Pseudoscience and the woo Epidemic

[blue_green_sparks]

I was at band practice and noticed a fellow musician had a red dot on their tongue. I asked if they knew and "yes, I take a drop of Iodine because it helps with my sciatica". I googled up "toxicity of Iodine" on my phone and showed them.

What is going on lately? Just about every day, someone says something guano-crazy to me. I was chatting with a guy recently who told me he thinks the water-tower near his house is occupied by "lizard people" and the powerlines gave him an inoperable tumor and oh, I should hire him to insulate my attic. I'm good, thanks.

Sometimes it seems that every-other youtube video is pseudoscience related. Poor you..if you actually try to challenge their ideas. It can be tiresome just constantly hearing all this nonsense. Have you noticed this lately?

https://onlysky.media/amartinezvargas/why-are-pseudosciences-so-appealing/




   

[wenchsenior]

As someone who trained as a scientist, married to an actively working scientist, we've noticed it everywhere as long as we've been practicing professionals. Maybe it's getting worse lately b/c of social media, but I would need to see hard data to verify that, needless to say.

[Metalcat]

As someone who is a former scientist, a retired medical professional, and a current student of a separate health profession, I can tell you that it's not just gen pop who ate drowning in pseudo science nonsense.

A whole lot of the applied science community is falling for psuefo scientific interpretations of actual science.

The "scientizing" of non-scientific information is a HUGE problem right now. Bullshit artists are leaning hard into very convincing "sciencey" explanations for their nonsense, and unfortunately, these bullshit explanations are much more convincing than actual sxie CE is.

Actually science is couched in the most non-committal, hedging language that it isn't very convincing when described accurately. But snipets of findings and conclusions taken out of their heavily-hedged context and provided as "evidence" to support ridiculous health claims are very, very convincing when someone doesn't have enough background to assess the validity of the conclusions being drawn from the "facts" being presented.

It's this sea of "sciencey" bullshit that has so confused the general public and eroded their ability to assess the value of information. Unfortunately, common sense tells them to have more faith in the explanations that sound the most convincing. But ironically, when it comes to science, this is often the worst way to go.

It's counter intuitive that in medicine you should trust the doctor who shrugs and says "I have no idea what's going on with you, but here's a treatment that might work for you. I can't really explain how it works, and I can't predict if it will work for you, buts it's all I've got" vs the doc who says "I can use all of these sophisticated tests to conclude exactly what's wrong with you that all of your other doctors have missed, because *I* have special knowledge. Here's a detailed etiological explanation of your symptoms, supported by the test findings, and here's an expensive treatment you should absolutely try, and here's a complex, tremendously well-structured explanation as to how and why it should work for you."

99 times out of 100 the second doc is a fucking quack.

When bullshit based on science sounds more convincing than actual science, it's hard for people to keep their bearings and easy to fall for really well written copy.

Your average person legitimately believes that a lot of science contradicts itself. One week eggs are good for you, the next week eggs are bad for you.

Meanwhile, the problem is that the science never said anything of the sort. The data are entirely compatible with one another, depending on the context of the findings.

It's the *interpretations* that contradict one another and only because the interpretations drew excessive conclusions in the first place.

No science has ever factually proven that eggs are good or bad. The existing research is painfully limited, which is exactly what every scientist who has studied eggs has honestly said in their original studies. But the *reporting* on the studies has made it seem like the science flails wildly back and forth in it's findings.

That's just pure nonsense.

However, it has generated an overall perception of science as something that it isn't, which has created a crisis in terms of how people respond to information.

Science is just a system for collecting the best information that we have access to at this time given the enormous limitations of our existing methods. And that reality has been totally lost in translation along the way.

[RetiredAt63]

It's nothing new.  Read Sherlock Holmes.  Read 20s fiction.  Read 60's fiction.  The worst thing the boomers (my generation, blush) did was the rise again of astrology.

[bacchi]

It's always been there. The real question is: Does the internet exacerbate the spread of pseudoscience?

[Kris]

It's always been there. The real question is: Does the internet exacerbate the spread of pseudoscience?

Of course. Because it amplifies the ways and degrees to which pseudoscience in all forms can be monetized. Woo and conspiracy are big money.

[thesis]

There's that saying that we are not rational creatures, we are rationalizing creatures.

In my experience, the people most drawn toward conspiracies are those who otherwise feel powerless in their lives. Knowing something "secret" and being able to look down on others as inferior gives them a sense of power that the conditions of their life have not otherwise afforded them. Follow the motivations.

As for the quackery, I think they will always be around to some extent. We live in a highly specialized world and we are always having to trust experts, many of whom get things wrong or deliberately lead people astray. We can't all be knowledgable about everything, but it's difficult to trust people, too. Unfortunately, people often make very bad decisions on who to trust.

[Metalcat]

There's that saying that we are not rational creatures, we are rationalizing creatures.

In my experience, the people most drawn toward conspiracies are those who otherwise feel powerless in their lives. Knowing something "secret" and being able to look down on others as inferior gives them a sense of power that the conditions of their life have not otherwise afforded them. Follow the motivations.

As for the quackery, I think they will always be around to some extent. We live in a highly specialized world and we are always having to trust experts, many of whom get things wrong or deliberately lead people astray. We can't all be knowledgable about everything, but it's difficult to trust people, too. Unfortunately, people often make very bad decisions on who to trust.

IDK, I'm surrounded by very autonomous medical professionals with enormous control over their own careers and lives and I CONSTANTLY see them fall for total bullshit woo cult nonsense from high end private continuing education programs.

I once attended a $1000+/day sleep medicine course from one of the top "experts" in the world and I fucking lost it on the first day and stormed out because it was the biggest crock of shit I had ever seen, and the audience was eating it up.

I'm not even kidding, the guy used basic kinesiology magic tricks to make an extremely complex and incredibly convincing argument about a whole complex approach to treatment.

Incredibly convincing for anyone watching, and even for the person being demonstrated on. I've done the exact same trick on people to explain to them how the con works and even while I'm explaining to them that it's bullshit, they're half convinced that I'm doing something real to them.

Highly intelligent, highly educated, fully autonomous,.successful people can very easily fall for a decent con. It's also remarkably difficult to get people to accept truths that are incomplete and uncompelling, which is unfortunately what most truths are.

Sure, less educated, more desperate folks fall for less sophisticated cons, but there are very sophisticated cons/cults out there for even the most discerning intellects, and unfortunately, many of them carry the veneer of legitimacy that intelligent people invoke as evidence of things NOT being a con/cult.

Lol, like a very literal example is that one of the leading dental clinic management companies is scientology. I'm not even joking. I work with doctors and dentists and my brain fucking exploded when I found out that dentists are super into scientology management systems.

Like, they all *know* scientology is a cult, and the company is technically separate, but there is small print on their materials and software that indicate that it's a scientology company, but all of these frickin' dentists think that they're magically immune to cult programming while they pay thousands of dollars for courses on how to become "more effective professionals".

....uh...guys...that's scientology...that's how it fucking works...

Just...fuck...shaking my fucking head.

[curious_george]

The mind has no particular defense against misinformation, and many of the same people who claim to know what they are talking about also go on and on about how everyone else is spewing misinformation and how they are a scientist, medical doctor, etc, etc. A lot of people are knowledge workers on some level or another these days, which further complicates this.

Without exceptional critical thinking skills it becomes impossible to differentiate between valid and invalid sources of information. Even with critical thinking skills, after looking at the source of information, the answer is often 'we don't know for certain' or 'here is some odds that this will work for you' or 'it depends' or 'it's complicated'.

The problem is the farther you get away from just the data that was gathered by a scientist somewhere, the more skewed the data is. Scientist gathers data, then posts analysis and results with some of their own interpretation thrown in, which could be wrong. Other scientists do meta-analysis and throw in their own interpretations, which could he wrong. A professor, medical doctor, etc reads through a lot of research and writes pop-sci books or academic textbooks showing high level overviews of their understanding of the subject, which are often skewed by their own interpretations and views and cognitve biases and statements that appear definitive but are actually not definitive. The news media takes one clip out of a book or research report and writes a horribly skewed article on it so they can get more money from clicks and ad revenue. Their living depends on their ability to emotionally sensitize content. Then the meme creators/youtubers read the news and make funny content which is then consumed by the typical person who doesn't read. Their living AlSO fucking depends on their ability to make emotionally sensitized 'clickbait' so naturaly they will also skew things.

A.I. and deep fakes are going to make this problem way way worse. Some of the members of this forum could easily be A.I. bots these days and I would have no idea, and this is an area I used to work in.

The only clues would be 'they post fast' and 'they tend to make long posts with few spelling or grammatical errors but may miss some important piece of overall context'. A.I. is getting extremely extremely good these days.

Deep fakes...yeah...we're not going to have much automated software defense against these for long...

We have been playing defense against some of this stuff where I work but we can't do this for much longer. Of course the government, which is our biggest customer, has no plans either for how to deal with this.

My point is - I would not blame the typical person for believing in nonsense these days. It has become baked into the system.

Question everything and always ask for sources of information, then go track down the sources.

[Sibley]

I am not going to explain this exactly right, but hopefully I'm close enough to convey my meaning.

Humans require something to center themselves around. Historically, the majority of people have gotten that from religion. Whether they actually believed or not, the dominant religion provided a structure that people used to orient themselves.

There's a movement away from religion, and so a lot of people have lost their orientation. Even many who are still religious, because that religion doesn't control all aspects of life anymore. You can't have a mental image of the how things ought to be and look around and see that indeed, things generally are like that. They aren't. You can't fundamentally look around and say all is well when your community is being ripped apart by drugs or whatever.

People are lost and confused at a very deep level. They are instinctively trying to find something that they can use to make sense of the world and how they fit in. This is necessary because most people need this, whether because it's innate in them that they can't make their own sense of the world, or if it's been socialized so that it's necessary. Either way, most people need that external focus. Intelligence and education don't necessarily replace this need. For individuals it may, but those individuals are the exception that proves the rule.

Science, or more accurately, what people call science, has become this external focus for many. They aren't comfortable with uncertainty though, so pseudoscience and woo are occupying that space and are being called science.

[RetiredAt63]

Our brains are wired to see patterns, whether they really exist or not.  Very useful when you are part of a small group of fairly hairless apes on the Savannah.

