Category Archives: Antiscience

Crackpottery, woo, superstition

About That New "Theory" of Yours . . .

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Outsider Science

To merit their attention, professionals say, an outsider would have to show that he’s done his homework. Serious contenders have to understand the language of physics and get their math right. Most importantly, any new theory must agree with past experiments.
[…]
Frustrated amateurs can be aggressive, clamoring to have their ideas heard. Not surprisingly, physicists are more receptive to polite questions than to lengthy treatises accompanied by angry rants, and if the science is solid, they may listen.

To this I would add, you have to make sure it’s science to begin with.

via physics and physicists

Crackpot Bingo

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It happens in science blog comments, and more so in discussion boards where you get some crank with their pet theory of some science subdiscipline, and how it’s the new paradigm ready to emerge and topple the orthodoxy. And it’s almost formulaic like a Hardy Boys mystery (or even a Robert Ludlum novel) with the same arguments cropping up in different combinations. Read several in a row and the commonalities jump out at you.

Hmmm. A finite set of arguments, appearing seemingly at random. Sounds like bingo to me!
Here are the major points, many of which are shamelessly cribbed from the crackpot index

Strawman – use of the strawman fallacy
Unbelievable — use of the argument from incredulity fallacy (I don’t understand, therefore it’s wrong)
Gedanken — use of a thought experiment to debunk a theory or actual experiment
ALLCAPS — extensive use of ALLCAPS or large font
Galileo — as in, comparing themself favorably (i.e. persecuted)
Einstein — as in, comparing themself favorably (i.e. I am the next one)
Nobel — claiming they will win one
School — listing degrees and/or schools attended
Dropout — usually a proud declaration
Many years — how long they’ve worked on their theory
Prize — offer a prize to anyone debunking their work
Terminology — new terms or acronyms
Particles — new particles proposed (Tachyons don’t count)
Interaction — a new interaction is proposed
Eponym — naming something of their work after themselves
Math — admitting to be unable to do it or doing it horribly
Theory — as in, “it’s only a theory” argument to dismiss accepted science
Metaphysics — the work explains “why” or what some phenomenon “really is”
Censorship — complaints about work being censored
Rue — “you’ll rue the day you ignored me” or similar warning
Religion — claiming science is a religion
Priest/Bible — scientists are high priests, or some work is the science bible
Gifs — animated, very pretty, meaningless
Graphs — must have unlabeled axes or be otherwise incomprehensible
See? — claiming the model explains/predicts many phenomena, but without actually presenting evidence
Huh? — befuddlement over lack of instant acceptance of new paradigm
We — the royal we; “we don’t understand X” applied to a well-understood issue
You — “You don’t understand X” directed toward an individual with significant experience in the field
Predicts — model predicts phenomena that have never been observed, but should have been
Turtles — all the way down: all of physics is due to one fundamental particle
Quotes — supports position by selective quoting
Like — argument by analogy
Topology — use of mobius strip or klein bottle in argument
Mum — won’t divulge details for fear of idea being stolen
Polly — simple repetition of claims, unchanged, after being debunked
——
Indignation — at being asked for evidence or other corroboration (added 5/11)

I’ll add more if worthy ones are suggested.

Card generator available here

The Illusion of Knowledge

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Over at Backreaction

Current illusions such as the idea that if it’s on the internet, and especially if it’s in an oft-visited location, then it must be true (argument from popularity), if it can’t be explained in a short presentation, it must be false (argument from incredulity), if it’s not on the internet then it must be false, newer information is always better, and others.

I think some of this is a remnant of the idea that if something appears in print, it must be true — print used to be instant credibility in part because print was relatively expensive. The cost aspect was especially true in the earliest days, and you wouldn’t bother to commit something to writing unless it was very important, but before mass-printing, that was often spiritual truth rather than scientific truth. But with the advent of printing, thanks to Gutenberg, more information could be shared at less cost, so knowledge was put down on paper and distributed.

But it’s still largely driven by economics, and the illusion was present even back in the day. As long as a lie is profitable, and this could mean power and control, as well as money, putting it in print has a payoff. And as the cost of print goes down, the wider the illusion spreads. Today, of course, electronic print is dirt cheap. There is almost no threshold at all to making misinformation available, and even sending it to you — hey, you’ve got spam! Every crank and their inbred cousin can have a web site that “teaches” us how relativity is a conspiracy, quantum mechanics has a connection to the mind and body, the earth is 6000 years old, etc.

One danger, to which Bee alludes, is that if you’ve been hoodwinked into thinking a solution has been achieved, you aren’t as likely to support further investigation — legitimate, scientific investigation — into the problem.

The problem is not lack of knowledge. The problem is the Illusion of Knowledge that comes with an overabundance of unstructured information. It fosters the public manifestation of unfounded believes, stalls scientific arguments, and hinders progress.

Doomed to Fail

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A while back I posted some links to anti-relativity sites and gg suggested that it would be fun to debunk the claims. Sometimes that’s fun, but often — and especially after doing it a number of times — I find that it’s tedious. An error is present, and one has to find it in a morass of often awkwardly defined and unnecessarily complicated scenarios (hey, let’s use three trains, and multiple clocks which will be juggled by a clown on each train!) set up by the author. Sometimes with some horrific ASCII “art,” to boot, though some do have fancy animated gifs.

