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Pseudoscience

I have a big problem with pseudoscience. And, apparently, I can't just let it go.

When I was a kid, I had a somewhat overactive conscience. That is, my ideas of right and wrong were absolute, inalienable, and unbreakable. My name was "Joshua," not "Josh," or "Joshy." As my parents often cite, more often than not if I had done something wrong as a kid I would rush off to my room crying, punishing myself by keeping in my room, completely unbidden to do so by my parents, who I imagine at the time were trying to stifle their laughter while I taught myself a lesson.

I was also curious, and asked too many questions, and played a lot with Legos.

Inevitably, I grew up.

Now, instead of feeling guilty and rushing off to my room to cry, I blog. As my coworkers describe, they imagine numbers, lines, angles, lists and tabular data flying past my vision as I perform tasks like trying on skis (not actually what's flying past my vision). I'm your characteristic high functioning computer programmer. And while truth has of course become a somewhat squishier notion, my conscience hasn't changed all that much, nor have my ideas of quantifiable right and wrong, or the pursuit of a better truth by way of knowledge and wisdom.

Unfortunately, this sometimes serves to my detriment, as well as those around me.

Pedantic

Replace me bringing up the tryptophan argument with:

... And you've got almost every Stairmaster-esque conversation my family members have to endure when they ask me what I've been up to since the last family get-together.

I mention these things about my personality somewhat humorously, but what I'm trying to preface my argument with is why anything less than scientific process and rational thought sticks in my craw, and why I can't let go until I have purged it from any state of acceptance, with fire if necessary. It is who I am. Ideas should be verifiably correct, or be concluded from a logical train of thought, otherwise discarded. If you believe otherwise, you subscribe to magical, fantastical, or at the very least, irrational thinking.

If you're of an analytical or combative sort, or you've learned to question everything I tell you, you could potentially be telling yourself "Josh makes irrational decisions all the time. Watch what happens when a bee flies anywhere near him." I'll grant you that. My ideals on epistemology are just that: ideals. And ideals are rarely executed in reality. It's the closest approximation to these in reality, and striving to each of those ideals that I believe in. "Oh, Josh. Reality? You spend most of your life on an arbitrary machine system that people invented to calculate bomb trajectories and distribute porn. What feeble grasp do you think you have on reality?"

My second point to the preface: question everything, and everyone, and ultimately come to only your very own conclusions.

That said. Where to start?

By pseudoscience, I guess I mean a lot of things. Most generally, I mean any system that is sophisticated enough to resemble a scientifically proven result, yet have no scientific basis. More specifically, I mean things like:

Maybe you've come across these things before. Maybe you know what they are. Maybe you've tried them. Maybe they've worked for you. Maybe they've worked for somebody else. I'm not going to argue the efficacy of any of these things. You can read the Wikipedia entries and get a better idea on how well the scientific community thinks these things work (brief summary: "they don't.")

I will, however, argue to inform. And maybe try to explain the scientific basis, or lack thereof, that these ideas are based on, or psychological phenomena which they abuse, and why they are popular, or at least, effectively marketed.

I have not read The Secret, but I have heard people discussing it, and the idea on which it is based. The idea is that through optimistic thinking, and willing the universe to submit to your needs and desires, an individual can gain control over one's life, finances, health status, and other things. An entire book and a movie has been made on the subject. In a related movie (which I did see) called "What the bleep do we know?", a similar notion is posited that due to the effects of observation in "folk" quantum physics, human will and thought can be responsible for actions in the universe at the quantum level, and even on larger scales.

The Secret (and more directly, "What the bleep...") rely on people's ignorance of popularly misunderstood phenomena. "Bleep's" is obvious: very few people in the world truly understand quantum mechanics, and I humbly count myself out of the running.

From what I understand of the theory, and its discovery, is what scientists have known about performing experiments since the invention of the scientific method: "Merely observing phenomena usually affects the outcome of the experiment." This is because random occurrences, environmental hazards, or merely the tools with which one is observing the experiment have the potential to be disruptive to the process being observed. Scientists acknowledge this, and account for it, either by providing numerous control groups, or statistically identifying significant changes to outcomes observed "in nature" versus those observed in the lab, and based on those changes, figure out what was causing the interference.

