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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."
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."
From the article, the full paragraph of the quote is:
There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it. And many such claims end up in a court of law after they have cost some gullible person or corporation a lot of money. How are juries to evaluate them?
The very next sentence indicates that there are very many people who are willing to invest or base laws on bad science!
"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.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
Why don't they just use the Crackpot Index to judge them?
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
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.
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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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Warning sign number 2
>2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress
>his or her work.
Well, a member of the secret scientific establishment brotherhood would say that, wouldn't he?
I'd like to add another tell-tale sign
8. The scientific study was funded or conducted under the auspices of a media company.
Recently in the UK we've had a number of TV documentaries about controversial theories. One was an investigation into homeopathic medicine. The other was into the idea that otherwise very mild diseases might lead to obesity. In both cases the TV company funded a small scale test.
The problem was that the tests involved only about 100 subjects, far too small to have any statistical validity whatsoever. They said so in the show, but is that enough? Several people I've talked to afterwards recieved the impression that the tests in the show proved something.
Far from promoting an understanding of science, the shows succeeded in missleading the public not only as to the validity of the theories under examination, but also as to the value of such small scale tests.
I've never come across this kind of thing in the UK before, is this happening on TV in other countries too?
Simon Hibbs
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.
The "Darwin == Evolution" meme is so thoroughly imprinted in most people's brains that many creationist types seem to use it as evidence that Darwin produced the idea ex nihilo, and what had been a God-fearing, Creation-believing world suddenly turned atheist, evolutionist, and immoral as a result, leading over the next couple of centuries to world wars, eugenics, the Holocaust, and Bill Clinton. In fact, evolution was a theory that itself evolved, and continues to do so to this day; that's pretty much how scientific theories work. Darwin was an important step -- a major internal node in the phylogenetic tree, one might say -- but he wasn't the be-all and end-all, and has numerous "ancestors" and "descendants" in the history of the theory.
He did publish it in a book -- after several of the leading scientists of the day, with years of urging, persuaded him to do so. He was reluctant to do so both because he didn't want to be accused of stealing other people's ideas (kind of a Newton/Leibniz thing, only without the monstrous egos involved) and because he was well of the theological shitstorm he was going to unleash. In modern terms, his work was thoroughly peer-reviewed before On the Origin of Species came out.
Science is suppressed by ideological forces, governments and churches not least among them. What marks that crank is when he claims that this suppression is being done in secret. Real suppression -- from the Catholic church and Galileo to fundamentalist Protestantism and Darwin to Stalin and anyone whose science case doubt on Communist ideology -- tends to be very blatant.
Evolutionary biology is an observational science, not (in most cases, microbiology and some botany excepted) an experimental one. Do you consider the existence of other stars besides the Sun to be "anecdotal evidence" because no one can create a star in a lab? And yet we have just as much observational evidence for evolution, and in fact more laboratory evidence.
Darwin was not proposing a new law of nature; the idea of evolution had been around for decades. What he did was to take the hypothesizing of others in the field (e.g. Lamarck) and give it rigorous theoretical underpinnings, much as Einstein took the results of Maxwell's equations to their logical conclusion and explained contradictions in Newtonian mechanics that had bothered generations of physicists before him.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
/syle
A more humorous aricle, the Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit can be found here. It basically tells the same stuff, in a lot more humorous way. Also checkout the section where he points out subtle flaws in arguments that everybody uses (and falls for).
Young Earthism attempts to make scientific statements, and fails the tests of observation. (ie, attempts to describe the history of the Universe, and is quite falsifiable). So Young Earthism is bad science, **not religion**.
Intelligent Design says that a Designer is behind the behavior of the universe, but makes no scientific statements, and can not be falsified observationally, so it is not science: it is Religion, **not science**. For the beliver in Intelligent Design, scientific observations about the behavior and history of the Universe tell about God's nature (since, by presumption, God exists). For the non-beliver, they do not (since, by presumption, there is no God). But science can make no (firm) statement about which is true.
Religious descisions (for both the believer and the non-believer) are descisions of faith and experience. No amount of science will (or can) ever change this.