The reason one knows that an error is present in these thought experiments is because a contradiction has been found. One might think that this is a dogmatic BESS (Because Einstein Said So) argument, but it isn’t — the issue here is that the ultimate authority, and the only authority one is allowed to quote, is absent from the problem: nature. These are thought experiments, and it all boils down to doing coordinate transformations and calculations. Special relativity consists of Lorentz transformations, which are derived from the hypothesis that the speed of light is invariant; all inertial reference frames will measure the same value. This has the admittedly strange consequence (especially to the uninitiated) of time and length not being absolute quantities, which runs counter to most peoples’ everyday experience. We think in Galilean terms which serves us reasonably well in everyday experience, and the differences presented by Lorentz transformations are not apparent to us under these conditions.

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The Strange-ness Attractor

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Female Science Professor makes an observation about random scientific inquiries made to universities

In some cases, the questions are easy and quick to answer — for example, some people call with a question about something they heard on the news. In some cases, people stop by the department (with or without calling first) and expect assistance. At least 62%* of these people are very strange. On several occasions, I have had random people call me and tell me what I should study in my research. Apparently I have been studying the wrong things. I have not yet, however, been tempted by any of these new and creative ideas, 100% of which have been bizarre.

[…]

Do some departments attract more wackos than others, or do all/most academic departments have their own special kind? Someone should study this

I know that in grad school, we had a folder of crank inquiries kept in the department’s main office, and one of my fellow students was once tasked to inspect some gizmo a random person had brought in to show one of the professors (I suspect at that point it’s better to do this than simply send the person away) because he was convinced it was an over-unity device. It wasn’t, BTW. In physics, most of the crackpots fall into three main categories: perpetual motion, anti-relativity, and anti-quantum mechanics. There are other meta-crackpots that just rail against the whole process of doing physics, claiming it’s flawed.

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Let's Teach Science in Science Class

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I agree that finding that half of polled students can’t identify that “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” is true doesn’t imply that the other half are creationists, given that other science questions also garnered less-than-spectacular results.

However, it also doesn’t mean that all of the negative response is due to insufficient science education, nor would a general improvement in science education necessarily imply an improvement in biology, et. al, if crappyscience™ is what gets adopted be school boards, or actual science education is discouraged.

Blake Stacey has an excellent post in which he has compiled a collection of incidents of educators and others being harassed and hounded by people who didn’t like the conclusions at which science arrives.

Open your mouth about evolution around the wrong people, though, and you can find yourself harassed, ejected from your job and even beaten in the street.

Just ask these people.

The recognition that our science education needs to be improved has to be tied in with admitting that things won’t get better if we don’t actually teach science in science class.

Take the Creationism Challenge

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An online colleague at my blog-host, SFN, makes the following observation:

Wouldn’t it be amusing if science groups started leading tours of the Creation Museum, lead by archeologists pointing out the flaws in their reasoning and why evolution really does answer those questions?

It would be a great response to that story out of Colorado about creationists leading tours of a natural history museum out there.

I say go for it. It would be great.

But I expect such a group would likely be EXPELLED from the museum. A normal tour (of at least, say, a dozen people), with no stealth or rambunctiousness (i.e. normal speaking voices and doing a reasonable debunking, not trying to get kicked out), touring the whole museum, even without PZ Myers hosting it. I’ll even pony up 20 bucks as a reward for the first such tour that is allowed to finish, just as incentive (such as it is) to be on one’s best behavior. Documentation shouldn’t be too difficult in this, the digital age.

Dogma as Far as the Eye Can See

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Greg Laden on the Pioneer Anomaly

I’ll be interested to see a more detailed analysis. I can easily imagine how nonuniform heat flow and different emissivities could lead to asymmetric radiation patterns, and that would cause a small force on the craft.

[N]owhere in this story do you hear people denigrating, belittling, or even expelling scientists who are suggesting that a change in the dogma may be afoot. Einstein’s gravitational theory is dogma in physics, and physicists are always questioning it. Darwinian evolution is dogma in biology and biologists are always questioning it. This crap about how we expel people who don’t blindly accept the dogma is, well, crap.

OK, so there really isn’t any dogma, I was just kidding. Though I’d have put “dogma” in quotes, and say something like “Einstein’s gravitational theory is “dogma” in physics, and yet physicists are always questioning it.” and similar for the sentence that follows. All that it takes to see that science isn’t dogma is to open your eyes and look at the data and evidence.

But we are high priests of science. That much I know.

Looking for Math in all the Wrong Places

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I ran a cross some comments over at A Quantum Diaries Survivor, in a book review, that raised my eyebrows (note that I haven’t read the book being reviewed and I’m not specifically commenting on the author in question):

However, after a first quick look, I was left wondering about the soundness of my pre-judgement. For one thing, the book contained no formulas at all. I mean none, not even a few. This did not quite fit the crackpot idea I had put together.

Which runs counter to my experience on science discussion-boards (SFN and others). Many crackpots, in my experience, want nothing to do with math. They run away as fast as they can from any suggestion that they quantify things. The ones that do show math, generally, either can’t do it, and fall prey to the simple mistakes that you find in 1+1=1 “proofs,” or their work is a mishmash of numerology.