That this is happening at the quantum level is surprising. However, the uncertainty and the "collapsing of wave functions" that occurs upon observation wasn't the intent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. It's intent was to say that in observing position and moment (a physical property of orientation, mass, and velocity), you can observe one with greater accuracy, but at the cost of losing accuracy in the other measurement. Schrodinger's Cat was a thought experiment to (ridiculously) show how to think about the superposition between states (moments) when dealing with quantum particles. And most theory on quantum mechanics is based on "wave functions," that have nothing to do with waves themselves, and are instead mathematical representations/models of what scientists think is occurring at the quantum level.

"The Secret" makes no attempt at quantum theory. It instead asks you to think differently about your particular problems. Specifically, to think positively. Or, the way I see it, to think at all about the problem. If you're having financial troubles, and someone tells you to "think about it," you come back insulted. "Of course I thought about it, it's not my fault." However, if somebody tells you to "think differently" about it, and hints and fabulous secret powers, well... you might just have something there. You mean, if I write this down on a whiteboard, and everyone can see it, the universe will react? It knows? It's watching me? And I simply haven't been communicating correctly?

The universe, as a physical entity, has no reason to care about us. In the scale of all things, we are meaningless noise. Even if "mind over matter" was a significant and measurable phenomenon, the basis of it would make no sense, at the cosmic level, the quantum level, or any context in between. And a book in the self-help section is not going to prove otherwise.

I can maybe give some credence to "The Secret" and "What the bleep do we know?" for the reason that they ask people to think a little bit, maybe even garner interest in quantum mechanics. However, I can give nothing to ideas that try to sell medical pseudoscience to people who are sick.

People that are sick are people that are in pain, afraid, or at the very least, extremely frustrated. They are potentially very vulnerable, and very desperate. It's the dregs of humanity that try to target these types of people and their families as a salable market.

In this category I place things like "ionized water" (or the "ionizing filters" of said water) and hologram therapy.

Both are products that are meant to prey on a person's ignorance of chemistry, or biology. Ionized water is marketed as a "better water," by the logic that it's important that you have the right type of water in your body (with the implicit assertion that there's a "wrong type" of water).

Ionization is the process by which extra electrons are added to a molecule (that would normally not exist in a neutral, non-ionized state). Therefore, ionized water is water in which a vanishingly small portion of the water molecules have an extra ion in them. This ion is applied to the existing water molecules by the process of electrolysis. Electrolysis, in this case, is running electricity through the water. Ionized water is electrified water. Nothing more.

They claim that ionized water gets rid of "free radicals," "corrects your body's acid/alkaline balance," and "reduces the symptoms of aging." The only benefit received from ionizing filters is that you're drinking more water. Your body has intricate systems in place to maintain healthy and optimum levels of acidity. This is one of dozens, if not hundreds of interrelated bio-feedback loops maintaining homeostasis. Each are discrete chemical pathways, with multiple voluntary and involuntary chemical triggers that have quantifiable and observable effects on the human body. Ionized water has none.

The business in ionized water isn't in producing the water itself. It is selling the filters for exorbitant prices, each claiming theirs to be different, unique, or somehow intrinsically better than the competitors. That, and each filter comes with the disclaimer that the water that the filters produce is "most beneficial" immediately after the ionization process, which necessitates the need for owning a filter due to the fact that one cannot store the ionized water (for fear of losing its effectiveness). With this small and subtle property of the water, they create an entire market of useless and overpriced machines.

Someone showed me one of these the other day. It's a bracelet. With a chip. And a hologram. And it... interacts. With your body's..., wait, no, your cell's vibrations. Because they vibrate? This is an incredible example of purposeful confusion and misdirection. It, however, doesn't purport to fix anything. Disclaimers all over the site disavow all legal liability and make clear that no claim is being made that the device has any medicinal properties (but only after lengthy descriptions of their "hologram data storage" technology, a flashy marketing video, and number of smiling faces talking about what a great product/sales/opportunity this is).

It is, however, being marketed directly to athletes (to give them a competitive edge, to increase energy, etc.), or being marketed to people who are having trouble sleeping. Testimonials on the website are from retired football coaches and players, "founding master retailers," and members of the "CieAura Medical Board."

