Science and pseudo-science
jstemwedel | May 5, 2009By email, following on the heels of my post about the Merck-commissioned, Elsevier-published fake journal Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a reader asked whether the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPandS) also counts as a fake journal.
I have the distinct impression that folks around these parts do not hold JPandS in high esteem. However, it seems like there's an important distinction between a fake journal and a bad one.
Kathleen Seidel of the Neurodiversity Weblog wrote a meticulous examination of JPandS and of the professional society, the Association of…
jstemwedel | May 2, 2009It seems that some people respond to public concern about swine flu and its spread by trying to sell you stuff. This stuff is not limited to face masks and duct tape, but includes products advertised to prevent, diagnose, or treat swine flu, but whose claims of safety and efficacy do not have a basis in evidence.
In other words, snake oil.
Now, some will take the P.T. Barnum view that separating the gullible from their money is a good living (and perhaps a good incentive for people to be smarter). The FDA, however, regards at least some snake oil peddlers as criminals -- and the agency is…
jstemwedel | April 7, 2008Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf has written a post on the relative merits of "correct" and "interesting", at least as far as science is concerned. Quoth PhysioProf:
It is essential that one's experiments be "correct" in the sense that performing the same experiment in the same way leads to the same result no matter when the experiment is performed or who performs it. In other words, the data need to be valid.
But it is not at all important that one's interpretation of the data--from the standpoint of posing a hypothesis that is consistent with the data--turns out to be correct or not. All…
jstemwedel | March 24, 2008Given that in my last post I identified myself as playing for Team Science, this seems to be as good a time as any to note that not everyone on the team agrees about every little thing. Indeed, there are some big disagreements -- but I don't think these undermine our shared commitment to scientific methodology as a really good way of understanding our world.
I'm jumping into the fray of one of the big disagreements with this repost of an essay I wrote for the dear departed WAAGNFNP blog.
There's a rumor afoot that serious scientists must abandon what, in the common parlance, is referred to…
jstemwedel | August 22, 2007A regular reader of the blog emailed me the following:
Have you ever considered setting up a section for laymen in your blog where posts related to the philosophy of science, how research is conducted, how scientists think etc. are archived? An example of what I think might be a good article to include would be your post on Marcus Ross.
Part of why I like reading your blog is because you analyze these fundamental issues in science, and I believe that this will help any laymen who stumble upon your blog for the first time quite a bit. It certainly helped me! I had to trawl through tons of…
jstemwedel | July 16, 2007In my last post, I allowed as how the questions which occupy philosophers of science might be of limited interest or practical use to the working scientist.* At least one commenter was of the opinion that this is a good reason to dismantle the whole discipline:
[T]he question becomes: what are the philosophers good for? And if they don't practice science, why should we care what they think?
And, I pretty much said in the post that scientists don't need to care about what the philosophers of science think.
Then why should anyone else?
Scientists don't need to care what historians,…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2007Prompted by my discussion of Medawar and recalling that once in the past I called him a gadfly (although obviously I meant it in the good way), Bill Hooker drops another Medawar quotation on me and asks if I'll bite:
If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem to be able to get on very well without it. Most scientists receive no tuition in scientific method, but those who have been instructed perform no better as scientists than those who have not. Of what other branch of…
jstemwedel | May 30, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science, there's a nice review by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg [1] of the literature from developmental psychology that bears on the question of why adults in the U.S. are stubbornly resistant to certain scientific ideas.
Regular readers will guess that part of my interest in this research is connected to my habit of trying to engage my kids in conversations about science. Understanding what will make those conversations productive, in both the short-term and the long-term, would be really useful. Also, I should disclose that I'm pals with Deena (and with…
jstemwedel | February 26, 2007On the post in which I resorted to flowcharts to try to unpack people's claims about the process involved in building scientific knowledge, Torbjörn Larsson raised a number of concerns:
The first problem I have was with "belief". I have seen, and forgotten, that it is used in two senses in english - for trust, and for conviction. Rather like for theory, the weaker term isn't appropriate here. I would say that theories gives us trust in repeatability of predicted observations, and that kind of trust counts as knowledge. In fact, already the trust repeated observations gives count as…
jstemwedel | February 24, 2007This is another attempt to get to the bottom of what's bugging people about the case of Marcus Ross, Ph.D. in geosciences and Young Earth Creationist. Here, I've tried to distill the main hypotheticals from my last post on the issue into flowcharts*, in the hopes that this will make it easier for folks to figure out just what they want to say about the proper way to build scientific knowledge..
