Sastra here.
I’m about halfway through, and really enjoying, Robert Price’s new book, Top Secret: The Truth Behind Today’s Pop Mysticisms.
Bob Price has an interesting background: he started out as a roaring Pentacostal Minister, gradually grew into a high-end Christian theologian, and eventually evolved to his present form as secular humanist. He’s currently teaching classes in comparative religion — and also happens to be an expert on HP Lovecraft and science fiction. I think this wide-ranging perspective gives him a particular advantage when dealing with religious topics. He’s been into almost everything, and can compare, contrast, and understand different mindsets with apparent ease. His analogies are often original, and spot on.
Even atheists are still influenced by the religious beliefs they once held. I was raised “freethinker.” Nobody at school knew what that meant, and I had a hard time explaining it, since I wasn’t sure what the alternative was. I wasn’t taught any particular religion, but it seemed to be a cultural prerequisite for having a “meaning,” so I would pick up bits and strands of things that seemed interesting to me, and try them on. I remember deciding in 5th grade to worship the Greek gods, since they would clearly be available, and very grateful for the attention. It seemed odd that they had so few current fans. But, by the time I was a teenager, I became enamored of the “psychic sciences,” and got into New Age.
Having since gotten myself OUT of New Age, I am particularly interested in books and articles that address and critique these self-proclaimed more enlightened, sophisticated, “holistic” forms of spirituality. My interest is not merely personal: such views are still held by many intelligent, well-educated, liberal-thinking people – and many of them take it all very seriously, and yield the power to have it taken seriously in secular arenas. These are not really marginal beliefs. As Price writes:
“Chopra and his fellow travelers are doing nothing essentially different from the tactics of Scientific Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates who seek to translate religious dogma derived from scripture into cosmetic, seemingly “scientific” terms so as to smuggle dogma into science classes, or at least to win for it the prestige of science.” (pg. 51)
Witness the success of So-Called Alternative Medicine, which justifies itself through pseudoscience, and rests on magic and mysticism. Creationists can only drool over how well it’s been doing in mainsteam academic circles – what’s been recently termed “quackademic medicine.”
There are a lot of popular new forms of spirituality out there, and Price tries to hit them all. He thoroughly fisks that reincarnation of New Thought “we create our reality” nonsense, The Secret; deals satisfactorily with A Course in Miracles and The Celestine Prophecy; and takes on other new versions of old ideas, from neo-Buddhism to neo-gnosticism, giving them due credit for valuable insights and useful techniques, and excoriating them for narcisstic excesses and simplistic panaceas when called for.
“Every religion diagnoses a problem, to which it then prescribes a single solution. One often feels the problem has been derived from the solution so as to provide a felt need for it, in the manner of Madison Avenue.”
Go, Bob. I think he has a gift for phrasing difficult concepts in ways that make sense – in case, like me, you think it may be important to know the difference between nondualism (Only God exists), pantheism (All is God), and panentheism (All is IN God), and you have a bit of trouble keeping them straight.
He’s also funny – though it’s hard to beat some of the stuff he cites:
“(Rhonda) Byrne recalls in The Secret: ‘I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them.” (p. 156) This is why we don’t let students grade their own papers.”
Well, I give Price a very good grade. My cosmic life energy is probably vibrating on a very low and materialistic level in the hierarchy of spiritual development, but I don’t care.
Bob Price is the man. My favorite is “The incredible Shrinking Son of Man”
You know, in middle (high? US school system confuses me…) school, I always thought I understood my physics books too, until the tests came along…
(First time I’m posting here, so hi Pharyngulites)
Price’s own Cthulhu Mythos fiction is worth checking out – it’s kind of like Gnosticism 101, only with tentacles. Weird fiction in every sense.
Simple question. Is everything that you can’t measure and quantify through several repetitions invalid?
Simple answer to #4 (OwlBear): not necessarily, but it sure isn’t science.
I think my comment disappeared–or I clicked something I didn’t intend to. (Another book to read!)
Sastra, I’d be interested in hearing–if you’re comfortable talking about it–what brought you into New Age. The getting out would be interesting as well. But, I’m kind of wondering what draws people to these things. Once I left Christianity, I accepted being an emotional being, dropped the “spiritual” language and just moved on. But I love hearing other folks’ experiences.
But “not being science’ isn’t justification enough for the insults and derision.
You set up a VERY rigid schema for gathering information that lends itself to select types of information.
Things that can’t be easily measured are dismissed out of hand.
I am atheist, but I don’t preclude ideas just because its hard to figure out how to Measure and Quantify them.
Here in the UK we are far less plagued (and use the term intentionally) with fundamentalist religion than you are in the US.
However we do seem to suffer more from new-ageism and “alternative” medicine. There is a government funded homoeopathic hospital for example, and the Royal Family espouse some stupid ld,ideas in that fie especially Chucky. However it gladdens my heart when I read the NHS homoeopathic hospital is suffering from funding problems as fewer and fewer health authorities (the people who decide who they will pay to treat patients in their area) are willing to allow patients to be referred to the hospital.
We also suffer from new-age, crystal type woo. I sued to live near what is consider the new-age capital of the UK, Totnes, Devon. My girlfriend at the time and I sometimes used to visit the town as they had some nice food shops. In the end she had to ban be from going into any of the new age shops as I used to ask the sales staff just what they meant by “quantum” or “resonance”. I also used to mutter about what a load of crap it all was.
I was religious for a period of my life, between 14 and 16. I was cured when we had a new physics teacher who also taught astronomy. I enrolled in the astronomy class and had ceased being religious within a few weeks.
Owlbear, for all intents and purposes science sets out to define reality by what can be perceived and measured. Thus if it cannot be measured, it is considered, until proven, not to exist. As we all know, believing in things that don’t exist often is frowned upon in all walks of life.
Owlbear1: Congratulations, you’ve found the difference between philosophic and scientific materialism.
owlbear1,
can you (yourself) be measured and quantified through several repetitions ?
Does the question make sense ?
Are you valid or invalid ?
No. There are many things that can’t be measured or quantified and are still held as valid. Some random examples:
– The idea that all human beings have the same rights.
– The legal doctrine that the punishment should befit the crime.
– The meaning of the biohazard symbol.
– The convention that English verbs end in ‘s’ in the third person.
– The international borders.
– A whole lot etc.
Owlbear #4: I am more militant on this point that Ames #5.
Everything that is real MUST be measurable and quantifiable. That is, only things that are theoretically observable can be said to exist in any meaningful way.
Now WE may not be able to observe all such things, at this time. We may be lacking in technological ability or biological capacity or both. But that’s just us.
This means of course that all of reality lies in the purview of science. Though of course, not everything is accessible to human science, right now.
Ampiox, you hit on my point. We can’t measure everything now. That doesn’t mean we won’t be able to do so later.
Big Bang
Plate Tectonics.
Laughed at…
I never got the New Age thing.
And then it dawned on me.
and just to be clear, I don’t think we’ll eventually be able to measure everything, just more of everything.
owlbear #7:
“hard” doesn’t mean “impossible”
Somethings may be very hard to measure or quantify, but no matter how difficult, there is still some way to do it, even if that way may be beyond our own abilities at the moment.
If something is “impossible” to measure or quantify, in any conceivable way, that it cannot be said to exist in any meaningful way.
Andres Diplotti #12:
All the things you list can, in fact, be measured and quantified, in many different ways. They are all concepts created by human minds. They exist as ideas so long as human minds exist to hold them. And when human brains think about them, events occur within those brains which can be measured and quantified.
Sastra,
I don’t know what you include or not in “Alternative Medicine”.
Take Osteopathy. I can tell you, I have once in a while really bad back pain, and gee, I visit my Osteopath and it works, he gets rid of it in a few sessions and much better than any drugs or visit to my regular MD.
owlbear1 #16:
Hard to keep up when you post again before I finish typing my reply!
I agree that most likely human beings will never be able to measure and quantify EVERYTHING. But just because humans won’t be able to do it doesn’t mean it can’t possibly be done.
#14, well, as Sagan put it:
Owlbear1, #14:
Except, of course, that all this new-agey stuff is tested for and found to be lacking. The problem isn’t reality, it’s methodology. It’s not closed-minded to say, as you put it, “set up a VERY rigid schema for gathering information” That’s the way it should be done, the problem lies with people who credulously accept things they shouldn’t do, and then think the problem is with people who demand a serious look.
There certainly are lots of things we don’t know about now, and can’t learn about yet because we don’t have the instruments to capture them, but that’s beside the point. The point is that you don’t get any closer to what’s really true by reducing your standards of rigour, or, as Richard Dawkins puts it, “we should be open minded, but not so much that our brains fall out”, or, as I would add, not so much that anybody can reach in and take them.
owlbear1,
Are you talking about things that can’t easily be quantified or things that can’t be quantified, period?
