Salt is bad for you
A lot of the previous things - like the efficacy of various herbal medicines - are not of themselves really psuedo-science. The psuedo-science (or non-science) is in the underpinning rationale as to why the herb was good. Same for chiropractic or yoga. There can be some component of what is done that turns out to be beneficial, but the underpinnings remain just as dubious. Unless chi, subluxations, or spritualism themsleves become accepted as mainstream is isn’t really true to say that any aspect of the containing dogma has become accepted. Modern science is completely agnostic to the source of an idea. You coud have a dream about a nest of snakes eating one another. What matters is that there is a falsifable hypothesis and you perform experiments to validate it.
Herbal medicine has been something of interest to western medicine for some time. A cynical, but all to true viewpoint is simply this. There are lots of potentially interesting drugs still out there in many country’s flora. Drug investigations are very expensive, and time consuming, just finding active drugs is hard, and then testing, and ethical testing, harder and even more expensive. If the local populace have spent the last few thousands of years poisoning themselves with everything they can find, you can expect that by now, they will have done a significant amount of early winnowing of the good from the bad. You can’t do human testing of early research drugs. So mining the information that these cultures have is worth doing. They will probably have a whole slew of whacky religious ideas about why the drug works, what matters is that they have done testing of it that is quite unethical and illegal in the modern world. If the drug turns out to be useful, none of this represents the mainstream acceptance of the whacky religious stuff.
Alchemy too. Alchemy had a set of clear axioms, the fact that we can can transmute elements is not a vindication of any of those axioms. No more than someone who has a surefire method of predicting lottery numbers (usually based upon the number of times a number has not come up) is vindicated when some of the predicted numbers do come up.
What about medical marijuana? Lately it seems to becoming more science based than in the past, therefore becoming more mainstream.
The biochemisty of THC has never been in dispute, nor the possibility that it may have useful phamacalogical effects. A legal system where certain chemicals are illegal despite having useful properties is a clash between the law, morals, religion and ethics. It isn’t a matter of science or medicine. Opitates would be illegal if they were not so crucial to medicine. Heroin is illegal with so sensible reason. Same for THC. There are vastly more dangerous, addictive, drugs that are legally presribed. But the moral stance is that it is better to make certain drugs illegal for anyone, even the medical profession. It isn’t ethical, but morals and ethics have always been strangers.
That’s exactly it. And yet it should still give people pause. Just because a proffered explanation is ridiculous, doesn’t meant the phenomenon it tries to explain isn’t real.
I’ll also say this: it happen rarely for things that are bleedin’ obvious true. But it happens regularly in more murky cases. It’s too bad we don’t dwell on it, or are able to come up with a list of examples when asked. If we did, it’d make us more responsible thinkers.
And this the inverse–people thinking something is true only because its explanation makes sense.
The explanation that ear coning sucks out wax is self-evidently ridiculous, and in fact most ear coning products may very well not work. But last time in a discussion of ear coning someone brought up something related he was taught regarding blowing cigarette smoke into the ears, and it made me think that it’s plausible that smoke irritates the ear canal and causes it to either produce more oil or to accelerate epithelial migration.
Francis, we can philosophize on the definition that “pseudoscience” ought to have, or does have to deeply introspective thinkers, but I think the OP is more concerned with how the term gets thrown around. How it is used. And it is not used with such care or precision.
In fact, the term pseudoscience is almost universally applied to both the claim as to the explanation. When in such cases you, Francis, start to step in and correct people about how they use the term (I’d like to hear you say “homeopathy can’t be called pseudoscience! Only its justifications may be termed as such”), then your words will start to have weight with me.
Wegener’s Theory of continental drift was wrong. Yes, his Hypothesis was correct, but he had no Mechanism. Thus it was just an inspired educated guess.
Nor was the idea original to him. However, his was the first to be backed by any kind of scientific work at all, so he does get some credit.
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In his work, Wegener presented a large amount of circumstantial evidence in support of continental drift, but he was unable to come up with a convincing mechanism. Thus, while his ideas attracted a few early supporters such as Alexander Du Toit from South Africa and Arthur Holmes in England, the hypothesis was generally met with skepticism. "*
True, but then we got a page of various questions about whether something was psuedo-science or not, with a clear unspoken divide between religious/faith based nonsense, and dubious science. I think that tends to underline that people do have an intuitive feeling that there should be a difference between psuedo-science and non-science - just that they were not able to articulate it.
