XKCD Query Bad Science Alert

I’m boggling at the explanation of that ‘decillionth’ thing. Since there’s only so much water in the world, [and even less of it both fresh and clean] how could one actually do such ‘diluting’? One would just be reusing the same water over and over again… Though I suppose that is rather the point…

A misleading explanation, then… it’s not the water that got big, it’s the dose that got small… ;-)

There’s really no need for arithmetic here. The benchmark for “number of atoms that represents an amount of stuff that is about human-sized” is Avogadro’s number– 6.02 x 10^23. So, the number of atoms of ‘stuff’ remaining after 60 ten-fold dilutions is zero.

Careful! Don’t let anything else near the water! Ever.

Their fondness for homeopathy could explain a lot about the British Royal Family.

Isn’t the idea that the mix should be so diluted that the resulting fluid would in fact contain no actual spermatozoon but through the wondrous workings of psyc… sorry, homeopathy the water would remember containing the stuff?

Still, I would guess that the chances of conceiving were greater if both parties wore tin-foil hats during the act.

Wouldn’t the argument work if the couple was trying to cure childlessness?

No. Sperm does not, generally speaking, cause childlessness in women.

Would a homeopathic solution of latex be the appropriate solution then?

(Alternatively, a 30x solution of Judy Garland’s back catalogue.)

It also raises the interesting question of why homeopathic true believers are not prepared to put their money where their mouth is (or; rather; not where their mouth is) and use homeopathic contraceptives. The results would be quite interesting.

Perhaps they do. It would explain the persistence of homeopathic true believers in the population.

@13: Homeopathy is obviously too advanced for my poor brain. What I can say, is that it is an issue in German politics – the Social Democrats and the CDU want to stop sickness insurance funds paying for homeopathic treatments while the Green Party oppose such a ban. To quote the Green spokesperson:

Wer die Kosten im Gesundheitswesen dämpfen will, sollte sich dort um die großen Mitnahmeeffekte kümmern, die keinen praktischen Nutzen für die Patienten haben

You can’t make this stuff up.

Even Martin Gardner underestimates the effect of some homeopathic dilutions. From the Wikipedia entry on homeopathy.

‘A popular homeopathic treatment for the flu is a 200C dilution of duck liver, marketed under the name Oscillococcinum. As there are only about 1080 atoms in the entire observable universe, a dilution of one molecule in the observable universe would be about 40C.

Oscillococcinum would thus require 10320 more universes to simply have one molecule in the final substance’.

And I thought the gin to tonic ration at my local J.D. Wetherspoons was bad.

Incidentally, that should read 10 to the power of 80 atoms in the observable universe, not 1080, a number which would make the universe considerably smaller than current theory predicts.

Sladek’s description, dramatic as it is, is still misleadingly generous to homeopathy: it leaves open the faint suggestion that if you drink some of the big galaxies-blob of water you will get some of the “medicine” albeit a teeny tiny amount. But Hidari’s quote in #23 puts us more on the right track: any drinkable quantity of the solution is unlikely to have any medicine whatsoever. In any quantity of the “medicine” there is a finite number of molecules, and if you dilute it enough using the procedure Sladek describes (where you dilute the “medicine,” throw most of the resulting solution away, then dilute it again, etc.), after a while it becomes statistically unlikely that your solution has any molecules of the medicine left. There is no more solute, only solvent.

This, together with homeopathy’s “hair of the dog” approach, explains why the “strongest” homeopathic remedies are the most diluted: they have gotten rid of all the crap that would otherwise cause the symptom you’re suffering from, and are closest to a pure placebo.

Some homeopathic remedies work. For example, found at Dr. Boli’s blog, this ad.

I remember in the ’80s Anthony Clare had this series — maybe called QED? — where he investigated common beliefs with controlled double-blind studies. Examples included Murphy’s Law (tested with buttered toast dropped on varyingly expensive carpet), Graphology, and Homeopathy. The Graphology one got a sample of actors and monks to write out the same letter and then had self-professed graphologists analyze the personality types. They didn’t do better than chance. For the Homeopathy one, I remember a biochemistry professor explaining the dilution factors as above, with a similar analogy of how, to be guaranteed a molecule of the original stuff, you’d need to drink a volume of water equivalent to the volume of the earth, “and that’s a very big pill to swallow”. The show wanted a test that would avoid placebo effects, so they took a herd of dairy cows with mastitis, split it in two, and had the farmer spend a week putting (blinded) the designated homeopathic cure in the treatment group’s trough and the equivalent amount of water in the control group’s trough. To the irritation of Anthony Clare, the cows given the homeopathic treatment got better, and the control group didn’t.

I love the Straussian exegesis of a cartoon. But then why didn’t I see it? When Allan Bloom said rock music ruins the imaginations of young people he was really telling sophisticated readers that he was a major-league head-banger.

I thought the gin to tonic ration at my local J.D. Wetherspoons was bad.

Though this reminds me of how the same underlying principle has been followed towards vermouth in martinis.