I ask because it’s an important distinction. For instance human conciousness or the mind can’t easily be measured or quantified, but few here would claim they were invalid or nonsense concepts. On the other hand, human souls can’t be measured, quantified, or distinguished from make-believe nonsense in any way. The nature of our minds is a deeply important puzzle. Talking about souls, “The Secret”, or Chopra’s gibberish is, at best, useless as speculating about invisible pink pixies.
Anyone know which physicist it was that said thinking you understand quantum mechanics is proof that you don’t?
Someone, somewhere, at some time, has laughed at every idea ever generated by the human brain.
Some of those ideas were right. Some were wrong. Some were partly right, and some were just damn funny.
Since they were all laughed at, the fact that they were laughed at doesn’t mean anything, except for the funny ones.
I am not sure I would go along with “laughed at”, but I will accept both were regard as being wrong when first proposed. Of course there was not much evidence to support either when first proposed. In both cases it was not really until the 1960’s that the evidence became strong enough that scientists could accept both as being correct.
The important thing to note is that it was science that first dismissed those hypothesis for lack of evidence and science that then embraced them when the evidence was found.
Both are excellent examples of science working as it should. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, freely admits that at first he favoured the steady state theory as put forward by Hoyle and others. He also admits that as there was not enough evidence at the time to tell which, if either, of Steady State or Big Bang was correct he did so on aesthetic grounds. Once the evidence began to support Big Bang he changed his mind. Science working as it should.
Thank you for the book recommendation, Sastra. I will definitely pick this up.
I was quite the “New Ager” myself when I was younger. I even considered becoming a Wiccan, because I like their basic philosophy (And it hurt none, do as you please) and the reverence for nature that they exhibit. I never did join a group though, because the silly costumes and rituals felt, well, silly. I did learn to read Tarot cards about 25 years ago and used to read for friends and family often.
I was raised as an evangelical Christian but in my early twenties became an Agnostic, then an Atheist. Even though I didn’t (and don’t) believe in a god, I guess I felt a need for some sort of spirituality in my life. Well, I got over that.
Up until very recently I used to read Tarot cards at the local All Hallow’s Eve event at our local living history Civil War Era village. Part of this event includes several fortune tellers who “read the future” for the attendees using numerology, palm reading, sand casting, etc. It’s supposed to be all in fun, but I began to realize in my second year that these people were taking me far too seriously.
I was only allowed three minutes with each person, so it’s not as if I could go into anything in-depth anyway. On top of that, I always removed the “scary” cards (any showing death, violence, loss, or sadness) from the deck prior to this event – so I wasn’t even playing with a full deck, so to speak. (hehe)
However, by the fourth year of reading Tarot at this event, my booth had the longest line, with repeat customers who had come to see me in previous years. I heard over and over again how on the spot my readings were and how much they appreciated what I had to say. I was told that some people wouldn’t come and see me because I had freaked them out too much the year before. That’s when I decided that I had to stop volunteering for the event. No one should be planning their future around a psychic reading, let alone a 3-minute off-the-cuff reading done for fun.
Honestly, it was scary to see how these people reacted to my generic comments. I used to tell teenaged boys that they were fighting with one or both of their parents (duh!) and teenaged girls that they enjoyed shopping and hanging out with friends (double duh!) and they would be AMAZED at how well I read them!
Anyway, I just thought I’d share this, since most of you seem to be far too rational to have ever been involved with this much woo.
I am not trying to defend “supernatural” claims here. I am not defending “fortune tellers” or “Ghosthunters”.
I am not even really defending any of them. I am trying to say the arrogance of insulting anything science hasn’t figured out out to measure is actually very un-scientific in and of itself.
The human mind is fine-tuned for pattern-finding and pattern-making, external validity be damned.
The rise of New Age thinking correlates to the decline in general trust in the traditional purveyors of pattern-narrative woo. Humans have an innate need/tendency for this stuff, so we just replaced the one with the other.
That’s why we had to create science, and formalize its rules, to overcome this inherent weakness (well it isn’t always a weakness, of course, which is why it has survived) in our thought process. If rational thought came naturally to us, we wouldn’t need to have science. We’d just be doing it automatically, from birth.
#26:
But science does measure these sorts of things and they come up empty. What does deserve ridicule is credulousness and the practical acceptance of things which aren’t well-supported. Whether or not I’m fond of, say, String Theory, if I accept it as being de facto true before any evidence arises to support it, that does deserve scientific ridicule. It does deserve condemnation.
There’s a very important methodological difference between legitimately not knowing something, and convincing yourself that you do know something which you cannot reasonably claim to. The New Age movement is predicated upon the latter, on pretending to already know the answer and on waiting for science to catch up.
Your religious experiences as a child sound very similar to mine. I was raised Methodist, but got over it fairly quickly (my mom tells me I used to argue theology with my grandmother when I was a child. My grandmother apparently loved and encouraged this). I developed a fascination for the Greek gods as well, though not to the point of having any desire to worship them. And like many, when I was college age (though not, sadly, actually in college), I developed an interest in things like Wicca and tarot cards and stuff like that. Eventually I drifted into Bhuddism as a way to try and hook up with someone I wanted (didn’t work), and finally wound up at my current position.
The book sounds interesting! I’ll have to try and get a copy.
I think there are two valid ways to react to the possibility of a phenomenon that cannot currently be measured.
One is to say “well, it can’t be measured yet, so we can’t say, right now, if it is real or not. Therefore we shall withhold all judgment on it for the time being.”
The other is to say “since it cannot be currently measured, and does not have any effect upon us at the moment (since if it had such an effect that we could feel, it would by definition be measurable by us) then from a practical point of view, we may act as if it doesn’t exist, until new evidence demonstrates otherwise.”
What is definitely not valid is to say “well we can’t measure it, and so we can’t know for sure if it really exists, so, just to be on the safe side, we’ll act as if it really does exist and has an enormous effect upon us!”
amphiox,
Too much logical positivism in your response. Science does not believe that theories are necessarily “the truth”, even when those theories are astonishingly useful for hundreds of years.
And much of the human experience is unquantifiable and will probably always be so. That we can reduce emotion, for example, to brain chemistry is interesting, but only a devout reductionist would think that would lead to a satisfying explanation of the experience of emotions.
To All,
But more on the topic. I think the DI admission of ID not being a scientific theory is more useful than you might think. Don’t forget that what we are fighting against is an attempt to affect public policy, not to replace Evolution with a better theory.
As such, there is a great body of “swing voters” who are not Christian fundamentalists, but tend to be in the gravitational pull of fundamentalists on issues like this. This is because they are not paying strong attention, nor are they adamant. They are simply influenced by the “sound-byte” oversimplified arguments that are shrilly put forth constantly by the extreme right. It is not that much different than a right wing republican winning voters by simply saying that the other guy will “raise taxes”.
Rather than concentrating on deprogramming fundamentalists, we should really be concerned with what can win back the swing vote on issues like this.
For example, at a school board meeting where the subject of teaching ID might come up, you could make a big difference with the swing voters if you could show that the institutional homestead of Inteligent Design does not believe that it is a scientific theory. Naturally, it won’t convince the fundamentalists in the group, but it will get the attention of the swing voters.
Living in Ohio, this is very evident to me. I know all kinds of intelligent reasonable non-fundamentalists who would gravitate towards “Teach the Controversy” simply because it seems fair to them. However, these people will actually sit still long enough to hear an explanation of why this is a sham, and they will respond favorabily because they also want a good education for their children. These people are not “immune” to more information in the same way fundamentalists are.
owlbear1,
Sure, where do you see this insulting happening ? Can you be specific ?
Amphiox, we don’t fully understand the functioning of our own brains. We certainly can’t actually measure many of the things it performs thousands of times a day.
Does that means its ok to assume “Brains” don’t exist?
I really like Bob Price a lot. However, he does think that global warming is a big lie invented by the liberal media in order to push their agenda. So it’s always important to get different viewpoints and always remain skeptical about even the people you mostly agree with.
I haven’t read any of the Price’s books yet, but have listened to lots of interviews with him on various podcasts. I always enjoy listening to him. Fans of his should check out The Reason Driven Podcast. So far there’s been 30 of them each one discussing a different chapter of Price’s book The Reason Driven Life. They also usually have a guest, they’ve had Phil Plait, Michael Shermer and Steven Novella in the past.
Oh, i thought it was funny the other day when i saw Price’s book Top Secret in the Christian section of the local Barnes & Noble.
“Price’s own Cthulhu Mythos fiction is worth checking out – it’s kind of like Gnosticism 101, only with tentacles. Weird fiction in every sense.”
When I got active in atheism a few years ago, and heard of Bob Price, I thought that name sounded vaguely familiar, this post puts the pieces together. I went and dug out my 4 book Chaosium set of Lovecraft mythos, and there it was plain as day, Robert Price editor and contributor. Thanks for linking this up for me.
Ia Cthulhu F’htagn!
negentropyeater #18
“I don’t know what you include or not in “Alternative Medicine”.”
