Germaine occasionally links or recommends a blog by Steve
Novella, the champion of Science Based Medicine. Rather than something to recommend
positively, I consider Novella to be an exemplar of a pseudoscience practitioner. I also consider the use of Bayesian
statistics to be the statistical equivalent of heroin – a really really bad
idea to get oneself hooked upon if one is seeking truth. These thoughts are both counter to this blog’s general inclinations,
so counter arguing these points is something I will try to deliver on. J
What is
Science? And what is pseudoscience? I will follow Karl Popper on both of these
questions, as I think he thought the answer through well. Science, per Popper, is an investigative
methodology directed toward finding discoveries about the world, which focuses on
hypothesis formation and revision based on test. The process varies in different fields and at
different maturities of a field. A general
summary is that it includes exploration, investigation, speculation, guided
investigation, hypotheses, derivation of tests, tests and revisions, repeat test/revise
cycle. This approach can be used for all sorts of subjects, and has been. Note, there are no subject areas that are or
should be excluded from science – the key question is whether there are
usefully testable hypotheses, plus an attitude of seeking and accepting refuting
tests. If Intelligent Design or Astrology
had productive hypotheses and engaged in the test/revise cycle, they could in
principle be “science”.
Pseudoscience, again per Popper is an approach claiming “truth”,
which REJECTS the test/revise process, AND which claims to be science.
So –what about SBM? Here
is SBM’s definition of science: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-is-science/ SBM does not come out and explicitly reject
Popper’s definition, instead they suggest there are TWO definitions, and they
want to use both:
In
common use the word “science” has several meanings, which may or may not be
clear in context. Two that readily come to mind are 1) the growing body of
knowledge about nature, accumulated over the several hundred years during which
a distinctive, rational method of inquiry, or at least parts of it, have been
employed; 2) that method of inquiry, also known as the “scientific method,”
characterized by the collective tools of science—observation, generation of
hypotheses, controlled and repeated testing of hypotheses, the use of
mathematics for generating hypotheses, for aiding in complex measurements, for
statistical inference, and so on.
There is
no such difference. In actuality, definition
1 is the result one arrives at when applying definition 2. Asserting two definitions is an effort to
blow smoke, the reason for which becomes clearer later in the essay. The purpose to asserting two definitions is
to provide smoke to obscure the claim that physicalism is irrefutably demonstrated
by science. Here is where the
bait/switch of physicalism for science is done:
The
late physicist, Milton Rothman, wrote three small books that are useful for a
discussion such as this. One of those books, A Physicist’s
Guide to Skepticism, has an entire section titled
“Laws of Permission and Laws of Denial.” The chapter on “Laws of Denial” begins
as follows:
It
is fashionable in some circles to insist that “nothing is impossible,” as
though to admit the impossibility of some cherished goal is to “give up
trying,” to have a closed mind, to be a spoilsport, a pessimist. This cliché is
most prevalent in inspirational rhetoric connected with therapeutic,
educational, or sporting activities. Nevertheless, one of the basic functions
of science is to determine what actions are impossible in this real world.
Choosing between the possible and the impossible is a task carried out by means
of the laws of denial, which tie us firmly to reality even as imaginations soar
unfettered through the universe.
Another
fashionable cliché is that “all scientific theories are provisional,” as though
physics knows nothing with a certainty, and that anything we think we know is
likely to be found false in the future…If all scientific knowledge is
tentative, what have we been doing for the past 300 years? How can I be so sure
that the computer upon which I am typing will print out the words that I am
putting into it?
A
more accurate assessment of the situation is to recognize that one of the
fundamental tasks of science is to critically examine all knowledge and to
separate from the tentative ideas and false notions of the past facts that are
so well established that to think them subject to change is to invite wishful
thinking and foolishness.
Laws of denial, as
explained by Rothman, are the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, angular
momentum, and of electric charge; the principle of Lorentz invariance, “from
which the conclusions of special relativity follow: no object, energy or
information can travel faster than the speed of light”; the principle of
causality, by which it is “impossible for an effect to appear earlier in time
than its cause”; and the first and second laws of thermodynamics. There are
other statements that can be made with a degree of certainty much higher than
is necessary to preclude their being overturned by clinical research, even if
they are less certain than the laws of denial. For example, since all known
interactions can be explained by the 4 forces of the standard model, and since
only two of those forces—gravity and electromagnetic force—explain all actions
other than those at the subatomic level, there is no reason to invoke fanciful
forces (the vital force, ‘biofields’) that have never been detected and that
add nothing to our understanding of natural phenomena.
Note what is done here in this quote – falsifiability, and
the tentative nature of all empiricism, is explicitly rejected, based on a
fallacy (argument by ridicule). And what
is substituted is a concept of science as something like bookkeeping, which
offers certainties.