There is a simple rule to getting full value from an XKCD cartoon, which is always to read the title tag (which usually pops up in a little box if you hover a mouse over the image). It usually takes the first level joke in the cartoon off in another direction and sometimes the second joke is even better than the first. But as the image has been copied without the title, those looking at it here will be missing half the fun:

Dear editors of Homeopathy Monthly: I have two small corrections for your July issue. One, it’s spelled ‘echinacea’, and two, homeopathic medicines are no better than placebos and your entire magazine is a sham.

…and I see you already got Martin’s point, anyway. Never mind.

Tom Hurka, applied to sex rather than music, that’s a great rebuttal of what the world though was Bloom’s hypocrisy.

Apologies if it’s been noted on CT before, but here‘s another homeopathy cartoon.

concerning martinis-

bunuel makes the mistake of actually bringing the highly energized vermouth near the gin. for a truly homeopathic concoction, one should follow churchill’s suggestion: simply look towards france and whistle the marseillaises. if the gin has any sympathy for the allies, it will join in solidarity with the vermouth.

Twiki!

Also: should you brush your teeth before taking a homeopathic remedy?

While probably true, the evidence would suggest that it also is not evolutionarily selected against

Unless you substitute homeopathic treatment for real treatment otherwise available to you for serious medical conditions. Which some people do.

Perhaps Henry and I can finally bond about something: our mutual disgust at the pseudo-science of homeopathy.

If you think homeopathy is too stupid to be worth your attention, then you shouldn’t make fun of it.

If you write sentences that make no sense you shouldn’t post comments.

Hidari@25: nicely done.

It’s interesting that in the ecology of pseudoscience, certain misbeliefs are obvious fads, like pyramid power or magnet therapy, while others enjoy multigenerational popularity. What separates the two? In the science community, you have cranks who are to do this earnestly insisting that Einstein Was Wrong. Cold fusion? Not so many people still digging into it. Is there some way to predict the longevity of these fads and fallacies in the name of science? Could it be something as simple as cost?

#55

Now you are into the sociology of pseudo-science, a subject I find much more interesting than pseudo-science itself. Why are there ‘fashions’ in strange beliefs? And why are some of these beliefs just so extraordinarily popular?

For example: here’s a Trivial Pursuit question for you.

What was the biggest non-fiction bestseller of the 1970s?
(No Googling!). Given it some thought? Well you’re all wrong.

The best selling non-fiction book of the 1970s was The Late, Great Planet Earth by Christian nutter Hal Lindsey. 28 million copies sold by 1990. Much more interesting to me than simply laughing at Lindsey, on the (unarguable) grounds that he is

a: mad and

b: stupid is to ask what it was about his work that struck such a chord, at such a time?

(Here’s a clue, in my opinion. Immanuel Velikovsky’s ‘work’ was also extremely popular at about the same time. This was also about the time that religion started to play a far more important part in American politics).

Some people are under the impression that people have ‘always’ believed nonsense and that these beliefs are atavistic. But not at all. For example, having an astrology column in a newspaper is a very new thing: it only goes back a few decades. In fact, in my University library, I was once glancing through a scholarly history of astrology (written in the 1950s) and in the preface it had words to the effect of: ‘Many people would question why anyone would wish to write a history of astrology, given that its unscientific tenets are no longer believed by any sensible person, and as a belief system it has been confined to the dustbin of history’ (or something like that).

How times change.

I would like to a moment to note – for the sake of many, many Indians who take Gandhi’s words as Gospel – that his opinions on homeopathy (“Homeopathy cures a larger percentage of cases than any other method of treatment and is beyond doubt safer and more economical and most complete medical science.”) are unsupported by scientific data, were already unsupportable by scientific data at the time of the quote and altogether incorrect.

@ Hidari – I believe he did. It fell into place with his idea of “ahimsa” and non-violence which, obviously, is not quite the same when applied to the human body. (Tagore also had some weird ideas about homeopathy. I am sure I can dig up the quote.)

Sometimes, the biggest risk really *is* to not take one. This is as true in health management as in anything else. The Indian government is risking the health and wellness of thousands of people by institutionalizing this quackery. It would be a good idea to risk (some) popular discontent and simply discontinue support for homeopathy.

I will note that homeopathy is big in India, and seems to enjoy governmental support as well. I was just Googling for some information on this, and so this might less than reliable. There are, apparently, over 200,000 homeopathic doctors there and more than a hundred degree colleges. They may also be subsidzing some of these medical colleges because the annual fees seem ridiculously low. The Government of India should really think about derecognizing all these degree colleges and use the money for something else. The opportunity cost is too great.

There, India. I just saved you tons of money! You are welcome.

http://www.dcscience.net/?p=19

Hidari
“Now you are into the sociology of pseudo-science, a subject I find much more interesting than pseudo-science itself. Why are there ‘fashions’ in strange beliefs? And why are some of these beliefs just so extraordinarily popular?”

People need to feel like they have a certain amount of control over their lives. Alternative medicine gives them the feeling that they have a say in what happens in their lives. So why turn away from traditional medicine? Well, here in the US a lot of people in my social class don’t have reliable access to good healthcare. What access we do have is through large impersonal institutions whose staff are underpaid, tired and even hostile to patients.