I met a chemist (chemistry not pharmacy) who was a strong 7th Day Adventist.  To my mind those are massively conflicting world views but he managed to hold both.

[thesis]

There's that saying that we are not rational creatures, we are rationalizing creatures.

In my experience, the people most drawn toward conspiracies are those who otherwise feel powerless in their lives. Knowing something "secret" and being able to look down on others as inferior gives them a sense of power that the conditions of their life have not otherwise afforded them. Follow the motivations.

As for the quackery, I think they will always be around to some extent. We live in a highly specialized world and we are always having to trust experts, many of whom get things wrong or deliberately lead people astray. We can't all be knowledgable about everything, but it's difficult to trust people, too. Unfortunately, people often make very bad decisions on who to trust.

IDK, I'm surrounded by very autonomous medical professionals with enormous control over their own careers and lives and I CONSTANTLY see them fall for total bullshit woo cult nonsense from high end private continuing education programs.

I once attended a $1000+/day sleep medicine course from one of the top "experts" in the world and I fucking lost it on the first day and stormed out because it was the biggest crock of shit I had ever seen, and the audience was eating it up.

I'm not even kidding, the guy used basic kinesiology magic tricks to make an extremely complex and incredibly convincing argument about a whole complex approach to treatment.

Incredibly convincing for anyone watching, and even for the person being demonstrated on. I've done the exact same trick on people to explain to them how the con works and even while I'm explaining to them that it's bullshit, they're half convinced that I'm doing something real to them.

Highly intelligent, highly educated, fully autonomous,.successful people can very easily fall for a decent con. It's also remarkably difficult to get people to accept truths that are incomplete and uncompelling, which is unfortunately what most truths are.

Sure, less educated, more desperate folks fall for less sophisticated cons, but there are very sophisticated cons/cults out there for even the most discerning intellects, and unfortunately, many of them carry the veneer of legitimacy that intelligent people invoke as evidence of things NOT being a con/cult.

Lol, like a very literal example is that one of the leading dental clinic management companies is scientology. I'm not even joking. I work with doctors and dentists and my brain fucking exploded when I found out that dentists are super into scientology management systems.

Like, they all *know* scientology is a cult, and the company is technically separate, but there is small print on their materials and software that indicate that it's a scientology company, but all of these frickin' dentists think that they're magically immune to cult programming while they pay thousands of dollars for courses on how to become "more effective professionals".

....uh...guys...that's scientology...that's how it fucking works...

Just...fuck...shaking my fucking head.

Huh, that is interesting!

I think some others mentioned it too, but as you stated, people want the fully complete truth, even though the truth is almost always less complete than we want it to be.

[blue_green_sparks]

A.I. and deep fakes are going to make this problem way way worse. Some of the members of this forum could easily be A.I. bots these days and I would have no idea, and this is an area I used to work in.

The only clues would be 'they post fast' and 'they tend to make long posts with few spelling or grammatical errors but may miss some important piece of overall context'. A.I. is getting extremely extremely good these days.

Deep fakes...yeah...we're not going to have much automated software defense against these for long...

Yeah, this is scary. Seeing won't be believing. Imagine dozens of videos on social media showing Antifa storming the Capitol on Jan 6. We are gonna need some sort of watermarking agency or something.

[Metalcat]

Huh, that is interesting!

I think some others mentioned it too, but as you stated, people want the fully complete truth, even though the truth is almost always less complete than we want it to be.

What most people don't understand is that the chasm between actual science and how it's used is ENORMOUS.

People think there's this continuous scientific line between research and treatment or product development, where if the science is credible, then so are the ways that it's used in our lives.

Lol, I see this presumption ALL THE TIME and it's absolute nonsense.

There's no governance on how science is used. Once it's out there, whatever private entity wants to capitalize on it can capitalize on it, even if it means totally misrepresenting what was *actually* indicated by the research.

I'm most familiar with this in medicine, but it's everywhere.

In medicine, I've seen COUNTLESS companies promote materials, techniques, devices, and technology, all with glossy marketing copy that cites very high quality studies to back up their claims.

So when science identifies a certain light source that can illuminate cancer cells and a company makes a medical device that uses that light source and sells it as a cancer screening tool, it seems to many clinicians and the public like this is a scientific device.

Except, the company isn't required to do full experiments on the actual function of the device, and it's no one's job to do that research, so the company is free to sell their cancer screening device with their very convincing, glossy, "sciencey" pamphlets.

And when the scientists who did the research put out more research indicating that this particular use of the light source is not actually useful, there is no market force to disseminate this research throughout the medical community.

Whether or not the medical professionals will ever see this research will depend heavily on how successful the device company has gotten and whether they have the pull to minimize the dissemination of this follow up research.

So maybe this device has a heyday for a solid 10+ years with everyone citing the original supporting research as an incontrovertible "fact" that it works.

Maybe, eventually, more people do research and the information eventually disseminates and people stop using the device. But they won't perceive it as though the device was always known to be a dud. They'll believe that there was very good science supporting it's use and eventually new science proved it wasn't the best option, which is normal in science and medicine.

But this is my point. There is no continuous path from science to practical use. What gets amplified and what gets suppressed is based on market forces, which use science as a tool for making money.

Scientists absolutely WISH that their findings would be widely disseminated and immediately adopted in industries where it's relevant, but that's just not how it works.

Another example is generic drugs. The science justifying the use of genetics is very good. Governments had an interest in promoting their use and used very good science as "proof" that their use was a good idea.

Except, with certain companies, they weren't actually testing their own products. They were just fabricating test results by submitting results from testing the original drugs they were trying to copy.

There was proof of this early on. Very good science existed to say that this was happening from the beginning. But the dissemination of that science was suppressed by a system that had too much investment in generics working, all the while doctors, pharmacists, health officials, etc were all subscribing to and hammering out the same "evidence based" messaging that generics are "bioequivalent" and therefore perfectly good because science said so.

Last example, and this one is a fucking doozy and covers my skin with goosebumps just to think about.

For the first several years of my career I prescribed opioids in a fashion consistent with the marketing strategy of Purdue Pharma.

The Sackler family secretly developed or bought every prominent pain management organization and journal in North America. They generated very good science and then created a machine to interpret it and "educate" medical professionals how to "responsibly" prescribe opioids.

I was educated at the very tail end of the Purdue Pharma strangle hold over pain education and knowing what I know now, I'm literally shaking at the thought of what I was brain washed to believe by one of the most reputable medical institutions in the world and the horrific public health crisis I contributed to.

Thankfully, as I said, it was the tail end, and I wasn't a prescriber for very long before it all came crashing down and I started doing my part to disseminate better knowledge, such as hosting large educational conferences on *actual* responsible prescribing practices. But it's a huge win for me to reach 100 prescribers, they reached, well, fucking EVERYONE.

And again, very good science existed from the beginning to show that Purdue Pharma's bullshit was bullshit. But scientists just don't have the pull to disseminate their knowledge any further than those with deep pockets want it to go.

Back to the stupid eggs are healthy vs eggs are unhealthy research war. Why do we see this useless research about eggs all the time? It's not because science naturally makes its way into the public consciousness, it's because there are DEEP pockets paying for both types of research and making sure it gets disseminated.

Science doesn't get elevated into the public consciousness because it's important, it gets elevated because someone financially benefits from that.

So let's look at Joe Blow who is being told that the entities pushing "science" on him are corrupt and not to be trusted...well, Joe isn't wrong to believe that.

The logical error Joe makes, that the doctors using the cancer screening device make, that their patients make, that everyone makes, is assuming that *someone* out there has the answers they need.

When the terrifying truth is that most of the time no one does. At most, we sometimes have good science that proves that a claim is full of shit, but that's often left hidden, and rarely actually offers an alternative or superior explanation.

I actually had a year where I had this onslaught of woo-obsessed patients because a local woo-peddler (who should have lost her license) got cancer and suddenly closed up shop.

My boss and I were the top two rated providers in the region and she didn't accept new patients, so I got hit with this shit storm of extremely indoctrinated woo patients who were convinced that half of my treatments and materials would give them cancer or cause brain damage.

I knew from my experience of already being a second opinion doc for a local crazy doc who recommended insane procedures for patients that I needed to validate their fears instead of challenging them.

I fully admitted that some of my materials may be proven to be dangerous and that the companies who make them are incredibly corrupt and don't care about bad outcomes for patients unless it hurts their bottom line. I also fully admitted that most of what we do in medicine is actually very poorly supported by science, and that they shouldn't have unquestioning faith in me because of my education since my educational institution is ALSO heavily influenced by industry and corruption.

I just validated every legitimate thing they've been told because it's all true.

But then I tore into their previous provider for claiming to have the truth, claiming to have special scientific knowledge that I don't have, and claiming to be some kind of magical saviour in a system that simply doesn't provide what is needed for any of us to be able to do that.

I explained that I knew the educational program where she trained and outlined the rampant private interest and corruption that forms the basis of their particular clinical approach.

I then asked them, who would they rather trust? The person who shows them systemic corruption and claims to be magically free of it, or the person who shows them systemic corruption and admits that they're just doing their best in a system where it's unavoidable?

The more we claim authority through interpretations of science, the more we contribute to the problem.

[Psychstache]

What most people don't understand is that the chasm between actual science and how it's used is ENORMOUS.
....
I'm most familiar with this in medicine, but it's everywhere.

(crazy examples in medicine)

As I recall, you are retraining/respecializing into psychology. Seems you are well prepared for the upcoming onslaught of bullshit you will run into there as well. Like you said, this shit is everywhere.

[curious_george]

I actually had a year where I had this onslaught of woo-obsessed patients because a local woo-peddler (who should have lost her license) got cancer and suddenly closed up shop.

My boss and I were the top two rated providers in the region and she didn't accept new patients, so I got hit with this shit storm of extremely indoctrinated woo patients who were convinced that half of my treatments and materials would give them cancer or cause brain damage.

I knew from my experience of already being a second opinion doc for a local crazy doc who recommended insane procedures for patients that I needed to validate their fears instead of challenging them.

Sometimes I wish I would have joined the medical profession instead of engineering...or I have dreams of going back to school to work in the healthcare field or to become a therapist, etc. Then I read your posts and I'm like 'nope nope nope' - not going to deal with that. I will spend the rest of my days on a beach somewhere instead, lol.

