Tracking Down Pseudoscience - Part 2

How many conversations you carry in one particular day? How much information you are being exposed to through your senses?

I would dispassionately assume the word is 'a lot', unless you're living in a cave...

Being able to sort through and filter the non-sense out of the mountains of claims and arguments that come toward you is one invaluable characteristic that you may wish to develop.

Carl Sagan, an astronomer, and Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, come to the rescue with their baloney detection kit, which contains a set of ten questions to ask oneself when presented with any claim/argument/information.

I dealt with the first question of the baloney detection kit in a previous post - [How Reliable is Your Source]. Here I'm going to go into the details of questions 2 and 3, leaving the rest of the questions for future posts in this series.

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Baloney Detection - Points 2 and 3

Questions 2 and 3 involve the frequency and verifiability of such claims coming from the source. I will be specific so you can understand better.

• Question 2: Does the source often make similar claims?

I will adopt my line of reasoning from a past post.

Pseudoscientists, quacks and even some of your friends often engage with you with deceptive intentions. They take a claim with some previous scientific support, remove it from the content and concoct their own version of the claim. You fall for it, most often than not.

Let's discuss radiation - one of my past delusions. For a while, I thought that radiation is the mother of all evil, I thought that my phone causes cancer and that my wi-fi router is killing me. Not knowing better, I injected these beliefs into my mind because I was gullible in following some famous quacks preaching about this. I will not give names; not now.

You see, research has shown that high amounts of concentrated radiation may lead to DNA damage through single and double strand breaks (SSBs and DSBs) and other DNA lesions. Think of the victims of Hiroshima or people exposed to high levels of UV, X-rays or gamma-rays.

Radiophobic quacks take this claim out of context, extrapolate it and make it appear that all types of radiation at all levels of exposure will massively impact your health, such as in 'the silent killer in your pocket' (smartphone).

There are many studies that come in support of such 'wild' claims, but most of them lack scientific rigor and more importantly, they lack replicability. You or members of the uneducated public are unfamiliar with the intricacies of good scientific conduit so you may fall for it. I did...

And this leads me to question 3...

• Question 3: Have the claims been verified by another source?

The strength and validity of an argument/theory increases when various sources fail in proving it wrong (!not right). Plus the verdict on the validity of an argument is never set in stone:

Even though you have dozens of sources having failed to prove it wrong, which makes the argument more valid, there is always the chance that it will be proven wrong. Validity is not set in stone and arguments/theories are never 100% right. They are always up to the test, which is great! Here's an example:

• Bad argument: All swans are white.

It only takes you one black swan to completely disprove/shatter this argument.

• Better argument: Most swans are white.

When you do find that black swans, your argument is still valid.

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What to do?!

• whenever being presented with a claim, resist the urge to adopt it (reinforcing herd mentality). Instead, put it to scrutiny by verifying it through various sources.
• refrain from engaging in black-white/binary thinking: either this or that - and no other way. 'Truth' is nuanced, there are innumerable shades of it.
• put things/claims into context. There are rare situations when arguments are valid in all contexts.
• beware of quacks, pseudoscientists, media, friends, who make extraordinary claims with/without deceptive intentions. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I'll leave you with an advice from Carl Sagan:

"Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours (*or because it looks nice, or because it comes from a friendly face). It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will. "
*emphasis mine

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To stay in touch with me, follow @cristi

Credits for Images: [Durova CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons] and [No Author CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons].

#psychology #science #practical

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Cristi Vlad, Self-Experimenter and Author