About a year ago I had a abscessed tooth that was giving me a lot of pain. So much so that I couldn’t sleep and could feel tenderness going up towards my eye. An untreated tooth abscess will kill you. So I went to the county hospital emergency room. I waited for hours. When the doctor did see me she told me that they couldn’t do anything for me because it wasn’t life threatening. She suggested I make an appointment with their dental clinic, this was Friday. She also offered me a hypo for the pain. I got charged 300 for the visit and 150 for the shot. The dental clinic told me on Monday to call back in a week a so because they were booked up.

I relate this not to talk about my troubles but to give you an idea of why people might reject standard medical care. I feel nothing but rage for that doctor, that clinic and the people in government that enable this abusive system to endure. I notice that every time I interact with the health system I come out on the short end. Sooner or later they screw me. The people who did help me were those at the Indian dental clinic. It cost me 30 dollars and the darvocet was free.

I think the same psychology is at work with people who reject immunizations today. The medical institution in the US today are not just large and impersonal, they are abusive. They are also in the pocket of the pharmaceutical corporation who lie cheat and steal for a buck. They fake their research and when their products kills people there are no consequences.

There are carcinogens in your milk, mercury in your fish, arsenic in your water, hormones and antibiotics in your meat. There is no reliable health information in the media at all, it’s all lies. In fact, it’s worse than lies. True honest medical information is forbidden in the media because that would hurt an advertiser.

So from my point of view, if I were a bit dumber, a bit less educated, more afraid and felt more helpless. I sure would want to turn to something that gave me the feeling that I had some control over my life. Something that was affordable, more personal and no more likely to kill me than anything else. Yeah, I’d go for that.

Hidari, you’re interested in the sociology of pseudo-science; have you drawn any conclusions?

Your comment @55 rang a bell. Are you familiar with Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder? The opening story about ants is worth the price all by itself, and it just gets better after that. Anyway, part of the book is devoted to puzzling over why the progress of science does not eliminate pseudo-sciences. He suggests an explanation that goes sort of like this (though he puts it better):

1. Scientific advances brings new discoveries.
2. New discoveries reveal wondrous things. (The New World! Sunspots! Subatomic particles! Black holes! Weird creatures that live in boiling seawater!)
3. The wondrousness of these things leads people to think that the world is a magical place.
4. This, in turn, gives license to belief in all kinds of weird stuff. After all, science has shown that really weird stuff is possible.

Another belief popular in the 60s and 70s was that of an imminent revolution. As I mentioned in an early CT post,
https://crookedtimber.org/2004/09/30/revolution-and-revelations/
this idea has pretty much disappeared (as I think have the ideas of Velikovsky and von Daniken), while the popularity of Christian eschatology has been unaffected by Lindsey’s failures.

People telling people that I’m right (on the internet) about the need to get things right need to get my name right (on the internet).

Exactness when you’re making fun of stuff is all about the away crowd; can’t be bothered shortcuts are all about the home crowd. Different games demand different tactics. The actual details of homeopathy are of course interesting and odd: lack of curiosity is an unbecoming flaw in intelligent people; but time is short for one and all, and distraction can very easily become procrasturbation. Relevance is a triage.

Another belief popular in the 60s and 70s was that of an imminent revolution. As I mentioned in an early CT post,
https://crookedtimber.org/2004/09/30/revolution-and-revelations/
this idea has pretty much disappeared

I don’t think it’s disappeared, it’s just found a new breeding ground on the right instead of the left. Sometimes they’re scared that the left is gonna do it, and sometimes they’re proud to announce their own intention to do it.

#69, 73

As John points out, many people are under the impression that pseudo-scientific beliefs have always been with us and that’s that. But actually, the popular tolerance for ‘weird’ beliefs varies over time, and some beliefs go in and out of fashion. For example, astrology (as I pointed out) was pretty much dead in the 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, in the late 19th century, there was a huge amount of interest (apparently) in animals (especially toads) being found, apparently alive, in ‘prehistoric’ rocks: a belief that has now completely died.

Which leaves the question of why do these ‘fashions’ in pseudo-science happen? As Substance McGravitas suggests, perhaps the original CT post linked to at #69 might be explained by saying that it was when (and because) people stopped believing in a Communist revolution, that (admittedly a different group of people) started to believe in a Christian revolution (i.e. the End of Time).

A standard objection to Marxism is that ‘it’s just a religion’, with the ‘classless society’ being simply a secularised version of Paradise after the Last Judgement. Not sure if I agree with that, but if one goes along with it, then one can trace the rise of the Christian millenarian movement to the decline of the New Left: the ‘Hal Lindsey’ school have, so to speak, de-secularised Marx’s secularised utopia and restored its (perhaps) inherently religious nature.

And why in the 1970s? Well, in well known study Israelis who were stressed (by the threat or reality of missile attacks) were more likely to express ‘superstitious’ opinions, and superstitious thinking generally is linked to loss of control. In the 1970s, especially in the United States, people felt increasingly paranoid (assassinations, riots, apparently meaningless wars) at the same time as the American Dream seemed to fail (economic recession, defeat in the Vietnam war).

