The follow-up to yesterday’s post.

I’ll admit it: I sometimes get frustrated when I hear people dis science. I feel like people who dis science don’t get how hard scientists work, how careful they are, how passionately they value the truth — even more than they value being right. (And like most people, they value being right a lot.) And I feel like people who dis science don’t appreciate the unbelievably vast degree to which it’s improved our lives, from polio vaccines to clean drinking water, from AIDS drugs to iPods.

But I also get it. Dealing with science as a layperson can be frustrating. You have to have a lot of trust in people who are talking a gobbledygook lingo that you don’t understand, about concepts that are often baffling at best and wildly counter-intuitive at worst. And while both experimental methods and results are theoretically transparent and available to anyone for review, the chances that a layperson will be able to make heads or tails of some paper on low-resolution structures of thyroid hormone receptor dimers and tetramers in solution are, shall we say, slim.

So I want to talk here about some of the reasons science gets a bad rap — and why I think that bad rap is much less deserved than many people think.

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“Frontier” science and the news media. Most of the scientific research that most of us read or hear about in the news is what’s called “frontier science” — new research, new theories, new results. And pretty much by definition, frontier science isn’t very solid. Frontier science is one study, one person’s theory, one surprising set of results. It’s important, but it hasn’t yet gone through the whole process of replicating and review to see if it holds up. Some of it pans out — a lot of it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, people’s reaction is to say, “See? Scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.”

You see this a lot in the science of nutrition. Because it’s a subject of tremendous personal importance to most people, new/frontier nutrition science gets a HUGE amount of news coverage. But because what’s being reported on is frontier science, the new research frequently gets discarded or discredited. And so people’s reaction to new discoveries in nutrition is often to say, “God, every week it’s some new damn theory — how the hell am I supposed to decide what to eat?”

The problem, of course, is that while frontier science isn’t solid science, it makes for excellent news. No news agency in the world is going to run with the headline “Scientific Consensus Finally Reached After Years of Careful Replication and Peer Review.” (Unless it’s about global warming — then sometimes they will.) It reads like something you’d see in the Onion. And no news agency in the world is going to run the headline, “No, Really, We Keep Telling You — More Fruits and Vegetables, More Whole Grains, Less Junk Food, And A Whole Lot More Exercise.” It doesn’t sell ad space.

Anyway, this problem doesn’t contradict the central assertion — that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.

Medical science. Medicine is almost certainly the branch of science that most people have the most immediate personal experience with. And medical science can be extremely frustrating. The excruciatingly long, uncertain in the short term, “there’s way too much information that we just don’t have yet” nature of scientific research… that can be unbearable when you’re trying to get treatment for your cancer or your depression or your bad knee. And I think it leads a lot of people to think that doctors and scientists don’t know anything. It’s not very fair — science is science, and it’s slow and stuttering whether you’re researching gamma rays or HIV. But it’s awfully damn hard to wait fifty years for the research to play out when you’re in unalleviated pain, or you’ve only got one year left.

But as painful as this problem is, it doesn’t contradict the central assertion — that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.

The devaluing of the intellect in our society. Modern American culture is, to put it mildly, not one that values reason, intellect, or education. (To the great detriment of our school system, I might point out.) We’re a culture that sees intelligent, educated people as smarty-pants know-it-alls who think they’re better than the rest of us.

This is a problem for a lot of reasons. I could write a whole post about it, and at some point I might. But one of the biggest reasons is political. When we don’t value reason or evidence, we play right into the hands of leaders who know how to manipulate us by pulling our emotional strings; leaders who get us to trust our gut — i.e., our fears and prejudices — rather than the evidence.

And we still have the central assertion on the table — that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.

Crappy science education. This, I think, is directly related to the previous bit about the devaluing of the intellect. Science education in our schools often seriously sucks. And I’m not even talking about the whole creationism/ evolution controversy; go read Evolutionblog if you don’t know enough about that, and how badly it fucks up our schools.

I got extraordinarily lucky. I got an elementary and high school education that didn’t just teach scientific facts and theories, but that taught — as early as third grade — the scientific method. (Really. In third grade science class, we had these weird little comics explaining, among other things, the difference between observation and inference.) Most kids don’t get that. And the grown-up news media doesn’t do a very good job of explaining it (see “Frontier science and the news media” above). So most adults don’t understand that much about it. (Oh, and for the record: I don’t think this is the fault of science teachers. I think most of them are great and do the best they can with what they have. I think it’s mostly to do with politics: lousy funding, and No Child Left Behind, and pressure from anti-science parents’ groups, and the like.)

And we still have the central assertion on the table — that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.

Limited resources. The complaint Layne made — about how no scientist is going to use their Magnetic Resonance Imagery equipment to examine the theory of interpsychic sexuality — is a very common one. People especially make this complaint about alternative medicine — that scientists dismiss it for not having been tested carefully, but then refuse to devote their resources to doing that testing.

And there’s some truth to that.

The problem is resources. Had they but world enough and time, I’m sure the researchers at Stanford would be delighted to use their MRI equipment for studies on telepathy in SM sex. (If for no other reason, it would be a whole lot more entertaining for the research staff than whatever they’re working on now.) But science is both ungodly time-consuming and ungodly expensive, and researchers aren’t going to put their very limited time and budget into avenues of research they think are unlikely to bear fruit. And the reality is that every single serious, careful study that’s been done on other forms of telepathy has failed to find any evidence of it.

