Seven Rules For Spotting Bogus Science

keynet writes "Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and the director of public information for the American Physical Society, wrote a list of warning signs to help federal judges detect scientific nonsense. (OK, so it hasn't worked and the Patent Office sure hasn't got a copy.) As he says, 'There is no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it'. What he doesn't say is that there are plenty more who will invest in it or base legislation on it."

Comments

They have to care first

[ralphart]

With so many judges being appointed for purely ideological reasons, it may be a bit much to ask that they be expected to be concerned about scientific nonsense. Can you spell Creationism?

Re:They have to care first

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Well, yeah, and although he doesn't mention it, "Intelligent Design" fails pretty much every one of his tests. The Biblical-literalist/"Young Earth" creationists at least don't pretend to be scientific -- their beliefs boil down to "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" -- which makes them less dangerous to our educational system. But the ID crowd have done a really good job of getting courts and legislatures to listen to their psuedoscientific babble.

Only need one rule

[Bitter Cup O Joe]

Is it too good to be true? That is pretty much the only thing you need to check. Simple antigravity? Too good to be true. Car that runs on water? Too good to be true. Honest politician? Too good to be true.

The big problem is that people are greedy, lazy, and generally lacking in common sense. Another set of rules isn't going to change that.

Hmmm,

[xA40D]

I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate.

I just know the above disclaimer will be ignored by most. Which makes the whole thing a bit dangerous. Afterall, according to the rules, Quantum Physics could be considered bogus.

reduced to one line

[BenjyD]

For judges that don't have time to read the whole article:

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." -- Carl Sagan.

Re:Only need one rule, but not this one.

[Uninvited Guest]

"Too good to be true" is heavily related to the evaluator's background in the subject matter. That's part of the problem: judges are not steeped in the evidence they must weigh. They need a more thorough guideline of what "too good" would mean to a knowledgeable expert.

Teach it in your schools

[Raindeer]

At university I was given several courses in Methodology, not all of them fun unfortunately, but all of them relevant. Certainly in my current work as a government employee I continuously see claims being made by government and private sector alike which are shaky at best. I still value what I learned in Methodology to judge those.

Methodology or anything that teaches kids to discern right from wrong should be taught in schools, so that we can protect ourselves from wrong ideas based in nothing. This could be by just explaining kids how you can know something is true and when something hasn't been proven yet, but might be true and when things are real BS. (BBC's Panorama had an illusionist who debunked the claims of homeopathy. Entertaining and educational)

I also have one fundamental rule I adher by: Never trust data given by the person that is going to benefit from the decision you make upon it.

I'm particularly stuck by this one

[Daniel Dvorkin]

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation. The image of a lone genius who struggles in secrecy in an attic laboratory and ends up making a revolutionary breakthrough is a staple of Hollywood's science-fiction films, but it is hard to find examples in real life. Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are almost always syntheses of the work of many scientists.

This one is important because "big science" is a favorite villain of both pseudoscientists and cost-cutting lawmakers. What the lawmakers don't get -- and the pseudoscientists, I suspect, know but choose to disregards -- is that big science is the way most science gets done these days because the small science has been done. Alexander Fleming leaving a couple of dishes next to each other and discovering penicillin, or Robert Goddard and a team of dedicated fanatics working day and night to build the foundations of space flight, are powerful images; the "Eureka!" moment is every scientist's dream. But in well-established fields such as microbiology and aerospace, those moments have all pretty much happened; we need the big expensive labs with bunches of people working on expensive equipment, because that's how new discoveries and inventions get made.

The only real exception to this is in new fields, such as computational biology; sometimes a whole new way of looking at the world comes along, and for a few years -- even decades -- the frontiers are wide open. Quantum physics was an example of this in its early years. At that moment, individuals and small groups and big organizations are roughly on a level playing field. But once the easy discoveries in the field have been made, the balance tilts back toward big science. That's just the way it is.

That's fine, but . . .

[Badgerman]

I'm all for spotting bogus science. The problem with some of these rules is assuming:
A) That there's always a friendly attitude towards actual innovation in science.
B) That there's no corruption in "accepted" scientific communities.

The "respected" scientists of various fields can be manipulated and manipulating, have their own vested interests, and have their reasons to be questioned as well.

That being said, I think a lot of these are spot-on, and that people do need the knowledge to ask good questions and spot frauds.

Evidence of macroevolution

[spanky1]

Most anti-evolution people are simply religious folks too afraid to face the facts. I suggest reading 29 Evidences for Macroevolution. I still do not see any objective evidence PERIOD for the existence of a supernatural deity. But objective evidence for evolution is abundant.

Think about it: man has invented various Gods all throughout history. The ancient Gods (Greek/Roman mythology, etc) were easy to disprove... (no Atlas dude holding up the Earth). The only reason the Christian God has hung around so long is because he is defined as untestable. News flash: You cannot invent something, make it untestable, and put the burden of proof on the opposing side to disprove it.

Re:Evidence of macroevolution

[J. J. Ramsey]

"The only reason the Christian God has hung around so long is because he is defined as untestable."

That is not nearly so true as you might think. The New Testament makes a lot of historical fact claims, that are potentially falsifiable. If enough archaeologists "get lucky," Christianity's factual foundations could very well be torpedoed.