Why homeopathy? Well you have to look at things such as the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s, which led to increasing power being handed to Big Pharma and medicine becoming far more of a money orientated thing. People felt (and feel) more and more pushed around by giant, faceless corporations. Homeopathy’s long ‘touchy feely’ consultations thus become very attractive. At the same time (and again, this is even more the case now) capitalism’s atomisation of the social means that, instead of finding social meanings through (say) political parties or trade unions or ‘social protest’, we find the meaning for our actions and existence through the market, and the idea that you can buy some tailored (i.e. individualistic) medicine that will alleviate vague, ‘lifestyle’ illnesses again becomes highly attractive.

Forgive me for trying to spoil the party (which I won’t succeed doing) but the level of discussion here has been somewhat under the potential of CT. You are talking as if it were obvious what is “science” and what is “pseudo-science”. Well it’s not. Even without bringing up economics (which would be fun but derail this thread), it is an old myth that there is a clear and unambiguous distinction between science and not-science and I am really surprised I have to mention this in this forum. In the case of homeopathy, in my view the data do not support the theory but it is not true that the theory itself is obviously absurd, at least not more than many other theories. Then there is the problem that evidence for homeopathy being effective exists. (Most of) that evidence can probably be explained by placebo effects bu you know what: that may be good enough. A lot of supposedly scientific medicine is on shaky grounds and as noen eloquently explains, the real-world experience that most people have with “school medicine” is mixed. Failures of school medicine can be explained, of course. Sometimes they are real failures and will hopefully be corrected. Sometimes they just appear as failures (the patient may have had bad luck). But does anybody here doubt that immense amounts of pharmaceuticals are prescribed on scientifically more than shaky grounds, that clinical studies are being manipulated and unwelcome results suppressed? Does wide-spread skepticism towards the medical establishment really require an explanation??? Add to this the fact that the achievements of scientific medicine, impressive as they in my view are, are frequently overstated. I hope you have read Lewontin’s critique pointing out that increased life expectancy has little to do with the progress of medicine. People have heard scientists promise the cancer cure for how many decades now? How long since gene therapy was supposed to be 10 years away from the cure etc. (and hasn’t produced any progress so far, except to kill a couple patients)? Are you really surprised people are looking for alternatives?

@piglet 77

No, homeopathy is total bunk. It is very easy to identify it as pseudo-scientific. And it is not necessary to resort to Popper (whose purpose was to raise the bar on science as high as possible).

First the ‘Law of Similars’ has no theoretical or experimental support. There is no reason to expect that a substance that produces the same symptoms is going to provide any therapeutic effect in any dose whatsoever.

Second, there is no theoretical or experimental support for the notion that dilution increases therapeutic effect.

The issue here is not simply the lack of a scientific theory, it is the complete lack of any support for the central claims in any theory generally accepted as ‘scientific’.

If either of the claims was true we would expect that the mechanism that gave rise to them would in turn give rise to other phenomena that could be observed, measured and studied. This is absolutely not the case.

That is not the same as claiming that all alternative medicine is total bunk. In particular it is pretty easy to see how certain remedies in Chinese medicine work, some of the herbal cures administered contain vast quantities of steroids. And certain claims of reflexology turn out to have some basis in neurology. The nerve fibers and decoding circuits in the brain have common paths, there is considerable potential for cross-talk. Which is why it is possible to give a woman an orgasm by jiggling her toes in the right way.

The grand claims made by certain alternative medicines do not have scientific basis. There is no scientific basis for claims made by certain chiropractors that their remedies can cure any form of illness. There is no scientific basis for claims that reflexology has significant therapeutic benefits.

As for the alleged failure of medical science to live up to certain expectations, eighty years ago we had no real answer to bacterial infections, today almost all are treatable using anti-biotics. In the past fifty years science has developed an explanation for the working of viruses, cancer and prion diseases. Effective treatments have been developed for a wide range of viral infections and we now have an understanding of the detailed mechanism that causes cancer. Thats not a bad rate of progress. Has any alternative medicine made any progress whatsoever in that same time?

You are talking as if it were obvious what is “science” and what is “pseudo-science”. Well it’s not.

How different are the mental leaps that make science vs. the mental leaps that make pseudoscience?

Pro-homeopathy arguments are often extended tu quoque rants.

It does, though, illuminate one attraction of woo — not just the illusion of control, the illusion of knowledge. Quacks dispense comforting certainty: you’re sick because your vital forces are low, this doesn’t align with that, all in a metaphorical language that’s easy to grasp. (And of course it’s carefully pitched out of the reach of systematic testing.) Real doctors are more likely to confess that they don’t know what’s the matter with you.

Does wide-spread skepticism towards the medical establishment really require an explanation?

Skepticism toward the medical establishment need not, and should not, be accompanied by non-skepticism toward everything that isn’t the medical establishment.

Even if the establishment is wrong about something, some or even most of its detractors are likely to be wrong too.

