Pseudo-Science

I cultivate a few unsavory vices; among them is a curious fascination with all-things pseudo-science.

It’s led to an unhealthy love of bad disaster movies, where teens are chased by killer frosts and “volcano tires” let heroes drive miles across molten, flowing lava.

Bad science is also responsible for my compulsive curiosity about late-night infomercials. (Did you know that 25 lbs of alien plaque can live in your intestines? Or that dangerous toxins can be leeched out through your feet?! Wowser, and only 29.95!)

But where pseudo-science really shines is in the “science” of Intelligent Design. (Come on, who can resist the life from a jar of peanut butter argument?) [click to continue...]

A reader recently pointed out that I toss around the term Pseudo-Science quite a bit.

Well, they’re right, I do.

For one thing, it’s fun to say, what with all the hissing SsssSSSsss’s.

For another thing, I admit to finding shameful amounts of amusement in taking apart the ideas - they just make me giggle. (I know. I shouldn’t giggle. But I can’t help it!)

More seriously, there’s a lot of value in examining pseudo-science.

It tests logical skills, encourages taking fresh, creative looks at things, and teaches about the stumbling points in our human thought processes. Debunking pseudo-science is good exercise for the brain.

___________

But what exactly *is* pseudo-science, you ask? I was getting there, I promise!

Pseudo-science refers to any claim, idea, or thought which is presented as scientific…. but isn’t.

Technically, science can mean any body of knowledge - (political science, for example) but most of the time, modern usage of the word conjures up images of laboratories, lab coated scientists and rigorous methods of testing, in search of answers about the world around us.

It’s this second type, the lab-coated type, that pseudo-science imitates.

[click to continue...]

This article was originally planned as part of the debunking series, “Why The Secret Seems To Work”. As I wrote, I decided it was good as a stand alone article. Still, if you’re interested, you’ll find the Secret series linked at the end of this post. Now I’ll shush with my ramblings, and get on with the posting.
__________________________________

The subconscious mind has a lot of interesting tricks up its cerebellum sleeve.

One of them, officially known as “confirmation bias”, plays a big part in our instinctive responses… and it’s also one reason that otherwise rational people tend to believe weird, sometimes irrational things.

So what exactly IS this ‘confirmation bias’?

It’s a fancy-pants $10 phrase that means exactly what you might think: We’re unconsciously biased towards information, experiences and interpretations that confirm our expectations and beliefs.

Simply put? Our brains are wired to count “hits” as more important than “misses.” When it comes to our desires, beliefs and expectations, positives are more important to us than negatives.

While the bias often leads us to cling to false conclusions, there’s actually a good reason our brains are set up that way.

__________________________________

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say we were lost in the wilderness, searching for food.

By chance, we stumble across a blackberry bush, with a handful of luscious ripe berries. We eat them, then look for more bushes. The next five bushes we find don’t have any berries on them, but the sixth bush we check has enough fruit to feed us for two days.

In this situation, our survival depends on our giving more importance to the time we found the berries, than the times that we came up empty handed.

Finding the berries in the first bush sets up the expectation: bush= food. Our mind disregards the five “miss” bushes, and we continue looking. Eventually we find another bush with berries, we’re rewarded for our belief in berries on bushes, and the whole thing reinforces the expectation of bush=food.

It’s a good tactic.

If our brain had assigned as much importance to the misses as the hits, we’d probably have stopped looking for bushes, gone back to random hunting for food under rocks, and we might have starved. Instead, the biased-brain strategy pays off, and we’re rewarded with more blackberries.

Cool, huh?

__________________________________

Why aren’t we more aware of it?

This confirmation bias is part of what I call the brain’s “autopilot” function; processing that goes on well below the surface of our conscious awareness or attention. The auto-pilot brain helps us cope with survival on a very basic level, a level that doesn’t require intellect or thought or awareness. In fact, it may be built to by-pass our intellectual process, so we cant think ourselves out of survival.