Sadly, in the last few years the term psuedo-science has taken on a life of its own.
OK. Homeopathy can’t be called psuedo-science, because its ideas are even more wrong than that. Attempts to justify why scientific trials are unable to reproduce any of homeopathy’s claims are however often psuedo-science. But, for instance, dismissing double blind trials as invalid isn’t even psuedo-science - it is simply bland stupid denial.
This is the same as creationalists. Creation science isn’t psuedo-science for the most part. It is non-science. There isn’t any sort of hypothesis at all. There is revealed truth. Any attempt to dismiss these truths are met, not even with a load of handwaving claptrap, but with simple denial from first principles of the revealed truth. Invoking Satan as the agent of contradictory evidence is not psuedo-science.
The Church of the Bozon?
I’m not sure about that one. There’s another meaning of theory where it’s a non-count noun, and refers to “theory about” rather than “theory that”. Evolutionary theory is not the same as the theory of evolution. Number theory is theory about numbers. Perhaps the distinction is blurry, but I think it’s real nonetheless.
Actually, modern drug research has largely gone away from natural products for a good reason. It’s one thing to find a great drug in the wild, it’s another thing to make it in theraputic quantities to treat thousands of people. Natural product synthesis is more of an academic exercise that just happens to lead to new synthetic strategies and produces new molecular architecture and make entirely synthetic testable derivatives. I’ve no doubt exceptions exist, but a remote cultures headache cure isn’t really very useful, and it’s highly doubtful they are curing pancreatic cancer.
How about this: what are examples of things that were dismissed as pseudo-science at the time that are now accepted as science and were actually based on sound (or reasonably sound) science then?
I find it hard to believe that there are no examples. It’s not unheard of for people to dismiss things as pseudo-science that are in fact science; surely there are some examples out there that turned out to be correct.
Was Darwin wrong also due to no mechanism? (or maybe he just had a hypothesis and not a theory).
There are also the mathematical uses of the word. It really has two uses in mathematics, one as a derived truth, the other as a name for a field of study.
Number Theory, is well, the study of the mathematics of numbers - whereas the Unique Prime Factorization Theory is a proven truth of number theory.
String theory is more a mathematical field of study than a field of science, and it is not really of itself a scientific theory as such. There isn’t a simple hypothesis that is testable. There is a sort of handwavy one - that the root of all physics is describable with an as yet unfound mathematical theory that is, in some sense, a member of the field of study called string theory. But that is about it. The problem with untestability isn’t intrinsic to string theory (well it might be, but we don’t know yet) but is certainly a problem with the current state of the art.
Indeed, the problem with string theory at the moment is that, like my description of psuedo-science, string theory contains about as much information as what it is describing. The theory needs as much if not more stuff in it than our knowledge of physics.
Whaddya mean no mechanism? For the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection?
And, with plate tectonics, I have no idea why one would call Wegner’s theory “pseudo-science” or a “guess”. He had an enormous body of evidence that he theorized could be best explained by continental drift. Just because he was honest and didn’t come up with some BS mechanism for this hardly means his theory was any less valid.
Compare to some of the dominant geological theories before this (geosynclines? ephemeral land-bridges?), which were convoluted messes of speculation and theorys molded around countless “special cases”. I’d be more willing to call some of the work that was done keeping these theories alive into the 70’s “psuedo-science” than anything Wegner ever did.
I think one thing this thread established is that “pseudoscience” is one of those terms, like “child abuse,” that different people define differently, and people get prickly when someone implies that their definition isn’t the right one. Everyone agrees that it’s bad, and they agree on the broad strokes of what it is, but it’s an emotional enough issue that even the minor disagreements rankle. Also, it can be sort of brush with which to tar something that’s being done in a way you violently disagree with.
For what it’s worth, I think that my apprehension of real science (and the fervor with which I defend it-- I love science) is probably sometimes not that different from a crank’s apprehension of his favorite pseudoscience. I just appeal to a different authority, one most of us here would accept, but still, I’m taking most of, say, quantum mechanics on faith.