@ John #69

Von Daniken’s ideas disappeared? You wish.

I found my son tuned into Discovery Channel’s “Ancient Aliens.” Von Daniken’s name wasn’t mentioned in what I saw, but a gang of other credulous yet credentialed people were filling in for him. Stuff on the level of “Here is this one little bird sculpture found in one single solitary ancient Egyptian tomb. See how it looks a little like a modern airplane to those of us who know what modern airplanes look like? Gosh, maybe this means that ancient Egyptians could fly! In modern-looking airplanes! And of course it must have been aliens who gave them the technology, so there may have been ancient aliens!”

The show was sometimes responsible enough to do some debunking on its own, but overall it was catering to ancient-aliens fans. So for Daddy this was an exercise in teaching son how to debunk this bullshit.

I stand by what I said. I’m not making a case for homeopathy but a case for a lack of integrity in the “scientific” medicine community that needs to be addressed at least as urgently as the lack of integrity of many supporters of homeopathy. And also that is not a tu quoque argument. My point is that if you raise the question of how certain beliefs become popular (which I think is an important one), you can’t simply ignore the context. You have to include in your discussion how the “scientific” side contributes to the phenomenon, for example by a lack of integrity and by raising unreasonable expectations that lead to disappointment.

“Real doctors are more likely to confess that they don’t know what’s the matter with you.”

Do you have evidence for that claim? Scientific evidence, preferably?

I strongly recommend this article by James M. Wilson, Science 8 May 2009:
Vol. 324. no. 5928, pp. 727 – 728, DOI: 10.1126/science.1174935

A History Lesson for Stem Cells

When President Barack Obama signed an Executive Order on 9 March 2009 rolling back the previous administration’s restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research, he took pains to temper Americans’ hopes for quick fixes. “At this moment, the full promise of stem cell research remains unknown and it should not be overstated,” the president said. “I cannot guarantee that we will find the treatments and cures we seek”. Unfortunately, some stakeholders in hESC research have failed to exhibit the same restraint, effectively promising cures for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, spinal cord injuries, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, macular degeneration, and hearing loss, to name a few. (emphasis added)

Studies of hESCs and their non–embryo-derived counterparts, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, will likely deepen our understanding of cell differentiation, human development, and birth defects. Hopefully they will also lead to novel therapeutics for some diseases, and I applaud President Obama for giving scientists longer leashes as they explore this exciting field. But in today’s clamor of stem cell enthusiasm it is possible to detect haunting echoes of the early and ultimately troubled days of gene therapy.

The field of gene therapy began with laboratory studies in the mid- to late-1980s and grew linearly during the 1990s. Very early in this evolution, clinical trials were initiated, and their number and overall patient recruitment figures grew in step with the science. During that period, gene therapy was touted as a potential cure for a huge array of ailments. By 2000, researchers had launched more than 400 clinical trials, testing the approach against a wide spectrum of illnesses. Yet the Food and Drug Administration concluded in a September 2000 review, “the hyperbole has exceeded the results” and “little has worked”. Although the field has improved since then, with notable successes against inherited blindness and immune deficiency, those successes are shadowed by several tragic adverse events, including treatment-induced cancers in some volunteers and, in 1999, the death of an 18-year-old, Jesse Gelsinger, in a gene therapy clinical trial that I led. Gelsinger’s death initiated a chain of events that seriously derailed the field.
(…)

Frankly, I have no time for the “we rationalists vs those superstitious believers” rhetoric. Nobody who knows a minimum about history and sociology of science can take such simple-mindedness seriously. Science has done immense harm as well as good, has produced plenty of bad theories that we now read about with disbelief but that were fully respected in their time, has served as cover for political oppression in myriad ways. The saving grace of science has always been that true scientists understand their own limitations. Science needs humility. Arrogant science becomes insufferable and people will always be turned off by it.

So then Piglet, why do people seem to love arrogant pseudoscience? You got it exactly backwards: People hate arrogant doctors who say “if it’s not showing up on my tests, then it’s all in your head,” but adore arrogant quacks who say ” you definitely have my syndrome, here’s this very expensive treatment and please, do tell me more about your problems.” All things considered, I’ll take the worst of the folks who reason in public with evidence over the worst of the quacks. And the best of science is a hell of a lot better.

As a former scientist married to a practicing biologist I have to take issue with the idea of science being arrogant. There are certainly individual scientists who are arrogant but as I group I have always found them (at several major universities) to be quick to admit the limitations of science. They do get irritated when confronted repeatedly by nonsense like homeopathy. Why would any reasonable person invest much time in debating psychic surgery or remote viewing? However wrong, and it often is, science does require proponents of a theory eventually to produce some evidence or to be based on assumptions consistent with evidence of how the world works.

Religiously based pseudo-science may be a special subset of irrationality. Faith healing is vigorously propagated by con artists for financial benefit. It might not be considered pseudo-science given its claims are based on divine intervention. It does persist no matter how many times individual faith healers are exposed as frauds or the lack of verifiable cures, suggesting similarity to pseudo-science based on “scientific” principles.