So when there are a hundred scientists in line to use the MRI equipment and the only slot you could get was on Labor Day between two and four a.m., you’re not going to spend it testing sadomasochistic telepathy. You’re going to spend it testing your theory about calcium supplements and bone density, or brain damage in alcoholics. (And even if you do want to spend your time and budget testing sadomasochistic telepathy, the people whose job it is to allocate time slots on the equipment aren’t likely to do it — for exactly the same reason.)

To believers in paranormal phenomena, that can seem really unfair. But here’s the thing we have to remember. In the early days of modern science, metaphysical theories were considered a lot more credible, and they got a fair amount of serious scientific attention. But when they were seriously tested, those theories fell apart — and the more the scientific method improved, the harder they fell. It isn’t that scientists are unwilling to do the research because they don’t believe the theory. It’s the exact opposite — they’re unwilling to seriously consider the theory because the research doesn’t support it, and never has.

Anyway, that’s what CSI (the Center for Skeptical Inquiry, formerly CSICOP) is for. That’s what they do. They take claims of paranormal or spiritual phenomena, and subject them to the same careful scrutiny and controlled experimental protocols that physical phenomena get subjected to. (They do non-paranormal research and analysis as well, on subjects ranging from magnet therapy to sex predator panic, and from the Kennedy assassination to Bigfoot.)

And as unfair as it may seem, this problem still doesn’t contradict the central assertion — that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.

Scientists can’t think outside the box. Again, this is one of the most common complaints leveled against scientists by believers in the spiritual, paranormal, and/or woo. It’s related to the argument above: people argue that scientists won’t even consider a theory of, say, telepathy or reincarnation, since it’s outside their narrow beliefs and expectations about the world. And of course, there’s some truth to this. Scientists are human, and like most people they have a difficult time thinking outside the box of their beliefs and expectations.

But it’s also true that in science, revolutionary thinking is highly prized. Possibly even too much. In fact, it’s a complaint I’m beginning to hear a lot of: every goddamn researcher wants to be Galileo or Darwin or Einstein. Nobody wants to be the reliable workhorse who clarifies a fine point of the existing theory. Everyone wants to be the world-famous breakthrough person who changes the paradigm.

And while this trait can be annoying, it also goes a long way towards counteracting the “inability to think outside the box” problem.

Ingrid once gave me a great example of this. She was watching a TV show where the guest was a woman who claimed to be from the planet Venus, who claimed that there were domed cities on Venus and she still had relatives there. The show also had an astronomer on, who asked this woman, “Okay, can you show me where on Venus I can find these domed cities?” The woman hemmed and hawed and said, “Oh, there’s no point, you won’t believe me, you scientists don’t want to believe this.” And the astronomer replied, “Are you kidding? I would LOVE to be able to prove that there are domed cities on Venus! If I could prove that, I’d be the most famous astronomer since Galileo!”

And that’s true of all this other stuff we’ve been talking about. If a scientist could prove — really prove, with hard, carefully-gathered, carefully controlled, replicable evidence — that there was life after death, or metaphysical telepathic communication, or an animating force infusing all living things, or any of this stuff we’ve been talking about — it would be an ENORMOUS contribution to science. They’d be more famous than Freud and Oliver Sacks combined. They’d probably become the most famous scientist in history.

In any case, this problem still doesn’t contradict the central assertion — that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.

Science keeps changing — so how can we trust it? One of the problems is that people who distrust or dismiss science often say things like Layne did, that “history is also littered with disproved and discredited science” — and that this somehow discredits science.

But people who value science don’t see this as a sign of science’s failure. On the contrary — we see it as a sign of its success, of science working exactly the way it’s supposed to. When enough evidence comes along that contradicts a theory, that theory gets discarded and replaced by a better one. A theory is only as good as the most recent results.

Now, obviously, there’s a limit to this “most recent result” thing. As a science professor of mine once pointed out, if one of his students got a result that the density of helium and the density of lead were identical, that professor would not be rushing off to publish the results in “Science.” He would, instead, be checking to see whether that student had turned on their scale.

That’s where the whole “extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence” thing comes in. If a theory has stood up for decades or centuries, if it’s explained all the evidence so far and done a good job of predicting new evidence, then one anomalous result won’t be enough to make everyone question the theory. And it shouldn’t. Anomalous results happen too often — and they too often turn out to be explainable by something in the “they forgot to turn on their scale” department. A really solid theory that’s held up for a long time needs a metric shitload of evidence for it to be discarded and replaced.

And here’s the thing: Of course it’s true that scientific theories have been discarded and replaced. But they’ve consistently been replaced with other scientific theories, other naturalistic explanations of the world. This is the point I was making in The Unexplained, The Unproven, and The Unlikely — not that naturalistic theories never get replaced, but that they never get replaced by supernatural ones. (Not ones that are supported by mountains carefully collected, carefully controlled, peer-reviewed, replicated, etc. evidence, anyway.)

Anyway, this problem still doesn’t contradict the central assertion — that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.

Science has resulted in bad things. From tasteless agribusiness food to the atom bomb, from racist intelligence testing to gays and sadomasochists being diagnosed as insane, from thalidomide to eugenics to the Tuskegee syphilis study, history is full of terrible, harmful results of science. (And I haven’t even mentioned Cool Ranch Doritos…) In many of these cases the science was bad science, and eventually got corrected — not just the results, but the scientific method itself. But it sucks deeply when the slow, self-correcting process of the scientific method is being corrected on your back. And in some of these cases the science wasn’t bad. It was flawless. It was just applied in a profoundly unethical way.

