Playing by the Rules

Harriet Hall has an excellent article on not leveling the playing field, but agreeing what game we’re playing. It’s worth reading the whole thing. Here, for your edification, are the rules:

If you want to play the science game, here’s what you do:

1. Submit your hypothesis to proper testing. Testimonials, intuitions, personal experience, and “other ways of knowing” don’t count.
2. See if you can falsify the hypothesis.
3. Try to rule out alternative explanations and confounding factors.
4. Report your findings in journal articles submitted to peer review.
5. Allow the scientific community to critique the published evidence and engage in dialog and debate.
6. Withhold judgment until your results can be replicated elsewhere.
7. Respect the consensus of the majority of the scientific community as to whether your hypothesis is probably true or false (always allowing for revision based on further evidence).
8. Be willing to follow the evidence and admit you are wrong if that’s what the evidence says.

If you want to play the science game, here are some of the things you don’t do:

1. Accuse the entire scientific community of being wrong (unless you have compelling evidence, in which case you should argue for it in the scientific journals and at professional meetings, not in the media).
2. Design poor-quality experiments that are almost guaranteed to show your hypothesis is true, whether it really is or not. Use science to show THAT your treatment works, not to ask IF it works.
3. Keep using arguments that have already been thoroughly discredited. (The intelligent design folks are still claiming the eye could not have evolved because it is irreducibly complex; homeopaths are still claiming homeopathy cured more patients than conventional medicine in the 19th century epidemics).
4. Write books for the general public to promote your thesis – as if public opinion could influence science!
5. Form an activist organization to promote your beliefs.
6. Step outside the scientific paradigm and appeal to intuition and belief.
7. Mention the persecution of Galileo and compare yourself to him.
8. Invent a conspiracy theory (Big Pharma is suppressing the truth!).
9. Claim to be a lone genius who knows more than all the other scientists put together.
10. Offer a treatment to the public after only the most preliminary studies.
11. Set up a website to sell products that are not backed by good evidence.
12. Refuse to admit it when your hypothesis is proven wrong

Education and Challenges in Afghanistan

Speaking of that Islamic business of throwing acid in the faces of schoolgirls, Michael Yon has an interesting post up about Afghanistan.

He links to an encouraging story about one girl who was disfigured by one of those throwbacks and who is going to school anyway.

“My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed,” said Shamsia, 17, in a moment after class. Shamsia’s mother, like nearly all of the adult women in the area, is unable to read or write. “The people who did this to me don’t want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things.”

More Islamic Pedophelia

The lamest spin on perversion I’ve ever heard: If you think 10 year old girls can’t marry you are “being unfair” to them.

Oh, yes. Islam is renowned for it’s “fairness” to women.

“A firehose of nonsense”

If that ain’t the best-ever description of Deepak Chopra.

Studies show, do they? Is there really a believable study that shows that Qi-freaking-Gong, of all things, is good for chronic pain? Ancient hokum about “energy fields” and “life force” does the trick, does it? My idea of a good trial of Qi Gong would involve one group of patients getting the full hand-waving treatment according to the best practitioners of the art. The other cohort gets random hand motions from a system I will gladly invent on request, and which I will have to be forcibly restrained from naming Don Ki Kong. It’ll be full of talk about holistic energies and connections to the universal flow, don’t you doubt it, and I’ll round up some impressive-looking worthies to administer the laying on of hands. Their passes and taps will be carefully screened by the Qi Gongers beforehand to make sure that none of them, according to their system, have any chance of actually having any effects on the Qi (assuming that any of them can agree). We call that a controlled trial to investigate placebo effects.

Update:

Another great Chopra smackdown at SBM.

May he unrest in peace

Patrick McGoohan has left the village.

When asked once why he created The Prisoner he gave the best-ever interview response (best imagined in his inimitable voice):

“To cause unrest.”

Update:

Speaking of getting off the island, Mr. Roarke has taken “de plane“.