Excellent post btw - it is funny how much the 'follow the money' dictum holds true on several levels of society.

[RetiredAt63]

A follow-up on Malcat's post about the line between research science and applications.

People don't look at follow through.  DDT was a miracle insecticide, because it didn't biodegrade in a few weeks like the other insecticides of the day, and wasn't a toxic metal.  What they failed to realise was that an insecticide that has a half life of roughly 30 years is going to have huge impacts through the ecosystem.  Another research issue is that chemicals are usually tested in isolation, instead of also looking at interactions with other chemicals, where there may be synergistic effects.  And they test pure chemicals, where there may be lots of other small chemicals in an industrial batch.  DDT has 2 isomers, one has hormonal effects, but it isn't the major isomer and wasn't tested.  Plus inert ingredients may not be - Rey's syndrome from insecticide applications over forests in New Brunswick was due to another ingredient, not the actual insecticide.

We know that now and we still don't require companies to really look at long-term health/ecological impact.  Look at the gases that were well on the way to destroying the ozone layer.  Look at the plastic softeners and flame retardants and BPA that are very damaging long-term. And manufacturers fought like mad to keep using those chemicals.

The thing is, testing costs money, and good testing costs more money.  Companies are not going to do that unless they are forced to.  Part of a government's role is to make them do it, or do it in government labs.  So every time a political party calls for reduced government interference in business and reduced government budgets, I figure they want the companies to make more money at the expense of health (human and environment).

It isn't really any better now.  We are seeing the effects of neonicotinoids on bees, but manufacturers fight like crazy against limiting their use. 

Plus read Invisible Women: Data Bias in A World Designed for Men to understand why medical testing has left women hanging in the wind.  Thalidomide is just the tip of the iceberg.

[Metalcat]

What most people don't understand is that the chasm between actual science and how it's used is ENORMOUS.
....
I'm most familiar with this in medicine, but it's everywhere.

(crazy examples in medicine)

As I recall, you are retraining/respecializing into psychology. Seems you are well prepared for the upcoming onslaught of bullshit you will run into there as well. Like you said, this shit is everywhere.

Lol, my first degree is in psych research, so yeah, I'm pretty well equipped to roll my eyes, especially when anyone invokes ANYTHING about the brain, which you already know is my pet hate.

[Metalcat]

A follow-up on Malcat's post about the line between research science and applications.

People don't look at follow through.  DDT was a miracle insecticide, because it didn't biodegrade in a few weeks like the other insecticides of the day, and wasn't a toxic metal.  What they failed to realise was that an insecticide that has a half life of roughly 30 years is going to have huge impacts through the ecosystem.  Another research issue is that chemicals are usually tested in isolation, instead of also looking at interactions with other chemicals, where there may be synergistic effects.  And they test pure chemicals, where there may be lots of other small chemicals in an industrial batch.  DDT has 2 isomers, one has hormonal effects, but it isn't the major isomer and wasn't tested.  Plus inert ingredients may not be - Rey's syndrome from insecticide applications over forests in New Brunswick was due to another ingredient, not the actual insecticide.

We know that now and we still don't require companies to really look at long-term health/ecological impact.  Look at the gases that were well on the way to destroying the ozone layer.  Look at the plastic softeners and flame retardants and BPA that are very damaging long-term. And manufacturers fought like mad to keep using those chemicals.

The thing is, testing costs money, and good testing costs more money.  Companies are not going to do that unless they are forced to.  Part of a government's role is to make them do it, or do it in government labs.  So every time a political party calls for reduced government interference in business and reduced government budgets, I figure they want the companies to make more money at the expense of health (human and environment).

It isn't really any better now.  We are seeing the effects of neonicotinoids on bees, but manufacturers fight like crazy against limiting their use. 

Plus read Invisible Women: Data Bias in A World Designed for Men to understand why medical testing has left women hanging in the wind.  Thalidomide is just the tip of the iceberg.

Oof, yes, medicine has this testing in isolation problem too.

When testing is even done...

[RetiredAt63]

A follow-up on Malcat's post about the line between research science and applications.

People don't look at follow through.  DDT was a miracle insecticide, because it didn't biodegrade in a few weeks like the other insecticides of the day, and wasn't a toxic metal.  What they failed to realise was that an insecticide that has a half life of roughly 30 years is going to have huge impacts through the ecosystem.  Another research issue is that chemicals are usually tested in isolation, instead of also looking at interactions with other chemicals, where there may be synergistic effects.  And they test pure chemicals, where there may be lots of other small chemicals in an industrial batch.  DDT has 2 isomers, one has hormonal effects, but it isn't the major isomer and wasn't tested.  Plus inert ingredients may not be - Rey's syndrome from insecticide applications over forests in New Brunswick was due to another ingredient, not the actual insecticide.

We know that now and we still don't require companies to really look at long-term health/ecological impact.  Look at the gases that were well on the way to destroying the ozone layer.  Look at the plastic softeners and flame retardants and BPA that are very damaging long-term. And manufacturers fought like mad to keep using those chemicals.

The thing is, testing costs money, and good testing costs more money.  Companies are not going to do that unless they are forced to.  Part of a government's role is to make them do it, or do it in government labs.  So every time a political party calls for reduced government interference in business and reduced government budgets, I figure they want the companies to make more money at the expense of health (human and environment).

It isn't really any better now.  We are seeing the effects of neonicotinoids on bees, but manufacturers fight like crazy against limiting their use. 

Plus read Invisible Women: Data Bias in A World Designed for Men to understand why medical testing has left women hanging in the wind.  Thalidomide is just the tip of the iceberg.

Oof, yes, medicine has this testing in isolation problem too.

When testing is even done...

Oooh, it's too hard to test on females, they have such messy hormones (mice on up) so let's pretend they are males with ovaries/uteri.    /s

If I have a heart attack I fully expect it to kill me, because my symptoms will be "atypical", i.e. they will be the normal female symptoms, not the normal male symptoms, and treatment will be too late/inadequate.

[Metalcat]

Oooh, it's too hard to test on females, they have such messy hormones (mice on up) so let's pretend they are males with ovaries/uteri.    /s

If I have a heart attack I fully expect it to kill me, because my symptoms will be "atypical", i.e. they will be the normal female symptoms, not the normal male symptoms, and treatment will be too late/inadequate.

As you well know because of your particular background, it's even worse than that. We don't even test on female animals.

Funny you mention heart attack, because I was in a first aide course for medical professionals recently and they were doing the section on heart attack where the instructor explained the "normal" signs and symptoms of heart attack except that they are different in women and people with diabetes.

I piped in with "so...if more than half the population is female, and an enormous proportion of the population has diabetes, then why are we taught that the male, non-diabetic symptoms are the 'norm' if they aren't the 'norm' for the majority of people???"

He did NOT appreciate that.

[StarBright]

Plus read Invisible Women: Data Bias in A World Designed for Men to understand why medical testing has left women hanging in the wind.  Thalidomide is just the tip of the iceberg.

I think of this book so often! Even when you *know something, I find it soothing to have it all laid out in a useful compilation of facts and examples.

[SpareChange]

As someone who is a former scientist, a retired medical professional, and a current student of a separate health profession, I can tell you that it's not just gen pop who ate drowning in pseudo science nonsense.

A whole lot of the applied science community is falling for psuefo scientific interpretations of actual science.

The "scientizing" of non-scientific information is a HUGE problem right now. Bullshit artists are leaning hard into very convincing "sciencey" explanations for their nonsense, and unfortunately, these bullshit explanations are much more convincing than actual sxie CE is.

Actually science is couched in the most non-committal, hedging language that it isn't very convincing when described accurately. But snipets of findings and conclusions taken out of their heavily-hedged context and provided as "evidence" to support ridiculous health claims are very, very convincing when someone doesn't have enough background to assess the validity of the conclusions being drawn from the "facts" being presented.

It's this sea of "sciencey" bullshit that has so confused the general public and eroded their ability to assess the value of information. Unfortunately, common sense tells them to have more faith in the explanations that sound the most convincing. But ironically, when it comes to science, this is often the worst way to go.

It's counter intuitive that in medicine you should trust the doctor who shrugs and says "I have no idea what's going on with you, but here's a treatment that might work for you. I can't really explain how it works, and I can't predict if it will work for you, buts it's all I've got" vs the doc who says "I can use all of these sophisticated tests to conclude exactly what's wrong with you that all of your other doctors have missed, because *I* have special knowledge. Here's a detailed etiological explanation of your symptoms, supported by the test findings, and here's an expensive treatment you should absolutely try, and here's a complex, tremendously well-structured explanation as to how and why it should work for you."

99 times out of 100 the second doc is a fucking quack.

When bullshit based on science sounds more convincing than actual science, it's hard for people to keep their bearings and easy to fall for really well written copy.

Your average person legitimately believes that a lot of science contradicts itself. One week eggs are good for you, the next week eggs are bad for you.

Meanwhile, the problem is that the science never said anything of the sort. The data are entirely compatible with one another, depending on the context of the findings.

It's the *interpretations* that contradict one another and only because the interpretations drew excessive conclusions in the first place.

No science has ever factually proven that eggs are good or bad. The existing research is painfully limited, which is exactly what every scientist who has studied eggs has honestly said in their original studies. But the *reporting* on the studies has made it seem like the science flails wildly back and forth in it's findings.

That's just pure nonsense.

However, it has generated an overall perception of science as something that it isn't, which has created a crisis in terms of how people respond to information.

Science is just a system for collecting the best information that we have access to at this time given the enormous limitations of our existing methods. And that reality has been totally lost in translation along the way.

Awesome post. Great thread too, if worrisome.

On a lighter note, back in radiography school I had a patient who was hesitant to get her chest X-ray done, because the last time she had one her TV reception went on the fritz. :)

[Metalcat]

Awesome post. Great thread too, if worrisome.

On a lighter note, back in radiography school I had a patient who was hesitant to get her chest X-ray done, because the last time she had one her TV reception went on the fritz. :)

It's only worrisome if you put too much faith in systems to not be subject to the universal economic forces that affect everything in our world.

Everyone is just doing their best with the limited information they have, and companies are capitalizing on how to convince people of interpretations that are most profitable.

Good information that fucks with profits of large economic forces will always be suppressed and more difficult to access. Low-quality, convincing information will always be more useful, and therefore disseminated more than high quality, limited, unconvincing information.