If it can be shown to work, by definition, it is just medicine.
Incidentally, does anyone know where homeopaths get the water to dilute their medicines?
I also did some cold reading for fun , but told the people (only did it with girls), that all I did was cold reading and that I didn`t have any psychic powers whatsoever.
Well, they didn`t believe me, because everything was so “true” (even some christian girls among them).
I told one girl what I was gonna say to the next person and that she can bring whoever she wanted, so she should have known that this was all a trick.
Well, after the “reading” both girls said that I knew who she`ll pick and that`s why I said all these things.
After that I refused to do any “readings” at all – just scary how people are willing to believe crazy stuff.
(btw. english is not my native language, so no comments about my grammar let alone spelling,please)
Are there any books i could read to learn to do cold readings?
And now, for my next trick, I will quantify everything.
[everything, nothing] = [1, 0]
Ta-Da! Thank you. Thank you very much. I’ll be here all week.
negentropyeater #18
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What I found funny enough is that osteopathy postulates that the body has all it needs to heal yourself. Maybe we should look that way first.
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Despite the fact that this particular discipline doesn’t inspire confidence to me for what I’ve seen, I find it interesting because it rises the problem of autosuggestion in medicine. I mean, it seems that autosuggestion can really work, as my doctor pointed it out to me recently. He said that to help children to get rid of plantar warts, he would ask them to draw them and then to destroy the drawings. It may have been just the autohealing of the body, as I’ve pointed out first hand.
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But my point is : the osteopath seems to practice a looney medicine, but is the placebo effect powerful enough to give this medicine some value in some cases? And if you check on wikipedia, you’ll ironically find that osteopathy seems to rely openly on the placebo effect :
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“Many osteopaths see their role as facilitating the body’s own recuperative powers by treating musculoskeletal or somatic dysfunction”
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:P
But getting a real treatment creates the placebo effect as well.
Even atheists are still influenced by the religious beliefs they once held. I was raised “freethinker.”
So true, still am to some degree. What I took from Christianity is to love thy neighbor, and help those less fortunate than you. Can’t say that’s a bad philosophy at all.
But it’s interesting you mention the move to spirituality. I would much prefer society to be more spiritual than religious.
BriansAWildDowner #39 – any beginning book on Tarot will teach you basic layouts. In fact, every new pack of Tarot cards comes with a booklet that explains the symbolism of each card. Alternatively, you could just lay down cards and make it up as you go along, based on what you think the cards should mean. Just be prepared for the ooohs and ahhhs that will follow…
About a decade or so, I was given a Tarot deck. This is my basic attitude: The cards don’t have any inherent meaning, but drawing particular combinations and taking the assigned meanings can provide an opportunity to think about connections. Sure, the dealing of the cards is a random procedure, but reflecting on “change” and “relationship” might not be a bad thing…as long as you keep in mind it’s reflection about those connections that were randomly drawn and not magic. They can provide a reflective tool, I guess.
But, so can therapy or conversation with the person about which you thought when the relationship-related cards got drawn, or conversation with a good friend.
Neils Bohr had the quote about thinking you understand quantum phsyics only proves how little you understand.
Quantum Mechanics has been abused and warped out of shape very badly by many a New Age mystic. They especially love some of the explanations that involve non-locality.
I imagine a lot of their explanations stem from people trying to explain quantum mechanics to them without following Einstein’s guide on simplicity. “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Sadly some of this may be related to Bohm. I do tend to prefer his interpretation though I don’t pretend to know if it is considered seriously any longer.
(I apologize to anyone not versed in physics. I am rambling anyway.)
Owlbear:
Owlbear:
Owlbear1, it appears you have a misconception of what science is.
It is a process by which we attempt to determine which of our hypothesis (beliefs, stories, techniques) are not reasonable (or the best so far) descriptions of reality.
Reality already exists – science doesn’t define it. Science is a process – a set of techniques and a (hopefully self-supervising) social structure.
The brain exists. People form models about how brain processes work and the scientific method works from there. (Did I say it was a process not a noun?)
If somehow think science is dismissing, a priori, some important part of reality because it can’t be measured – you’re working at it from the wrong end.
What do you propose? What is your hypothesis? Does you hypothesis allow you tell if your hypothesis is incorrect? (i.e. is it falsifiable?) What does it predict?
If you can’t measure the effect, and you can’t propose a mechanism, are you just talking about magic? If not, what the fuck are you talking about?
When I studied some psychology a fair few years ago we looked at how people made decisions. One method that came up, and it struck me at the time as being rather useful, was to toss a coin.
Now I need to point out this was a strategy suggested for when someone was undecided, and it is not intended that you will go with the choice you give heads or tails. What the coin toss is intended to do is reveal your true feeling. A sense of relief or dread depending on the outcome can give insight into your true feelings.
5keptical, that second quote isn’t mine.
And the first was a reply to an earlier post.
I haven’t read that book, but I looked at the reviews on Amazon and I think it’ll be a good one.
I haven’t read this particular woo pile, but it sounds very similar to one that was embraced by a high school acquaintance.
I don’t recall the specific title, but the story revolved around a woman who could “channel” (i.e. speak in the voice of) an “entity” who she called Seth. The philosophy that this entity espoused was that reality was a consensual, collaborative construction, unconsciously created by some kind of mysterious backdoor communication between our consciousnesses. For example, that table over there only really “exists” to us because we have decided to (unconsciously) agree that it does.
Predictably, all manner of impressive-sounding “quantum” terminology was used to explain this process. In particular, the physical interpretation of QM through observer-mediated wave function collapse was repeatedly invoked. It’s important to keep in mind that this so-called Copenhagen interpretation of QM is a fairly standard one that was accepted at that time by many, arguably most, reputable physicists, at least provisionally.
Because I was aware of this, even though I found it extremely hard to swallow the whole “channeling” silliness, it was difficult for me to dismiss the underlying philosophical ideas without a lot of thoughtful discussion and probing questions. It’s also true that this is an area of physics where we don’t yet have a single, unambiguous, clear theory, so it’s like a local weak spot in our current understanding of the universe.
Quite clever, actually, and the whole thing only really started to fall apart when “Seth” failed miserably in his attempts to clarify how the mystery psychic communication worked. He danced suspiciously around the details way too long, until finally stumbling by making some testable predictions that were easily falsified by simple experiments we could do.
Flash forward to today, and here’s an interesting report of an experiment that appears to cast doubt on the Copenhagen interpretation of QM.
A postdoc has been able to design and perform an experiment to successfully test an hypothesis by physicist Robert Jordan that a wave function can be collapsed only partway, and then “uncollapsed” back to its previous state. Very cool.
opium4themasses #46
I tought that statement was made by Richard Feynmann
BriansAWildDowner #42
Right!
In replying to owlbear, people are making some weird assumptions. What is this assumption that there are things that may never be able to be measured?
When DNA was discovered, the idea that you could codify the whole thing was a ridiculous pipe dream. As time went on, it became merely horrifyingly difficult.
Then scientific progress went asymptotic, as it usually does, and now we can transcribe DNA faster than we can write random letters by hand. And it’s only going to get faster.
The idea that we may never be able to scan all the processes of the brain as it operates is also crap. Right now, it’s a pipe dream. In a few years, it’ll be ridiculously difficult.
In twenty years, it’ll be par for the course.
That’s science.
Ref: http://www.liv.ac.uk/researchintelligence/issue32/DNA.htm
I could someone point me to the post I made that said science is bunk?
I said “Arrogantly dismissing ideas” is un-scientific.
I did realize I was insulting anyone with the idea.
Haha, whoops! I mistyped “Robert Jordan”, who is a fantasy author, instead of “Andrew Jordan”, who is the physicist.
Gah, way past my bedtime.
‘Didn’t realize.’
Your first word is a non-sequitur. Arrogance or humility is irrelevant to science.
Dismissing ideas that cannot be verified, and holding all theories provisionally, is the essence of the scientific method. Why do you care if something is “unscientific” if you don’t know or care enough to learn what the word means?
Sastra,
Do you have contact info for Danio, LIsaJ, or I? We’ve been chatting off and on (mostly “How do you do this?” or “how do we want to organize this?” sorts of stuff) since starting, but none of us can find your email address, and we thought it would be good to bring you in on any conversations we have.
Melior, I know what the word means. And YOU really made my point for me…
As a person with PTSD, it’s distressing how woo and pseudoscience has invaded the mental health field.
The predominant treatment for PTSD is becoming EMDR, which is a total load of bull… and there’s this new “treatment” which is based on the idea that when a word that means something to you is spoken, your arm is easier to push down.
So the “therapist” essentially uses cold reading techniques to find out what’s bothering you, while they are pushing your arm down DIFFERENTLY depending on what they themselves think.
They go over the words “angry,” “depressed,” “lonely,” etc. until they find the relevant one, and then they go over time frames “birth,” “ages 1 to 5,” etc. to discover when you felt that feeling.