Ooops, I’m late for my orgone treatment. See you.

There are certainly individual scientists who are arrogant but as I group I have always found them (at several major universities) to be quick to admit the limitations of science. They do get irritated when confronted repeatedly by nonsense like homeopathy.

There isn’t quite so much vocal crankery in other areas. Professional historians would probably become just as combative – and some of them might well become just as arrogant – if there was a large number of people who repeatedly asserted that most historians were liars and that the Roman Empire really persisted into the early 18th century, or that Napoleon and Louis XIV were the same man. In areas where history really is a political plaything (Irish history, say, or mediaeval Balkan history, or archaeology in Turkey) this is pretty much what happens.

@Dr. Hilarius 97

The reason a sane person looks into pseudo-science is that others do so. In particular the Russian Colonel who runs their information-engagement operations is into various types of Psi-ops.

They still do the remote viewing and action at a distance nonsense. And its not so hard to see why it has a hold. Every senior officer in the Russian army was educated in a school system based on the pseudo-science of Marxist-Leninism. The nonsense poisoned everything they did since.

You can’t teach science in a country where asking questions or demanding proof gets you a ticket to the gulag. To do well in Soviet science it was much better to be a charlatan than an honest man. A charlatan had no difficulty making up results or stealing from the West. Honest research would inevitably expose such activity and create a real personal risk for the exposer.

I’m not so sure magnet therapy isn’t one of the perennial ones. It’s recurrent, at the very least; it was big 100 years ago, and also in the 1770s when Mesmer himself was pushing it for the first time.

@piglet: The idea that science should have some humility is a good one, but surely you can’t possibly be ignorant of the fact that demands for science to have more humility very often come from people who have just lost on the merits and are trying to obscure that fact?

The saving grace of science has always been that true scientists understand their own limitations.

IMO, the saving grace of science has always been that when one scientist has been wrong, another has pointed it out, and eventually, proved it. It takes truly extraordinary outside pressures like Lysenkoism to (locally and temporarily) stop science from fixing its own mistakes.

P.S. It seems a bit unfair to blame “science”, as if it were a uniform mass, for the sensationalized media results that “promise” cures for X disease within Y years. Such statements clearly aren’t scientific theories or conclusions in the first place, even if they are uttered by people whose profession is “scientist”, and to the extent that their failure to come true should discredit anyone, it should be the speaker only (except maybe if there is widespread agreement within the field on the correctness of the prediction, which there generally is not). Indeed, I would bet that most such statements are more aspiration than prediction even to the (unrepresentative) utterer.

“It seems a bit unfair to blame “science”, as if it were a uniform mass”

Of course, but you understand that everybody can use that argument. I am aware that there is no such a thing as “science” in the singular, but then there is no such a thing as “pseudo-science” in the singular. The claims about the miracle cures of fads such as gene therapy that I cited above are very representative, and I am glad be able to cite Dr. Wilson as witness. You cannot explain that away. That doesn’t discredit the whole scientific enterprise, and I never suggested it did.

One more point. There used to be a strong tradition of science criticism on the left (I was particularly influenced by Gould, Lewontin and the like). With the right since Bush going frontally anti-science whenever it suits their interests, it seems that the left has completely forgotten its critical knowledge and now feels compelled to circle the wagons with whoever claims to represent science. We need to do better than that.

I’m not so sure magnet therapy isn’t one of the perennial ones. It’s recurrent, at the very least; it was big 100 years ago, and also in the 1770s when Mesmer himself was pushing it for the first time.

I was dubious about that one even as I wrote it down, as I still see advertisements for magnetic bracelets being pushed as a health aid all the time. I left it at that because I don’t see this as rising to the level of popularity, of, say, chi balancing, homeopathic medicine or acupuncture.

In any event, there seems to be something there which I can’t quite put my finger on which elevates some crank notions into perennial fads while others either fade away or at best go in and out of fashion at long intervals. Let me list a few examples from different categories.

I’ve already mentioned the “Einstein Was Wrong!” set – why are there so many people determined to prove otherwise, and why doesn’t QM come in for a similar hit? Oddly, it seems that this crowd also has a definable political bent, which would be – of course – libertarian. On the math side (Mark Chu seems to be one guy who’s made it something of a crusade to demolish this nonsense), there are legions of people who are out to prove that there are just as many natural numbers as there real numbers. This talk about “orders of infinity” is just so much gibblegabble they seem to think.

Someone mentioned “The Late Great Planet Earth” as a 1970’s best seller. Well, one avid reader of that stuff would be my dad. He moved us back to Missouri on the strength of Dr. Hal, just so he could join up with the “The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord” crowd. I mention this because he’s also a believer in the 100 mpg carburetor that “they don’t want you to know about” despite the fact that he’s a mechanic who should know better and despite the fact he’s been shown with facts and figures why that isn’t possible. While I really don’t keep track of such things, I think this one is a fad. It is nevertheless, part and parcel with the “free energy machine” crowd that have been around forever, whatever the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics may have to say on the subject.

