Category Archives: Pseudoscience

Respect my worldview!

Posted by on October 28, 2011 No comments | 2,766 views

You probably have heard that demand from various people? The idea for the post was triggered by this brief Twitter exchange on #skeptics:

Respect!The top reply there is mine, and this little exchange got me thinking. I have no idea who SnBEternally is and what their problem is. They did tell the whole of CSICON to go fuck themselves though, so there’s some animosity at least.

Anyway. So why this demand for respect? First let me clarify what I am referring to here. I do respect people’s freedom of religion, belief and speech. This is not what I’m targeting her. What I am talking about is why should I respect a given belief by default? There are numerous religious and alternative beliefs I simply cannot respect or accept because I’m a secular humanist. I don’t respect the acts of terror performed by fundamentalist Muslims. I don’t respect the hatred displayed by Christian fundamentalists towards gay people and other groups they target. I don’t respect the homoeopath who sell water and sugar for medicine to sick people. I don’t respect the anti-vaccine activist who indirectly cause great suffering for individuals and put the flock-immunity of dangerous diseases of the entire population at risk. I don’t respect the global warming denier who is too fond of their wasteful lifestyle to want to sacrifice it for the common good. I don’t respect the pope for sweeping child abuse under the rug and opposing prevention of the spreading of HIV in Africa. The list of assholes I don’t respect is long. Too long.

But let’s flip the coin and ask: Why do these people crave our respect? I don’t really give a shit if they don’t respect my world view. My world view doesn’t rely on that. It isn’t fixed. I evaluate my world view based on how well it fits with reality. Specifically I rely on scientific evidence when I make up my mind what to believe. If the evidence isn’t present I either make up my mind based on available data, or don’t form an opinion at all. I have no problem with not knowing the answer! This maybe is the key. The religious and the alternative thinking seem to demand an answer regardless of how well the answer applies to observable reality. Where did the universe come from? God made it. How does homoeopathic medicine work? Quantum mechanics does it. (As a physicist, the QM explanations for homoeopathy is complete gibberish to me). So why this craving for respect? The answer is simple I think: validation. Their world view is not self-consistent, self-evident or self-reliant, thus they need external affirmation. That is why they get so annoyed when we don’t provide this. This is also why it is a bad idea to pay too much lip service to these people. The so-called “accommodationism approach”.

Dem Evangelicals …

Posted by on July 8, 2011 No comments | 2,236 views

Came across this interesting blogpost via PZ Myers’ blog. It is about some interesting results from «Pew Research Forum on Religion and Public Life» which had a survey of the opinions of evangelical leaders attending a conference last year. Leaders from all over the world were included and there are some interesting cultural differences noted in the blogpost. You can read about that there, but the point I found most interesting and disappointingly unsurprising was that fact that the rejection of evolution was almost complete. Given the option of Evolution (but not excluding God), Intelligent Design and traditional creationism, 47% chose creationism, 41% chose ID and only 3% chose evolution. The error margins are usually a few percent. The number of evangelical leaders who said it is not “essential to follow the teachings of Christ in one’s personal and family life” was also 3%, so clearly the error margins are in that range. It is disappointing that so many evangelical, near all, reject a well established and well proven scientific theory. The author of the blogpost concludes:

Rejection of evolution is not simply a theological side issue in evangelical Christianity, but appears to be a defining feature.

There are other interesting things gathered from this survey as well, about their attitude towards atheists for instance. Interesting read:

Full post: Evangelicals, evolution and atheism: the 2011 Pew Foundation survey

The complete theory of evolutio

Homeopathy debunked in 1842

Posted by on April 24, 2011 No comments | 2,375 views

Oliver Wendell HolmesAlready in 1842 Homeopathy was debunked. I came over this old essay written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a poet and physician that lived from 1809 to 1894. His essay Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions was two lectures  presented to the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1842.

The essay gives us a quick introduction to the principles of Homeopathy and its inventor  Samuel Hahnemann’s original written work published in 1806. Even to the educated of his own days the principles he suggested were logically and scientifically unsound as they even more so are today.

Holmes describes the principles and suggest 3 consequences of these principles that ought to be true if these principles were. He picks them apart thoroughly. An examples is his comment on the first principle, namely that “like cures like”, or that a remedy that causes some given symptoms will cure a disease with the same symptoms.

Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though it may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects, one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief. I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in which the spontaneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by the agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any terms. But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have been founded upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a physician; that the Homeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, “the sole law of nature in therapeutics,” a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse ever presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant novelty, that it demands a corresponding breadth and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast pretensions.

Then he looks at the absurdity of the claim that the more the remedy is diluted, the more effective it is. This is the most common argument anyone arguing that Homeopathy is humbug will first use. A commonly used dilution is 30C, which means that the dilution is of the order 1 to 100^30, or a one with 60 following zeros. This is of course absurd to anyone with some knowledge of chemistry or physics. As Holmes notes, even a schoolboy can see the flaw in that logic. Homeopaths claim there is some mystical effect that “copies” the information of the remedy unto the dilution. The way this is supposed to happen is purely magical and has no scientific plausible explanation. For more info on the process see here.