Once they have magically identified the fact that you felt “despair” at age 20, they tell you so close your eyes and “feel that feeling” for a few moments. Then they test you again, and magically your arm DOESN’T press down as easily. You’re cured! You “processed” that emotion and your arm shows that you’re OK with it now.
This bullshit from a psychologist with a Phd. Not a psychic, but a mental health professional.
Might as well use a Ouija board. And she comes out and says that “talking about things,” (conventional therapy) is not going to help, you need either the magic arm therapy, or the EMDR. (Research EMDR to see what a crock it is.)
These are becoming the predominant forms of treatment for PTSD. Not fringe, but literally the standard forms of treatment in the US.
Press my arm down and see how much despair I feel NOW when faced with this bullshit as the only available treatment for my illness.
Owlbear,
My apologies about miss-attributing quote to you, and upon re-reading it looks like your quote is also taken out of context and could be read the wrong way – so that’s a double mistake.
#54
Yes, there are things that cannot possibly be measured. Fairies, the soul, the “collective consciousness,” etc. That’s what this article is about.
#55
Hard to believe you didn’t know such a dismissive and vague comment of your own would be insulting. First, by calling it “arrogant,” implying people who dismiss such ideas are, well, arrogant. Second, stating that it’s unscientific to dismiss things we can’t measure with science. That’s just bizarre.
PZ was a New Age mysticism devotee?? Great Cthulu’s ghost!
It is odd how it can bubble up anywhere. One of my oldest friends (since 1st grade) has a PhD in an actual science, but now is a professional “animal communicator.” Since she is, as far as I know, totally without guile or dishonesty, I can only conclude she actually believes it.
I have to wonder if her upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness predisposed her to embrace the irrational.
opium4themasses:
It ain’t. Bohmian mechanics doesn’t mesh well with relativity and is therefore on unfriendly terms with quantum field theory. Just one more lost cause on the path of inquiry.
In order to have a scheme which accounts for all known observations as well as quantum mechanics does, you need something which is basically as fucked up as quantum mechanics is. You can try to push the fucked-up-edness off into the corner or invent some way that the world is more sensible on a deeper level, but when you try, you end up “replacing” QM with something which is either no more or considerably less useful than QM itself. Block the door, and Nature will come in the window.
Bluegrass @ 63:
Oh, you mean stuff that DOESN’T EXIST…
I dunno, man, that’s more stuff that science has specifically detected nothing, rather than something science has failed to detect. I count it as “nonexistent”, but I’ll be sure to change my opinion if real science detects them.
#60:
Sorry, I should have been more clear. You have demonstrated that you do not know what the word “unscientific” means to scientists. You are, of course, just like Humpty Dumpty, free to use the word inside your head to mean whatever you like.
Wikiquote for Niels Bohr Has a quote “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” which is probably what I was thinking of.
Wikiquote on Feynman has “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”. I’ll google some more cause it’s gonna bother me.
melior (#52):
Except that even in the Copenhagen Interpretation, the “observer” can’t choose which eigenstate to collapse a wavefunction into. All the experimenter can do is compute probabilities and choose when to poke the system and force it to collapse. You don’t get to be telekinetic; you just get to choose when to be an intrusive busybody.
Since about 1970, more and more physicists have been treating the “collapse of the wavefunction” as a pedagogical fiction, a sort of “lie-to-children” (in this case, it’s more of a “lie-to-undergraduates”). Instead of saying that an “observer” or an “entity from the classical level” collapses a quantum system’s wavefunction when the observer performs a measurement, the new habit is to treat the measurement apparatus as a quantum system in its own right, made up of lots of tiny quantum pieces; we then ask, what happens when these two systems are coupled? The result, as often happens with coupling, is a loss of innocence.
craig, #61: That hand-pressing therapy sounds…um…insane. The ‘diagnosis’ would be bad enough, but the ‘curing’ part just sounds pathetic.
Where are you that these methods are so predominant?
“PZ was a New Age mysticism devotee?? Great Cthulu’s ghost!”
PZ is away and has guest bloggers. Try to keep up. That’s why the first words of the post are “Sastra here.”
Breakfast, specifically in NY state, though this crap is blanketing the whole country.
The arm thing is new to me (I forget the name, something like Neuro-Muscular Therapy or whatever)
But EMDR is quickly becoming the standard therapy across the whole country, and is almost as crazy. Do some research on EMDR and read about how the “therapy” was invented, etc.
Thanks for pointing this book out, Sastra. I’ve never read any of Robert Price’s books, but they sound interesting so I’ll have to give them a try.
A really short and simplified version of my spiritual history, because MAJeff says he’s interested in such things and it seems there are other people here with similar histories:
I was raised Christian, but felt there weren’t any satisfactory answers to the questions I was asking. Many of the Christians around me said that I shouldn’t be asking questions and should just accept what they told me. One even told me that my questions were “from the devil”. I was just a kid, so I didn’t know that alternatives beliefs existed. When I was 12 I met someone who was into new age spirituality, and her answers seemed to make more sense to me. She also brought up even more questions that I had not yet thought to ask about Christianity. But after dabbling in new age woo for a few years, I found that I had questions about it as well. It was too subjective – in many cases if you believed it, than it was true – and people were claiming all sorts of things that I couldn’t verify and saw no evidence of.
In university I took a bunch of religious studies courses on the side, including classes on Western, Eastern and comparative religion. I migrated back to Christianity as kind of a “default”, and for a while was pretty successful at suppressing my doubts and ignoring tricky issues. I sincerely believed for a while. However, eventually I couldn’t ignore the contradictions and absurdities any longer. I have also been fascinated with science for a long time, and the more I learned about the world through science, the more I realised how flawed and limited the religious world view is. Also, I realised how unnecessary it is to invoke God as a explanation. So now I’m leaning strongly toward atheism.
Oh, and Hubris Hurts: I’ve had similar experiences with the fortune telling stuff. I learned some basic techniques from a book and tried them out on some friends and somehow that turned into a reputation for being psychic, even though I didn’t believe in it and TOLD people I didn’t believe in it. A couple of years ago I created my own system of divination for a novel I’ve been toying with and tested it out on a few people to see if it gave believable results. It does. Far too believable, as once again I had people telling me it really DOES work. I told them I was just making stuff up and don’t believe in it myself, but they were convinced that some mystical power was working through me in spite of myself. I suppose they’re partially correct – it’s the mystical power of suggestion.
I’m reading the EMDR wiki page now. The wiki has a pretty positive tone about it, whatever that means. The theory behind the therapy does indeed sound rather weird and hand-wavey (specifically the supposed connection between the eye motion or sensory stimulus and the effect on the memory).
Zetetic — Even with the warning that you made the system up! That’s pretty astonishing.
Confirmation bias is so powerful.
Breakfast, here’s the scoop on EMDR.
A woman with a degree from a non-accredited school which has since gone under was upset and walking through the park.
After her walk, thinking about the things that bothered her, she felt better.
She decided that the reason she felt better was because of her eye movements during the walk. She came up with the “theory” that eye movements somehow put the brain into a different state that allows emotions to be better processed.
So she starts training people to do it, for several thousand dollars each. She also sues people who train others, claiming her technique is copyrighted.
People undergoing EMDR find that it helps. Then, they find that the eye movement part isn’t necessary… it works with finger tapping too. The theory changes from “eye movement changes the brain’s state” to “any distraction…” etc.
Then of course, it’s found that even the finger treatment doesn’t matter. What do you have left? STANDARD cognitive therapy. Which works.
EMDR is simply standard therapy with a bullshit gimmick thrown on top, and a spurious explanation for the gimmick.
Oh, and as far as the wikipedia page for EMDR goes…
EMDR has a huge following of rabid fanatics who defend it, it’s like a religion. They routinely delet anything negative from the wikipedia page, so the current article is the best any skeptics have been able to get stick.
While it is certainly true that the issues of New Age confusion deserve a scientific critique the fact is that current technocratic Big Science is unable to provide, because its basic assumptions are wrong.
http://darwiniana.com/2008/08/10/top-secret-and-pop-mysticism-vs-big-science/
Oh and one more thing about EMDR – James Randi debunked it, and got a huge backlash from the EMDR devotees.
Thanks for the clarification, Blake.
I’m glad that the simple explanation of observation-triggered wave function collapse is being seen more as foma these days, because to me it always left hanging all sorts of natural followup questions about how exactly it worked. It’s not as if anyone was proposing (or could propose) a force-particle exchange or some such similar mechanism of interaction, so the mechanism always seemed unsatisfying and incomplete.
I’m still not comfortable with my understanding of the substitution of “measurements” for observers though. Is Schrodinger’s cat dead yet, or not until someone reads the results of the measuring device? I’m encouraged by the idea that we might make further progress by characterizing the system as including the measurement/observer, and that working on opening that black box a bit more may allow us to gain some traction again. That’s why experiments such as the one I linked in #52 are so fascinating to me.