First, here's the process that no one thinks is a good description of how to come to a scientific conclusion:
Believing something doesn't make it so. Science is an endeavor that is not concerned…
jstemwedel | February 22, 2007Following up on my query about what it would take for a Young Earth Creationist "to write a doctoral dissertation in geosciences that is both 'impeccable' in the scientific case it presents and intellectually honest," I'm going to say something about the place of belief in the production of scientific knowledge. Indeed, this is an issue I've dealt with before (and it's at least part of the subtext of the demarcation problem), but for some reason the Marcus Ross case is one where drawing the lines seems trickier.
First, for the sake of argument, I want to set aside all questions of Marcus…
jstemwedel | February 21, 2007By now, you may have heard (via Pharyngula, or Sandwalk, or the New York Times) about Marcus Ross, who was recently granted a Ph.D. in geosciences by the University of Rhode Island. To earn that degree, he wrote a dissertation (which his dissertation advisor described as "impeccable") about the abundance and spread of marine reptiles called mosasaurs which disappeared about 65 million years ago.
Curiously, the newly-minted Dr. Ross is open about his view that the Earth is at most 10,000 years old.
There have been interesting discussions in the comments on the linked posts about what…
jstemwedel | December 7, 2006... Page 3.14 shares the transcript. Go read what we said when Ben Cohen and I shot the cyberbreeze about Karl Popper and the allure he holds for scientists.
I can't promise it will leave you ROTFLYAO, but it might make you :-)
TTFN.
jstemwedel | December 2, 2006Revere stirs the pot (of chicken soup) to ask why alternative therapies are presumptively regarded as pseudo-science. The reflexive response of the quackbusters has been that alternative therapies fall on the wrong side of some bright line that divides what is scientific from what is not -- the line of demarcation that (scientists seem to assume) Karl Popper pointed out years ago, and that keeps the borders of science secure.
While I think a fair amount of non-science is so far from the presumptive border that we are well within our rights to just point at it and laugh, as a philosopher of…
jstemwedel | August 1, 2006It was another full day at the BCCE, starting with an excellent plenary address by Peter Atkins (who wrote my p-chem text, plus dozens of other books) and David Harpp (of the Office of Science and Society). Each of them spoke about the best ways to talk about science with people who are not scientists, science teachers, or science students. Some highlights after the jump.
Atkins, it turns out, is not just a scientist and author, but also an accomplished artist. So, it's probably not surprising that he sees the most promising route for spreading chemical understanding as a visual route. A…
jstemwedel | July 17, 2006One of the things that happens when I lay out a problem (say, the difficulties for scientists in communicating with non-scientists about scientific matters) is that my excellent commenters remind me not to stop there. They press me for a solution.
I started, in my earlier post, to gesture toward an answer to the question of how to improve communication between scientists and non-scientists:
... because non-scientists count on scientists as a source of reliable knowledge on a whole range of issues, non-scientists have a stake in improving communication with scientists. This means part of the…
jstemwedel | June 20, 2006A few days ago I pondered the ethical dimensions of breastfeeding given a recent article trumpeting its astounding benefits for infants and mothers. Those ethical considerations took as given that the claims trumpeting in the article were more or less true.
Today, I want to point you to an examination of those very claims by Rebecca Goldin (Director of Research, Statistical Assessment Service, Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences at George Mason University), Emer Smyth (Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at Univ. of Pennsylvania), and Andrea Foulkes (Assistant Professor of…
jstemwedel | June 5, 2006Hey, do you remember that oft cited Newsweek article from 1986 that proclaimed that the chances of a 40-year-old single, white, college educated woman getting married were less than her chances of getting killed in an act of terrorism? It turns out it was wrong. From a recent retraction of that article:
Twenty years later, the situation looks far brighter. Those odds-she'll-marry statistics turned out to be too pessimistic: today it appears that about 90 percent of baby-boomer men and women either have married or will marry, a ratio that's well in line with historical averages. And the days…
jstemwedel | March 30, 2006In response to my first entry on Steve Fuller's essay on Chris Mooney's book, The Republican War on Science, Bill Hooker posted this incisive comment:
Fuller seems to be suggesting that there is no good way to determine which scientists in the debate are most credible -- it all comes down to deciding who to trust.
I think this misses an important piece of how scientific disputes are actually adjudicated. In the end, what makes a side in a scientific debate credible is not a matter of institutional power or commanding personality. Rather, it comes down to methodology and evidence.
So, in other…
jstemwedel | March 29, 2006As promised, here are some more thoughts on Steve Fuller's contribution to the Crooked Timber seminar on Chris Mooney's book, The Republican War on Science. My last post on Fuller's essay took up his picture of the workings of science, where it seemed to me he was gesturing toward the influence of democratic politics as an antidote to the influence of an elite scientific oligarchy in steering the course of science. In this post, I examine Fuller's comments on democracy, science education, and the fortunes of Intelligent Design in the scientific community.
In his response to The Republican…