On the health side, there seems to be an ongoing fascination with “supplements”, for example, the megavitamin crowd. I’ll admit that I’ve taken a wide variety of these supplements, everything from massive doses of vitamins E, B, and C to chromium picolinate, St. Johns Wort, glucosamine chondroitin, etc. The difference between me and a lot of people seems to be that I stop taking them when enough evidence rolls in that they don’t do anything for you, and other people swear by them long after this has been established (by the way, are there any new supplements that anyone wants to recommend?)

Another category would be odd animals and odd animal behaviours – during the halcyon days of Steve Austin, Bionic Man Saskwatch was being sighted by everyone’s third cousin, in modern times not so much. But Nessie still seems to be getting a good deal of favorable press. I’ll include UFO sightings in this one. This is another phenom that seems to have peaked in the 70’s and then dropped off, though I’ll concede that this is a case where the popularity may be cyclic as well. Oh, and I might as well throw strange places in here as well, such as the Devil’s Triangle. At one point, there was a school of thought who held that there were actually twelve such areas on the Earth, iirc.

Anybody see a pattern, or think they see one? Could it be something as simple as the financial cost of maintaining the belief?

At least part of the reason for acupuncture maintaining its popularity is as a cover for prostitution. Acupuncture tends to substitute for massage in areas where massage parlors are heavily regulated.

But it really isn’t fair to put acupuncture in the same bracket as homeopathy as it does not claim to have a scientific basis in the first place. Homeopathy does claim to be scientifically based and apes the forms but not the substance of science.

Oh and @Hidari, 100 – She hot-footed it then?

SoV 110, you quote me saying: “My point is that if you raise the question of how certain beliefs become popular (which I think is an important one), you can’t simply ignore the context.” Well that’s what I’m saying. Now what was your question again? (You don’t need to answer that).

SoV, it’s a matter of reading and understanding English sentences. You are only embarrassing yourself.

SoV, I won’t tolerate your trolling. You asked me to “explain” why some people try to refute Einstein (96 and again 106) even though nothing I have said had any connection with Einstein. You have been misreading my comments (as you admit in 114) and now you try to ridicule me for not having said what you thought I had said. Apparently I “should have said at the beginning” that I don’t claim to have a theory of everything, instead of simply assuming that nobody capable of reading would assume I had said something that I haven’t. Understand that nobody here needs that nonsense, get over it, and shut up.

Oh, the obligatory “I’m going to stop wrestling the pig” should be applied here. No point in any more insulting discussion.

(F**k, formatting emergency)

I’m merely asking about the sort of context that would make questioning Relativity popular (an particularly, popular amongst libertarians.)

You are certainly free to ask that question, and maybe it is a good question to ask. But you didn’t ask it in any of your earlier posts, until 118. What you DID ask was:

That might be true . . . but how does that explain the legions of cranks beavering away to prove Einstein Was Wrong? I don’t see how your theory covers that.

That sounds like trolling, looks like trolling, and smells like trolling. Maybe it isn’t – appearances can be deceptive. In any case, I never set out to “explain the legions of cranks beavering away to prove Einstein Was Wrong”, or to provide a theory that would “cover that”. The most benign interpretation is that you were misreading my comments. If you weren’t, you were trolling.

Get a room, you guys, please!

#124 But a one off experiment proves nothing. Only a meta-analysis can provide us with the, ahem, hard scientific evidence we require.

So if you all pop round to my house tonight……make sure you bring your car keys…….

Not on YouTube. Shocking, frankly. This kind of information needs better dissemination.

I don’t know if neil’s assertion, that critics should learn more about what they’re criticizing, is appropriate in this case. But often, it seems to be.

A case in point: Phil Plait (of Bad Astronomy) once wrote a big “debunking” of astrology. He basically kept repeating over and over that since stars are so far away, there are no forces that can affect what happens to you on earth (he listed them: Gravitation? No. Weak electromagnetic force? no. etc etc.).

Well, duh. But if he had thought about it a bit, he’d realize that there are three types of explanation an astrology believer can choose to “explain” the supposed correlation between planet’s position and significant life events. Those are:

1. The position of planets and stars cause human life events.
2. Life events causes the position of planets and stars.
3. Something else causes both human life events and the position astronomical objects.

And if he had spent half a minute talking to an astrology believer, he’d realize it was the third. Astrology believers generally believe in determinism. They explain astrology with symmetries in the universe present from beginning – either deliberately, because it was set up that way by God, or merely out of spontaneous natural symmetry.

This is a position which can be criticized, but that was not what Phil Plait did. He just attacked his own idea of astrology, and dismissed me as an astrology supporter when I contacted him about it (I am not.)

Re Harold @ 11:25 a.m.

Too bad people like the one in Harold’s story go around “proving” how stupid other people’s beliefs are in a way that inspires the question, “If you’re so smart, why are you so stupid?”

Ah, since all alternative candidates seem to have been disposed of, here are my thoughts on the relative popularity and staying power of the various pseudosciences: apart from what seems to be a random walk, pseudoscience lasts to the extent that it is difficult to disprove. Pyramid power was pretty big for a few years, but since none of the claimed results never manifested (we did a really cool project with that one in the seventh grade), and since these results were easily isolated, it was bound to crash and burn within a half a decade.