If we just expect systems to work the way that we *already know* that they work, then it's not worrisome, it's just common sense.

But by God do we WANT to have unfounded faith in the systems that irrationally make us feel safer.

Hence woo.

Woo-peddlers have mastered the art of offering the kind of reassurances that medical doctors legally aren't allowed to offer. Some medical doctors are also woo peddlers, but this doesn't mean that they are legally allowed to say the things they do, it's just that there's very little oversight and shockingly few levers that governing bodies can even pull when a practitioner has gone off the rails in terms of their claims.

I saw a woo pain doctor not too long ago who was working out of a chiropractic office. Fuck he was full of shit. Unbelievably full of shit, and I did end up reporting him to the college for the utter nonsense he was saying. However, he offers this one super rare treatment that does actually work for me.

And this brings me to another very critical point, which is that there's a HUGE DIFFERENCE between evidence of a treatment working and evidence that the explanation for the treatment working is correct.

There are TONS of things that are done in the world that data does actually support doing, but that doesn't mean that there is good data to support the explanations as to *why* those things work.

You see, again, there is no continuous line between research and reality. When it comes to technologies and medical treatments, and products, and really, just most things in life, typically someone just has an idea, decides to try it, perhaps reasonably proves that it's not dangerous (lol! not as often as we think!), and then releases that thing and time tells if it actually works.

But the explanation they give as to *why* it works is usually made up. The thing working then often retroactively gives credence to the explanation, and voila, people believe there is an entire scientific validation of this person's/company's ideas, when that just isn't the case.

Science can't really effectively prove why things work in complex systems, so at best, we end up with very limited data as to how or why something *might* work within a complex environment, and then use those findings to backup the *why* explanations. But again, there isn't a shred of scientific "proof" that the vast majority of our explanations as to *why* things work are actually true.

The moment you throw humans into the mix of anything, the *why* is almost always theoretical.

There was one treatment I used to do that theoretically did the exact same thing as a surgery. Neither treatment was developed through controlled experiments. There was just a *why* that was generally understood to be true and the surgeons developed a treatment to address that *why* and the medical device folks developed a treatment to address the exact same *why*.

The surgery failed, over and over again. It was a shit intervention. The medical device worked remarkably well about 50-75% of the time (depending on the research parameters). But then the medical device company was fucked because they had marketed for years that their device did the same thing as the surgery. Their entire explanation as to *why* the device worked was proven wrong.

It didn't matter that the device did work at that point, they lost their convincing explanation, and popularity of the device plummeted because they had no convincing way to sell it beyond "it works sometimes, unpredictably, and we don't know why."

In truth, that's the basis of a lot of shit that we have faith in.

A friend of mine is s prominent cognitive psychologist who happens to be obsesses with astrophysics. He consulted on "change blindness" in the measurement of space objects and commented that the very basis of the way they measure space objects is pretty fucked and not at all consistent with the current standards of cognitive science. The astrophysics folks had very compelling explanations as to why they did what they did, none of which was backed by solid experimental science, it's just what they've always done and it's always worked.

The *why* of how we do things is the least scientifically valid part of the decisions we make, and yet, it's the far more powerful force in choosing what we believe in.

Stories are always more powerful than facts, because facts don't exist on their own, they have to be interpreted into stories to have any real meaning, which is what @curious_george already said.

When we embrace that all of the *whys* around us are essentially fairy tales inspired by facts, it becomes a lot easier to grasp the current state of information/disinformation.

[wenchsenior]

Awesome post. Great thread too, if worrisome.

On a lighter note, back in radiography school I had a patient who was hesitant to get her chest X-ray done, because the last time she had one her TV reception went on the fritz. :)

It's only worrisome if you put too much faith in systems to not be subject to the universal economic forces that affect everything in our world.

Everyone is just doing their best with the limited information they have, and companies are capitalizing on how to convince people of interpretations that are most profitable.

Good information that fucks with profits of large economic forces will always be suppressed and more difficult to access. Low-quality, convincing information will always be more useful, and therefore disseminated more than high quality, limited, unconvincing information.

If we just expect systems to work the way that we *already know* that they work, then it's not worrisome, it's just common sense.

But by God do we WANT to have unfounded faith in the systems that irrationally make us feel safer.

Hence woo.

Woo-peddlers have mastered the art of offering the kind of reassurances that medical doctors legally aren't allowed to offer. Some medical doctors are also woo peddlers, but this doesn't mean that they are legally allowed to say the things they do, it's just that there's very little oversight and shockingly few levers that governing bodies can even pull when a practitioner has gone off the rails in terms of their claims.

I saw a woo pain doctor not too long ago who was working out of a chiropractic office. Fuck he was full of shit. Unbelievably full of shit, and I did end up reporting him to the college for the utter nonsense he was saying. However, he offers this one super rare treatment that does actually work for me.

And this brings me to another very critical point, which is that there's a HUGE DIFFERENCE between evidence of a treatment working and evidence that the explanation for the treatment working is correct.

There are TONS of things that are done in the world that data does actually support doing, but that doesn't mean that there is good data to support the explanations as to *why* those things work.

You see, again, there is no continuous line between research and reality. When it comes to technologies and medical treatments, and products, and really, just most things in life, typically someone just has an idea, decides to try it, perhaps reasonably proves that it's not dangerous (lol! not as often as we think!), and then releases that thing and time tells if it actually works.

But the explanation they give as to *why* it works is usually made up. The thing working then often retroactively gives credence to the explanation, and voila, people believe there is an entire scientific validation of this person's/company's ideas, when that just isn't the case.

Science can't really effectively prove why things work in complex systems, so at best, we end up with very limited data as to how or why something *might* work within a complex environment, and then use those findings to backup the *why* explanations. But again, there isn't a shred of scientific "proof" that the vast majority of our explanations as to *why* things work are actually true.

The moment you throw humans into the mix of anything, the *why* is almost always theoretical.

There was one treatment I used to do that theoretically did the exact same thing as a surgery. Neither treatment was developed through controlled experiments. There was just a *why* that was generally understood to be true and the surgeons developed a treatment to address that *why* and the medical device folks developed a treatment to address the exact same *why*.

The surgery failed, over and over again. It was a shit intervention. The medical device worked remarkably well about 50-75% of the time (depending on the research parameters). But then the medical device company was fucked because they had marketed for years that their device did the same thing as the surgery. Their entire explanation as to *why* the device worked was proven wrong.

It didn't matter that the device did work at that point, they lost their convincing explanation, and popularity of the device plummeted because they had no convincing way to sell it beyond "it works sometimes, unpredictably, and we don't know why."

In truth, that's the basis of a lot of shit that we have faith in.

A friend of mine is s prominent cognitive psychologist who happens to be obsesses with astrophysics. He consulted on "change blindness" in the measurement of space objects and commented that the very basis of the way they measure space objects is pretty fucked and not at all consistent with the current standards of cognitive science. The astrophysics folks had very compelling explanations as to why they did what they did, none of which was backed by solid experimental science, it's just what they've always done and it's always worked.

The *why* of how we do things is the least scientifically valid part of the decisions we make, and yet, it's the far more powerful force in choosing what we believe in.

Stories are always more powerful than facts, because facts don't exist on their own, they have to be interpreted into stories to have any real meaning, which is what @curious_george already said.

When we embrace that all of the *whys* around us are essentially fairy tales inspired by facts, it becomes a lot easier to grasp the current state of information/disinformation.

This is a really interesting way to put one of the biggest elements of the scientific process that creates a gulf between scientists and layperson understanding of science APPLICATIONS.

The 'whys' are ALWAYS PROVISIONAL in science, b/c they always remain subject to new information and falsification.

People simply don't understand that science mostly operates to advance knowledge by disproof, rather than proof. The most robust part of the method is demonstrating lack of a specific thing happening in response to a test of cause and effect. The less robust part is demonstrating that something does happen in response to a test. The least robust part is trying to figure out why those did or did not happen (the 'why'). 

We can still establish a hell of a lot of knowledge with these limitations (by progressively discounting certain cause/effect relationships and 'whys'). But mostly what scientists can say with some certainty is: "[thing 1] does not cause [thing 2] under this specific set of conditions, but here are some other possible causes of [thing 2] that we now need to test"; or "[thing 1] is associated with [thing 2] under this set of conditions, but we can't be sure there is a causative relationship." 

Sometimes we can even venture out into: "[thing 1] appears to consistently have a causative relationship with [thing 2] under this set of conditions" but here we start getting into the realm of trying to establish why that relationship exists, and then things get MUCH harder, and even when we have repeatedly tested hypothetical 'why's many times, and the hypothetical 'why' seems to be holding up, a good scientist will never say, "We are certain that this relationship operates in thus and such a way" b/c there always remains the possibility of further tests disproving that explanation, or new information adding to the explanation or changing it.

We cannot establish 'whys' as 'true', though we CAN establish them as untrue. All 'whys' must remain provisional.

That's hard enough for people to understand. Then further, it's tough bc we still have to APPLY this provisional information to our lives in order to get shit done with best available knowledge, which runs into the wood-chipper of problems that Malcat describes.

No wonder people are so confused. And yet, knowledge has progressed HUGELY since the dawn of use of the scientific method, and it's the best thing we've found to establish applicable knowledge, so it's awesome. But boy is it frustratingly limited.

[Metalcat]

This is a really interesting way to put one of the biggest elements of the scientific process that creates a gulf between scientists and layperson understanding of science APPLICATIONS.

The 'whys' are ALWAYS PROVISIONAL in science, b/c they always remain subject to new information and falsification.

People simply don't understand that science mostly operates to advance knowledge by disproof, rather than proof. The most robust part of the method is demonstrating lack of a specific thing happening in response to a test of cause and effect. The less robust part is demonstrating that something does happen in response to a test. The least robust part is trying to figure out why those did or did not happen (the 'why'). 

We can still establish a hell of a lot of knowledge with these limitations (by progressively discounting certain cause/effect relationships and 'whys'). But mostly what scientists can say with some certainty is: "[thing 1] does not cause [thing 2] under this specific set of conditions, but here are some other possible causes of [thing 2] that we now need to test"; or "[thing 1] is associated with [thing 2] under this set of conditions, but we can't be sure there is a causative relationship." 

