RationalBlogs is go!

[reddragdiva]

Hey, why not add another blog to the pile. I've started an unofficial RationalWiki blog with aspirations to official blessing, provided it doesn't suck: What is going on at RationalWiki? The theme is skeptical interest (using RationalWiki as a source) and RationalWiki-related inside baseball.

CONTRIBUTORS WELCOME. Help raise the sanity waterline a little. Also, tell all your friends. Suggestions for topics also welcomed.

RationalBlogs is an idea from RW contributor (and RationalWiki Foundation board member) Nutty Roux. So far this is the first one, but it aspires to more. So far it's being paid for out of Nutty's pocket.

I'm trying to get a post a day on there to get it going, and it feels like NaNoWriMo in my pants.

To fix the shitty, shitty hyphenation in the WordPress Twenty Twelve theme, go Appearance->Edit CSS and add the code fragment from here.

Comments

[ihcoyc]

I think homeopathy gets a raw deal, myself. It was invented, of course, when the germ theory of disease was unknown, and the concept of a chemical element was in its infancy. But it had recently been discovered that dosing people with weak versions of smallpox prevented the full blown disease.

Given the state of the art, an attempt to generalize this principle was hardly irrational. It may be a pseudoscience now. It once was a reasonable hypothesis.

[reddragdiva]

Yes, Samuel Hahnemann giving people water was better than the state of medicine at the time. But we have rather better stuff now, and I think it's ludicrous to say homeopathy gets anything like enough of a raw deal in the twenty-first century. Science and technology actually do progress.

[ihcoyc]

Yes, of course, but....

... Even if we grant that homeopathy as practiced today is simple fraud, that isn't the point. I think we do science no favors by labelling falsified but plausible hypotheses as 'pseudoscience'. I think that Hahnemann's idea made enough sense to try given the state of the art when it was proposed.

Of course, it was the medical men who clung to astrology the longest. I can't diagnose this, I have no remedy for that, but the patient is in pain and wants something, and these old books tell me to look to the stars. Take the horoscope of the next time the patient pisses. If the patient wanted an explanation of the treatment, at least we'll be able to come up with something sufficiently unintelligible.

[reddragdiva]

"I think we do science no favors by labelling falsified but plausible hypotheses as 'pseudoscience'."

I think you're wrong there; the theory is advocated in the present day by a process of pseudoscience - something that pretends to be science but is nonsense - and that it was once a plausible hypothesis does not somehow make this not pseudoscience.

In this model "pseudoscience" is closer to a statement about the mind of the advocate. I've just read Worlds Of Their Own: A Brief History of Misguided Ideas: Creationism, Flat-Earthism, Energy Scams and the Velikovsky Affair, which has a chapter setting out the pseudoscientific method in detail (which I really need to write up for RW).

I think that if you come up with something where the last line says "in the present day, homeopathy cannot reasonably be described as pseudoscience", you've hit a reductio ad absurdum.

[reddragdiva]

I was struck reading Mencken to see him talk about how they'd only had medicine that was any good in the past fifty years. That was as at 1930, which I mentally filed as "modern times". Doctors are not scientists (except of course when they are).

[ihcoyc]

I suppose my problem with the label is that it strikes me as an instance of Whiggish historiography, written from the winner's perspective, with opponents castigated as obscurantists and villains; the sort of thing you get all the time in popular science historical writing, from de Kruif's Microbe Hunters to polemics like White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.

The people who proposed such things as phlogiston theory or expressed doubts about the germ theory of disease were not idiots standing in the way of progress. They were scientific colleagues. They were not acting any more irrationally than humans habitually do. They asked questions that needed to be answered.

Similarly, Hahnemann's hypothesis was at least worth a try given the state of the art at the time; he was simply trying to extend the vaccination principle. The reasons why it wouldn't work weren't accepted until decades after his death. The treatments he devised gained a following because they were as likely to work as anything the conventional medicine of the time had going. When homeopathy was proposed, it was not pseudoscience; it was simply wrong. And science isn't science unless it's given leave to be wrong from time to time; that it will indeed be wrong is a necessary part of the scientific method.

[reddragdiva]

Yes, but saying now that it's pseudoscience is entirely accurate - you haven't shown otherwise at all. Pursuing a long-discredited theory is a far from infrequent mode of pseudoscience, particularly in the alternative medicine field, where argument from tradition is frequently considered to override the minor detail of it not actually working.

[ihcoyc]

I will admit that, too. Then again, I learned all the physics I need from C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image.

On the other hand, human minds were not made for scientific reasoning; they were made for social reasoning. One of the things this all but guarantees is that any idea that gains a following will continue to have one well after its expiration date. And if the people who stood on the losing side of scientific debates were bad people, this is mostly why as well. Phlogiston had damned well better be right; it got me tenure.

Progress won't come until we allow ourselves to be wrong and are willing to change our minds when we are. And, because the human mind is made for social and not scientific reasoning, that's something we won't do consistently and shouldn't be expected of anyone. I'm too forgiving of human weakness to label historical ideas with a present-day judgment that suggests deliberate deception or bad faith.

[reddragdiva]

I'd question that when people label homeopathy as "pseudoscience", they're talking specifically about the historical idea; I think they generally mean the present-day manifestation.

I'd approximately place the judgemental line between foolishness and malice when they ask for money. But even sincere, foolish homeopathy turns out to actually be a danger in practice.

The meta-problem is that distinguishing between being unkind to ideas and to the people holding them is hard for human brains, and skeptics are bad at it too.

[arkady]

If people persist in pushing discredited and false ideas even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are in the wrong, then yes - it will be branded as pseudoscience, because that's what it is. And homeopathy foremost of all.