Applying falsifiability to SBMs definition of science shows
that it is FALSE, in every particular.
·
First – LAWS in science are NOT inviolable! Laws are just regularities. SBM’s bookkeeping alternative to science,
relies upon the pre-scientific concept of inviolable laws.
·
Conservation principles are not inviolable
either. Noether’s theorem showed that conservation
principles are the outgrowth of symmetries.
And the study of symmetries in physics has showed that they all
spontaneously break (IE, the conservation laws do not always hold). Here is a physics reference that explains why
all symmetries break. https://www.pnas.org/content/93/25/14256
·
Note – decades ago for my undergraduate degree
one of my essays was on the conservation law breakage needed of the baryon conservation
law to there to be any matter. More recently,
I asked, on physics stack exchange, about whether either Hoyle’s proton
creation speculation, or the Zero Energy Hypothesis, could be relevant to the
plausibility of dualist interaction effects. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/494408/the-zero-energy-hypothesis-and-its-consequences-for-particle-creation-and-dualis Note
these speculative violations of conservation laws are common in theoretical
physics.
·
The Bell Inequality demonstrated that physics cannot
be both localized (limited by light speed), and real (observer independent), hence
the “light speed limit” claims are also untrue
·
Another physicalist and fellow member of CSI, Victor
Stenger, noted in one of his books that the average entropy of an expanding
universe can decline, explicitly violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
·
We cannot “explain the interactions” between
matter and either dark energy or dark matter, and these interactions cannot be explained
by the Standard Model and its four forces.
·
Additionally, neither the interactions of mind with
brain, nor of abstract objects with matter, nor the postulated process of
emergence are explained by physical reductionism, nor can they be.
SBM holds by a dogma – reductive physicalism – and rejects
the falsification of its dogma. Asserting
a dogma as science, and in particularly a REFUTED one – is pseudoscience.
SBM then takes the pseudoscience project further – not only rejecting
the methodology of science and replacing it with a dogma, but then campaigning
to PREVENT THE EXPERIMENTS WHICH FURTHER CHALLENGE ITS DOGMA. One of the most fruitful sources of evidence
for the falsity of reductive physicalism is the experimental success of psi and
CAM (complementary and alternative medicine). SBM, though, considers the
experimental data relative to CAM and psi to be ”incorrect”:
Such
Trials Don’t Work
The final reason that
efficacy trials of highly implausible claims are a bad idea is that they don’t
work very well: they tend to yield, in the aggregate, equivocal, rather than
merely disconfirming results. Yes, the biases are so serious that they have led
to incorrect conclusions about CAM, at least for a substantial
period.
I.E. – the results of good testing do not provide the support
that Novella wishes they did for his wish to reject the reality of psi and CAM effects,
SO – he wants to PREVENT ANY FURTHER TESTING!!!!!
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/of-sbm-and-ebm-redux-part-iii/
Note this rejection of testing and evidence is not limited to
Novella and SBM – it is a common position across the “skeptic” community. Here is one skeptic paper making this same point of refusing to even look at evidence supporting phenomena that challenge physicalism. Susan Blackmore, another CSI fellow, made the rationale explicit in her autobiography -- NO evidence would convince her of the reality of psi-- because she will always consider creating and data fraud to be more likely than the overturning of physicalism. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/07/why-parapsychological-claims-cannot-be-true/
Novella is not alone as an advocate of pseudoscience, he is part of a
pseudoscience movement which is much larger than SBM.
OK – second subject – Bayes.
Bayes developed his statistics in order to emulate how humans
actually think – that our conclusions are based on both the evidence, AND OUR
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE. This is NOT actually a
good thing to do! We humans are HIGHLY
subject to confirmation biases – which lead us to DRASTICALLY overestimate the
likelihood that what we think is true, actually IS true. Basically anyone can see this, by trying to
talk to somebody about what they believe on almost any subject. One will quickly run into multitudes of poorly
supported, but certainly held positions.
Therefore, IF one gives permission to set the probability of priors as a
user action, USERS SET PRIORS FAR FAR FAR TOO HIGH (or low, depending on what
their beliefs are).
This effect was in action with SBM and “science”. Novella wants to believe in physicalism,
hence he approaches “physics” with a confirmation bias, and does not look for
refutations, but instead falsely thinks science confirms physicalism. This is not a problem unique to Novella, we
ALL suffer form this sort of cognitive bias.
Then he sets the prior for “physicalism”
to 1, which under Bayes methods, leads to legitimately rejecting all contrary
data. There is NO HOPE FOR HIM to ever change
his mind, as long as he maintains a Bayesian approach to experimental data.
Using user-independent statistics – frequentist statistics -- is how “paradigm shifts” ever occur in science, and
that individuals change their minds. The
“Bayesian method is better” approach will, I fear, basically shut down
science.