Sometimes we can even venture out into: "[thing 1] appears to consistently have a causative relationship with [thing 2] under this set of conditions" but here we start getting into the realm of trying to establish why that relationship exists, and then things get MUCH harder, and even when we have repeatedly tested hypothetical 'why's many times, and the hypothetical 'why' seems to be holding up, a good scientist will never say, "We are certain that this relationship operates in thus and such a way" b/c there always remains the possibility of further tests disproving that explanation, or new information adding to the explanation or changing it.

We cannot establish 'whys' as 'true', though we CAN establish them as untrue. All 'whys' must remain provisional.

That's hard enough for people to understand. Then further, it's tough bc we still have to APPLY this provisional information to our lives in order to get shit done with best available knowledge, which runs into the wood-chipper of problems that Malcat describes.

No wonder people are so confused. And yet, knowledge has progressed HUGELY since the dawn of use of the scientific method, and it's the best thing we've found to establish applicable knowledge, so it's awesome. But boy is it frustratingly limited.

[/b]

Yep, and entities have unfortunately capitalized on a "truthiness" of science, which doesn't even exist, and have imbued their *why's* with some non-existent transitive property of the validity of the science that has inspired their *why's*.

So yeah, no wonder people are confused AND no wonder they're suspicion and angry.

Because they HAVE been fed a heaping spoon of bullshit and told that it's chocolate.

[Just Joe]

Thalidomide is just the tip of the iceberg.

I listened to a podcast on the subject recently. Very interesting. Tried to look for the podcast to share here and discovered there are many to choose from. I had no idea of the controversy but I knew a kid in school (1970s) who likely showed evidence of its use. Or Agent Orange (family was Vietnamese). 

[RetiredAt63]

People simply don't understand that science mostly operates to advance knowledge by disproof, rather than proof. The most robust part of the method is demonstrating lack of a specific thing happening in response to a test of cause and effect. The less robust part is demonstrating that something does happen in response to a test. The least robust part is trying to figure out why those did or did not happen (the 'why').

Which it why it is scary that experiments are not always repeated, and negative results tend to not get published.  Plus unless the Materials and Methods section in the original paper are truly explicit, replicating an experiment is difficult.  Field "experiments" are even more difficult.

This goes back a long way, but they first discovered the molting and metamorphosis hormones in insects* because a paper towel brand changed pulp source.  Fortunately they knew which brand they had been ordering and investigated if it had changed.  If they had just been randomly been using whatever was cheapest from a supplier - well . . . . . .


I think one of the identifiers of scientific thinking is an acknowledgement of just how little we know and how we understand what we know even less.  Seriously if something is really tiny we don't have many tools to look at it.  Which is why we are just on the beginning of understanding of 2 huge ecosystems, the mammalian (especially human) gut and the soil microbiome.



* I forget what they were rearing but it was larvae of some sort on paper towel.  Suddenly the larvae just kept molting and getting bigger and bigger, instead of pupating and turning into adults.  Chemicals in the new wood pulp were hormone mimics that prevented pupation.  Good chemical defence by a tree, keep your predator as a juvenile, it will eat more but there will be no next generation. 

[Metalcat]

Thalidomide is just the tip of the iceberg.

I listened to a podcast on the subject recently. Very interesting. Tried to look for the podcast to share here and discovered there are many to choose from. I had no idea of the controversy but I knew a kid in school (1970s) who likely showed evidence of its use. Or Agent Orange (family was Vietnamese).

It's funny, we're socialized to think these things are exceptional, and that horrific cases like this are the exception that prove the rule that most of medicine is responsible and safe.

That's a fucking joke though. It's just rare that the negative impacts are so quickly obvious and attributable to a specific intervention.

There has been medical calamity after medical calamity and those are the just ones we know about! Hell, even the shit that does work and that is generally safe is typically not very well supported by actual science.

Most of our treatments are made up, which is a scarier way of saying that they're based on collective clinical experience and intuition, or y'know, shit we stole from north american Indigenous folks.

But so very, very, very little of medicine is actually solidly founded on experiments to prove that treatments work. That is NOT how medicine is done, and never has been.

Drugs? Yes, to a degree. But treatments?

LOL! NO!

I can make up whatever I think is good idea and legally do it to you if you agree to it and I've advised you reasonably of the expected risks based on the very limited science.

That's how the vast majority of treatments come about. They generally only get researched AFTER they've started being used on the public.

The *why* of a lot of treatment is "well, this one guy thought it might work."

Fun fact: that's why many of our currently validated treatments came out of woo. A woo-drenched quack came up with a convincing reason to try something and then it fucking worked!

One of my main treatments is straight out of the woo-world, was shit on for decades as bullshit-woo, but then enough woo-folks did it and the conventional medical world started saying "hmm...this seems to work, I guess we'll adopt it."

However, they sensibly abandoned the woo-drenched explanations, and went with the ol' faithful "we can't predict who it will work for and why don't know why it works, but for the low, low price of $500-1200 per session, you too may be helped by this"

[RetiredAt63]

Thalidomide is just the tip of the iceberg.

I listened to a podcast on the subject recently. Very interesting. Tried to look for the podcast to share here and discovered there are many to choose from. I had no idea of the controversy but I knew a kid in school (1970s) who likely showed evidence of its use. Or Agent Orange (family was Vietnamese).

Most likely Agent Orange.  Thalidomide was the 50s.  There are lots of teratogens out there, again the unwillingness to do research on female lab animals is a real impediment.  We do have the Ames test, but it isn't going to catch everything.   We have no idea what the accumulation of masses of different hormone mimics* are doing to us.  I speculate on 2, but without much evidence - obesity and declining male fertility (sperm counts).

Thalidomide is actually being examined as an anti-cancer drug, becasue it works by inhibiting the formation of new blood vessels in fast-growing tissue.  Very bad for a limb bud, equally bad for a fast-growing tumour.  I have no idea how the research is progressing; I don't have as good access to the scientific literature in retirement, and not as much reason to check since I am no longer teaching.


* Hormones are chemicals we make ourselves.  The ones I know the most about are estrogen mimics, but there are others.  There are phytoestrogens (plant hormones mimics) and xenoestrogens  (estrogen mimics that are not biologically made, DDT is an older example).  Anyone who wants to do a little research will find lots of information with those 2 terms.

Teratogens are chemicals that interfere with embryo formation.  Carcinogens are chemicals involved in inducing unregulated cell growth.  The same chemical can be both a teratogen and a carcinogen.

[Sanitary Stache]

I have been appreciating this thread. 

Just wanted to point out that the discussion here seems relevant to MMMs latest post (from September) about the podcasting science guru he is excited about.  Similar themes in the comments section of the post.

I am also wondering how closely MMMs current promotion aligns with Malcat's metric for a healthy lifestyle. Which I came looking for.  I have read it and measured my day against it enough times I should be able to remember it.  Is it:

Enough sleep
Eating not too many whole foods
Enough exercise that I enjoy
Time with friends
Growth in my marriage

[ChpBstrd]

This may be too meta for some, but ask yourselves why a species evolved the ability to think about abstractions in the first place. In our native primordial environments, we had to use abstract reasoning to transmit complex information within our band of hunter/gatherers, to cooperate on tasks like defense, food procurement, and reproduction, and to explain cultural concepts like the manufacture of arrowheads or baskets. The whole point was so that a human child could observe the elders doing something, like avoiding a particular plant or planting when the sun rose to a particular point, and copy their adaptive behavior. The humans who were able to accept the abstract reasoning of those around them were most likely to survive.

Now the tables have turned, and abstract reasoning is less necessary for survival than ever before - especially among the privileged middle and upper classes. Survival is now about doing a specialized task over and over again to earn the rights to the output of other people who know how to do something you have no interest in doing. It's no longer about struggling for a meal and safety in a dynamic environment every single day, using information from others to analyze novel scenarios and strategize.

Our cultural-abstract-information-absorbing feature has been hijacked by the capitalistic and religious processes as a way to sell things to us and to convince us to increase the relative status of other people. This may be why some of the people who excel at thinking abstractly are the ones most likely to fall for other people's abstract woo. It makes sense to them just like some medicinal plant made sense to their ancestor 4,000 years ago. However, the abstract reasoning capacity which was once an asset is now a liability. The people most willing to do the adaptive thing 4,000 years ago are now the ones taking colloidal silver as a cancer cure because of a YT video, donating all their resources to some cult in the expectation of a fictional afterlife, or believing elaborate conspiracy theories.

It's always been there. The real question is: Does the internet exacerbate the spread of pseudoscience?

Yes. The internet makes it nearly free to distribute information, so if you make a living selling ads while distributing information, you want to distribute the lowest-cost information you can find that will also "sell" attention. Just like with physical objects, the lowest cost information is the lowest-quality garbage out there. But in the attention economy, trading this trash information for attention is the highest-margin activity. For a media site, any time or money spent checking sources, applying critical thinking, etc. is wasted.

The addictive nature of smartphones and the business models of social media sites like YouTube and Reddit make these platforms more likely to distribute dopaminergic content, which is ANYTHING BUT ACTUAL SCIENCE. As people have devoted more and more of their time to being exposed to such content, they've become less scientific in their thinking. As the internet moves more toward passive entertainment like YouTube, TikTok, and various "reels", there is less and less user activity involved and the activity becomes absorbing content rather than questioning it.

These concerns are not new. There was a lot of concern decades ago that television was rotting people's brains, but that doesn't mean the concerns weren't valid. Look at how the TV generation is voting, how they are spending their money, or how they are treating their bodies! If anything, the young people spending 4-10 hours per day on their smartphones will end up even worse off than the boomers: full of false assumptions and unable to act in their own interests.

[Metalcat]

You presuppose that people were EVER more scientific in their thinking.

I don't believe they were, they just questioned sources of scientific authority less than they do now.

Hilariously, the rise of woo and conspiracy theories is, IMO, actually a product of MORE critical thinking, not less. People are legitimately finding out that their "legitimate" sources are corrupt and nowhere near as authoritative and infallible as generations have been lead to believe.

This suspicion is well founded.

The problem isn't a lack of critical thinking, the problem is that the discomfort from this information is so profound that they urge to latch on to the most convincing explanation that reassures them.

Hence the woo and conspiracy shit.

If I tell you the truth that what you've been fed your whole life is actually bullshit, and I can actually demonstrate to some degree that that's true, you are more likely to trust me when I offer you a reassuring truth that you can transfer your faith onto.