Being the thinking, reasoning, intellectual creatures that we are (And proud of it!) we mostly assume that any and all of our thoughts are the results of our intellectual reasoning. We don’t pay much attention to how often the auto-pilot is on, or how strongly it influences us in our day to day decision making process… but it does influence us.

No matter how smart we are… when we look at facts related to our expectations and desires, we pay more attention to facts, experience and information that support the result we want or expect. When it works, it works well.. but when it doesn’t.. we wind up very convinced in things that may be very wrong.

__________________________________

Our hit-over-miss bias can be used against us

Fraudulent psychics and spiritual con-artists are well aware of our preference for hits over misses. They know that all they need is for one chance prediction to come true, one accurate guess, and we’ll tend to dismiss all of the false and inaccurate things they’ve said.

We don’t need anyone intentionally fooling us, either… our bias towards the positive hits can cause us to leap to some startling conclusions, including that even the most simplistic astrology is accurate, Big Foot and ancient astronauts really exist, and that old Aunt Eunice can really give you the evil eye, and muck up your whole day.

It’s part of why mystical believers can be so devout, even in the face of scientific studies disproving their beliefs, and it’s also why skeptics can be so stubbornly skeptical, able to blindly dismiss any evidence that might support a mystical explanation — because their confirmation bias leads them to do exactly that.

Mind you, just because our confirmation bias is in play doesn’t mean we’re wrong about our beliefs or expectations. Blackberries DO grow on bushes, after all, and Aunt Eunice IS eerily frightening… but our bias towards the hits makes our instinctive belief an unreliable standard.

__________________________________

Ok, but… what does this have to do with The Secret?

The Secret states that that *whatever* we hold in our mind, we bring into reality.

Not just things we see as goals, or desires, or intent, not even things we dwell on… but any old thing that we think about, we mystically manifest.

That’s where our hit-over-miss bias comes into play.

Statistically speaking, some of the things we think of *will* happen, even if we take no action towards them at all. Every once in a long while, someone will randomly think of a giant tie-dyed elephant just exactly the moment before a circus parade is turns down the street, complete with a rainbow-clad elephant named Hippie.

Most of the time, of course, we could spend a full week meditating on a tie-dyed elephant, and it would never manifest; the same goes for any number of other unlikely scenarios.

But all if that ONE unlikely elephant appears, we forget all about the other things we thought of that *didn’t* happen -winning the lottery, the tea-party with Elton John, the exploding Tasmanian duck.

Our auto-pilot brain notes the elephant as a hit, ignores the misses, and .. tada.. we must have magically manifested the elephant.

So, that’s how our confirmation bias contributes to the apparent success of The Secret — If you count the times it works, ignore the times it doesn’t, The Law of Attraction winds up with a very skewed 100% success rate.

__________________________________

MindTweak: If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. - Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink
__________________________________

“This season’s run-away hit is called The Secret. It’s a book, it’s a DVD, it’s a down-loadable video file. It slices, it dices, it steams the wrinkles out of your laundry while you sleep… and it manages to misrepresent science, history, and philosophy in the process. What isn’t there to love?” - Me, dripping sarcasm.

So. If The Secret is bunk and bruhaha, why do so many people swear it works?

Can smart marketing, pretty parchment and hints of an ancient conspiracy not only convince people to buy a product, but get them so invested that they believe anything they’re told about it?

Well.. yes. But more on that another time.

Today’s topic is much more positive.

Truth is… (and I hate to admit this) once you scrape the moldy psuedo-science and the spiritual soft-spots off of The Secret …. there really are some sound aspects that are likely to bear fruit.

For those who may not know, The Secret is all about The Law of Attraction (which isn’t a law, but.. whatever.) The idea is that whatever you hold in your mind you draw to you.

If you think friendly happy thoughts about elephants, you draw friendly happy elephants to you. Elephants with smiles and balloons for the kiddies.