This would explain why Saskwatch sightings are so rare now, but Nessie seems to be as popular as ever; back in the mid-70’s there really were large parts of the American Northwest that weren’t very accessible. That’s not so true now, of course, hence the low interest. It also explains perennial health fads, insofar as there will always be placebo effects to consider and there will always be confounding variables; “I still have a cold, but it’s not as bad as it would have been if it weren’t for those megadoses of vitamin C.”

The other consideration is cost, both of the monetary kind, but also the cost in intellectual preparation and personal effort. Why doesn’t QM have the same detractors as Relativity? The math is much harder. With SR, are you really need to set up a dedicated career of crankery is high school math. It’s much easier to set up complicated Rube Goldberg scenarios to “disprove” the Twin paradox than it is to actually learn linear operator theory. This goes for math crankery as well. The Cantor diagonalization proof is actually pretty easy; any reasonably intelligent junior high school student can follow it. Thus you have legions of cranks busily constructing correspondence schemes – some of them quite complicated – that they think will shut down Cantor and earn them eternal fame for taking down one of the big guys. You won’t see this sort of energy directed at, say, any of a number of famous conjectures and theorems in projective geometry stated in the language of sheaf theory simply because the amount of work to put into the subject just to understand the questions and why they are important is beyond the capacity of most cranks.

This applies in spades to alternative medicine. The remedies that “they don’t want you to know about” are not only efficacious, they are also cheap and within the budgets of the credulous and easily gulled. Megavitamins? Accupunture? Aroma therapy? Cheap, cheap, and cheap.

I’d say that this explains about 90% of the variance.

Another belief popular in the 60s and 70s was that of an imminent revolution. As I mentioned in an early CT post, this idea has pretty much disappeared (as I think have the ideas of Velikovsky and von Daniken)

Other crazy things the Far Left thought in the 60s: that there was going to be a global nuclear war in which we’d all die. Those idiots! It NEVER happened!

@sg

You want a ewe? Shouldn’t we at least start systematic studies on humans before going off onto other species?

I have very limited data to work with here, cannot confirm or deny effect on males. All I know is it has little effect on me.

So step one in this process is to make a toe twiddlification machine so that we can get some repeatable measurements here, then hit craigslist.

@ engels,

You obviously didn’t go to the same parties I did when I was at MIT is all I can say.

@SoV

So you are suggesting that rather than start the online forum to do some wikiResearch into recreational neurohacking for sensual pleasure, I should form a cult instead?

Sous les pavés, la plage!

What’s the English for ‘ressentiment’?

Why doesn’t QM have the same detractors as Relativity?

Probably because QM is weird enough already. It’s hard for any nuts to come up with crazier unrealities to the really existing reality.

I still take the risk of nuclear extinction seriously

I don’t think there has been any point in my lifetime when a leftwing revolution was even a remote possibility

I don’t think it’s logical to hold those two beliefs simultaneously. If you take the risk of nuclear armageddon seriously, then surely the potential for almostanything to happen should be respected?

Substance MCGravitas @56: (“certain misbeliefs are obvious fads, like pyramid power or magnet therapy, while others enjoy multigenerational popularity. What separates the two?”) The potency of the conspiracy theories of their repression?

I’d say not. I get the impression that those are mostly concerned to explain rejection rather than repression, and are epiphenomenal, arising from defensive rebuttal of the meta-argument: ‘if this theory were any good the scientific ‘community’ would have accepted it’.

Not only that, but such ancillary conspiracy theories are often merely imputed. The ‘read-ahead’ appraoch provides a lazy shortcut to rebuttal: something like a closure principle gets you from ‘disagrees with received opinion’ to ‘must think the received opinion is corrupt’, which gets you to a conspiracy theory, and it’s case closed.

e.g.: noen (who will no doubt be deeply gratified to learn I otherwise agree with him/her) @88: “…Discovery Channel’s “Ancient Aliens.”” I saw that, god it was horrible. What really offends me about those kinds of conspiracy theories is… etc.

This kind of thing buys (or at least feeds) into the pernicious tendency to associate theories about ordinary corruption, covert ops etc. (i.e. politics carried on by pretty ordinary* means) not only with scapegoating propaganda and historical mythology, but also with unscientific and superstitious beliefs. I think such a tendency has serious consequences for the quality of public debate.

*In the colloquial Australian sense as well as the standard compositional one

IIRC Harry Frankfurt’s point, to which noen was alluding, was that the statements of someone who BSes don’t have a truth value–because he doesn’t care.

> Except that bullshit normally does have a truth value.

It is important to be cognizant of the fact that some people may be compulsive liars.

So, actually, bullshit may not have a truth value. On the one hand, you could have a manager who says that their open source software is the best in the industry, is unbreakable and is the world’s best. On the other hand, you could have a manager who says he reports to the CEO, who says that it is company policy not to email people outside the group, or who says that he worked for various big-name software companies. Whereas the second category of bullshit does have a truth value, the first category does not.