What is very, very difficult is to think critically about some source of knowledge, accept that it's bullshit, but then also accept that it's still your best option.

That's a hard fucking pill to swallow.

If I were so inclined, I could make an absolute fortune peddling Dr. Malcat's magically convincing solution to your medical problems, because I'm sooooo good at convincing folks that the establishment is full of shit...cuz they fucking are.

However, I'm a frugal mustachian who doesn't need to predate on scared patients to make more money so that I can buy a helicopter, or whatever. Instead I *just* crush people's faith in the medical system and conclude with "but it's the best option you've got, so keep using it, but be cynical as fuck about it."

Hilariously, I actually own a small part of a supplement company that brought me on to legitimize their health claims and write them in medically defensible language.

I'm pretty sure they sorely regret that move since I'm basically refusing to write any copy that would actually help with sales.

[ChpBstrd]

I guess what I'm saying is that believing chieftan Gru when he tells you there's a pack of lions just over the hill, and believing Dr. Woo when he says his supplements will cure all your ailments is the same behavior. It is believing something abstract that was communicated by another person. In the former scenario, this behavior is highly adaptive. In the later scenario, you'll be ripped off at best and die at worst.

Similarly, when you went to school and listened to a lecture about how atoms have electrons, or how blood carries oxygen, or how a diode functions, or how Jesus turned water into wine... it's all the same behavior. Our behavioral capacity to believe other people's non-observable claims is being employed in all these scenarios, for better or worse.

Evolution shaped us to place trust in other people's abstract communications, to save our lives in the lions-over-the-hill scenario. But now we're in a very different environment, receiving communications from hundreds (thousands?) of people and groups of people each day. The vast majority of these messages are not attempts by fellow tribe-mates to help us. They tend to involve suggestions to buy something, but there are also messages trying to get us to believe something. All these new types of messages utilize the old system that evolved to help us survive, but now it hinders our well-being.

[Metalcat]

I guess what I'm saying is that believing chieftan Gru when he tells you there's a pack of lions just over the hill, and believing Dr. Woo when he says his supplements will cure all your ailments is the same behavior. It is believing something abstract that was communicated by another person. In the former scenario, this behavior is highly adaptive. In the later scenario, you'll be ripped off at best and die at worst.

Similarly, when you went to school and listened to a lecture about how atoms have electrons, or how blood carries oxygen, or how a diode functions, or how Jesus turned water into wine... it's all the same behavior. Our behavioral capacity to believe other people's non-observable claims is being employed in all these scenarios, for better or worse.

Evolution shaped us to place trust in other people's abstract communications, to save our lives in the lions-over-the-hill scenario. But now we're in a very different environment, receiving communications from hundreds (thousands?) of people and groups of people each day. The vast majority of these messages are not attempts by fellow tribe-mates to help us. They tend to involve suggestions to buy something, but there are also messages trying to get us to believe something. All these new types of messages utilize the old system that evolved to help us survive, but now it hinders our well-being.

And I wouldn't challenge any of that. I think that's pretty common sense.

I only took issue with the previous statement that people are thinking less scientifically.

I don't believe they ever, on average, thought *more scientifically*.

[GuitarStv]

This may be too meta for some, but ask yourselves why a species evolved the ability to think about abstractions in the first place. In our native primordial environments, we had to use abstract reasoning to transmit complex information within our band of hunter/gatherers, to cooperate on tasks like defense, food procurement, and reproduction, and to explain cultural concepts like the manufacture of arrowheads or baskets. The whole point was so that a human child could observe the elders doing something, like avoiding a particular plant or planting when the sun rose to a particular point, and copy their adaptive behavior. The humans who were able to accept the abstract reasoning of those around them were most likely to survive.

Now the tables have turned, and abstract reasoning is less necessary for survival than ever before - especially among the privileged middle and upper classes. Survival is now about doing a specialized task over and over again to earn the rights to the output of other people who know how to do something you have no interest in doing. It's no longer about struggling for a meal and safety in a dynamic environment every single day, using information from others to analyze novel scenarios and strategize.

Our cultural-abstract-information-absorbing feature has been hijacked by the capitalistic and religious processes as a way to sell things to us and to convince us to increase the relative status of other people. This may be why some of the people who excel at thinking abstractly are the ones most likely to fall for other people's abstract woo. It makes sense to them just like some medicinal plant made sense to their ancestor 4,000 years ago. However, the abstract reasoning capacity which was once an asset is now a liability. The people most willing to do the adaptive thing 4,000 years ago are now the ones taking colloidal silver as a cancer cure because of a YT video, donating all their resources to some cult in the expectation of a fictional afterlife, or believing elaborate conspiracy theories.

I like this argument, but don't think it holds weight.  People have just always been into bullshit and snake oil.

Homeopathy has been around convincing people that water (sometimes substituted with booze) is the world's greatest cure for everything since 1796.  Chiropractic has been around since it's inventor in the 1890s claimed the secrets were passed on to him from a dead doctor in another world.

It's a con.  From the root word 'confidence'.  There's something innate about humans that makes us like confident people who have all the answers . . . it's much easier to follow than to think objectively, and a huge number of people are just kinda lazy.

[wenchsenior]

People simply don't understand that science mostly operates to advance knowledge by disproof, rather than proof. The most robust part of the method is demonstrating lack of a specific thing happening in response to a test of cause and effect. The less robust part is demonstrating that something does happen in response to a test. The least robust part is trying to figure out why those did or did not happen (the 'why').

Which it why it is scary that experiments are not always repeated, and negative results tend to not get published. Plus unless the Materials and Methods section in the original paper are truly explicit, replicating an experiment is difficult.  Field "experiments" are even more difficult.

This goes back a long way, but they first discovered the molting and metamorphosis hormones in insects* because a paper towel brand changed pulp source.  Fortunately they knew which brand they had been ordering and investigated if it had changed.  If they had just been randomly been using whatever was cheapest from a supplier - well . . . . . .


I think one of the identifiers of scientific thinking is an acknowledgement of just how little we know and how we understand what we know even less.  Seriously if something is really tiny we don't have many tools to look at it.  Which is why we are just on the beginning of understanding of 2 huge ecosystems, the mammalian (especially human) gut and the soil microbiome.



* I forget what they were rearing but it was larvae of some sort on paper towel.  Suddenly the larvae just kept molting and getting bigger and bigger, instead of pupating and turning into adults.  Chemicals in the new wood pulp were hormone mimics that prevented pupation.  Good chemical defence by a tree, keep your predator as a juvenile, it will eat more but there will be no next generation.

Bingo. One of my husband's happiest (and probably most consequential) pubs was a follow up to work from at least a decade earlier. Earlier work was very powered by a 'hot' hypothesis about population source/sinks (ecological 'traps'), and early evidence supported the hypothesis. He was fortunate in that he was able to follow up long term b/c someone else took over that research he started, and thus he was able to stay active with the pubs in the subsequent 20 years. The hypothesis did not hold over the long term, though it was notably statistically significant at first. And they were able to publish several rounds of negative results over the decade disproving his original hypothesis. THAT IS WHAT WE NEED...longer term replications, and the willingness to get your idea kicked in and then get that disproof actually published. (ETA: And it's important that the scientist (in this case my husband) is not so ego-identified with their original idea that they don't excitedly and willingly pursue publication of data that destroys that idea).

[RetiredAt63]

People simply don't understand that science mostly operates to advance knowledge by disproof, rather than proof. The most robust part of the method is demonstrating lack of a specific thing happening in response to a test of cause and effect. The less robust part is demonstrating that something does happen in response to a test. The least robust part is trying to figure out why those did or did not happen (the 'why').

Which it why it is scary that experiments are not always repeated, and negative results tend to not get published. Plus unless the Materials and Methods section in the original paper are truly explicit, replicating an experiment is difficult.  Field "experiments" are even more difficult.

This goes back a long way, but they first discovered the molting and metamorphosis hormones in insects* because a paper towel brand changed pulp source.  Fortunately they knew which brand they had been ordering and investigated if it had changed.  If they had just been randomly been using whatever was cheapest from a supplier - well . . . . . .


I think one of the identifiers of scientific thinking is an acknowledgement of just how little we know and how we understand what we know even less.  Seriously if something is really tiny we don't have many tools to look at it.  Which is why we are just on the beginning of understanding of 2 huge ecosystems, the mammalian (especially human) gut and the soil microbiome.



* I forget what they were rearing but it was larvae of some sort on paper towel.  Suddenly the larvae just kept molting and getting bigger and bigger, instead of pupating and turning into adults.  Chemicals in the new wood pulp were hormone mimics that prevented pupation.  Good chemical defence by a tree, keep your predator as a juvenile, it will eat more but there will be no next generation.

Bingo. One of my husband's happiest (and probably most consequential) pubs was a follow up to work from at least a decade earlier. Earlier work was very powered by a 'hot' hypothesis about population source/sinks (ecological 'traps'), and early evidence supported the hypothesis. He was fortunate in that he was able to follow up long term b/c someone else took over that research he started, and thus he was able to stay active with the pubs in the subsequent 20 years. The hypothesis did not hold over the long term, though it was notably statistically significant at first. And they were able to publish several rounds of negative results over the decade disproving his original hypothesis. THAT IS WHAT WE NEED...longer term replications, and the willingness to get your idea kicked in and then get that disproof actually published. (ETA: And it's important that the scientist (in this case my husband) is not so ego-identified with their original idea that they don't excitedly and willingly pursue publication of data that destroys that idea).

Wow. 

This is why long-term studies are so important.  It reminds me of some of the finch data from the Galapagos, where what looked like a very successful male with many offspring turned out to have no descendants several generations later.  So in the long run his contribution to the gene pool was zero.  But if the data only spanned 10 or 15 years he would have looked like a very successful individual, genetically speaking.  Tenure and grad students for the win.

[dang1]

I was at band practice and noticed a fellow musician had a red dot on their tongue. I asked if they knew and "yes, I take a drop of Iodine because it helps with ..

https://onlysky.media/amartinezvargas/why-are-pseudosciences-so-appealing/

it's natural selection working as it should

[wenchsenior]

People simply don't understand that science mostly operates to advance knowledge by disproof, rather than proof. The most robust part of the method is demonstrating lack of a specific thing happening in response to a test of cause and effect. The less robust part is demonstrating that something does happen in response to a test. The least robust part is trying to figure out why those did or did not happen (the 'why').