I’m not going to pretend that this stuff isn’t real. I don’t think it’s fair to praise the benefits we’ve gained from science — and they are legion, from vaccines to clean drinking water to HIV medicine to the Interweb — and not acknowledge the curses it’s handed us.

All I can say is this: It’s not like human beings need science to do terrible, stupid things to each other. And it’s not like the religious/ spiritual impulses of humanity haven’t led to horrors as well. For every atom bomb and toxic farm and electroshocked homosexual you can show me, I can show you a religious war, a witch-burning, a piece of knowledge being violently suppressed, a fraudulent psychic preying on the hopes and fears of the gullible, a child getting beaten up for being Catholic or Jewish or Muslim.

And unlike the scientific method, religious or spiritual beliefs often don’t have a built-in self-correcting mechanism. Quite the contrary. Any religious or spiritual belief that’s based on the idea that faith/ feeling/ doctrine/ intuition trumps evidence (and many of them are) has the exact opposite — a built-in self-perpetuating mechanism.

Anyway, as troubling as this problem is, it still doesn’t contradict the central assertion — that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.

Scientists are arrogant.

Well — yeah.

Some of them are, for sure, what with them being human and all. And it could easily be a disproportionate amount. I don’t know if there’s ever been a double-blind, peer-reviewed, replicated study comparing the arrogance of people in different careers — but if there were, it wouldn’t surprise me to see scientists on the high end of the list. (Especially if you include doctors.) Science is not a field for fragile egos — it’s a field where you’re constantly having to defend your ideas, and the discourse is not always polite.

But even if scientists are, on the whole, more arrogant than average (and I’m not totally convinced that they are — arrogance is a pretty common human trait)… I’m not quite sure how to say this, but it’s a different kind of arrogance. There is nothing in the world like the arrogance and smugness of someone who has been vigorously trained to admit when they’re wrong — whose entire life’s work and professional community are based on the principle that people have to admit when they’re wrong or else the whole thing goes kaflooey — and who knows they’re capable of doing it, and has almost certainly done it dozens or even hundreds of times in their career. (There was just an episode of The Office about this, when Michael says, “It takes a big man to admit his mistake — and I am that big man.”) As smug and self-righteous as people can be when they’re loudly insisting that they’re right, it does not even come close to the smug self-righteousness of people who are loudly pointing out that they’re big enough to admit their mistakes.

And while that kind of arrogance can be extremely annoying personally, it’s not the kind of arrogance that gets in the way of the truth.

Ingrid was actually just talking about this. Ingrid is a nurse practitioner in the field of HIV and AIDS, and she goes to conferences where researchers report the results of their studies. And she says that people report surprising results ALL THE TIME. She says it’s a world full of enormous egos… and yet, people are CONSTANTLY reporting that, “We went into this study completely expecting A to happen, but much to our surprise, B happened instead.” (I keep saying this, but it bears repeating: You can have all the expectations in the world, but if your research protocols are good, the outcome is going to be the outcome no matter what you expected.)

And, she points out, nobody stands around them pointing and laughing and saying, “Ha ha, you thought A was right, you stupid twit, boy were you wrong.” There is hearty and fierce debate in the scientific world… but there’s also a basic understanding that having your hypotheses proven wrong is an essential part of how the process works.

Besides  you know, it’s not like there aren’t arrogant jerks in religion and spirituality. From Ted Haggard to Deepak Chopra, the world is full of arrogant spiritual leaders. Not just the leaders, either: ordinary spiritual believers can be every bit as condescending about their world view as scientists. And much of the time, they’re NOT in a field that’s founded on the principle that a theory is only as good as the last piece of evidence supporting it. Quite the opposite. (See Science has resulted in bad things above.)

This is the big difference, the thing I keep coming back to. Scientists may be arrogant — but they can back up their arrogant opinions with carefully gathered, rigorously examined, replicable evidence. (And if they’re wrong, they’ll get some equally arrogant scientist smacking them across the head and telling them so.) Spiritual believers are much more likely to back up their beliefs with, “Well, that’s just how I feel,” or, “I know it in my heart,” or, “That’s what the Bible/ Torah/ Koran/ whatever tells me,” or, “It’s just intuitively obvious.” And they’re more likely to think that this somehow ends the conversation — that their intuition and/or doctrine and/or personal experience is good enough evidence, by itself, to base their beliefs on. While there are certainly exceptions (the Quakers are a good counter-example, as they so often are), many religious and spiritual beliefs have, at their very foundation, the idea that faith is more important than reason or evidence. (Again, see Science has resulted in bad things above.)

And this problem still doesn’t contradict the central assertion — that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.