Holmes also note that the three basic principles of Homeopathy are derived with no logical connection. The idea that “like cures like” has absolutely no relation to the method of dilution they use, the last original principle, which apparently weren’t even well accepted by Homeopaths back then, is that all diseases have their origin in an itch! In any case, as his main arguments Holmes look at three implications of the argument that “like cures like” and go through them in great detail. The argument are as follow:

I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and his school.

In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is cured by like), to be the basis of the healing art—”the sole law of nature in therapeutics”—it is necessary—

  1. That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be faithfully studied and recorded.
  2. That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those, diseases most like their own symptoms.
  3. That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do not produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.

The arguments themselves are lengthy, and are best read in the original essay. Which is well recommended reading for those who are interested in the subject.

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James Randi’s Norway Visit

Posted by on April 23, 2011 No comments | 2,179 views

In March 2011 James Randi came to Norway to take part in the Humanist Association’s campaign to inform the public about those people that are out to fool you with trickery and empty promises to get your money. The campaign has to a large degree focused on alternative medicine, but not only them. The so-called clairvoyant, crystal healers, astrologist and the like are also people the campaign wants to warn about.

James Randi had seminars in Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim. With full houses every night. I attended the one in Oslo and got to shake his hand at the restaurant after the event where Oslo Skeptics were gathered. The video below is from the event in Trondheim and is in English. Enjoy!

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Science and Skepticism – Part 1

Posted by on April 19, 2011 No comments | 1,893 views

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

I have decided to write a few blog-posts on the topic of Science and Skepticism. I have recently been debating people from the alternative movement (read New Age) lately, and have a few thoughts on various subjects related to this, and also the type of subject I’m more used to discuss, religion.

The title “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection” I have stolen from Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist well know for both his popularization of science and for his skepticism. The title refers to his covering of the subject in his book The Demon-haunted World, a book on pseudoscience (a book I have read a few times and can absolutely recommend). More on his take on the art of baloney detection here.

Science - It works, bitchesAnyway, what I want to write about is not necessarily the well known list of logical fallacies, but rather a specific way of thinking that seems to be common amongst those who think “alternatively”. First, let me define what I mean by thinking alternatively. I am not referring to a person who thinks out of the box, or is curious, or just like to philosophise about life, the universe and everything. I am talking about those people that reject reality and substitute their own to put it in Mythbuster-terms. Science have established a set of techniques, or rules if you wish, by which we evaluate scientific theories, organize them, and test their validity. It has a built-in fault-correction mechanism and a fraud-correction mechanism. It is otherwise known as The Scientific Method.

… and now for the Baloney

So what is it exactly I’m getting at? Well, science consists of people, and people are driven by different things. So are scientists. Many have a certain theory or hypothesis they want to prove, or some idea they want to be right for various reasons. This makes for a potential pitfall, namely that of bias. Especially in more fringe types of science, people tend to be driven by a desire to prove something specific right. Examples are research into the paranormal and attempts at proving various dualistic mind-body concepts. There are also a lot of people who desperately wish to get famous by for instance finding a new theory of relativity, or a new string theory and such. The New Age movement and the alternativers thrive on these fringe sciences and the outright crackpots you also find there. These alternative thinking people tend to look for some kind of scientific validation of their ideas, and anything will do. Otherwise they will openly reject science as a valid way of gathering information about the world. They are in other words inconsistent and selective to the extreme.

Recently I have been debating someone who is convinced people can have parapsychological abilities like clairvoyance and such. He is convinced this is proven (no less) by quantum mechanics, arguably the most popular scientific theory to be abused by New Age. It is very tempting for the more informed of that crew to pick apart the philosophical problem surrounding quantum uncertainty, a topic called the Quantum mind-body problem. Some have suggested a dualistic interpretation of this, but this is the far end of the spectrum and highly speculative. There are much better suggestions which are in line with the otherwise very successful ways of interpreting nature. In any case, these fringes of philosophical interpretation of science is gasoline on the fire for what is otherwise known as quantum mysticism. To many of these people science is a symbol of closed-mindedness and an insufficient tool to interpret reality as they see it. However when they find something they can use, they glorify it and use it for all its worth and then some. But again, they will out of hand reject any other piece of science that might balance any fringe theories. Without exception, every time I have seen any New Ager or a creationist embrace something appearing to be science at first glance, it has proven to be either highly speculative fringe science or outright crackpots with an agenda.

So why can’t you New Agers and alties out there decide whether you accept science or not? And when and if you do choose to accept science, why do you always cherrypick and the insist that cherry is the only possible true cherry? No matter how rotten it may be? Either accept science and its methodology or stick to the mysticism.

 

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