Re: The "Science can't explain this" fallacy

On 7/3/06, Nadav Har'El <nyh-TS7m/[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 02, 2006, Arik Baratz wrote about "Re: [hackers-il] The "Science can't explain this" fallacy":
> > The affects of medicine are notoriously difficult to verify
> > scientifically. First, medicine affects different people differently.
> > Second, and perhaps more important, the body is a very complex
> > machine, and people's brain or mind participate what's going on.
> > That later aspect is both frustrating to scientists and hopeful to
> > people who seek healing. Frustrating, because results are more
> > difficult to replicate. Scientists have a name for it - the placebo
> > effect. The most you can say about a medicine today is that, in most
> > cases, it is more effective than a placebo. Granted, some medicines
> > are MUCH more effective than a placebo. But people can die from
> > placebo poison and can be cured by placebo antibiotics.
>
> But this was also true when cures were found to Beriberi, to Rabies and
> to Pneumonia. And still, somehow when these cures were found, it was not
> hard to prove them using the scientific process. Nobody said to Flemming
> (who discovered penecillin - and I'm saying this from memory so please
> don't shoot me if I'm wrong), that "your medicine is herbal crap, just
> mold. It's just quackery". They couldn't, seeing how it really killed
> bacteria and really saved millions of lives.

So? What's your point? Penicillin is better than placebo. So are the
other cures you mentioned.

> I find it utterly ridiculous that people accept these remedies, and continue
> to sell them, without a trivially conducted experiment. For example, take
> 100 babies and give them nothing or sugar-water (or whatever placebo you want)
> and count the number of times (or hours or whatever) they are in pain in
> a month. Then take 100 more babies, give them some of these remedies, and
> count the number of times or hours they are in pain. Is there any difference?
> If there is no noticable difference - not on avarage and not on on the
> distribution of pain across babies, then it isn't a case of "science can't
> yet explain" - it's a case of a quack wanting to take money from you for
> nothing.

So, what's the point? That no one has done that test, or that a test
has been done and not found effective? You cannot prove it nor
disprove it without such a test, and for some reason or another, this
test was not yet performed. Why is no one doing this test? This is my
point - it MAY be effective, but the scientific community is for some
reason loath to test these claims. And mind you to test it you need
considerable resources.

Conspiracy theorists will say the large corporates don't want these
things to be tested because they don't make money from unpatented
mixtures of herbs.

> There is certain value in being skeptical. The problem is that it's not
> hard to write a 10 page scientific article that ends with the conclusion
> that 1=2, and then you have to spend hours looking for what has to be
> a mistake in one of the arguments.

Oh, do be skeptical, and work to disprove what is claimed, but do the
work and don't just ignore it.

> Stephen Jay Gould (the renowned zoologist) has a book "The Mismeasure of Man"
> in which he explains how people, pretending to use scientific methods, used
> them wrongly to "prove" things like blacks being dumber than whites, women
> being inferior to men, and so on. He demonstrates in his book the errors
> they did in their use of probability, statistics, and so on. So not every
> study pretending to be scientific actually is, and when you find a study
> that contradicts your knowledge, it doesn't hurt to be skeptical before
> you throw away your existing knowledge and exchange it for what you read
> today.

That's the beauty and elegance about scientific study - it's published
and you can criticize it and recreate the experiment and publish your
results.

> > Why don't we have mood clinics as part of the conventional medicine?
> > Why don't we have belief-change workshops subscribed like we have
> > physical therapy sessions?
> Because, arguably that's something you don't need a doctor for - it's
> something you can do yourself. Similarly, eating is essential for life -
> if you don't eat, you die. And still, society knows that 99.9% of the
> people can manage that on their own, and you don't need to go to a doctor
> to feed you. Only the 0.1% who can't feed themselves (e.g., anorexic)
> will get treated by a doctor. In the same way, most people can change
> their mood on their own - they just need to decide to do so. Only a
> minority have a disease (e.g., depression) that prevents them from doing
> that, and in that case doctors do intervene.

Oh I think you got the ratios wrong, and while being a minority it's
big enough to be considered. Add to that the fact that many people
tend to become depressed when they're told they have, say, cancer. I
disagree and think that a holistic (= treating a person as a whole)
approach for treating people will give better results.

> The question is, why should they be more difficult to measure?
> Why is it difficult to take a control group, and compare it to a group
> on which you applied any sort of "healing", include "belief change workshops"?

I can't explain it rationally, except that I think scientists just shy
away from these topics, believing them in the realm of religion or
new-age or whatnot.

> > What's more, because conventional, science-based medicine rejects
> > these aspects of healing,
>
> I don't agree with this. Science also thought once that the sun revolves
> around the earth, or that bread mold is bad. When someone proved this
> to be false, scientists were surprised, but then convinced. If any sort

Well, first they tried to suppress that opinion, and then they tried
the most vocal proponent for that opinion and found him guilty and
sentenced him not to express his hypothesis (that the Earth revolves
around the Sun). Scientists can be as conservative as anyone.

> of "alternative healing" is correct, I claim that it will convince
> scientists and will no longer be viewed as alternative. If feeling good
> does cure disease, why should scientists have a hard time to accept it
> while they accept that peumonia is caused by a particle so small it can't
> be seen, that gets killed by... bread mold?

Like I've said, I don't think it's rational. I think that somewhere in
the process of becoming a scientist you learn to dislike these topics.
If you figure out why, let me know. The fact of the matter is, these
are subjects that receive much less scientific attention than bread
mold, and IMHO unjustly so.

-- Arik


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