How we are wired

[Continental Drift]

Yes, but let us have some sympathy for the strong religious believers. Humans are genetically predisposed to religion, to believing in a supernatual creator who loves us or hates us. As such, it is hard for people to overcome religion even when all evidence is to the contrary. Equally, we are wired to understand basic physics, so we should sypmathize with how difficult it is for us to understand quantum mechanics.

We have instinctual systems that make it hard to apply these seven rules, and it helps to be aware that people who seem to believe lies are mostly following their gut.

Re:How we are wired

[shams42]

Humans are genetically predisposed to religion...

Really? Pray, which genes are responsible for this phenomenon?

Blaming everything on god is one kind of pseudoscience, blaming everything on genes is another.

Warning signs, not indicators

[The Famous Brett Wat]

It's true that most bad science is accompanied by some or all of the listed conditions, but I note that none of the conditions really say anything about "the scientific method", for any reasonable definition of that phrase. Consider.

1. Whilst it's true that a charlatan will probably prefer to take his chances with the gullible masses directly, pitching a theory to the media does not, in itself, impact the validity of the claim.
2. Claims that the work is being suppressed by a powerful establishment are a convenient excuse for the charlatan with nothing real to demonstrate, but there is a certain credibility to the idea that, say, the oil industry might engage in dirty tricks against someone who threatened their position. And again, claims of interference do not directly impact the validity of the theory itself.
3. Plenty of real scientific research happens at the limits of detection. As I recall, Einstein's relativity was an example of this at the time he proposed it. Quantum physics and the outer limits of astronomy are further examples.
4. Anecdotal evidence is dodgy, I agree, but no less dodgy than grand claims about evolutionary ancestry that are made on the basis of a single incomplete fossil find from time to time. A theory like the Big Bang Theory gets treated with respect in scientific circles, despite the fact that all the evidence is circumstantial, and the historical aspects of paleontology and geology are taken seriously despite the fact that the concept of a "randomized double-blind test" isn't even applicable to most of the work in those areas.
5. Antiquity does not essentialy validate or invalidate any claim; nor does novelty. Even so, ideas that endure for a long time may do so because they are at least partly true. It would be arrogant to suppose that science can't get a few good leads from folklore now and then.
6. The isolation of the discoverer does not directly impact the validity of the claim. Sometimes a radical new idea requires an outside thinker. Examples may be few, but they do happen. Einstein and relativity might be a fitting example, again.
7. Proposing new laws is a serious problem when said laws flatly contradict other well established laws. Energy-yielding perpetual motion systems would contradict what we know about conservation of energy, for example, which is a very well demonstrated principle. But sometimes new observations do happen which require us to amend or replace existing theories. A certain degree of tenacity is appropriate, but too much becomes "dogmatism".

I guess I was hoping for something a little more along the lines of a philosophy of science. Although I agree that bad science is usually accompanied by one or more (usually more) of these conditions, the conditions could just as readily be applied to certain particularly brilliant scientific breakthroughs. The conditions need fine-tuning to eliminate the false positives if we want to be sure to encourage the next Einstein, rather than mistakenly brand him a charlatan and run him out of town.

And we need this common sense.

[mwillems]

Sadly, we need this common sense. A lot of people are living in what Carl Sagan called a "demon haunted world".

Just last week I was with some people, otherwise intelligent people in a book club, who turn out to believe in predestination and ghosts - one lady says she hears voices of dead friends and they tell her they are OK and they give her comfort.

What is scary is not so much that (we all need comfort when friends die, and whatever we choose to believe is at least understandable), but the fact that the entire group of people misunderstood science. "There must be types of radiation that are not yet known causing this", was the consensus. Everyone just took this lady at her word!

Last week on a radio show here in Canada a "shaman", Doctor Somethingorother, took questions. One went like this:

"Doctor: Fred here from Winnipeg. My question: When you are about to get in touch with your spirit self, do your electrons speed up their frequency? And does this mean I have a talent for communicating with the spirits? Because this happens to me weekly: first I suddenly feel like my inner electrons are speeding up their frequency and then I am unable to talk for what seems like a while, I am like a Zombie for a few minutes, and meanwhile I feel like I am in the spirit world and communicate with their mystery, and then I come back again". Doctor: "Yes! Exactly! And Yes! And Yes! You are talented in spirit communication, and indeed the frequency response of the electrons increases as we get near the spirit communication level, as the energy increase is a presurcor to this communication..." bla bla bla.

Now this poor caller was presumably an epileptic or narcoleptic. He should have been told to get (science-based) medical treatment. But no-one found it necessary to point this out: just because someone starts talking in an authoritative voice, he is believed.

Just now as I typed this message received a junk fax for "Marina, a Leading Psychic". Many people will pay for this stuff, in 2003. Not 1403! Weird.

This suspension of disbelief is dangerous. I think we need to be forceful in debunking myth. It seems to me that in the early 21st century we are a bit too apologetic.. "emotional correctness": it is seen as necessary to respect all beliefs. I think we do ourselves a discredit by that.

Did you read the article carefully?

[pr0ntab]

These are WARNING SIGNS. Not litmus tests.

If you saw a person waving a few of the aforementioned red flags, it would warrant closer investigation of the claims then might normally be required, not dismissal.

Dogmatism is bad no matter how you slice it; the author of the 7 rules was aware of this.