One particular low, which caused me to let my subscription lapse, was a provocative piece on pseudoscience<\/a>.\u00a0 In principle, I have no beef with anyone taking sloppy thinking and evidence-poor arguments to task.\u00a0 I have had, on many occasions, the need to roll up my intellectual sleeves and rip apart poor scientific logic, whether it was someone else\u2019s (I\u2019ll discuss a particularly interesting example later on) or my own.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not what the author did.\u00a0 Rather than focus on the \u2018truth content\u2019 of the claims, he focused on the \u2018stupidity\u2019 of the ideas and made light of those who held them and I have a big problem with that.<\/p>\n As a typical example, the author mocked the concept of alien abduction.\u00a0 You may be remarking to yourself that alien abduction should be mocked; just look at the people who assert that they are victims.\u00a0 But we shouldn\u2019t be mocking people in general nor should we mock an idea, no matter how far-fetched.\u00a0 The assertion that people are taken off the earth and placed on alien spacecraft and are subjected to who knows what else is neither a scientific statement nor unscientific one; it is ascientific.<\/p>\n Admittedly, the word \u2018ascientific\u2019 is one that I\u2019ve coined for this discussion but I think it serves the need well.\u00a0 No simple statement that can be uttered, such as \u2018the sky is blue\u2019 or \u2018the sky is red\u2019, can have any scientific content, merely truth content.\u00a0 We add the \u2018science\u2019 to these assertions by the way we investigate the claim made in the statement.\u00a0 In other words, the word science should mean the process by which we add a truth content to an assertion not the truth of the assertion itself.<\/p>\n The \u2018science\u2019 begins by the very obvious but often forgotten steps of formulating a question and then gathering what evidence exists.\u00a0 (The wikipedia article on the scientific method<\/a> is amazingly detailed and explanatory on these points as well as the others that span the general principles of the method).\u00a0 In the case of alien abductions, we start with the claim at face value and look at what evidence exists.\u00a0 Admittedly, the evidence that its proponents muster is the worst kind of evidence, riddled with eyewitness testimony and scant bits of circumstantial evidence and no reasonable analysis would it.<\/p>\n So, based on the evidence, we can conclude that there is no support for the statement \u2018alien abductions take place\u2019 and the truth content of any claiming victims is low.\u00a0 But it doesn\u2019t mean we disproved the statement as a whole, anymore than Europeans of nearly 350 years ago could have proved that the statement \u2018some swans are white\u2019<\/a> as false.\u00a0 The tests we set a limit on the likelihood of the particular assertions that have been made.<\/p>\n To be more concrete, I\u2019ll draw from personal experience and talk about two of my encounters with people who believed in the explanatory and predictive power of astrology.\u00a0 Both of these encounters occurred when I work for a small technology firm and the people involved were highly trained STEM professionals (oddly enough they didn\u2019t know each other).\u00a0 Once the individual in question brought up their belief in astrology I thought I would put the power of the system to a test.\u00a0 Rather than reveal my \u2018star sign\u2019 and get a stream of vague statements that could be interpreted in just about anyway, I asked for the person to predict my astrological sign given what they knew about my behavior, attitudes, and habits.\u00a0 In both cases, the adherent started by suggesting what I might be and eventually ruling out the actual sign under which I was born.\u00a0 They might have had better odds simply by spinning a zodiac spinner.<\/p>\n In both of these areas (alien abduction and astrological predictions), we are on firm ground saying that since we\u2019ve examined a large number of such claims and found little to no evidence supporting them that it is unlikely we will ever find anyone with a credible set of facts that support these claims.\u00a0 But we need to recognize that: 1) are conclusions are not deductive proof but merely the product of statistical inference, and 2) the individuals making these claims are real people and we must treat them with rudimentary respect if we ever hope to persuade them that these positions are very likely wrong..<\/p>\n Now some might suggest that I\u2019m splitting hairs with this fine distinction between the claim and the truth of the claim?\u00a0 What practical implications could warrant such a careful treatment?\u00a0 One prominent example springs to mind – the debate over whether to vaccinate.<\/p>\n Before digging in, let me state categorically that in my opinion the benefits of vaccines outweighs their risk and I endorse getting children vaccinated.\u00a0 But I am not ignorant of the fact that in the current debate there are actually two pseudoscience positions.\u00a0 The first is the obvious position taken by in this debate by the anti-vaccine crowd, best attested to by the recent and ongoing outbreak of measles in the US<\/a>.\u00a0 The other pseudoscience position is by the medical professionals who assert that vaccines are perfectly safe by citing \u2018medical studies\u2019.<\/p>\n Much of what passes for medical studies, or statistical studies in most disciplines for that matter, themselves border on pseudoscience.\u00a0 As William Wilson so nicely puts it in his opening paragraph in the May 2016 article of First Things: \u201cThe problem with science is that so much of it simply isn\u2019t.<\/a>\u201d\u00a0 In a nutshell, his points are that most studies are unreproducible (and therefore unfalsifiable) and are built on the flimsiest of statistical interpretation.<\/p>\n The public is aware of these problems even if they are unable to articulate their concerns precisely in a way that would make a philosopher happy.\u00a0 Therefore, it is hardly a surprise when they hold pseudoscientific positions that cause unneeded misery and death.\u00a0 The science community needs to put its own house in order by raising standards on publication before turning its critical eye somewhere else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"http:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Flying-Saucer.png\")
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