The many-worlds interpretation suffers from none of these issues, of course, but of course it’s also frustratingly difficult to design an experiment to test.
By the way, I’m a big fan of Greg Egan’s SF too.
Breakfast @ #74
I told them in advance that I had created my fictional system to use in a novel, and even explained some of the process of development to them because I didn’t want to accidentally mislead anyone. Amazing how even after the preamble they still believed in it. I guess people are very good at misleading themselves and don’t need my help.
People have told me that I should try to sell my system. I probably could… but that feels too much like a con. I have ethical standards about things like that, however tempting it may be.
Sounds like a pretty cool book. Love the quote from The Secret creator.
Owlbear,
you seem to be missing out a major point, and that is that it’s not just the process or cause that has to be measurable, there has to be some EFFECT on something. For the plate tectonics example, I don’t know, but can easily IMAGINE, that there were some really strange anomalies in geology that could not be explained with the current-at-the-time theories. OBSERVABLE anomalies. Not made up ones. So a theory was postulated, tested against, and found to be accurate.
As for brains, we can measure the effect of brains, and we can observe that with certain injuries to certain parts of the brain cause those effects are destroyed. Even if we don’t understand YET what exactly causes you to be able to, for example, recognise your mirror image as a reflection of yourself, that doesn’t really mean we can’t tell that it is simply SOME sort of result of a process in a physical brain.
I think a point that people haven’t really addressed that you’ve made is the ‘insulting’ part. Yes. The post and the attitudes of some of the commenters (and my thoughts too) has an air of derision for people who believe these things (psychic phenomenon, ghosts, the secret, etc). I can understand if you don’t want to think badly of those people, but you must also understand why some of us think their BELIEFS worthy of ridicule? They have no measurable cause OR effect (or at least any effect that isn’t explainable with probability or trickery as the cause).
I can see why you would think these points of view arrogant, but you have to draw the line somewhere in terms of defining ‘nonsense’ beliefs. If you follow the scientific method that line is very very easy to see, and also moves about sometimes, but I have no intention of jumping over it.
“PZ was a New Age mysticism devotee?? Great Cthulu’s ghost!”
PZ is away and has guest bloggers. Try to keep up. That’s why the first words of the post are “Sastra here.”
i am so ashamed. I will now join a monastery for those who are behind.
Ack, that should have been Breakfast @ #75, though since Breakfast has both posts 74 and 75, I guess it’s not that big a deal.
“i am so ashamed. I will now join a monastery for those who are behind.”
Hey, don’t take it so hard… at least you aren’t Left Behind. ;)
#78:
Don’t leave us hanging, man, for gods’ sake tell us which basic assumptions and what’s wrong with them! The link you gave only claims that:
I fully agree that quixotic excursions should be discouraged as a formal research plan, but I’ve never heard of “human depth psychology”, possibly because of the massive global conspiracy to suppress it.
“I’ve never heard of “human depth psychology”, possibly because of the massive global conspiracy to suppress it. “
Big oil bought the patents in order to kill it.
or something.
A bit late to the party, but:
Owlbear @#33, the brain certainly exists. A quick five minutes with an axe in the mirror will convince you of the fact.
That is all.
Stacey @ 65: Ahh well. My hopes were raised by the lack of criticism on the wikipedia page.
Still, I remember debates about whether the non-locality was a releveant charge in light of the EPR experiment. As far as I can tell the Bohm Interpretation is still computationally valid, correct?
Are hidden variable interpretations simply being discarded as a whole or is there a push to abandon notions of causality?
More to the point, Owlbear, you are committing a very basic error, and that is this:
You assume that truth claims are all independent of one another.
They are not.
A truth claim that the miracle of the Sun at Fatima exists need not be positively disproved, because it has corollaries that are clearly in contradiction to reality; eg. the Sun does not suddenly shift position to the Earth, and if it did we would bloody well notice.
I would like to point out that this is not the case.
Thus, without examining the evidence further, we can immediately deduce that the miracle at Fatima did not occur as declared.
Likewise, truth claims of the Noachic worldwide Flood do not need further examination, since my ancestors in China completely failed to notice a Great Flood that wiped them out.
Truth claims of astrology do not need further examination either, as astrology claims contradict each other, and thus cannot all be examining an objective phenomenon.
You assume, in short, that every idiot with a megaphone has the right to be examined equally.
Do you seriously think that someone who claims, for example, that he is invisible except when observed deserves the same respect as someone who claims that he has managed to create a generator with a 15% improvement in efficiency?
The second puts forth a claim that can be easily checked and disproved, if false, and is thus worth examining. The first cannot be disproved, and thus is pointless to waste time on.
Can you see the difference? If not, that explains everything.
“Do you seriously think that someone who claims, for example, that he is invisible except when observed “
That is a REALLY shitty superpower.
Well-spotted, Craig!
Only slightly less useful than being able to stretch any part of your body at will.
Especially when compared to Bowler’s Daughter.
The worst superpower ever.
Darn, I haven’t gotten around to reading Bob’s new book. I enjoyed his previous books, especially his “Jesus is Dead”. Highly recommended.
#92 Notkieran,
I can’t believe you can’t think of a lot uses for that superpower.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, New Age has some positive aspects. I never heard of any New Age holy wars or conversion via threats or their version of hellfire preachers. To my knowledge they haven’t been forcing their way into schools or demanding special considerations the way christianity has. On the whole, it’s a very tolerant and open religion.
But on the other hand, it does appear to be a mish mash of just about every superstition in history. It’s not organized and includes everything from the Secret to tarot cards to ancient Lithuanian gods. It’s as if someone renamed the Other category of religious beliefs and brought it all under the same umbrella.
One of my friends is a New Ager. She convinced me to listen to The Secret audio book. I could barely get through the first few chapters. If Role Playing Games are “let’s pretend” with rules then The Secret is wishful thinking with rules. Last year when our cliche went to the Ren Fest she convinced me to visit a tarot reader. (The things we do out of friendship.) The card reader did a perfect job. Nothing she predicted came true. I’m starting a new job tomorrow so MAYBE she was just a year off.
To me New Age is a bunch of nonsense, but as far as nonsense goes, this is pretty harmless. It grows as changes with new information (sort of like science) and lacks the rigidity that so easily transforms religious people into fundamentalists and terrorists. And because New Age has the breadth and depth, if any religion winds up being real this is high on my list sharing the spot with Wicca, Paganism, and Buddhism.
Plus New Age music is pretty cool.
“Deepak Chopra is full of shit!”
Julia Sweeney.
Letting Go of God
#91
“Dad, I’m going up to my room with a bunch of strange men.”
“OK Son”
Invisible Boy and his father from Mystery Men
Alverant @ #97:
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, New Age has some positive aspects. I never heard of any New Age holy wars or conversion via threats or their version of hellfire preachers. To my knowledge they haven’t been forcing their way into schools or demanding special considerations the way christianity has. On the whole, it’s a very tolerant and open religion.
These aren’t really positive aspects in and of themselves so much as the absence of some of the vices of other religions. The tolerance and openness might be considered virtuous, but it seems it’s often taken to the extreme of viewing all ideas, however hare-brained, as simple differences of opinion, and that all are equally good.
Of course, my principal problem with religion has always been that it is the product of bad thinking, rather than that it is a source of violent atrocities. The vast majority of religious people are not terrorists, and are even moral people. But without exception (as far as I can tell) they adhere to some whacked out beliefs about how the world works without having good reason to adhere to them.
Since I place a high value on truth, and a lack of respect for truth is religion’s most ubiquitous sin, I can’t see New Age beliefs as anything more than marginally better, and then only because they lack the most severe, but most exceptional vices of certain, more common religions.
Just for clarification, Alverant, I did read your entire post, and am not really in disagreement. I just don’t consider the aspects of New Age beliefs you listed to be real virtues so much as the absence of certain vices.
My cosmic life energy is probably vibrating at the very highest level in the hierarchy of spiritual development, but I don’t care.
#60:
Melior, I know what the word means. And YOU really made my point for me…
Sorry, I should have been more clear. You have demonstrated that you do not know what the word “unscientific” means to scientists. You are, of course, just like Humpty Dumpty, free to use the word inside your head to mean whatever you like.
=============
My point was Arrogance leads people to make stupid and inaccurate assumptions and therefore reach the wrong conclusions.
Yes, Owlbear@103, that much is clear.
But can you please point out where, in relation to the topic of this thread, has anyone arrogantly dismissed an idea out of hand?
#100, 101 Escuerd
I agree we’re not really in disagreement. Your statement “These aren’t really positive aspects in and of themselves so much as the absence of some of the vices of other religions.” would be accurate. But for me when it comes to religion the line between positive and negative is set pretty low. IMHO “not being crappy” is a positive aspect. Otherwise I’d have to ask myself the question, “What would be positive aspects for a religion?”
