The dangers of pseudoscience, the science vs pseudoscience divide.
"Demarcation problem" is the issue of what separates good science, bad science, and pseudoscience.
The pseudoscience of things like astrology and mysticism are fairly harmless, ridiculous but harmless. It is when pseudoscience starts creeping into things like the medical field that things start to get hairy.
Things like "Faith healing, Naturopathy and and Homeopathy" can have dangerous results when people believe them and they seem to be gaining more and more ground.
Naturopathy
A type of alternative medicine based on a belief in vitalism, Naturopathy has long been considered nothing more than pseudoscience and a dangerous one at that. Possibly one of the more dangerous aspects naturopaths and their "medcial following" are often against vaccinations possibly one of the best medical discoveries of our time and having been responsible for saving millions of lives. I'm not going to have a go at you if you're an anti-vaxxer but just know i think you're stupid and you will regret it if your child gets seriously ill with a preventable disease. Although anti vaccination can be dangerous to others too i wont go into that right now.
Now given, there are some natural remedies that do have some scientific evidence to back them up, in fact things like aspirin for example, are extracts of willow bark which has been known to have had beneficial effects for hundreds of years. This however can be a problem, when one thing is confirmed by medical science it can help push forward the argument that most natural treatments are healthy and it just isn't true, whether they're dangerous or not most of them are at the very least useless.
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While naturopathy may promote some useful things most of this field is widely considered pseudoscience as it has no empirical evidence to back it up. Don't get me wrong, when a naturopath recommends a healthy diet and less sugar, or meditation as stress management, there's nothing wrong with that, but we need to be diligent in determining what can be considered useful and what can or could be harmful.
Pseudoscience seems to of had a bit of a boom in recent years, or maybe i'm just following more stupid people on social media, who knows. The problem is when i see things like "healing crystals" that can stop cancer, AIDS, and whatever other incredibly dangerous diseases they claim to be able to cure. It's like faith healing, but instead of putting your faith in some weirdly dressed guy in a church who puts his hand on your face, you put your faith in some pretty shiny rocks...
The belief that this sort of thing could help cure you is fine in and of itself but when it stops people getting proper medical treatment it becomes a real issue. Maybe i shouldn't care, its less people clogging up our medical system and less of my taxes gone to waste. But then again i'm not a monster and i don't believe these people should die just because they're A. Stupid, or B. Brainwashed.
We need to be promoting real science and i wont claim to be some intellectual with a degree (though i'm sure you can tell that by my writing) But i do like to consider myself a logical person who prefers evidence to random conjecture.
I may not understand everything but i'm smart enough to look for evidence before i start basing life choices off it.
Psuedoscience is not only dangerous when it gets involved in medicine, but its detrimental to progression and costly. When people or "doctors" receive grants to study things that have no scientific bases or run programs that do nothing more than spread mis-truths, that's not just us paying for it out of tax dollars, that's us paying for it with the lack of advancement in other fields. Imagine if the funding from a UFOologist had gone to someone who discovered some new space phenomena, or someone who discovered a real cure for cancer. Imagine all of the stuff that could be possible if we hadn't put funding towards stupid shit that is nothing more than falsified evidence or anecdotal evidence.
Let's all try and be more rational and base our choices and opinions of evidence if possible. I know we will all disagree on things sometimes but when it comes to something like science lets follow the evidence and not get led astray by conspiracy's or heresay. When the evidence is there all we have to do is follow it.
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Resources
http://anthropology.msu.edu/anp364-fs15/2015/09/11/ways-in-which-pseudoscience-can-be-harmful/
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/the-dangers-of-pseudoscience/
https://www.csicop.org/si/show/why_is_pseudoscience_dangerous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_as_pseudoscience
Like the American Medical Association (AMA) testified before Congress in 1937 that the AMA knew of no danger from the medical use of cannabis. To 360° turn in the 60's and 70's that cannibis causes psychosis is highly addictive and had no medical uses. Roll on to the present day where
science is claiming cannibis is useful again. I do feel science is very conflicting somtimes depending on the narrative that governments wants you to belive.
I think it's more to do with what the government allows or puts out there, a lot of science would of had no way to get its information to the mainstream in those days but now we have the internet anyone can access the information easily so it's harder to fool us.
The boom of Internet is not helping here. Anyone can find contradictory information on anything, and for someone not used to it, it is hard to tell which one is good and which one is wrong.
yea all you need to do is start a professional looking website and throw in some intelligent sounding words and people can be convinced
Totally, unfortunately. Or an expert: a world expert on topic A is easily considered as a world expert on any topic by most people, which is of course a totally wrong thing to do... (think about the Hawking vs IA stuff).
Very interesting read, many pseudosciences are really cult-like and would be based on a belief rather than evidence. It sounds like pseudoscience is a fancy name meant to draw people interest and make it sound more legit.
Though that doesn't mean you should disprove something so fast, I would say that some things should be just tested to see there's a positive effect on an individual (and the why is not important sometimes if it does bring results).
For example, I'm pretty sure that most of the things in NLP are not proven by science but anyone could just try few of the ideas and find out that they work. While NLP approach is to find what's working for an individual without asking too much "why", you could still see stuff that is really repetitive there.
Again, not black and white :)
Some pseudosciences could have a positive effect while promoting wrong ideas.
Thank you for awesome post :)
I dunno if can ever be completely rational as an artist but i agree with everything said here. Go science. ;)
I read a cool article about this. It talkes about how people were more rational in the 50's. Now a days more people believe in Ghosts,UFO,Astrology, etc etc. I think people cant handle the truth and are looking for extraordinary, or supernatural solutions to their problems
Yea, i would say that and a mix of new media, people claiming to be experts on the internet etc luring people into their beliefs.
I disagree with your assertion that studies of pseudoscientific claims should not be funded. If plausible claims are not studied how will we know they are pseudoscience? Even improbable claims should be studied if only to put the final nail in their coffin. And then there are the rare but important hypotheses that appear to be nonsense, but turn out to be true, such as continental drift.
Thank you for this article. I find extremely important to fight against the pseudoscience, because it shapes our lives, directly or indirectly. I made the post about homeopathy and several more about bad Kickstarter science:
https://steemit.com/life/@alexs1320/homeopathy-is-the-scam-and-here-is-why
Great work!
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Whatever you want to label it, when it comes to medicine of any type you should do your own research and be aware of two main things: everything can be bad if you over do it and everyone reacts differently to different things.
I don't like to generalise, so I try to keep an open mind with all things. Just because it's natural it doesn't mean it's safe, but then just because a doctor prescribed it, it also doesn't mean it's safe. I think there is good and bad on both sides of this equation and you should always do your own research. People have a tendency to go to extremes one side or the other, but there is a middle path.
In my opinion, food and laughter is the best medicine! 😉