The bracelets come with the same built-in expiration date. It is recommended on the site that the bracelets be replaced every 30 to 60 days, otherwise the bracelet can no longer effectively communicate with the body's intrinsic energies. Again, necessitating the repeat purchase of a useless item.

The thing that ionized water filters and hologram bracelets have in common is that they are "multi-level marketing" schemes, or pyramid schemes. That, and they too try to misrepresent scientific terms to sell a product, in this case, misrepresenting their effects on biological processes, or making up biological processes altogether.

Which I guess bring me to palmistry, or palm / hand reading. It's in our cultural unconscious, something that most everybody has heard of or seen, but can't really speak to why. Wikipedia says it's as old as astrology or fortune telling. It's the art of reading hands, as well as people, making vague guesses at something, and constructively letting the person being read fill in the gaps.

When I was 10 or 11, a friend's mother read my palm. This lady had recently been reading up on it, as well as working on her fantasy novel. She looked at my left hand. It didn't really have anything to say. She looked at my right hand. She saw that the crease running from my wrist to the base of my thumb was broken in the middle. "Ah, you have a broken life line," she said. "That means you have a disruptive event in your future. A rift, over which you'll have to cross."

What does this mean to a fifth grader? A particularly paranoid, overly-analytical fifth grader? It means that from then on, I was watching for this particularly disruptive, rift-like event. Was it when I fell off the monkey bars and hit my head? Was it when I forgot how to whistle forwards? When I moved across town and changed schools? When I realized how you could tell when the monster was about to jump out at Scooby and Shaggy because it wasn't rendered the same as the background? When I shocked myself playing around with an electrical outlet? When I quit hockey? When I joined and subsequently hated football? When I bumped a car in the movie theater parking lot? When I discovered recently that I don't really like "The Goonies" that much?

The point is, making the statement that "something disruptive will happen in your life" is about as vague as it can get, though it still sounds specific and definitive. Another example: "You're a social person, but you like to be alone sometimes." That's the case for all of humanity, or at least, a larger enough percentage of the population that the chances of the statement not applying are very small.

Though a series of careful questions and assertions can get you pretty far, I have to imagine palm reading is more about picking your mark. You pick people who have readily apparent personality traits, or, listen to people talk for long enough to get an idea how they interact with others. As humans, we have hardware that tells us exactly the types of general information based on tone, body language, and facial expressions that one would need to make predictions on what a particular type of personality would want to hear. There are, after all, 6 billion people on the planet: some of us have to be similar, no matter what. Palmistry is manipulating this fact, the tenets of basic psychology, and people's initial astonishment at the reader's incisive guesses.

If you want to prove it to yourself, run a couple of rounds on the "20 Questions" server. It's a database of questions with weights on certainty and relevance that can usually guess something you randomly come up with by asking you less than 20 questions.

What's even more fun is if you lie to it, or, answer a question incorrectly. If it does eventually guess by way of another line of questioning, it can eerily tell you where you deviated from the norm.

This is exactly what palmists and fortune tellers do. They look at a condition on your hand, identify something that is even marginally distinguishing, and play 20 questions until they find something for you to fill in their prediction with. It might be an art, but it's certainly not a science.

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I hope in writing this that most of this seems obvious to you. I hope that the con in each situation is readily apparent. I hope that the affront to the scientific process makes you a little ill. And I hope that you're also the person stamping out the tryptophan myths at Thanksgiving. You aren't alone.

If this isn't obvious, if at some point you've bought into, or paid for the things here, then I'm sorry. I hope that you've learned something in the course of reading. Again, I would hope that you do your own research, and come to your conclusion. But if your conclusion is that any of these things are more real than professional wrestling, we will be at a disagreement.

I'm not sure why people pay attention to these things at all. People know about pyramid schemes, and people are skeptical, and people are paranoid. And yet, people get played like keys on a keyboard. My own friends and family members at times. As I think I've mentioned here somewhere before, people have a hard time believing in the unlikely, the improbable, but they tend to have no problem believing in the impossible. It's a part of human nature we can't avoid, but of which we should be cognizant.

The difference between science and pseudoscience is whether you're being sold something. Science is thousands of educated, highly intelligent individuals working to understand the universe, and they are giving away their results for free. Pseudoscience is greasy multi-level marketing schemes looking to sell you something that is worthless in hopes that they will make money off of the placebo effect.