Science is limited – there are certain kinds of questions it simply can’t answer. Is the scientific method limited? You betcha. There are huge, important questions about life and human experience — what kind of art we like, what kind of sex we like, where we decide to live, what career we pursue, who we fall in love with — that are fundamentally subjective, that are about how we experience the world and not how the world is, and that are to a great extent best understood by introspection and emotion. (Although I sure do know a lot of people who would seriously benefit from applying a little more reason and evidence in their romantic and sex lives…)

And of course, in everyday life, we have to make quick decisions about the world without subjecting them to years of careful research and replicability and peer review. Whether to pet the dog or stay three feet away from it, whether we have time to make that left turn before the light turns red, whether someone we pass on the street might be a threat… all these evaluations and thousands more have to be made fast, with limited evidence and our gut feeling. (Although again, I think a little more reason and evidence could help improve these decisions for a lot of people. It could go a long way towards minimizing the “clutching your purse when a black man passes you on the street” phenomenon, just for example…)

But when you’re arguing — for instance — that the soul is a real metaphysical entity that survives death, or that prayer can help treat illness, or that people can communicate telepathically… that’s a completely different ball game. Those are claims, not about our personal subjective experience, but about the objective world. And those are exactly the kinds of claims that the scientific method is suited to investigate.

And once more, this problem still doesn’t contradict the central assertion — that the scientific method is the best method we have for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it.

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Finally: Even if, after all this, you remain dubious about science and the scientific method — how does that dubiosity support a claim of the paranormal? Even if someone could convince me that the scientific method was hopelessly flawed, how would that support a claim that paranormal phenomena are real? Even if someone convinced me that scientists are far too subjective and attached to their opinions to be able to observe the world accurately, why would that show that paranormal claimants are less subjective, less attached to their opinions? Even if someone convinced me not to trust CSICOP, why would that convince me that I should trust Deepak Chopra? (Or whoever.)

In other words: If you’re not going to rely on some sort of methodical system for evaluating what is and isn’t true — apart from “It just seems right,” which we know to be among the worst arguments in history — then on what basis are you trying to convince me (or yourself) that your beliefs are right?

There’s something Richard Dawkins says about this. It’s his response to the saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” His response: “There are no cultural relativists at 30,000 feet.” If you’re in an airplane, he says, and it stays in the air, it’s because a whole bunch of scientists got their sums right.

And this is one of the things that bugs me most about the “What has science ever done for me?” argument. Science is why you can fly to London. Science is why you don’t have to be afraid of getting smallpox or polio. Science is why we understand that our planet is not the center of the universe, and that our species is not the center of the planet. Science is why you can go off about how science can’t be trusted… on the Internet. Science is why you have friends with AIDS with a life expectancy of more than six months. The reason for all of this is because of scientists who used the scientific method, instead of their gut, to make sure that their orbit calculations and polio vaccines really worked.

Remember what I was saying earlier about the devaluing of the intellect in our society and the political consequences of it? One of the most crucial examples: Science is why we know global warming is happening. And the mistrust and scorn of science and scientists is a huge part of why we’re not doing enough about it. It’s not the motivation for the denial — the motivation is greed and inertia, mostly — but it sure gives a handy excuse. “Oh, those scientists, they don’t even all agree, and what do they know anyway?”

Scientists aren’t perfect. But they work really hard doing something really important, something fundamental to what makes us human — trying to understand who we are, and what the world around us is, and what our place is in that world. They make mistakes, whammys sometimes. But in the long run those mistakes tend to get filtered out — and in the meantime, they’ve contributed not only practical assistance to our daily lives, but insight into who we are. And their method really is the best one we know of for minimizing human error and bias in observing the world and trying to explain it. I certainly haven’t seen or heard of one that’s better. We should, of course, view scientists with as much skepticism as they view one another. But I strongly believe that, on the whole, they deserve our respect and trust.

I talk about science a lot in this blog. I am passionate about science, especially for someone who’s only studied it as a humanities major and an educated layperson. Scientists are my heroes — most obviously scientists like Galileo or Darwin, who’ve forced people to radically rethink the universe and our place in it, but also Joe and Jane Nerdiac slogging away in a lab or a swamp, trying to figure out some minute detail about the world with more patience and diligence than I could ever muster up.

And periodically, both in this blog and elsewhere, I run into people who try to convince me that my faith in science is misplaced. I hear/read people say things like, “Scientists are human, therefore science is flawed… therefore science is not to be trusted, and/or can’t really tell us anything useful about the world.”

The thing is? The first part of that is absolutely true. Science isn’t perfect. It’s a human endeavor, and it’s therefore fraught with imperfection. It’s shaped by bias, and arrogance, and the intense desire to be right, and the ability to be fooled, and the difficulty people have in seeing or imagining what they don’t expect.

I’ve never met, or read, a scientist who thought otherwise.

Which is exactly why the scientific method has developed the way it has.

People talk a lot about science as if it were a set of beliefs — like a religion, a body of theories and opinions about how things are. But while there’s some truth to this on a practical day-to-day basis, it really isn’t the big picture, or even the medium-sized picture. What science is, ultimately, is a method — a method for observing the world, and trying to explain it.

And here’s the thing about the scientific method: It’s been developed over the years to do one very specific thing — to minimize the effects of human error and bias, as much as is humanly possible.

See, scientists KNOW that they, like the rest of the human race, are arrogant, stubborn bastards who crave recognition and have axes to grind. Believe me: when you point out that many scientists are arrogant, you’ll get a dozen or more scientists laughing and saying, “Buddy, you don’t know the half of it.” And they have therefore developed this method for trying to figure out what is and isn’t real about the world — one which goes as far as we know how to minimize the effects of that arrogance and stubbornness and the rest of it.

It doesn’t do it perfectly. And it takes time, not to mention extremely hard, often tedious work. But I would argue that it does this job better than any other method we have of gathering information about the world and coming up with theories to explain it.