For an analogy think of a school whos students are in the 22% percentile of the nation. If one student is 29% that’s pretty good for the school, but still lousy nationwide. The New Age is that one student in the school of religions.
I see your point when it comes to truth, but I think New Age has a vague unifying factor that can combine all the myriad beliefs and rituals by saying they’re all different approaches to the same thing. It’s like claiming all the gods/goddesses of love in the different cultures are all the same entity but called different names.
For those of you who see “new age” stuff as harmless, please consider the fate of my brother-in-law.
He is close to death now, doesn’t have very long.
He was diagnosed with cancer which was treatable with a good prognosis. He opted not to get traditional treatment, choosing instead “new age” therapies.
He is firmly convinced that quantum physics shows that all of the various new age techniques will work.
He doesn’t have long now, and of course it’s now way too late to try anything else. When he DOES face up to the fact that he’s dying (which is rare) he claims he’s merely “going to the next level,” and seems to think that he’ll still be around to pay the bills. And there are a lot of bills, because these “new age” therapies cost a fortune… people are making serious bucks off of this.
“New age” has killed my brother-in-law, left my little nieces fatherless, and left his dependents deep in dept.
Think about THAT when you call that crap “harmless.”
deep in dept.
and also deep in debt.
opium4themasses (#89):
For the love of Jebus, don’t take anything Wikipedia says about the status of any dispute in physics as a reliable indicator. I worked, actively, on that project for over two years, and I won’t use it as much more than a handy formula sheet.
In sharply restricted circumstances — i.e., nonrelativistic situations, i.e., not the way the world really works — you can cook up some hidden wave which makes computations come out right in the end. Why you would want to, I haven’t the foggiest idea: all you’ve done is add eccentric fairies which make it harder to move on to a more accurate description of physical reality.
This sounds like a false dichotomy. Few people want to abandon causality. Few people are pursuing hidden-variable models with any vigour. Again, why replace QM with something just as strange which is substantially more difficult to apply to relativity, field theory and so forth?
My own personal bias, which is the bias I’ve soaked up from my professors and the physicists I’ve interacted with, is that hanging on to hidden-variable models is just a way of refusing to hear what Nature is telling you.
melior (#80):
Well, cats are significantly larger than any physical decoherence scale. Indeed, pretty much anything larger than a single amino acid in any of the cat’s cells can be treated effectively as a classical entity. So, anything to which we could apply the descriptors “cat”, “alive” or “dead” is a classical system, not a quantum one.
I vaguely recall a good treatment of this in Ian Stewart’s book Flatterland (2001).
craig (#106):
Have you seen What’s the Harm?
Hm, what is it with the Lovecraft/atheism connection?
See S.T. Joshi, author of (among many others) H. P. Lovecraft and Lovecraft Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography and Atheism: A Reader.
“Have you seen What’s the Harm?”
Interesting. He’d be on several of those lists. You name the woo, he believes it. Performing reiki over his food just after asking Jesus to bless it, feng shui, UFOs, crystals, pyramids, faith healing, atlantis, unicorns having existed before the “fall,” etc.
And anyone who expresses any doubts is “closed minded” and doesn’t understand that quantum physics makes it all true.
He had a whole group of followers lapping up the woo that overflowed off of him too… and that “What the bleep do we know” movie? Oh, that absolutely ate that shit up.
If Rhonda Byrne understands quantum mechanics so well, then let’s see her demonstrate that. Let’s see her solve a simple quantum-mechanical problem, like doing the harmonic-oscillator problem with operator algebra.
I enrolled in the astronomy class and had ceased being religious within a few weeks.
I always thought that Douglas Adams’ idea of the Total Perspective Vortex would make the ultimate cure for superstition.
-jcr
I never did join a group though, because the silly costumes and rituals felt, well, silly.
That’s a big part of why I never joined any religion. Couldn’t buy the ritual thing. That, and it never made any sense.
I was raised without religion, so I never had the trauma of giving it up like many other people here have. It’s really heart-rending to hear how people have been shunned by their families for deciding not to play along anymore.
-jcr
#106 Craig,
I’m sorry to hear about your brother in law being swindled by quacks. Since as you say, he won’t be alive much longer, I hope your family will make no effort to pay them. If they sue, let them try to convince a court that they did anything worth paying for.
-jcr
“I’m sorry to hear about your brother in law being swindled by quacks. Since as you say, he won’t be alive much longer, I hope your family will make no effort to pay them. If they sue, let them try to convince a court that they did anything worth paying for.”
Oh, too late for that. For some strange reason “new age” practitioners don’t float credit and have accounts receivable departments. Cash or check up front, always.
The only time to start believing in a theory is when the evidence supports it, not earlier.
For some strange reason “new age” practitioners don’t float credit and have accounts receivable department
Not surprising. Back before the War on Drugs, police departments had bunko squads to keep a lid on that kind of fraud.
I wonder to what extent he was motivated by fear of the conventional treatment. Radiation and chemo are pretty traumatic, even if you can get medical marijuana to treat the side effects.
My grandfather died of lung cancer which he opted not to treat at all (can’t blame him, he was in his late 80’s and the chemo was just as likely to kill him faster.)
-jcr
Blake Stacey @ 108:
Whoa. First off, I didn’t take what wikipedia said at face value. If I did, why would I have bothered to ask about the current consideration of Bohm’s Interpretation? I was mostly just curious on the current state of quantum mechanics because I used to be a Physics major but for various reasons moved on.
As far as the false dichotomy charge. This is actually a reference to things like EPR and Bell’s theorem. EPR seemed to create such an odd dilemna. Take 3 ideas people thought to be axiomatic, pick 2, and discard the other. Then Bell’s theorem picks causality and then creates a dichotomy between the other 2 axioms. (I will admit to using the term causality lossely here. I’ve done little direct study of Quantum Mechanics in 5 years.)
Of course, it could also be that I jumped ship before I got to the point at which criticisms of EPR would be presented (and understood). There is also a fair chance that I was simply having a standard reaction to the blatant counter-intuitiveness of QM and the Copenhagen Interpretation. “Intuition building” was certainly a phrase I heard quite often in class.
Melio, #58
You never met Jonas Salk.
Jay Wright @#96:
It’s a useful _ability_ certainly. I just think that it’s kind of a pointless one as a superpower, kind of the way Kenny and co. can raise the blood pressure of everyone here by fifty points with a single well-placed cut-and-paste.
Let me revise that: it could be useful sometimes, like putting Kenny in front of Bruce Banner and then running away.
And hey, want to make guesses on who named Reed Richards Mr Fantastic? It certainly wasn’t Ben Grimm or Johnny Storm…
Not only is the universe weirder than we imagine, there are times when it can get downright strange.
There are things we understand, things we don’t understand, and things we’ll never understand so long as we inhabit this reality.
Our reality is not the whole of existence, but it makes for a pretty good stand-in at our stage of development.
Everything we know is wrong. That’s because we really don’t know anything, all we have are good guesses. And the worst thing about guesses is, sooner or later a better guess comes along.
Never mistake insightful thinking for a good measuring tape.
When genome sequencing gets cheap enough cryptozoology is going to see a lot of changes.
Everybody calls on Jesus when they get a bad sunburn.
—And that ends my attack of random pontification.
I used to argue with an engineer friend about what science could and couldn’t do. It all began because he hated Buffy the Vampire Slayer because of the mystical aspects; I responded that just because something hasn’t been verified by science doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I would then point out that it wasn’t until we had microscopes that we knew bacteria etc. existed – prior to that the idea of invisible creatures would be ludicrous in much the same way as ‘magic’ is to us today.
But something someone posted here a while back made me realise that that isn’t necessarily true. Any scientific analysis includes not only the mechanism itself, but all the processes around it – and if there isn’t something consistently measurable then it seems unlikely anything that is measurable is going to be responsible. The ancient greeks, I believe, posited the concept of the atom well before anyone bothered to grind glass for the purpose of lenses. The concept of super-tiny particles was something they’d managed to come up with despite not being able to discern them.
The effects of things like ‘magic’, or the rubbish espoused in The Secret, are still subject to analysis – even if we aren’t yet able to establish how they work; testing is relatively straightforward using standard methods of whether it works or if it doesn’t. If it can be shown that it doesn’t work (and I dare say that’s happened already) then why waste any more time on it?
I don’t know a great deal about QM or string theory, but I believe that, while they involve a certain amount of counter-intuitive weirdness, it’s consistent counter-intuitive weirdness.
opium4themasses:
Sorry for getting jumpy; I spent too much time as a Wikipedian debunking cranks who wanted to use WP as their own soapbox to keep an even emotional keel. (One of the original motivations behind their whole “No original research” policy was, in fact, to shut up physics crackpots. It wasn’t enough.)