Which it why it is scary that experiments are not always repeated, and negative results tend to not get published. Plus unless the Materials and Methods section in the original paper are truly explicit, replicating an experiment is difficult.  Field "experiments" are even more difficult.

This goes back a long way, but they first discovered the molting and metamorphosis hormones in insects* because a paper towel brand changed pulp source.  Fortunately they knew which brand they had been ordering and investigated if it had changed.  If they had just been randomly been using whatever was cheapest from a supplier - well . . . . . .


I think one of the identifiers of scientific thinking is an acknowledgement of just how little we know and how we understand what we know even less.  Seriously if something is really tiny we don't have many tools to look at it.  Which is why we are just on the beginning of understanding of 2 huge ecosystems, the mammalian (especially human) gut and the soil microbiome.



* I forget what they were rearing but it was larvae of some sort on paper towel.  Suddenly the larvae just kept molting and getting bigger and bigger, instead of pupating and turning into adults.  Chemicals in the new wood pulp were hormone mimics that prevented pupation.  Good chemical defence by a tree, keep your predator as a juvenile, it will eat more but there will be no next generation.

Bingo. One of my husband's happiest (and probably most consequential) pubs was a follow up to work from at least a decade earlier. Earlier work was very powered by a 'hot' hypothesis about population source/sinks (ecological 'traps'), and early evidence supported the hypothesis. He was fortunate in that he was able to follow up long term b/c someone else took over that research he started, and thus he was able to stay active with the pubs in the subsequent 20 years. The hypothesis did not hold over the long term, though it was notably statistically significant at first. And they were able to publish several rounds of negative results over the decade disproving his original hypothesis. THAT IS WHAT WE NEED...longer term replications, and the willingness to get your idea kicked in and then get that disproof actually published. (ETA: And it's important that the scientist (in this case my husband) is not so ego-identified with their original idea that they don't excitedly and willingly pursue publication of data that destroys that idea).

Wow. 

This is why long-term studies are so important.  It reminds me of some of the finch data from the Galapagos, where what looked like a very successful male with many offspring turned out to have no descendants several generations later.  So in the long run his contribution to the gene pool was zero.  But if the data only spanned 10 or 15 years he would have looked like a very successful individual, genetically speaking.  Tenure and grad students for the win.

Yes, indeed.

Whenever I am contemplating some puzzle of biology (which means ALMOST EVERYTHING OUT THERE), I despair over how little we know for all our incredible physical and mental efforts.

On the other hand, when I'm reading the 5,000th replication of effects of supplemental nutrition on antler size or harvestable population of quail, I remind myself that replication is important, even for questions that seem to be beaten into the ground and/or very trivial to me LOL.

[teen persuasion]

Interesting thread and ideas.

Much of the discussion brings to mind the decades long, ongoing soil remediation in the village where I work.  A state agency has made it its mission to pursue arsenic removal.  The arsenic contamination was due to an agricultural sprayer manufacturer, before there were limits or laws about contamination.  The responsible company has been cooperative in the remediation and funding for it, but the state agency is in control of the process.

The state agency cited some research on acceptable levels of arsenic, which mentioned a hard number X (to quite a few decimal points).  But background levels of arsenic vary by location, so they tried to find a proxy for local background levels by testing the soil in a nearby community.  Unfortunately, this number exceeded the "official" max safe number X, so this number Y was substituted for X and became the new magic target max safe number that soil needed to be remediated  below.  Soils were tested and the worst spots were dug up, soil trucked out and dumped elsewhere, and new presumably cleaner soil was trucked in.  Over and over and over and over...decades now with no end in sight.

When the community got tired of the constant upheaval every spring/summer/fall and began pushing back about how necessary further remediation was, and tried to get the state agency to quantify the danger of the arsenic levels it became clear that "safety" wasn't the goal.  There was no proof X was a max safe amount, and certainly that the local background proxy Y (which was > X) was safe.  The state agency had simply codified that Y was THE max acceptable arsenic level, period.  Because they said so.  Homeowners could opt not to have their land tested, or remediated, but then the state agency wouldn't give the homeowners a certificate of ??? and strongly implied they couldn't easily sell their house in the future (or would need to pay for remediation themselves later).

The state agency would also state that arsenic wasn't an issue for residents, because it binds to the soil, as long as it wasn't disturbed.  And yet, their mandatory remediation involved digging up all the soil from properties, loading it in trucks, and driving it elsewhere to dump it.  Active remediation creates dust clouds daily in the village - in the warm months when windows are open and children play outside.

There is also an interesting question on how contaminated the orchards in this agricultural community are, as they were using the pesticides for decades.  The state agency has never looked at testing any of the agricultural land outside of the village.  Honestly, I wonder where they background tested in the nearby proxy community, since that is also agricultural.   IDK, because that was before we moved here almost 30 years ago.

I'm convinced that the state agency people have turned this into a lifetime assignment, and a remediation industry has sprung up around it, all paid for by the pesticide company.   There's no deep pockets to pay for remediation on farmland, though, so that is never pursued.

[RetiredAt63]

Don't get me started on remediation.   ;-)

[thesis]

I'm enjoying this thread :)

Strangely enough, it was my chiropractor who did a very woo test on me for food reactions, which involved the presence of the foods themselves. He was basically able to identify many of the foods that my body "didn't react well to," and this ultimately led me to discovering the foods that had been giving me raging heartburn for years. I had thought hearburn was natural and normal, but it turned out it could be traced to very specific foods, albeit several that are in almost everything, including cow milk and cow butter (but not most ice creams), as well as corn and corn starch and sometimes tomoato sauce, in addition to things like alcohol (except cider) and uncooked onions. My heartburn was really bad. I've never quite known what to say about this, but it was incredible when I had my first week without any hearburn at all. Mind you, this guy never tried to tell me my spine was bad and he could "fix" it through adjustments, which my mom's idiot chiropractor tried to do. Chiropractic in general has very woo origins, but then again, Galen had some pretty strange ideas, too. I don't go around saying this "test" is foolproof, but I'm sure glad it taught me something so important, even if only circumstantially. Honestly, though, I still don't know what to think about it. I really don't get any quack vibes from the guy, and he's never recommended anything like that or stranger since.

[Metalcat]

I'm enjoying this thread :)

Strangely enough, it was my chiropractor who did a very woo test on me for food reactions, which involved the presence of the foods themselves. He was basically able to identify many of the foods that my body "didn't react well to," and this ultimately led me to discovering the foods that had been giving me raging heartburn for years. I had thought hearburn was natural and normal, but it turned out it could be traced to very specific foods, albeit several that are in almost everything, including cow milk and cow butter (but not most ice creams), as well as corn and corn starch and sometimes tomoato sauce, in addition to things like alcohol (except cider) and uncooked onions. My heartburn was really bad. I've never quite known what to say about this, but it was incredible when I had my first week without any hearburn at all. Mind you, this guy never tried to tell me my spine was bad and he could "fix" it through adjustments, which my mom's idiot chiropractor tried to do. Chiropractic in general has very woo origins, but then again, Galen had some pretty strange ideas, too. I don't go around saying this "test" is foolproof, but I'm sure glad it taught me something so important, even if only circumstantially. Honestly, though, I still don't know what to think about it. I really don't get any quack vibes from the guy, and he's never recommended anything like that or stranger since.

Not strange at all, a lot of woo turns out to work.

I mean, ALL of our over the counter pain medications came directly from shamanistic woo.

A LOT of shit works, often unpredictably and in ways that are hard to systematically measure, but that's the same of a lot of non-woo medicine. The key is to not fall for the convincing explanations as to why it works.

Like, dry needling and acupuncture are basically the same thing, just one has a complex woo-y explanation and the other has an explanation of "who the fuck knows why it works!" but the dry needle folks only exist because of the woo acupuncturists and their track record of helping some people.

That's not actually a different process than medicine.

I've been prescribed no fewer than a dozen prescription drugs for "off label" purposes in the last few years with no science actually supporting their use, and most of them started being used off label just based on the intuitions and ideas of experienced clinicians.

This is no different than trying acupuncture or any other woo treatment, except that I generally prefer a lot of woo treatments because they come with a lot less risks and side effects than most of the drugs they keep trying to put me on that don't help and cause enormous harm.

A little sugar water injected around my spine sounds nice and benign compared to being put on a drug that makes me fall over when I try to stand up. I just tune out the explanations when the woo-folks start talking.

I also ignore 99% of what my RMT says because those folks are full of shit and there is ZERO scientific evidence for their claims of what they are doing and why it works.

BUT we have tons of data saying it does work, so who cares if they're all deluded/brain washed as to why? Pretty much everyone benefits from massage and the iatrogenic risks are virtually non-existent, so woo-away RMTs, have at 'er!

When people start getting hurt and fleeced is when bullshit is a real problem.

[jeninco]

^-- @Malcat, I thought of this conversation Tuesday while my PT was poking needles into my forearms and then wiring them up to a generator. At least it gave me something to think about along with "I am a lab frog! Look at my pinkie finger extending! Look at my hand supinating!"

Yep, I'm one of the lucky fraction of the population for whom dry needling is really, really effective. Not 100% positive about the shocking part, but WTF: I don't think it causes damage, and I like everything else about this PT, so in for a penny...

I do think acupuncture and dry needling differ in some important ways, though -- I know what he was feeling for when he was deciding where to place the needles, and it wasn't "chi meridian points".

[GuitarStv]

I'm enjoying this thread :)

Strangely enough, it was my chiropractor who did a very woo test on me for food reactions, which involved the presence of the foods themselves. He was basically able to identify many of the foods that my body "didn't react well to," and this ultimately led me to discovering the foods that had been giving me raging heartburn for years. I had thought hearburn was natural and normal, but it turned out it could be traced to very specific foods, albeit several that are in almost everything, including cow milk and cow butter (but not most ice creams), as well as corn and corn starch and sometimes tomoato sauce, in addition to things like alcohol (except cider) and uncooked onions. My heartburn was really bad. I've never quite known what to say about this, but it was incredible when I had my first week without any hearburn at all. Mind you, this guy never tried to tell me my spine was bad and he could "fix" it through adjustments, which my mom's idiot chiropractor tried to do. Chiropractic in general has very woo origins, but then again, Galen had some pretty strange ideas, too. I don't go around saying this "test" is foolproof, but I'm sure glad it taught me something so important, even if only circumstantially. Honestly, though, I still don't know what to think about it. I really don't get any quack vibes from the guy, and he's never recommended anything like that or stranger since.

