Leaving aside the mechanisms issue, there’s a question of whether this is good empirical work, and if so whether it has implications for the policy experiment literature like that of Levitt (among very many other economists). It doesn’t seem to me to be particularly close to the natural experiment literature, really.

A quick critique of the paper, taking it very seriously. First: the time series model seems to include only a few weeks, which is quite frankly not long enough to develop a decent model. Second, their policy intervention variable (which actually seems to have been number of practitioners, rather than on or off?) is likely to be affected by violence on any given day itself (so not exogenous, though they do discuss this possibility). Third, there’s no control by comparison to another area or areas (eg: does meditation in Jerusalem affect violence in Korea?). They don’t even do a proper statistical comparison of Jerusalem v Lebanon, although their theory suggests no effect on Lebanon until numbers of practitioners are high enough.

There are a few recent papers in economics about issues re policy experiment studies (Bertrand/Duflo/Mullainathan on correlations in series across time; and Conley/Taber on small numbers of policy changes). But in most cases they are way more considered than this one. Most of the economics studies, including all of Levitt’s work, at least use other states as controls, and typically have more than one policy change (in the abortion case, different states changed policy at different times, and identification is from those timing differences).

Also, as Loren points out, it’s probably not particularly costly to run (true) random experiments of TM, which is certainly not the case for, say, abortion laws. So lets have more of them, I say!

Wow, I’m posting way too much on this thread, but it’s a topic close to my heart (or at least, beer-tinged memories of college dorm life): back in my final year of undergrad, a bunch of us had the Maharishi Lagrangian ad plastered on our residence room doors, with different labels circled (I think I had “world peace”). We had to buy five or six copies of The Weekly World News to build our Maharishi “Wall of Wisdom” (we also included a related story about a meditating levitator who accidently materialized in a wall—bummer). When we got sick of doing grad school applications, we hatched a plan to rent a van and drive down for a week, to discuss this particular piece of mathematical artwork with whomever we found on their campus (“really? that’s the “eternal bliss” element? ‘cause we thought maybe, like, it was a distinct expression altogether”). Never happened, alas.

Sure, apples fell before Newton, but it isn’t as if there haven’t been widely held superstitions and metaphysical beliefs floating about for centuries, about why objects fall toward the earth. No doubt somewhere in the mists of evolutionary time, some early homo sapiens saw fruit fall, and maybe had the glimmerings of curiosity about it, absent anything we’d recognize as a causal story, but by the time anyone was systematically cataloguing the apparent facts of the natural world, I suspect there was already a significant background of familiar conjectures and suppositions that guided observations (with a desire either to confirm or challenge received wisdom). Many of those suppositions turned out to be bad explanatory models (cough – Aristotle), and were replaced by better ones once people did start to think more carefully about how things work.

That isn’t to deny the value of a scientific division of labour: no one should have to do all the work. But it’s a bit annoying when someone who publishes a case study (that just happens to support a clinical technique they endorse) cries foul when people ask for some sort of plausible causal story about what might be going on. (On the other hand, it seems as if at least some of her respondents may have been just a wee bit condescending, so perhaps this is something specific to this field, and to this exchange in particular.)

“But (and I think this serves as an answer to everyone else who made the same point), how can they be expected to, when the game is so obviously rigged against them?”

Have you ever read their writings about that causal model? They often appear in two-page newspaper ads. The problem with the model is that, in its fundamentals, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not coherent enough that an outsider could actually get predictions out of it. They’ll write down something like a supergravity Lagrangian and draw arrows pointing to the terms in it labeled things like “bliss”, “immortality”, etc. How you get from that to “the square root of 1 percent of the world’s population” being a critical meditation mass to create world peace, I have no idea, and I strongly suspect that neither do they, because the hypothesis doesn’t have the internal coherence to make it clear. This experiment could be successfully replicated a hundred times, it it would tell us something surprising and important, but that business about the bliss term in the Lagrangian still wouldn’t make any sense.

The interesting thing is that physicists at Maharishi University actually do publish a lot of field theory work in mainstream physics journals (or at least they did in the 1990s when I was a grad student). The publication of these is completely noncontroversial, because they have to do with stuff that makes internal sense.

So I guess I do think some hypotheses deserve publication more than others. If I were to write a paper that said “zombies from Neptune made 2+2=5, and then a miracle occurs, and therefore I can predict the following about the physical properties of ammonium perchlorate”, and there followed a methodologically impeccable description of an experiment involving ammonium perchlorate, I would expect the referees to object to the theoretical background section, and so, I think, would any reasonable reader. Even if my result is right it doesn’t sanely tell you anything about the zombies from Neptune.

Now, I’ve been polite, but this business of people who by their own description know next to nothing about science “sympathizing” with one or the other anti-science line of bullshit really does get my goat. Has it occurred to you that it’s pretty damn arrogant to express such “sympathies” in the absence of any knowledge and understanding of what you’re talking about? Do you really think you can come up with questions that thouands of scientists working across many years haven’t thought of? Frankly, it’s just anti-intellectualism of the rankest variety.

Thank you! That’s the kind of information I needed. My problem is that there is so much out there that I don’t always know where to start looking; that’s the disadvantage of being largely self-taught—I know lots of information, but not how it all fits together.