So I want to talk a little about the scientific method — what exactly it is, and how it works, and why it’s done the way it’s done. (FYI, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive summary of the scientific method — just a quickie tour of the features that I think are most pertinent to these conversations.)

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Transparency, of both results and methodology. When scientists publish papers, they don’t just report the results of experiments. They also report — in mind-numbingly boring detail — exactly how those experiments were done.

They do this for two reasons. They do it so other people can repeat the experiment and see if they get the same results (see Replicability below). And they do it so other people can examine and analyze their methodology, and point out any problems there might be with it. Scientists know that outside observers can often spot mistakes that an insider can’t — especially when that insider has been working on their research for years, and has a certain rabid attachment to the outcome.

Replicating results. One of the first things that happens when a scientist reports a surprising result is that a hundred other scientists run to their labs to repeat the experiment and see if they get the same result. So even if one scientist gets a particular result because they expected or wanted it and somehow skewed their experiment to make it happen… when the hundred other scientists repeat the experiment and try to replicate the results, it’s not going to come out the same. (BTW, this doesn’t just work to screen out bias — it also works to screen out fraud.)

Peer review. Again, scientists know that outside observers can often spot mistakes that an insider can’t, either because that insider cares too passionately about the outcome, or because they’re simply too close to the work to have perspective on it. So before it’s even published, research has to be reviewed by other scientists in the field — scientists who don’t have the same personal stake in the outcome as the researcher, and some of whom may even have opposing or competing stakes.

Careful control groups. As much as is humanly possible, scientists set up control groups for their experiments that are identical in every way to the testing group except in the area being tested. (And if they don’t do a good job with this, it’s likely to get caught in the peer review process — and even more likely to get caught in the attempts to replicate the research.) It’s impossible to do this perfectly — especially when you’re doing your testing on human beings and not, say, hydrogen atoms — but they do it as well as they can, and they run it by their peers to see if they missed anything (see Peer Review above). They do this because they know, from experience and history, that a hundred different variables can affect the outcome of an experiment — and a variable that you thought was trivial could turn out to be crucial.

I learned about a wonderful example of the importance of careful controls when I was in middle-school science class. We were learning about the polio vaccine, and our teacher explained that when the vaccine was first being tested, the researchers went to the schools and asked parents for permission to test this experimental vaccine on their kids. Some parents said yes, some said no… so the researchers said, “Great. We’ll test the vaccine on the kids whose parents said Yes, and the ones whose parents said No will be our control group.” But when they went to publish their results, they were told that the experiment was flawed and they had to repeat it. There was an important difference between their control group and their testing group, one that hadn’t occurred to them — namely, whether the parents had said Yes or No to the experiment. So they repeated the study, this time splitting the kids whose parents said Yes into a testing group and a control group.

And when they compared their results to the results of the original experiment, they found that, in fact, kids whose parents had refused the experiment WERE more likely to get polio than kids whose parents allowed it. Regardless of whether they’d gotten the vaccine or not. They would never in a hundred years have expected that outcome — but that’s the outcome they got. And they got it — as well as an accurate answer to the rather more important question of whether the polio vaccine worked — because of the combination of peer review and careful use of controls. (I don’t have space here to go into why they think this outcome happened — if you’re curious, ask me in the comments.)

Double-blind and placebo-controlled testing. Scientists know — especially when it comes to doing tests on people, such as medical or psychological research — that unconscious biases of the testers can influence the results of the tests. (You jiggle the test tubes of your experimental group just a little harder than your control group, and your results are fucked.) And when it comes to medical testing, scientists know about the placebo effect. So as much as possible, experiments are carefully set up so that even the researchers don’t know, for instance, which batch of blood samples came from the group that got the drug, and which batch came from the group that got the placebo — until the testing is all completed.

Falsifiability. This is one of the most important principles of science. If you have a theory that can’t be disproven — if any evidence at all can be made to fit into your theory — then you don’t have a useful theory. It has no predictive power, no explanatory power. So when you offer a theory, you have to be willing to say, “If A, B, or C happens, that would support my theory; if X, Y, or Z happens, that would contradict it.”

This is one of the reasons so many science-lovers and skeptics get so frustrated with so many religious or spiritual beliefs (not all of those beliefs, but many). Anything at all that could ever happen can get twisted around somehow to fit into the belief system. And from a scientific method point of view, that makes the belief system useless.

Which is what I was trying to get at before (somewhat clumsily) in my Lattice of Coincidence post, when I was asking, “If paranormal phenomena were ‘shy’ (i.e., inconsistent and unpredictable and tending to disappear when tested) but real, how would that information be useful?” If you have a theory about the paranormal or metaphysical (or about anything else), and no possible result or evidence — or lack thereof — could contradict that theory or convince you that it’s wrong… then it’s not a useful theory. It has no power to explain past results or predict future ones. And that’s not just a practical problem. It’s a philosophical problem, and a big one. If you have no way of knowing whether you’re wrong, then you have no way of knowing whether you’re right.

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Does this system sometimes screw up? Fuck, yeah. Especially in the short run. Early results can seem promising but don’t pan out. Surprising new evidence gets explained by boatloads of new theories that turn out to be ca-ca. And I’m sure everyone can probably think of (or Google) many, many examples of times when scientists have taken one or more of the abovementioned principles and massively screwed it up.

