Spinning off … the discussion got me wondering more broadly about belief and actions based on being able to understand the cause, one that fits into your extant understanding of the world; vs based on observed evidence even when it conflicts with what you can understand about how things work?
Granting right off that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” I personally am in the evidence camp, an empiricist. I am always open to the idea that my/our current understanding is likely minimally incomplete if not wrong in some important ways. I don’t need to understand why something is to believe solid evidence that it is. Nor do I need to accept garbage hypotheses just because I don’t have a better one.
How about you? Are more likely to take an action based on how it fits with your model, or based on evidence that apparently is inconsistent with your understanding?
The model matters more
The evidence matters more
0voters
Pick the one that matters more even if is just by 0.0001%. I’m not giving space for calling it a tie.
I would like to say that the evidence matters more, and that if the evidence and my model conflict, that my model needs to change. And that’s what I picked in the poll. But realistically, I also recognize that I’m a fallible human, and that I probably don’t live up to that ideal to the degree that I ought to.
I am not a scientist. In my field (law) we can only work with the existing model or try and persuade people to change it. Sometimes people don’t agree to change the model, evidence be damned and the world can go to hell. We have to accept garbage hypotheses because our models are not necessarily evidence-based. So for me, the model comes first.
The evidence, if trustworthy, has to prevail over previous models. But that is a critical “if.” As in, the scientific model or process of verifiable and repeatable studies and all the care and caution that go with that model (which I’m not repeating here because I’d probably get it wrong). And conclusions, i.e. changes to or repudiations of previous models would be strictly limited by the scope of that evidence. I’m very conservative when it comes to new conclusions. So with those caveats, yes, evidence over previous models.
One of the things you learn studying an Engineering degree is that there are other people who know more, and are smarter than you. And that the world is made up of facts and absolute truths. So I always start with things I understand, but I’m never surprised or hurt to find that the facts don’t agree with me.
In my lifetime, medicine has been an area where the balance between facts and theories has been interesting. Most of medicine as it actually operates is “Tradional Medicine”. Medicine based on the unbroken tradition of Western medicine and science, with occasional inputs of facts into that tradition.
So we get things like the investigations into the effects of radiation from mobile phones. Negative evidence, but a plausible mechanism based on enzyme catalysis, followed by negative evidence.
Law has a separate idea of truth, based on court precedent. I’ve actually seen that argued by lawyers against doctors.
And politics has a separate idea of truth, based on voting. People put up theories like “global warming”, and people vote, and then you know.
This. Philosophically, I’m in “the evidence matters more” camp. But practically, I can be wrong about what the evidence is. Especially if somebody else is helping skew the evidence on purpose.
As came up in the thread this was split from. Like I said there in that “choose two boxes” scenario I wouldn’t trust the evidence because it looks too much like a trick, so my assumption would be there’s some kind of fraud going on.
Or for an even more obvious example; when a stage magician saws somebody in half, you really shouldn’t trust what you see.
That said, I was trying to articulate something yesterday - that it seems increasingly more difficult to find out what’s true.
Case in point, there’s been a rise in therapeutic circles of an intervention based on something called “polyvagal theory.” Is sounds vaguely scientific, but for me, it had a whif of bullshit. The problem is I couldn’t find anything anywhere that approached it with a critical lens. I asked here. Crickets. I googled. Eventually I found one YouTube video by a neuroscientist explaining that the theory flies in the face of settled neuroscience. That’s the only resource I ever found. I was also unable to find whether this theoretical approach was effective, because there are definitely cases where the theory is bullshit but the therapy works.
It really bothers me. I’m particularly bothered by uncritical acceptance of unproven therapeutic interventions, but uncritical acceptance of anything just gets on my nerves. The problem is, when made-up shit is also uncritically accepted by so-called experts, what do you do? Where do you go for the truth?
And it’s not like I’m blameless. I believe climate change is happening because scientists say it’s happening, not because I’ve ever done deep research on it. It’s a vulnerability.
But to ignore a truth just because it doesn’t fit my model is not in alignment with my values. I can say that much.
I received a lot of folksy wisdom when I was growing up, and one of the ones that stuck with me was: "Never believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see. "
And, doing some research, this is a great example.
My quick research has me concluding that the theory itself is complete bullshit.