As an undergrad, I went through a whole semester of “intuition building” — in their august wisdom, that’s how the Physics Department decided we should spent our first term of quantum mechanics. In hindsight, I concluded that it had been a counterproductive waste of time, building up wrong ideas which we had to truck out later.
“I wonder to what extent he was motivated by fear of the conventional treatment.”
He totally distrusts all doctors. Even before this, he would always go on and on about doctors, the medical establishment, how its all a scam, “right brain” versus “left brain,” etc.
I think I should point out that he seems to have a need to believe in this crap. His main criticism of me and others in my family is that “we don’t believe in anything.”
Like, it wouldn’t matter what woo we believed in, it’s just necessary and somehow admirable to believe in something. Anything.
He was raised Catholic, btw.
Well, perhaps it doesn’t work so well with Quantum mechanics.
Still, my first run in with with intuition building was a positive one. I thoroughly enjoyed my Thermal Physics course. Later, I found out it was just a (very) basic statisical mechanics course. Learning Gibbs various sums made me feel so powerful. It’s amazing how much that subject affects how I see the world.
Sorry, I should also probably mention. Thermal Physics was also my first 300 level Physics course and so I may have been a tad.. biased. It’s interesting how Physics is so much better when taught after noon as opposed to 9AM in a lecture hall full of engineering majors.
I think I should point out that he seems to have a need to believe in this crap.
That seems to be the case for many people. Keith Henson wrote some interesting papers on memetics years ago, and one of the things I’ve discussed with him before is the possibility of coming up with a benign set of memes to satisfy the need for belief that many people have.
-jcr
…um back to the topic of ‘Top Secret” and Dr. Price…he was recently on
Atheists Talk #030 Aug 3, 2008 if anyone wants to listen to the author talk about his book.
All the comments about tarot readings took me back a few years to when I first freed myself of belief in God. I would go to visit my brother, and we’d smoke some pot and throw the I Ching. I was always amazed at how relevant the interpretation seemed to be, but knew that only random chance was involved. Recently I had some important decisions to make about my future, and though I had all the data I needed, I was finding it difficult to make a decision, so I tried the I Ching. This time it seemed entirely irrelevant. I don’t know whether 25 years of aging, not being stoned, or something else made the difference, but it was kind of liberating: I no longer needed to explain how chance seemed to show purpose.
Of course one shouldn’t forget Paperback Apocalypse, Price’s book about Left Behind and its predecessors. A sweet, sweet, sweet read. First he bulldozes the idea of a Christian apocalypse, then goes through more apocalypse novels than I ever dared to believe existed.
Best of all, he has a sense of humor. (Okay, that’s second best of all; the best is that he is a Cthulhuphile.)
And he closes it with a piece of ”Left Behind fan fiction” that, er, the original authors might not entirely approve of.
To negentropyeater @#18:
If no one has responded, (not enough time to read ’em all, no matter how brilliant) even the most egotistical of MDs will admit that a good, honest Chiropractor will help with poorly aligned backs due to muscle tension, poor posture, etc. The big issue is of course when an Osteopath claims he/she can cure diabetes by manipulating the spine…
We are taught that pain is subjective and if the patient says they’re in pain, then, they’re in pain and we need to do what we can… if realignment is in order, then do it.
Simple enough, if we can just get past that ego thingy…
Craig: “”New age” has killed my brother-in-law”
No. He killed himself. His choice. Blame others if you like, though. One thing is for sure: sanctimoniousness never cured anything.
When priests molest children, whose fault is it? The priests’? Yes. And? Ours, for putting them on the pedestal in the first place.
‘Mkay?
As far as I know, Price believes in souls. After a few emails back and forth (this was a few years ago), I challenged him on that. He never responded. Other than that oddity, he seems to have done well to reject the other childish beliefs found in Christianity.
Clear, but one has to be particularly stupid or gullible or ignorant to go and see an Osteopath to ask him to “cure his diabetes”.
On another hand, if I go and see my MD with terrible back pain, is he going to recommend that I visit a Chiropractor or an Osteopath ? Sometimes Yes, sometimes No. Some MDs are very much against sending their regular patients over there and don’t trust that for specific conditions, Osteopathy or Chiropracty is a valid form of medicine.
“arrogantly dismissing ideas is unscientific”
Arrogant is a subjective term. Most scientific endeavor that treads on religion’s broad toes is termed “arrogant.” And even then, it’s usually termed by those on the losing end of the discussion. If you’ve got an idea, you’d better darn well have a way to quantify and test it, else you are dangerously meandering in the realm of “metaphysics.” Take the idea, run it to the wall in its conclusions, see what it predicts. If (insert idea here), consequences would include (a) and (b) in extreme cases.
Arrogance, in my experience, evolves from believing one has an insight that nobody else has – sounds a lot like “personal revelation” in charismatic religions to me.
http://www.offendedyet.com/2008/03/what-secret.html
Thank you, Sastra. Your blog introduced me to Mr. Robert M. Price. He’s rational and hilarious.
I read the first chapter of “The Reason-Driven Life” on Amazon. He said in one succinct paragraph what I have been attempting to vocalize to my wife for the past two years. Now I’m hooked. I’d like to purchase a thousand copies and distribute them to all the local churches.
I know what I’ll be reading for the next few days. Thanks, again.
negentropyeater said:
And people are not in general stupid or gullible or ignorant – oh wait, they are. Las Vegas is built entirely on this theory, and it is well borne out.
I remember seeing a chart on the average GPA’s of various professions – surgeons of various types: 3.8 to 4.0, and at the bottom: chiropractors: 2.0. We needed a 2.5 to stay in our university. This of course is not to impune practitioners, but it does give one the idea that there is less a barrier to entry into this profession than other medical professions. Physical therapists can duplicate the benefits from visiting an osteopath, all without causing cavitation bubbling and scarring of your sinovial fluid sacs, and are more heavily regulated which is something I prefer in a profession that allegedly is there to “do no harm.”
Pikemann Urge said:
Yes, who are we to trust anyone. Ever. The priest’s molestation? It’s an abuse of trust, much like pushing a quack cure. That’s human failing, trusting others to be truthful and honest. But the Church failing to prosecute and moving abusive priests from parish to parish is tantamount to the continual pass on evidence that new-age “treatments” are given by regulatory and fraud prevention agencies. It’s not “our” fault, it is the fault of a very specific subset of society.
The brother was preyed upon through his own actions initially, but new age treatments so lack a conscience in their being “holistic” that they don’t allow for other types of treatments. Everything in the modern world is toxic, see? And that’s what “causes” the cancer. Magical thinking got him there, but more magical thinking and greed kept him there. New Age plus lack of strength or conviction in our society’s regulatory arm killed him. Nothing sanctimonious about it.
He is dying of a preventable condition not because he refused treatment, which is his right, but because he was duped into only funneling his attention to a bunk treatment in the hopes that it would cure him, probably with promises of no side effects and blaming his illness not on the random crap-shoot that is genetic damage but a comforting “cause.” Our responsibility is not to shake our heads and say effectively that we let this happen, it is not the fault of New Age medicine, none are blameless. Our responsibility is to get these murdering charlatans locked up where they should be: holistically protecting themselves from a shiv in the ribs.
Pat,
what’s the GPA of Physical Therapists ? I’ve tried both, and I’m stickng with my Osteopath. He does the job, the other one not. When you have the kind of back pain that I have once every two years, I tell you, once you have found someone who gets rid of it, you don’t ask him what his GPA was.
BTW, since I visit my Osteopath, the recurrence of my back pain has also tremendously decreased. It used to be frequent, it’s now been more than two years since I haven’t had it.
I used to visit a Physical Therapist, and that’s what pushed me to try something different. About 6 years ago, I started with my Osteopath, and I am much more satisfied with the result. I visit him in case of emergency, which hopefully hasn’t happened too many times since then, and then I have once every 6 months checkups and that’s it.
RE#135:
Agreed, except that some Osteopaths do indeed make this claim, as well as other wildly improbable things…
Just the other day I had a person in my ER wanting to see an “On Call Osteopath” because her Osteopath in New York had helped her to “adjust” her “Cranial Pulse” and it was now in need of further “adjustment.”
My cheek was bloody by the end of the interview…I had a really hard time figuring that one out…We all speculated on the various ways we could detect a person’s “Cranial Pulse,” and finally realized it could be detected directly through the wallet: if it’s fat enough, we’ll find a non-existent term for a non-existent medical condition and you can pay us big bucks…
Now that was one richer Osteopath and that was one poorer patient…
Doesn’t shine a very favorable light on their profession, though…
A friend, long since gone to Marlboro country, had a deck of tarot cards and used them on me, he looked quite alarmed at the results, told me I had a predilection to serve evil. All these years later, I work for Wal – Mart. Seriously, one sees odd little things now and again, but never useful, unless it’s useful to say “Now that was weird!” .
I don’t know if there is also a difference between Europe and the USA there. In Europe, where there are far less of these professionals, they have mantained a better reputation and do really focus only on treatment of the vertebral column, at least that’s what I found here in Barcelona.