But when the method is followed, it works. Slowly, in the long run, with lots of stops and slowdowns and detours along the way, it works. And even when it isn’t carefully followed by an individual scientist, the method works in the long run to catch that scientist’s mistakes — and to catch mistaken assumptions and incorrect theories made by all scientists, and provide a new and more accurate theory.

And maybe more to the point:

What else do we have? What other method do we have for gathering information about the world, and coming up with explanations of what that information means, that has anywhere near the same power to minimize bias, and the desire to be right, and the difficulty in seeing what you don’t expect, and all the other obstacles our brains put in the way of understanding the world?

Intuition and inspiration are great. Scientists rely on it heavily to come up with ideas in the first place. But intuition is a starting place — not a final answer. We KNOW that intuition is heavily slanted by bias and expectations and what we want to be true. Intuition gives us ideas, gets us started on roads to explore — but if we want to be really, really sure that our ideas reflect reality, as sure as we can be with our imperfect brains and our huge and mystifying world, then we need a method to test those inspired, intuitive ideas. And as imperfect as it is, I think the scientific method is the best one we have.

In tomorrow’s post: Common objections to science and the scientific method — and my replies to them. If you have arguments against my little love letter, I’d like to ask you to hold them until then.

I don’t usually debate people about their actual religious or spiritual beliefs, unless they’ve either asked me to explicitly, or have invited me to implicitly by arguing with my beliefs. (I did say “usually,” everyone, so there’s no need to rush to the archives to dig up counter-examples — unless you’d find that entertaining.) I’ll start debates about the place religion has in society, the way we do and don’t talk about religion compared to other topics, what kind of language we use to talk about religion and atheism, whether faith does more harm than good or vice versa, etc. — but for an assortment of reasons, some good and some bad, I rarely debate the actual beliefs themselves.

But a few weeks ago, Layne made a comment here saying that he believed in some sort of telepathic or precognition phenomenon, at least partly because of an experience he had in his teens, when he had a sudden fear of his sister’s car being hit by a train and later found out that it almost had been. I know Layne to be a smart person with a thick skin and a fondness for a good argument, so I decided to cadge an invitation, and asked if he wanted to know my skeptic’s response to his experience. He said yes (“Go ahead, hit me with your best shot” were his exact words). Here is that response.

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My short skeptical answer to the experience you described would be, “Yes, I think that was a coincidence.” But I don’t actually think that’s a very good answer. Not by itself. It doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge the freakishness and intensity of your experience. And it doesn’t accurately or fairly represent the skeptical philosophy.

Besides… well, you used to be my editor. When have you ever known me to give a one-word or seven-word answer when 1000 words would do? 🙂

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I can see that an experience like the one you had would be both intense and hard to explain. The odds against it are astronomical. It would be foolish of me to say otherwise. Yes, the odds of that particular experience — getting a sudden scary mental image of your sister being run over by a train, and then finding out that she almost had been — are very unlikely indeed.

But look at it this way.

What are the odds that SOME freakishly unlikely experience along those lines would happen to you at SOME point in your life?

They’re actually pretty darned good.

Random thoughts about the people we know and love are flashing into our minds every minute of every day. And things are happening to the people we know and love every minute of every day. Given enough time, the thoughts and the events are going to line up — in a way that will seem far too unlikely to be merely a coincidence. (A tip of the hat to Douglas Adams on this one.)

The problem is that the tens of thousands of times when the thoughts and events don’t line up, we don’t notice. We only notice the few times when they do. It’s the “van on the corner” phenomenon. We say, “Why is that white van always at the corner?” when it isn’t always at the corner — we just notice it when it is.

And here’s the bigger problem. Our brains are not very good at grasping statistics and probability. (That includes mine — I can’t get more than ten pages into a “Statistics and Probability For Dummies” book without my puny earthling brain exploding.) The processes of evolution have shaped our brains to understand probability, not in a way that’s accurate, but in a way that helps us survive. Among other things, our brains are wired to see patterns and connections, regardless of whether they’re there. And they’re wired to pay very careful attention to things that seem out of the ordinary. All for very good evolutionary reasons. It may not help us understand the finer points of probability and coincidence, but it helps us find food and escape from tigers.

So because this stuff is so fucking counter-intuitive, I want to give a couple more examples of this particular idea before I move on

Example 1: There’s a wonderful example from a book called The Skeptic’s Guide to the Paranormal by Lynn Kelly. (An excellent book, btw, and one I recommend to anyone – she’s very readable, often very funny, and she doesn’t talk down to her audience.) When Lynn’s mother was in the hospital, she (Lynn) had an intense dream that her mother had died. She woke up and called the hospital in a panic 

 and her mother was fine, recovering nicely.

But what if her mother had in fact died? It wasn’t completely unlikely; she was in the hospital, after all. And it wasn’t at all unusual for someone whose mother was in the hospital to dream that she’d died. But if her mother had died, Lynn says, she would have been completely convinced that her dream had been precognition or telepathy — not coincidence.

In fact, Lynn says, there was a part of her that was almost disappointed that her dream hadn’t been true. A part of her wanted to believe that the connection between her and her mother was so close, she would just know when she’d died. (I wonder, Layne, if that might be relevant to the experience you had with your sister.)