I still seems to me, though, that “evolution provides an explanation of phenomena X” is not quite on point. Think of some of the other theoretical models that have been supplanted—Newtonian physics and Ptolemy’s astronomy. They provided explanations of most common phenomena that were good enough to provide accurate predictions of those phenomena; it is by looking at the (rare) case where they did not work that the need for a different paradigm was realized. Their replacements provide explanations that predict exactly the same phenomena 95% of the time; it is only in a few cases that the (very different) replacement theories predict (accurately) a different result.

Excellent approach and one I shall cherish in using to drive people crazy when discussing ID. So, prove to me that God/Aliens/Whatever don’t exist…

Also, I can’t resist mentioning this (though it is shameful for me to know it), you may benefit from reading the introduction to Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard who clearly knew a thing or to about science and religion – though to be fair, should anyone have to read such a thing? Anyway, in it, he discusses his aim to write a science fiction book rather than a fantasy. His distinction, drawn from hazy memory, was to take an example of a character needing a sword. Fantasy: poof! the sword appears by magic, no further explanation necessary. Science Fiction: some extrapolated mechanism based on science. Either way the character gets a sword.

I wonder if the the Maharishi’s results would be the same if the study period included the last month or so?

Crossley concluded that “The case does, for example, seem to demonstrate that language difficulties remediable by touch do exist.” but that “One of the problems with many critics is that they seem to want the explanations to come before the observations.” As the editors had eventually realised that the piece was controversial they added a series of commentaries (I’m mildly surprised that JSTOR didn’t adopt this generally recognised method of washing your hands of the controversy) in which one said that “Crossley offers no justification as to why a touch of a finger can have the effect… … we would like at least some of the explanations to come with the observations.”

To which Crossley retorted that
“I have not attempted to provide explanations for phenomena for which I have no explanations. However, theories are not essential accompaniments to observations. Apples fell before Newton provided us with an explanation. In the affairs of this world, and in our science, we must take into account both facts for which we have explanatory theories and facts for which we have, as yet, no such theories. The absence of a justificatory theory (or, indeed, the possible incorrectness of a justificatory theory) should be no barrier to the acceptance of a fact. Language disorders that are susceptible to remedy through touch exist. I appreciate any and all attempts to explain these phenomena, but their existence does not depend on my ability to account for them.”
I hope that counts as a new hare.

I share Steve’s and Albert’s scepticism with the Fuller critique you’re endorsing here (at least stronger variants of it), but on my specific complaint I’ll just note that some of the gruntwork I was referring to doesn’t require huge research budgets.

For instance, the TM folks make a big deal about their metaphysics of consciousness, and Orme-Johnson himself is a physicist, so I’d expect to see a lot more theoretical physics going on at the very least, just to make some sort of rigorous sense of the idea that consciousness is ultimately the stuff of reality (and that meditation, through certain mechanisms, lets us alter features of that reality in ways that don’t make sense under existing models of physical and particularly neurological processes). It isn’t as if they don’t have the money and institutions to do that sort of gruntwork (they have their own university, after all).

I think I might buy a weak version of Fuller’s concern: prevalent attitudes and existing institutional incentives may make some interesting scientific work difficult merely because it doesn’t fit neatly into popular (and thus lucrative) research agendas.

For example, I find plausible Evelyn Keller’s argument about how gendered attitudes and political associations slowed down research in cell biology, by devaluing some german research in development, and by focusing researchers so intently on the nucleus at the expense of studying carefully the rest of the cell.

But I’m not convinced that the exclusions are legion or especially durable: I suspect that good and useful work eventually makes it (as it has in cell biology and developmental genetics), and that ultimately unsupportable biases and omissions eventually get corrected.

Now, if we want to refute this sort of ‘Horatio Algiers’ optimism about the self-correcting property of scientific practice, I’m not sure TM and ID are the best candidates.

Why? Because it’s not at all clear that TM or ID are suffering primarily because they’re being shut out of the scientific club, or because they’re victims of Reindeer games once they’ve fought their way into the clubhouse (“they wouldn’t let poor Rudolf …”). Rather, I suspect they suffer in credibility because they seem to avoid the really interesting (and controversial) questions that their overarching approach raises, and those are in large measure conceptual questions about the precise workings of causal mechanisms.

Perhaps science needs persistent empirical anomalies to inspire just this sort of theoretical work? Thus (the argument might go) if no one can fund research to find those anomalies and get their work published in reputable journals, then no one in the broader scientific community has an incentive to tackle the controversial conceptual innovations when they are occasionally proposed by lone voices in esoteric journals.

Maybe that’s the problem here, but my gut sense is that the relationship between theory and empirical anomaly is complicated and reciprocal; that the messiness of this relationship is actually more forgiving to unconventional thinking than many charge (at least in the longer term of a few generations); that TM simply doesn’t have the sort of theory yet that could result in a fruitful interplay between empirical challenges and conceptual innovation; and finally, that this failing is not obviously attributable to the culture and institutions of mainstream science (although of course that cannot help, I’ll grant).

That’s exactly Fuller’s point, but it’s also exactly what’s wrong with Fuller’s point.

There may be science that’s feasible but never gets done because of prevailing social forces or prejudices in science. Perhaps if we saw some better examples than ID & TM it wouldn’t seem like Fuller is just letting in the crazy.