Ya, Sagittarians are funny that way…
This appears to be a nice little summary of what I mean.
ANCIENT ASTROLOGY AS A COMMON ROOT FOR SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE
You mean…homeopathy might someday be a real discipline?
When they merge with the National Union of Waterboys, yes.
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The thing that amazes me is that so many people buy into these crank theories/rip-offs.
I mean, if only from a cynical point of view, if something simple and easy had any degree of the powers that most of these theories claim, don’t people realize that some large corporation is going to patent or attempt to otherwise legally lock away access to it for the simple approach of then marketing and monopolizing a processed version of said miracle cure?
How much easier would it be to sic lawyers on folks than operating some huge shadow conspiracy to attempt to prevent information from spreading (in the age of near instantaneous information transfer)?
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The medical community is on occasion wrong, folks.
I know of at least one big example: Doctors are not especially quick to check for vitamin B levels when patients show up with one of the numerous symptoms associated with vitamin B deficiency. This is in spite of very large estimates of a prevalence of B deficiency in the population. The most obvious symptoms – like tingling in the extremities – are indeed likely to be recognized by some doctors, but there are many symptoms related to this issue, and they differ for each person, making it a nightmare for some people to get properly diagnosed. What we tend to see is that doctors will oftentimes prescribe pharmaceuticals before they will even test the B levels. Chances are high that a large number of people with dementia or depression in our culture really just need to eat meat (which contains the necessary B).
What I believe tends to happen is that there are mistakes within our biological theories, and these mistakes trickle into the medical system, in the process constraining the focus we see within the medical system. The B thing is an interesting case study, because the more a person digs into this, the more they will come to see that B is not a direct energy source for the human body. It is not analogous to fuel for the body; it is more like fuel for the gut microbes which the body cultures for energy.
The importance of the microbiome has been a bit of a surprise to the medical community, in large part because we tend to treat the human body as a mechanical-chemical system within the textbooks. The idea that our health and even behavior may depend upon communities of bacteria within the gut is defied by the frequent administration of antibiotics. Rat experiments where one rat starts behaving like another, based upon a direct transfer of their microbiomes with needles has taken the medical community by surprise.
What I would advise, in a general sense, is that people stop imagining that the only way for mainstream science to be wrong is through some sort of conspiracy. These are probably artifacts of the way in which we teach science. Keep in mind that our science textbooks oftentimes leave out critical historical details in the interest of conveying the very large amount of facts and problem-solving routines necessary to perform a discipline. What this does is create specialists who tend to think alike in very specific ways.
Absolutely. But it’s also wrong to assume there must be a conspiracy when mainstream science tests and tests and tests a new hypothesis, can’t come up with any proof that it’s right, and then dismisses it because of that. One of my big pet peeves is the frequency with which proponents of an alternative medical idea claim that Big Science has ignored them and is allying against them unjustly and then, when you look into it, it turns out that mainstream researchers have actually studied the claim … it’s just that the results aren’t turning out favorably for the alt proponents.
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Science is wrong ALL THE TIME! In fact, the wisest scientists realize that pretty much everything you know, scientifically, is wrong at some level, and really should be scrutinized and re-worked and refined. That’s kind of the beauty of the system, it’s an inherently self correcting system. Yeah, I get that human biases and failures/foibles slow down and muck up the process.
And yeah, there’s periodically a massive upheaval in the dominant paradigm, but usually, the corrections are oh so slow and so minor that they bore the living shit out of everyone who isn’t intimately familiar with that particular branch of science.
Pseudoscience is so appealing because it lets the average Joe feel superior (Those damn doctors/specialists/whoever just don’t know as much as I do [or random person on the internet who I choose to believe]). Also, it can grant hope when true science can often be a little sparse on it (and this is why quacks like Burzansky (sp?) ) retain a following, even though it’s pretty obvious that his “anti-neoplastons” aren’t doing shit.
The danger is that believing without evidence often leads one down fruitless or even harmful paths (see example of Steve Jobs, who chose alternative treatments for his very treatable pancreatic cancer).
I’d agree with you that people need to understand that science doesn’t have to have some crazy fantasy land pseudoscience/conspiracy alternative that’s right to be wrong. In fact science is usually wrong, but it’s the best model that we happen to have at any given moment.
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You win the marketing dollar.
Here. Have a dollar: $.
Bill Hicks is a nasty old man who loves you.
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