Example 2: Here’s an example Ingrid likes to use (probably because she’s deathly afraid of flying). Millions of people fly in airplanes every day. Flying is scary (even for people who aren’t seriously phobic about it). So almost certainly a high percentage of the millions of people in the air every day have had, at some point, a strong feeling of the willies about their flight. Add to that the number of people with family and friends who are flying on a given day, and think how many of them got the willies about the flight. Then add to that all the people who, for some reason, were going to take that flight but didn’t… and think about how many of them had some sort of willie-ish experience about it before their plans changed.

Okay. Planes do sometimes crash .Or almost crash. Or have some serious malfunction that requires the plane to make an emergency landing. Or have food poisoning in the fish dinner that incapacitates half the passengers and both the pilots…

Any one of which would confirm the feeling of “I knew it! I knew something was wrong with this flight!”

Now, what are the odds that, in any given plane disaster, someone on that plane — or someone close to someone on that plane, or someone who was “supposed” to be on that plane but wasn’t — had had the willies about the flight? I’d bet that it’s pretty close to 100%. (And then those people — if they survive — tell the people they know about it, who then add it to their own bank of “too weird to be coincidence” stories… but that goes to pattern recognition, which is another point I’ll get to in a minute.)

But people don’t pay much attention when they get the willies about a flight and the worst thing that happens is they run out of pretzels… which is what happens most of the time. They only notice when they get the willies about a flight and something bad happens.

Third and last example: Finally, I have an example from my own life, from my woo-woo Tarot reading days. A few months after I’d broken up with my boyfriend (first real relationship, total schmuck, very traumatic), I did a series of Tarot readings on the question, “Should I start looking for another relationship?” I was lonely and horny, and really hoping the answer would be “Yes”… but in every single reading (four or five in a row, if memory serves), The Hermit came up somewhere in the spread.

At the time, this to me was unshakeable proof, not only that I should stay single for a while, but that the Tarot was real and that a mystical force was guiding the cards. (The fact that the answer was the one I needed rather than the one I wanted only served to confirm this.) But when I started looking at my Tarot readings with a more skeptical eye, I realized a couple of things.

I realized that I’d seen other patterns and runs like this, which I’d also taken as profoundly meaningful and predictive… but which hadn’t actually come true. (In a later relationship, I had a similar run of getting The Star several times in a row, a card of “hope in a difficult time/light at the end of the tunnel” — which turned out to be total bullshit. That relationship was doomed.)

Plus, I realized that I’d almost certainly gotten other runs of cards that I simply hadn’t noticed, because they weren’t very interesting cards or weren’t relevant to the questions I was asking. I mean, at some point in my Tarot years I almost certainly had a run of getting, say, the Two of Wands or the Eight of Disks in four or five readings in a row, runs that were every bit as unlikely as getting The Hermit four or five times in a row… but it was the Eight of Disks, so who the hell cares.

(Statistical tangent, which I’m finding fascinating, but which y’all should feel free to skip past to the next bit if you find it tediously math-y: Now that I think about it, I wonder how astronomical the odds of my Hermit run really were. There are 15 cards in a reading [the way I was reading them, anyway]. There are 78 cards in the deck. Plus there are a couple different cards in the deck that can mean “solitude” or “independence,” so that brings the odds down a lot more. And there are also a couple of cards that can mean, “Whatever you’re thinking about is a really bad idea, get it out of your head right now.” Let’s be very conservative and say there are four cards that could mean either “solitude,” “independence,” or “whatever you’re asking, the answer is No Way.” [There are probably more, but I’m trying to be fair here.] So that’s four out of 78 cards, or about 1 in 20. What are the odds of one of these four cards coming up somewhere in a 15-card spread? If my math is right [and it may not be], it’s three out of four. Pretty damn good odds — better than even. And what are the odds of any one of the four coming up in four 15-card spreads in a row? Again, my probability math is poor, but I just called Chip and we put our heads together, and are coming up with 81 in 256  or roughly 1 in 3. Not at all unlikely. Make it five readings in a row, and you still get about 1 in 4. Okay, this is freaking me out now. I based my metaphysical beliefs for YEARS on the idea that this pattern was ridiculously unlikely. Sheesh. [BTW, if there are any mathematicians or statisticians reading this who are screaming with frustration at my math, please feel free to correct me.])

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So enough with that idea and those examples. There are other things that compound this situation, and I want to move on to them now.

The first thing that compounds the situation is what I call the “cluster phenomenon.” (I’m sure there’s some psychological or statistical term for it, but I don’t know what it is.)

Think of it this way. Your sister didn’t, in fact, get run over by a train. She almost did. (In the strictest sense, your precognition didn’t actually happen.) Now, think of all the other things that could have happened that day that might have made you think, “Wow, that is so freaky, what are the odds of that?” Your sister might have gotten into a car crash near the train tracks. Or tripped and broken her leg while crossing the train tracks. Or been in a toy store near the toy train section when the store got robbed at gunpoint. Or someone else you knew might have been run over by a train. Or gotten into a car crash. Or… you get my drift. The odds of your particular coincidence, the one that actually happened, aren’t very high — but the odds of SOMETHING happening that might have made you think, “That is too freaky to be a coincidence,” are nowhere near as bad.