Not strange at all, a lot of woo turns out to work.

I mean, ALL of our over the counter pain medications came directly from shamanistic woo.

A LOT of shit works, often unpredictably and in ways that are hard to systematically measure, but that's the same of a lot of non-woo medicine. The key is to not fall for the convincing explanations as to why it works.

Like, dry needling and acupuncture are basically the same thing, just one has a complex woo-y explanation and the other has an explanation of "who the fuck knows why it works!" but the dry needle folks only exist because of the woo acupuncturists and their track record of helping some people.

That's not actually a different process than medicine.

I've been prescribed no fewer than a dozen prescription drugs for "off label" purposes in the last few years with no science actually supporting their use, and most of them started being used off label just based on the intuitions and ideas of experienced clinicians.

This is no different than trying acupuncture or any other woo treatment, except that I generally prefer a lot of woo treatments because they come with a lot less risks and side effects than most of the drugs they keep trying to put me on that don't help and cause enormous harm.

A little sugar water injected around my spine sounds nice and benign compared to being put on a drug that makes me fall over when I try to stand up. I just tune out the explanations when the woo-folks start talking.

I also ignore 99% of what my RMT says because those folks are full of shit and there is ZERO scientific evidence for their claims of what they are doing and why it works.

BUT we have tons of data saying it does work, so who cares if they're all deluded/brain washed as to why? Pretty much everyone benefits from massage and the iatrogenic risks are virtually non-existent, so woo-away RMTs, have at 'er!

When people start getting hurt and fleeced is when bullshit is a real problem.

I specifically mentioned chiropractic and homeopathy.  There's some slight evidence that chiropractic can be good for some kinds of back pain, and maybe in certain cases neck pain.  Nothing supporting any other claim associated with the field.  Homeopathy is (of course) grade-A bullshit through and through.

They're both industries dedicated to fleecing people.  If people believe the lies they tell and act on those beliefs rather than proven medicine, they're going to be hurt.

[Metalcat]

I'm enjoying this thread :)

Strangely enough, it was my chiropractor who did a very woo test on me for food reactions, which involved the presence of the foods themselves. He was basically able to identify many of the foods that my body "didn't react well to," and this ultimately led me to discovering the foods that had been giving me raging heartburn for years. I had thought hearburn was natural and normal, but it turned out it could be traced to very specific foods, albeit several that are in almost everything, including cow milk and cow butter (but not most ice creams), as well as corn and corn starch and sometimes tomoato sauce, in addition to things like alcohol (except cider) and uncooked onions. My heartburn was really bad. I've never quite known what to say about this, but it was incredible when I had my first week without any hearburn at all. Mind you, this guy never tried to tell me my spine was bad and he could "fix" it through adjustments, which my mom's idiot chiropractor tried to do. Chiropractic in general has very woo origins, but then again, Galen had some pretty strange ideas, too. I don't go around saying this "test" is foolproof, but I'm sure glad it taught me something so important, even if only circumstantially. Honestly, though, I still don't know what to think about it. I really don't get any quack vibes from the guy, and he's never recommended anything like that or stranger since.

Not strange at all, a lot of woo turns out to work.

I mean, ALL of our over the counter pain medications came directly from shamanistic woo.

A LOT of shit works, often unpredictably and in ways that are hard to systematically measure, but that's the same of a lot of non-woo medicine. The key is to not fall for the convincing explanations as to why it works.

Like, dry needling and acupuncture are basically the same thing, just one has a complex woo-y explanation and the other has an explanation of "who the fuck knows why it works!" but the dry needle folks only exist because of the woo acupuncturists and their track record of helping some people.

That's not actually a different process than medicine.

I've been prescribed no fewer than a dozen prescription drugs for "off label" purposes in the last few years with no science actually supporting their use, and most of them started being used off label just based on the intuitions and ideas of experienced clinicians.

This is no different than trying acupuncture or any other woo treatment, except that I generally prefer a lot of woo treatments because they come with a lot less risks and side effects than most of the drugs they keep trying to put me on that don't help and cause enormous harm.

A little sugar water injected around my spine sounds nice and benign compared to being put on a drug that makes me fall over when I try to stand up. I just tune out the explanations when the woo-folks start talking.

I also ignore 99% of what my RMT says because those folks are full of shit and there is ZERO scientific evidence for their claims of what they are doing and why it works.

BUT we have tons of data saying it does work, so who cares if they're all deluded/brain washed as to why? Pretty much everyone benefits from massage and the iatrogenic risks are virtually non-existent, so woo-away RMTs, have at 'er!

When people start getting hurt and fleeced is when bullshit is a real problem.

I specifically mentioned chiropractic and homeopathy.  There's some slight evidence that chiropractic can be good for some kinds of back pain, and maybe in certain cases neck pain.  Nothing supporting any other claim associated with the field.  Homeopathy is (of course) grade-A bullshit through and through.

They're both industries dedicated to fleecing people.  If people believe the lies they tell and act on those beliefs rather than proven medicine, they're going to be hurt.

uh, my point was that a lot of woo works, not that all woo works.

I'm not sure you're actually saying anything that disagrees with me.

To be abundantly clear, I fucking DESPISE the chiro industry and would never, ever go to another chiro after the first time when I ended up in the ER. I don't care how many "good" ones there are, their entire industry is steeped in incredibly dangerous shit.

As for homeopathy, that's just water and everyone knows it. If people want to drink water and feel better, then have at it. The placebo effect is very, very powerful and I'm all for people getting benefit from magical water.

But fuck the chiro who told me all sorts of things about my supposed "causes" of my pain, which turned out to actually be caused by misaligned bones in the end! Which is the shit that chiros claim to be able to detect and treat but definitely couldn't! How's that for fucking ironic!

[curious_george]

Yeah - I have read a lot of 'woo woo' stuff by a lot of 'woo woo' teachers and tried a lot of it.

The explanations are often complete bullshit, imo, made up to make people believe there is some sort of logical explanation to what they are doing.

I have been *extremely* surprised how often if you simply look at the action or practice and end results how often these line up with what someone says. I have seen many things occur that have no current scientific explanation, which left me scratching my head a lot and shrugging my shoulders. I know some things actually occur that are not complete bullshit, but that currently lack good science to explain them. Or there have been one off occurances that left everyone looking at everyone else in disbelief asking 'did...we all just witness the same thing'?

I have pondered at times why the placebo effect is so strong that we have to use active placebos now to help negate the effect. Seems odd that the simple power of belief should have this much impact on our perception of reality.

With all that said I *much prefer* when things have actual scientific explanations and have been replicated in several labs.

[achvfi]

I'm enjoying this thread :)

Strangely enough, it was my chiropractor who did a very woo test on me for food reactions, which involved the presence of the foods themselves. He was basically able to identify many of the foods that my body "didn't react well to," and this ultimately led me to discovering the foods that had been giving me raging heartburn for years. I had thought hearburn was natural and normal, but it turned out it could be traced to very specific foods, albeit several that are in almost everything, including cow milk and cow butter (but not most ice creams), as well as corn and corn starch and sometimes tomoato sauce, in addition to things like alcohol (except cider) and uncooked onions. My heartburn was really bad. I've never quite known what to say about this, but it was incredible when I had my first week without any hearburn at all. Mind you, this guy never tried to tell me my spine was bad and he could "fix" it through adjustments, which my mom's idiot chiropractor tried to do. Chiropractic in general has very woo origins, but then again, Galen had some pretty strange ideas, too. I don't go around saying this "test" is foolproof, but I'm sure glad it taught me something so important, even if only circumstantially. Honestly, though, I still don't know what to think about it. I really don't get any quack vibes from the guy, and he's never recommended anything like that or stranger since.

Great, so the chiro was able to help you with your issue. You should appreciate the help received and respect it. So he does know what he was doing. Many chiros are practicing functional medicine now a days.

Not pointing to you, but just dismissing entire professions, platforms as woo is a mistake.

[Metalcat]

Yeah - I have read a lot of 'woo woo' stuff by a lot of 'woo woo' teachers and tried a lot of it.

The explanations are often complete bullshit, imo, made up to make people believe there is some sort of logical explanation to what they are doing.

I have been *extremely* surprised how often if you simply look at the action or practice and end results how often these line up with what someone says. I have seen many things occur that have no current scientific explanation, which left me scratching my head a lot and shrugging my shoulders. I know some things actually occur that are not complete bullshit, but that currently lack good science to explain them. Or there have been one off occurances that left everyone looking at everyone else in disbelief asking 'did...we all just witness the same thing'?

I have pondered at times why the placebo effect is so strong that we have to use active placebos now to help negate the effect. Seems odd that the simple power of belief should have this much impact on our perception of reality.

With all that said I *much prefer* when things have actual scientific explanations and have been replicated in several labs.

You're conflating things working with the explanations being legit.

Just because something works *exactly* the way it's explained to work doesn't mean the explanation is valid.

This is the cornerstone of bullshit: explanations that make sense in a world where very little is that understandable.

I mean, people who followed the wheat belly diet almost universally lost substantial weight and had dramatic increases in their overall health. This doesn't validate the utter bullshit explanations in wheat belly.

Also, sorry to busy your bubble but you can repeat a scientific experiment a million times and still be no closer to an explanation of *why* you found the effect you did.

Do not conflate scientific validity with legitimacy of explanations.

This is the BIGGEST mistake people make when discussing science and woo.

If I do a treatment that costs $500 and the clinician does a treatment that has the exact same results but costs $70K and has a much more complicated explanation, and is much more invasive, which one of us, if either, is peddling woo?

Science will show over and over and over again that both of our interventions have the same rate of success. Their intervention has A LOT more science that kind of, sort of, could support their explanations if you squint your eyes and blue the findings a bit.

My explanation is "*shrug* fucked if I know why it works sometimes, but here's a vague idea."

The woo is almost always in the explanations, not the efficacy of the interventions. Many woo interventions have as good efficacy as medicine, which is why so many woo interventions eventually get adopted into medicine.