don't know what "inter substance" means... but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
The following is a quote from the study leader:
"Not only did we make it absolutely clear that these pills had no active ingredient and were made from inert substances, but we actually had 'placebo' printed on the bottle," said Kaptchuk. "We told the patients that they didn't have to even believe in the placebo effect. Just take the pills."

"Placebo effect works even if patients know they're getting a sham drug
Study suggests patients benefit from the placebo effect even when told explicitly that they're taking an 'inert substance'"
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...

Or believing scientific researchers are always in a underpants-gnome style conspiracy.