This goes back to the “how often do you suddenly think of someone, and how often do people die” question. If we suddenly think of someone out of the blue and then find out they’ve just died, that can seem very unlikely and spooky. But if we suddenly think of someone and they give us a call, or we hear they’re getting married, or we read about them in the paper, or we run into one of their kids, or their ex calls us to say they’ve just broken up and we’ve been on their mind and would we like to meet for a drink at this nice little hotel bar they know  any of these events, and dozens more like them, will also give us the “Woo, spooky” experience. The odds against any particular one of these events are astronomical, it’s true… but the odds of something in that cluster of events happening aren’t quite as bad. And again, when you add those odds up over a lifetime, the odds of something in that vein happening at some point in your life start to get pretty damn good.

Then the situation gets compounded further by the fact that (a) our brains are wired to see patterns and connections where none may exist (and intention, too, but that addresses the God question more than the telepathy/ precognition/ general metaphysical weirdness question) — and (b) our brains are wired to be more likely to see what we expect to see, and to explain what we see in a context we already believe.

So if we’ve already had a freakishly unlikely experience that we’re chalking up to telepathy or precognition, we’re more likely to explain other weird experiences with similar paranormal explanations. And once we’ve started doing that, and have started creating a mental pattern and a mental context for thinking paranormal or metaphysical experiences are real, then there’s a cascade effect/ feedback loop. The more we believe in something, the more we see of it — and the more we see, the more we believe. (I think this is what Nina was getting at when she talked about having had intense transcendent experiences, but not thinking of them as religious because she wasn’t brought up to see things in a religious context.)

Like with the Tarot. There were so many times when what I thought was a clear message from the cards turned out to be wrong. (The time Chip and I asked the cards what movie to see and were given the unmistakable message that we should see “Pretty Woman” leaps to mind…) But when the cards were wrong, I always blamed myself and figured I’d mis-read them. I only went “Woo, spooky” when they were right.

(BTW: While I am mostly talking here about less conventional spiritual beliefs, I think this principle can apply to many traditional beliefs as well. I’ve heard and read many religious believers defend the power of prayer in this exact way. When their prayers are answered, it’s proof of God’s love and works; when their prayers aren’t answered, then God moves in mysterious ways. I know that’s not the way everyone experiences prayer — but it’s not uncommon.)

*****

All of which is a very long way of saying this:

“It just seems too unlikely to be a coincidence” is not, by itself, enough evidence to support a hypothesis of telepathy or precognition or metaphysical energies. It’s too easy to explain unlikely-seeming coincidences with all the stuff I’ve been talking about: long-term probability analysis, the cluster phenomenon, and pattern recognition.

So in order to tell whether telepathy or precognition or other paranormal/ metaphysical phenomena are really true, or even plausible, we need to look at them as hypotheses about the world, and test them accordingly. And we need to test them carefully, using the best testing protocols, to screen out unconscious interference and the placebo effect and all that good stuff, and to make sure the results are consistent and replicable.

And so far, when that kind of testing has been done on telepathy and precognition and other paranormal/ metaphysical phenomena, the results have been the same: Zip.

Which all brings me back to the point I made in The Unexplained, the Unproven, and the Unlikely — that given the overwhelming historical pattern of natural explanations replacing supernatural ones and not the other way around, it’s many, many orders of magnitude more likely that any given unexplained or weird phenomenon will have a natural explanation than a supernatural one.

There’s a standard in science that scientists cite a lot (it’s something I believe Carl Sagan first wrote): “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” If a scientist claims that, say, tuberculosis isn’t caused by exposure to bacteria but by an excess of chicken in the diet… well, that’s an extraordinary claim, one that contradicts everything we think we know about the disease, and that scientist is going to have to come up with a MASSIVE body of hard evidence to support their claim.

And while claims of telepathy and precognition are certainly common, they’re still extraordinary. They contradict everything we know about how the mind perceives and processes and communicates information. (Admittedly, there’s a huge amount we don’t know about how the brain and the mind work — but there are some things we do know, and telepathy and precognition don’t fit into the picture.) It’s a claim that requires extraordinary evidence to support it… and “It just seems too unlikely to be a coincidence” isn’t enough.

Now, of course, you can argue that pattern recognition works the other way too: that when you’re predisposed to NOT believe in the paranormal or metaphysical, you’re less likely to see it.

Which is true.

But that’s kind of the beauty of the scientific method. If your testing protocols are good, the results are going to be the results, regardless of your expectations. When CSICOP (now CSI) tested the Russian psychic diagnosis girl, I’m sure they were pre-disposed to think her claims were full of shit — but if she had in fact been able to diagnose serious medical conditions just by looking at people, she would have been able to do it, regardless of the researchers’ expectations. (In fact, while they did set up the test to control for educated guesses and picking up physical clues and other non-psychic explanations for her “diagnoses,” they also set up the protocols to give the girl the benefit of the doubt.)

Of course, you can argue that these kinds of metaphysical phenomena aren’t predictable or consistent in the same way that physical phenomena are. But (a) I’ve never seen a good explanation of why that would be.

And (b) even if that were true, even if paranormal/ metaphysical phenomena were “shy” but real… even if it were true, how would that information be useful, either on a day-to-day level or in a larger philosophical sense? How would it change the way we live, or the way we understand the world and our place in it? How would we be able to study and explore these phenomena in any meaningful way? How would we ever know whether any particular freaky experience was one of the real metaphysical ones… or just our brains playing tricks on themselves? Or simply one of the seemingly bizarre but ultimately explainable coincidences?

For all the reasons I’ve talked about here — and more — “I can just tell,” or, “It just seems obvious to me,” or, “It’s just too unlikely to be a coincidence,” simply aren’t good enough answers to those questions.