The idea of the “sacral/cranial pulse” has to do with fluids, not bones. There is an actual group of people who think this is an actual condition responsible for a host of real maladies when it is “out of rhythm.”
Again, questionable research, etc., etc. But of course there’s always anecdotal “evidence”….
These kinds of pure quacks do serious damage to legitimate practicioners.
And, it’s been said before, people are stupid enough to believe the claims. This should come as no surprise, really, considering that so many people believe in a god, or that you can’t prove whether a god exists or not, etc.
You really can make a lot of money if you just have no scruples: people are, by and large, idiots willing to believe the most preposterous crap you can invent…
Raymond Weil is the anti-cthulhu. Chopra’s a liar. The Secret is there is no secret. New Age B.S. irks me almost more than religion does. I think it’s the pseudo mystical language they try to wrap around pseudo science that pushes my buttons. At least the Theists don’t for the most part try to co-opt science and try to make millions from it.
negentropyeater:
This sounds rather familiar, kind of like argument put forward by users of acupuncture, Reiki, healing touch, and so on. “It works for me” isn’t much of a recommendation for efficacy, or a statement of factual practical benefit.
Would a masseuse/masseur help? Is the “osteopath” nomenclature more assuaging than “massage” or “therapist?” Is there a special technique that only an osteopath does other than the cracking and saying you are out of alignment? Does “rolfing” enter the picture? I’m curious of the unique benefit offered by an “osteopath” – a term I hadn’t heard until “chiropractor” had gone out of favor.
#147,
do you perhaps mean [i]Andrew[/i] Weil?
re: #78 John Landon | August 10, 2008 5:32 PM
Ah yes, I remember you from when you wen by the moniker
“Intellectual Rigor & Honesty” in your comments here. You’re the crackpot behind the ‘Eonic effect’ and “Darwiniana” nonsense.
In other words: [i]Fuck off, troll.[/i]
Do you mean “legitimate practitioners” of osteopathy or chiropractic techniques? The legitimate ones are the ones that claim all disease is poor balance of fluids; the “outliers” are the ones that try and integrate it with modern medicine. Chiropractors at their core are anti-vaccination, and osteopaths are believers in something similar to “chi” (or “qi” or “ki” or whatever phlavor of phlegm phloats your boat).
That’s the point: if these people really want to help, why not ditch the century-old baggage and become a massage therapist without the woo-woo, or a physical therapist? Is the wacky aspect part of the traveling medicine show, something they really believe, or a way to dodge regulation and educational requirements?
Physicians are trained (somewhat) to realize when they are out of their depth and refer someone to a specialist or practitioner to evaluate a complicated condition. I’m not so sure chiropractors/osteopaths do this other than on the receiving end.
The idea of the “sacral/cranial pulse”
Ahh yes, I’d forgotten about that.
Besides EMDR and the “push your arm down” treatments for PTSD, I’d also had offered to me once “cranial-sacral therapy.”
That’s another BS therapy for PTSD.
It’s really distressing how much the bullshit has infiltrated “legitimate” mental health treatment, so that psychologists and clinical social workers are offering this crap.
Pat,
I think you can use Osteopath and Chiropractor for the same thing, and no, a therapist or a masseur or a Reiki shit doesn’t do the job in my case, I’ve tried many times (see my previous posts). When I have these terrible back pains and I can’t even get out of bed, it hurts so much I can’t even stand up, all the other alternatives have failed.
I don’t know exactly what he does to my back, but he gets rid of the pain and puts me back in shape in a few sessions, and I can start having a life again.
I’m really not a woo person (very much the opposite actually), but I think with regards to the treatment of problems of the vertebral column, Chiropractors have a special technique or something that other practitioners do not have.
I don’t know what it is, I haven’t bothered studying the details, but I know it works.
Darwiniana? What’s that? Darwin-related collectibles? That could be cool.
“How’d you like to come over and check out my collection of Darwiniana?”
Oh man, chicks would love that!
The dopey guy with the big gut and the beard… that Weil.
Many years ago I was in a hotel bar in Dallas TX, reading palms. I knew all about cold reading; and you really can tell a lot about someone by looking at their hands and being physically close and noting personal details.
One woman in particular got very upset and started crying and told me I was absolutely right about her and then proceeded to tell me all about herself.
At this point the unscrupulous ‘psychic’ would be gathering information and asking for money or sexual favors for further ‘guidance sessions’.
It is scary how easy it is to dupe people.
Welcome aboard, Rik. I hope you have as much fun here as I do.
#155,
yes, that would be *Andrew* Weil…the subject of this review:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_1_30/ai_n26718255
#154: “Darwiniana? What’s that? Darwin-related collectibles? That could be cool.”
If only. Instead, it’s a cool word regrettably co-opted by a windy, philosophy-spouting cuckoo (John Landon aka ‘nemo’ aka’Intellectual Rigor & Honesty’) to be the name of his blog.
sample:
“We have a secret here at Darwiniana: we know Darwinian thinking is wrong, because we have a reality check, a ‘glimpse of evolution’, that can tell us instantly where standard reductionism goes wrong. Nor is there any license given to the design alternative. http://eonic-effect.net
The result is not ‘another theory’ but a framework for observing historical evolution in its great complexity, in a condition of some wonder!”
Apparently, in addition to hating ‘Darwinian thinking’, he also hates creationism..oh, and Gurdjieff, too, for whateverthefuck reason.
Hm, what is it with the Lovecraft/atheism connection?
Lovecraft wrote about malevolent extramundane super-entities that had been worshipped by various groups throughout history… if you read a story about insane and/or evil cultists serving a being like ‘Yog-Sothoth’ or ‘Cthulhu’ for nefarious aims, it gets you thinking about the cultists you know who serve ‘Jehovah’ or ‘God’.
As far as my personal paganism goes, I consider the Goddess and God to be purely symbolic, and the rituals and ‘magic’ to be psychological only. And I find the rituals and the costumes fun.
negentropyeater: “I don’t know what it is, I haven’t bothered studying the details, but I know it works.”
No, see, it *doesn’t* work. Why not? Because it *can’t* work! Why not? Because they use nouns and verbs which are not compatible with contemporary medicine. Now, get off that health wagon and go see a “real” doctor.
p,
But that’s what I did first, of course. I do trust contemporary medicine, and I distrust woo. So for years when I had these terrible back pains, I visited my MD, he would prescribe me something and send me to see a Physical Therapist. And I just kept on going that way. Until I moved location and then explained to my new MD that I was really becoming frustrated with this recurrent problem and that I really wanted to try something that works for good, not to have to deal with this over and over again. And I’m very greatful that it’s my MD here, a “real” Doctor, who sent me to see this Chiropractor/Osteopath. And I am very satisfied with the results; I HAVE NOT had this terrible back pain again for the last two years, he says “I’m realigned” and that I now walk properly, which I didn’t before, I understand that this might not be the adequate terminology for contemporary medicine, but please understand, I’m just a patient looking for a solution to my recurrent back pain, not for correct terminology.
When I visit my MD for other things or regular checkups, he goes “How’s your back ?” and I say “fine”, and he says “told you this would work”.
Next time I visit my MD, should I say, “Oh you know I think I’m going to stop with the Chiro caus’ someone in a blog told me that he doesn’t use the correct terminology for contemporary medicine”. Maybe I should try that next time, see what his reaction is.
negentropyeater #163 wrote:
Although chiropractry started out as pseudoscience — and many of its practitioners are still resting on its dubious premises — over the years both it and osteopathy have evolved some very useful techniques for working with back pain. So, it’s probably been pointed out here already, but there are chiropractors, and then there are chiropractors. They’re not all the same.
Some of them are simply very good physical therapists. The woo is either absent, or minimal and irrelevant. It sounds to me like you found one of those. Excellent.
Over on Quackwatch, there is a pro-science, anti-woo Chiropractor with some excellent critiques of chiropracty. As I recall, however, he has changed his tune somewhat. He used to argue that chiropractors needed to get the garbage out of chiropracty. He now says that the woo is so deeply embedded, and the practitioners so stubborn, that people who want to do good, scientific chiropractic techniques should probably just become physical therapists in the first place.
craig at *87: Not big oil, Big Psych!
Jay at #82,
#161 – *Waves hand at you*
Sastra: “there is a pro-science, anti-woo Chiropractor with some excellent critiques of chiropracty”
Bah. Who cares what the talk is as long as they walk the walk. He says ‘energy’ you say ‘molecules’. Whatever. Just fix me. Properly and with minimal side-effects, please.
One more word about Lovecraft and atheism, or a word from the man himself:
That’s from Lovecraft’s Selected Letters, vol. 4, p. 57, which I don’t have since I don’t roll in money, but which is quoted in the introduction to The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, edited and commented by S. T. Joshi.
I can’t think of anything beyond “Ia! Shub-Niggurath!” to add to that.