But if you think fearful, negative thoughts about elephants, a herd of rogue bulls with tusks the size of skyscrapers will manifest in your front yard and raze your house in a fearful, negative stampede.

Simple, eh? Too simple, and rather absurd, but that’s the deal in a peanut shell. (Sorry, the elephants ate the actual peanuts.)

So why do so many people swear by it, in spite of the absurdity and elephants?

Because The Secret uses some pretty sophisticated mind tricks and tweaks. Yes, some of the tactics are in the marketing, and aimed at getting you to buy the DVD/book and support materials. Other tricks are about getting you to suspend your disbelief, to buy not just the product, but the idea, so that you’ll spread the word.

These tricks benefit the producer, not the consumer.

But other techniques used *do* have practical value for the end user. The Secret encourages and teaches positive thinking, skims around defensive pessimism, teaches abstract goal-setting, letting go of attachments and fears, techniques for programming your subconscious actions, as well as some pretty solid visualization techniques.

That’s useful stuff, and worth more than peanuts (though less than elephants).

So I’ve decided I’ll debunk The Secret by explaining how it *actually* works.

Cool, huh?

Don’t worry, the series will also contain the usual snips and snipes about pseudo-science and marketing ploys (ancient parchment, baby, ancient parchment!) and whatever bits of humor strike my fancy.

The first segment should be up Monday. Meanwhile, you might want to go back and re-read The Secret: A Rant Against Self Help Pseudo Science, just so you remember I am not endorsing the thing. I’ve simply become one with the Borg, and succumbed to my Google search results. That single post receives more hits on any given day than the combined hits on all the other articles.

Who knew?

_____________________________________

MindTWEAK:

That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies;
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright;
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Grandmother

_____________________________________

A friend of mine recently announced his latest grand plan: marketing the ultimate spiritual-woo product. He made me sign an ironclad non disclosure agreement, so I can’t share the details — but let’s just say its the equivalent of selling bottled sparkling air via electronic download. It is brilliant, I have to admit.

Since I’ve made a casual study of psuedo-scientific-psuedo-mystics, I thought I’d jot down a few tips for him on how to best tune up his image for his new role.

1. Adopt An Ancient Culture.

Associate yourself with an Ancient Culture, and you gain instant credibility. Be sure to do your research — it’s ooh-so-awkward when the descendents of your chosen culture crop up out of no where, start screaming about your misrepresentation of their great great great grandparents.

No worries, though… you can always just point out how far they’ve fallen from their family tree, and how disappointed their ancestors are in how they’ve turned out. (You ARE in otherworldly contact with their ancestors, right? Get out that Ouiji board, son!)

2. Cultivate a Fatherly (or Motherly) Demeanor.

Study Parental Archetypes. Watch old episodes of Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best, and Happy Days. Alternatively, you can watch Sylvia Brown and Deepak Chopra — they have this one down pat.

Strive to project an air of paternal indulgence, with a side order of unchallenged authority. Be someone who isn’t afraid to send a child to bed without supper: stern, but tolerant. Your goal is to inspire trust, loyalty and love from your followers. Like any parent, you are all about their growth. (And their worship of you. And their money.)

3.Mention Quantum Mechanics.

You don’t need to understand Quantum Mechanics (no one really does, anyway). Just mention it, casually, as supporting your theories. The combination of “Cutting Edge Science” with your “Ancient Culture Connections” provides you the true Alpha and Omega of authoritative wisdom.

Sure, a few scientists will turn up now and then to give long winded explanations of how wrong you are, but no one will really understands what they say anyway. If they really start causing problems, you can break out the Ouiji board again and tell them how disappointed Einstein and Tesla are in how they’ve turned out.

[click to continue...]

Here’s a bit of entertaining education: A talk from Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptic Society, on the human tendency to seek patterns based on expectations, overvalue “hits” and assorted other mind-tricks.

With these tips, you too can see the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese, Satan in Led Zepplin, and aliens in hubcaps!!

Check it out.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/22