I have recently finished reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst's Trick or Treatment, two books that cover largely similar ground. Goldacre’s book is lighter and more humorous, while Singh and Ernst’s is more focussed and more specific but both go heavily into the concepts of evidence based medicine and into why there is little or no evidence that alternate therapies such as chiropracty, homeopathy or acupuncture actually work, indeed there is evidence that they may actually be harmful. (On the whole there is no evidence that they work because they don’t, but that’s not what I’m writing about here.)
Both books include sections on why clever people believe stupid things.
However I think that there is a reason that clever people believe stupid things that is missing in both cases and it’s missing because the starting point for the argument is that people treat homeopathy and so on as if they were sciences and behave accordingly. People give the same credence to nonsense such as crystal healing as they do to antibiotics. To some extent this is true but I’d argue that most of these pseudo-sciences are, to all intents and purposes, much more like religions than sciences. They are filled with strange rituals and arcane language. They are administered by initiates to the inner mysteries. Above all they are based on faith. And that’s where the authors have missed something important.
Faith is, by definition, belief without proof. People don’t buy into the myths of Acupuncture or Chinese Herbal Medicines in spite of a lack of proof, they buy into them because of a lack of proof. The more you, as a rational scientist, come along with evidence that these therapies are all mumbo jumbo and that you might as well hang iron over your doorway to keep out the evil spirits or sacrifice a goat on the third Tuesday of every month to propitiate the gods, then the more they are vindicated in their faith. You are the heathen, the unbeliever. Your views count only inasmuch as by opposing them you are confirming that their faith is the true faith.
Conversely, if there was sudden, undeniable proof that homeopathy worked, it would become mainstream. It would cease to be faith and start to be truth. People would walk away from it in droves in search of something else they can believe in without being troubled by truth or facts, without worrying about the lack of any evidence whatsoever.
This need for faith is culturally programmed into humanity. Most people feel a need to have something that they can trust in unquestioningly, blindly, absolutely. GK Chesterton is supposed to have suggested that when people cease to believe in God rather than believing nothing, they will believe anything.* That’s precisely what is happening with alternative medicine. People are searching not for medical cures for a malaise of the body but for spiritual cures for a malaise of the soul.
I agree with virtually everything in either book. But I don’t think it will do any good. Telling, showing, proving that these so-called therapies are all rubbish will convince only those who want to be convinced. The true believers won’t take any notice at all. It’s like arguing with a Jehovah’s Witness on the doorstep. They believe what they believe and no amount of evidence to contrary can possibly change that. I confidently predict that twenty years, a hundred years, a thousand years from now people will still be putting their trust in quacks and crackpots, no matter what the state of medical science is at the time.
(*According to Wikiquote, this is a misattribution and comes from Emile Cammaert’s "The Laughing Prophets" where he is talking about Chesterton. It doesn’t alter the point though.)
Both books include sections on why clever people believe stupid things.
However I think that there is a reason that clever people believe stupid things that is missing in both cases and it’s missing because the starting point for the argument is that people treat homeopathy and so on as if they were sciences and behave accordingly. People give the same credence to nonsense such as crystal healing as they do to antibiotics. To some extent this is true but I’d argue that most of these pseudo-sciences are, to all intents and purposes, much more like religions than sciences. They are filled with strange rituals and arcane language. They are administered by initiates to the inner mysteries. Above all they are based on faith. And that’s where the authors have missed something important.
Faith is, by definition, belief without proof. People don’t buy into the myths of Acupuncture or Chinese Herbal Medicines in spite of a lack of proof, they buy into them because of a lack of proof. The more you, as a rational scientist, come along with evidence that these therapies are all mumbo jumbo and that you might as well hang iron over your doorway to keep out the evil spirits or sacrifice a goat on the third Tuesday of every month to propitiate the gods, then the more they are vindicated in their faith. You are the heathen, the unbeliever. Your views count only inasmuch as by opposing them you are confirming that their faith is the true faith.
Conversely, if there was sudden, undeniable proof that homeopathy worked, it would become mainstream. It would cease to be faith and start to be truth. People would walk away from it in droves in search of something else they can believe in without being troubled by truth or facts, without worrying about the lack of any evidence whatsoever.
This need for faith is culturally programmed into humanity. Most people feel a need to have something that they can trust in unquestioningly, blindly, absolutely. GK Chesterton is supposed to have suggested that when people cease to believe in God rather than believing nothing, they will believe anything.* That’s precisely what is happening with alternative medicine. People are searching not for medical cures for a malaise of the body but for spiritual cures for a malaise of the soul.
I agree with virtually everything in either book. But I don’t think it will do any good. Telling, showing, proving that these so-called therapies are all rubbish will convince only those who want to be convinced. The true believers won’t take any notice at all. It’s like arguing with a Jehovah’s Witness on the doorstep. They believe what they believe and no amount of evidence to contrary can possibly change that. I confidently predict that twenty years, a hundred years, a thousand years from now people will still be putting their trust in quacks and crackpots, no matter what the state of medical science is at the time.
(*According to Wikiquote, this is a misattribution and comes from Emile Cammaert’s "The Laughing Prophets" where he is talking about Chesterton. It doesn’t alter the point though.)
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