But … biofeedback using heart rate variability does apparently have some modest evidence of efficacy as adjunctive care for depression and PTSD. So I can tentatively accept the possibility that heart rate variability biofeedback, touted as part of “polyvagal therapy” is effective even while dismissing the theory base as nonsense. The issue there is whether or not the study is strong, and if it holds up when more studies get added. Not the woo of the theory.
Where I’ve seen it used is essentially trying to get the client from a “flight” state to a resting state, essentially calming the nervous system, and I think those states (fight, flight, freeze) are pretty well established in the scientific community. So in the context of breathing exercises and mindfulness meditation I have no real problem with it, but why does it need this bullshit theory to justify what’s already established science?
There’s worse out there. One of the favored interventions right now is internal family systems and in my opinion it has the potential to be dangerous. It encourages clients to interact with their “parts,” which are not presented as symbolic, but literal distinct personalities that need healing. The claim, as I understand it, is that every person has actual distinct personalities inside them. For vulnerable people prone to deluded thinking or experiencing derealization I think it’s a very bad idea.
Then there’s Bessel Van Der Kolk.
Oh, yeah, and tapping. I’ve been asked to do it and it’s so stupid.
A few years ago my agency required me to read a book that claimed trauma was encoded in DNA and that the reason white cops abused black people is that they had generational trauma from the violence inflicted on their ancestors during medieval times.
Somebody needs to sound the alarm about how completely untethered from reality trauma interventions have become. Not that they really started on firm ground to begin with! I blame Freud for all this shit.
The version of that which I like best goes something like “Only believe half of what you see and hear. The problem is figuring out which half.”
As others have said: the model has to give way to the evidence, but the evidence needs to be investigated. And the more fundamental the model is, the stronger that investigation needs to be. And it’s necessary to also bear in mind the strength of the evidence for the model. The box problem requires you to ignore a whole lot of actual evidence that makes its situation impossible.
A few days ago I was reading about something similar. Groups of people who are genetically closer to their more primitive relatives show higher rates of clinical paranoia and also higher rates of distrusting people in general, even if it does not reach a clinical diagnosis. I have no idea if this is true or not.
Your implication that your position in the box problem is evidence based is untenable though, but that thread has run long and it’s not something I want to hash out all over again in a different thread.
No matter how damning evidence against one’s pet theories is, it’s always possible to dismiss it as being biased, bought and paid for by Giant Corporations or conjured up because “they don’t want you to know”. No proof needed - your feels tell you that it’s so.
As for mechanisms, purveyors of pseudoscience are quite good at building castle-in-the-air mechanisms to explain how their woo supposedly works. Homeopaths have quantum physics, acupuncturists have Qi (or even De-qi) and so on.
There could have been a third poll option: Testimonials and my personal beliefs matter more.
Not therapy, but I recall there being studies showing that some astrologers show a better-than-random ability to predict the future. It’s just that they are consistently also the ones who ignore how astrology is supposed to work and just predict what “feels right”; they’re just good guessers.
Most likely that’s what you are seeing. Some people crediting a bad theory for what they are accomplishing by personal intuition (or just luck).
The problem is that what we value and what we do, do not always comport. You’re likely to find a higher number of people than average on this board who favor evidence above all else, but I bet there are few of us who haven’t been accused of willful ignorance at some point. Perhaps even justifiably.
No matter how much we might favor evidence, we all have blind spots and vulnerabilities.
Probably not. We have some research that trauma can affect genetic expression. So if someone has some genetic predisposition to depression, their life experience can affect whether or not their depression genes are expressed. This is, to my admittedly untrained eye, a far cry from “trauma is encoded in our DNA.”
Trauma is not as mysterious or complicated as some people want to make it out to be. It does get interesting neuroscientifically because the brain appears to recall traumatic memory differently than traditional narrative memory. But the gold standard treatment is similar to any anxiety disorder. Exposure. Speaking of bullshit theories with interventions that work, there’s also EMDR. Ultimately they do the same thing, though. They make a threatening stimulus less threatening, either through repetition or recontextualization.
Maybe I’m oversimplifying but this is what I know so far. As I mentioned upthread, it’s very difficult these days to get at the facts.
Just for what it is worth. My therapist wife, who has her fair share of clients with trauma, and my daughter who is training for marriage and family therapy, talk about parts theory frequently. My overhearing understanding is not how you understand it, and they find it useful.
My critique is generally just that it sound mostly like repackaging of many other models in the past with different jargon.
Are you sure you’re not confusing family systems with internal family systems? The former is harmless and seems reasonable to me. I have to look into it more, but my husband’s on a tear about the latter.