Finally, in answer to the OP: How about Timecube? I hear it’s really starting to go mainstream! ::d&r::
Darwin and Wegner were both right. The hypothesis does not require a mechanism, it requires that it be testable - in that it requires it be predictive enough that you can come up with a falisifiable version of the theory that can be tested. Now this gets a bit thorny, because we can’t re-run history. So we look to other parts of the theory to see if they make predictions we can check on.
Continental drift says that the continents are moving. So, in order to validate the theory we measure the modern distances over time. If it turns out that the continetnts are moving, and better, at a rate and direction consonant with Wegner’s theory, the theory is validated. If they are not, the theory has problems. No need for plate tectonics. So if the distances are measured and no movement is found one of three things can happen:
- The theory is dropped,
- Wegner says, “well clearly they were moving, but now they have stopped,”
- He says, “well the movement is too low for you to measure” .
At this point the science goes three ways. If the theory is dropped, it was good science, it failed the test and all is fine. If he assertes that the continents have now stopped, he has added new information to the theory in order to counter new evidence. It becomes psuedo-science. If he asserts that the prediction is unmeasureable, it is non-sciecne - because the hypothesis isn’t testable.
But, guess what? The continents really do move, and the movement is measureable. The theory is validated, and does not need a mechanism. In fact the problem is now shifted. The continents really are moving guys, time to work out what the hell is going on.
Darwin is harder. Quite a lot harder actually. Because we can’t see natural selection at work easiliy, we can’t guage its effect all that well. Making actually testable predictions from the theory is hard. It isn’t that the idea of natural selection isn’t clearly valid, and happens. There is a harder edge to it. That it is the dominant, if not only, mechanism at work. So quite serious effort is needed. On the other hand, it is a very simple theory, and it accounts for observations well, and there really isn’t much to counter its intelectual appeal. As to mechanism, Darwin would hardly have been unaware that traits were inheritable. Humans had been breeding animals to select better stock for millenia. That was why he had to call his theory “natural” as opposed to selection by an inteligent entity (i.e. us.) Mendel’s work was good solid science, but he didn’t have a mechanism either, but it laid the foundations for modern genetics way before genes were discovered. Indeed it laid the foundation for the need to find genes, and presented the researchers with a clear goal. Genes had to satisfy Mendel’s laws to be considered a viable theory. So far from being weak due to a lack of mechanism, Mendel’s theory drove the work to find the mechanism.
This point of view lies at the heart of pseudoscience.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” is most effectively countered by the simple statement “You ain’t got nothin’”.
Believing something because it sounds plausible to you, in the absence of any rigorous investigation, or more tellingly in the presence of ample evidence that the premise is false, falls into the realm of pseudoscience. There are also many who construct chains of plausibility based on anecdotes, isolated case reports and preliminary or badly constructed research and argue that their evidence should be accepted as proving a particular theory or justifying medical therapy. This constitutes pseudoscience.
To directly answer the OP, a good example of pseudoscience that’s “gone mainstream” is homeopathy - based on the homeopathic products I see sold in supermarkets and drug stores, and the credulous acceptance of this nonsense by a surprising number of otherwise educated people. There are a variety of loopy explanations as to why water containing a “memory” of a nonexistent compound should have a medical use, but homeopathy boils down to a minimally plausible idea, backed by anecdote and the rare “research” paper (whose findings can’t be reliably reproduced), embraced in the face of considerable counter-evidence - - - pure pseudoscience.
I can’t let the statements about chiropractic go by without noting that the pseudoscience at the heart of chiropractic (mysterious vertebral “subluxations” that can’t be detected by anyone other than chiros) has never gone mainstream because it cannot be demonstrated by scientific means and is not accepted by anyone with a good understanding of human anatomy and physiology. The practice of chiropractic has gone mainstream to the extent of its acceptance as one of several forms of hands-on therapy that can alleviate musculoskeletal pain in a subset of patients. Chiropractic is still way outside the mainstream in relation to claims by many of its practitioners that it’s good for internal medical complaints including asthma, cancer, infant colic et cetera.
No, it has also established that “pseudoscience” is often misspelled.
I agree that it’s hard to define “pseudoscience”. Like pornography, I can’t define it but I know it when I see it. I was recently in a similar discussion about “paranormal”.